Rainbow Nation Research Articles

Implicit Racial Bias in South Africa: How Far Have Manager-Employee Relations Come in ‘The Rainbow Nation’?

ABSTRACTThis article examines manager-employee relations in democratic South Africa, using an unobtrusive, implicit measure of managers’ racial bias. We test the link between manager automatically activated evaluations of race labels with positive/negative words (implicit racial bias), and employees’ judgement of their manager’s effectiveness, their satisfaction with their manager, and their willingness to engage in extra-role workplace behavior. Results indicated that Indian and white managers were similar in their negative automatic evaluation of African blacks, and that employees of white managers reported higher manager satisfaction, higher manager effectiveness, and a greater likelihood of engaging in extra effort, compared to employees of African black managers. From these results we infer that racial bias has gone ‘underground’ and continues to play a pivotal role in manager-employee relations in ‘the Rainbow Nation’.

A public practical-theological response and proposal to decolonisation discourse in South Africa: From #YourStatueMustFall and #MyStatueShouldBeErected to #BothOurStatuesShouldBeErected

The years 2015 and 2016 were marked by violent protests at South African universities. While the focus of many of the protests was on access to university education, an equally major theme was the decolonisation of universities. University statues, such as that of Cecil John Rhodes at the University of Cape Town and many others, were pulled down or defaced. Within the discourse on decolonisation of curriculum, statues were viewed as symbols of maintaining and preserving the colonial hegemony that is being sustained by a Western or Eurocentric curriculum taught at universities. These developments led to a national discourse, which, among others, highlighted universities as spaces of exclusion because of residual colonial features. These protests became represented by hashtags such as #RhodesMustFall. These protests indicated a conflict and contest to eradicate the remnants of colonialism, as represented by statues (#YourStatueMustFall), which some protesters argued should be replaced by symbols of black liberation and anti-apartheid iconic symbols (#MyStatueShouldBeErectedInstead). For an integrated South Africa, with its constitutional ideals of a rainbow nation, a discourse of coexistence is required (#BothOurStatuesShouldBeErected). In this situation, a contextually engaged reformatory public practical theology is required to contribute to a constructive discourse and coexistence.

“Decolonise, Don’t Diversify”: Discounting Diversity in the South African Academe as a Tool for Ideological Pacification

The problem of the South African university, and society in the same breath, is not so much that of governance or politics but ideology. The deepening realisation of the farcicality and impossibility of strategies, attendant ideologies and “master signifiers” of transformation (such as diversity, multiculturalism and rainbow nation) of the South African society and (whatever remains of) its institutions has never been more acute than now, when the insistence at meaningful change and the unanimous rejection, mostly by blacks, of the university (at least in its current form) have gained traction. This paper draws on Žižek’s Lacanian theory of ideology to provide a counter-narrative and reading of official transformation consensus and ideologies like diversity, by highlighting their ethical liminalities. The underside of diversity’s official claims to equality and justice are unmasked, and the terror and ironies of this liberal ideology are exposed, especially its refusal to recognise that whiteness (as a system) and justice can never coexist or inhabit the same space. Transformation discourse, of our kind, fashioned under diversity’s register can never escape being appropriated by liberal ideology and practice, as yet another means to reaffirm its priorities.

Mixed Race Families in South Africa: Naming and Claiming a Location

ABSTRACTThe very act of living across racial boundaries or borders is a challenge to existing ideologies and social structures. Through in depth interviews with ten South Africans, I explore the border patrolling or policing of people who cross race lines in intimate relationships. Interracial partners are concerned with safety and comfort in public places and in the role of parent, they are concerned about their children’s sense of belonging. As interracial parents and partners resist border patrolling, they are also resisting racial categories, even as they claim and name locations that may work to reproduce racialisation. The experiences and perspectives of interracial parents and partners presented in this article suggest that racism and other forms of inequality remain entrenched and pervasive. And, despite the dream of unity and non-racialism, inequality between racial groups and classes has grown under neoliberalism in South Africa [Bond, P., 2004. From Racial to Class Apartheid: South Africa’s Frustrating Decade of Freedom. Monthly Review, 55 (10), 45. Available from: https://monthlyreview.org/2004/03/01/south-africas-frustrating-decade-offreedom-from-racial-to-class-apartheid/] Far from the hope for a rainbow nation the experiences of interracial partners and parents show that race remains significant, hierarchical and defining of ideologies, identities and institution. The interviews highlight that borders of racial categories are contested and charged spaces.

Unshackling the chains of coloniality: Reimagining decoloniality, Africanisation and Reformation for a non-racial South Africa

Racial divisions, polarisation and tensions are on the rise in South Africa today. A democratic dream of a rainbow nation remains just a dream with racism continuing to raise its ugly head in the democratic South Africa, to the detriment of the rainbow dream of a united South Africa. This article seeks to probe whether South Africans should continue to sing the song of racial reconciliation in the light of the continued racial tensions and post-colonial and post-apartheid legacies and stereotypes that continue to manifest in our private and public spaces. Based on an examination of the decoloniality project, Africanisation and Reformation, through literature study, the article calls for the decoloniality of faith in an effort to craft a vision for a non-racial society. This vision not only takes the importance of the redeeming memories of the 500 years of Reformation seriously, but also the notion of Africanisation and, in particular, the use of the African value systems in shaping and reconstructing a non-racial South Africa. This article taps into the resourcefulness of the Reformed faith in South Africa, as articulated in the theologies of Snyman, Tshaka and Botha, and applies them to South African discourses of decoloniality.

‘Les années de braise’ reconsidered: literary representations of Mauritian independence, fifty years on

ABSTRACTOn 12 March 1968, Mauritius celebrated independence from Great Britain. This article explores how the independence period is represented, fifty years later, in a selection of recent Mauritian novels. Focusing upon long-silenced inter-ethnic tensions, inequalities and exclusions, these twenty-first-century fictional works deconstruct dominant celebratory narratives of Mauritius's multicultural ‘rainbow nation.’ By retrospectively revealing cracks in the nation's harmonious façade, the article argues, the novels’ counter-discursive narratives of the nation's foundation play an important part in an ongoing, forward-looking project of nation-building that envisages more inclusive, non-ethnic forms of ‘unity in diversity.’

Performing the Rainbow Nation: The Limitations of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission

After the dismantling of the apartheid regime in 1994, South Africa was charged with acknowledging the sufferings of its populace while democratizing and de-racializing state infrastructure. Instead of pursuing the politically expedient path of collective amnesia, a Truth and Reconciliation Commission was formed in 1995. It has since been heralded as the most ambitious and organized socio-political endeavour to confront a troubled and divisive history. The Commission attempted to initiate South African into a new future predicated upon the principles of social justice, the rule of law and reconciliation; however, this paper will argue that in practice, these ideals were not sufficient to combat extant political pressure and were not politically supported by any concrete mechanism capable of catalyzing social transformation. Through an analysis of the Commission’s provision of amnesty, dismissal of institutional responsibility for apartheid and crime and the reluctance to pursue reparative and developmental policies, this paper will suggest South Africa’s attempts to bridge its racial divides were chiefly symbolic and restricted. Finally, it will consider whether the TRC’s performance of “truth” occurred at the price of reconciliation and the ramifications for restorative justice as a tool of social healing.

"Remember Marikana": Violence and Visual Activism in Post-Apartheid South Africa

"Remember Marikana":Violence and Visual Activism in Post-Apartheid South Africa1 Kylie Thomas (bio) To produce creative works that translate rage into critique and that open spaces for mourning and solidarity with the dead is an essentially hopeful gesture that reaches out and toward others. It is the making of political community (or at least an expression of the desire for it) and an injunction not to give up, but to resist. Such is the case of the interventions made by visual activists in the aftermath of the Marikana massacre of 2012 that refuse to allow the continuities between the violence of apartheid and the violence of the present to go unmarked. The works I focus on here draw attention to how remembering Marikana entails not only commemoration, but a summons for justice and social change. In 2012, thirty-four of the thousands of miners who were participating in a strike at the Lonmin platinum mine in the Marikana area near Rustenburg, South Africa were killed by the police. The police encircled the miners and opened fire, shooting at them with automatic rifles. No fewer than fourteen of the miners were shot in the back, while others were hunted down and shot at close range as they fled from the police. The Marikana massacre was the first to take place in South Africa [End Page 401] after the end of apartheid. It evoked the violence of the apartheid regime and the massacres that took place at Sharpeville in 1960, in Soweto in 1976, and in Boipatong in 1992. In many ways, the Marikana massacre can be understood as marking the end of the first period of the South African transition and the ideal of the new democratic "rainbow nation," and it has been followed by waves of protests against the persistence of colonial and apartheid-era ideologies and structures and against the corrupt practices of the current state. This essay engages with the work of visual activists who have responded to the Marikana massacre and argues for the importance of these responses in critiquing the failures of the transition and in configuring the post-apartheid public sphere. I focus on the work of the Tokolos Stencils Collective and on Rehad Desai's documentary film Miners Shot Down (2014), as well as the forms of protest these works have in turn generated. These interventions attack the repressive mechanisms of the post-apartheid state and address the traumatized collective psyche of its citizens by making use of visual forms that effectively return the massacre to public view. By insisting that the massacre is not forgotten, the works I discuss below inaugurate public mourning and commemoration and also play a critical part in calling for those who are responsible for the massacre to be held to account. DARKNESS PASS2 In February 2012, as part of a project on violence and transition at the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation in Cape Town, I was writing a research report about vigilantism and police violence in South Africa during and after apartheid.3 In the business pages of local newspapers, I began to track reports of violent incidents in Rustenburg, a town outside of Johannesburg that is the center of the platinum mining industry. Something was brewing there that began to look serious: a photograph of a man lying on the ground at the Impala platinum mine, his head split open, appeared on the front page of the financial section of the Cape Times, above the reports of business news, stock prices, and lists of numbers I have never learned to read. The killing was a response to a strike at the mine and of a conflict between two opposing trade unions. Warning signs of the ongoing crisis of systemic inequality and structural violence on the mines had filtered through to the public, but the strike did not receive too much attention. [End Page 402] Three months after reading that account of a killing at the mine, I was completing the report, which argued that apartheid-era policing practices remained in place in the aftermath of apartheid and continued to protect the rich and powerful, and still largely white, elite. By...

Belladonna by Celia Hawkesworth

spreads throughout the city, sowing fear on top of the terror that stalks the streets. But as with any great literary work, this novel doesn’t just tell a story. Rather , it unfolds across multiple dimensions, each layer peeling back to reveal something new: the structure of the novel itself (stories within stories, references to the “author” as a character); buildings that, when damaged by bombs, reveal archaeological treasures; and identities that turn out merely to be covers for other (perhaps still false) identities. Exquisitely translated by Jonathan Wright, this novel breaks through the superficial news stories and helps us see more clearly what the American invasion has wrought, how violence begets violence, and how tenuous is the line between innocence and guilt. Brilliant and horrifying, Frankenstein in Baghdad is essential reading. Rachel S. Cordasco Madison, Wisconsin Tidiane N’Diaye. L’Appel de la lune. Paris. Gallimard. 2017. 223 pages. The Senegalese author Tidiane N’Diaye is known for such historical works as Le Génocide voilé (Gallimard, 2008) and Par-delà les ténèbres blanches (Gallimard, 2010). L’Appel de la lune, set in nineteenthcentury South Africa before and during the Anglo-Zulu war of 1879, is his first novel. The “call of the moon” depicts a multiracial , though rarely tolerant, South Africa, before complete British military domination , and long before apartheid. This historical novel’s main plotline sets up a love story that is in some ways worthy of a fairy tale. The idealistic romance, however, develops against a backdrop of widespread and clearly depicted racial, religious, and generational strife. Marc Jaubert, a descendant of exiled French Protestants whose family runs a vineyard, falls in love with the beautiful Zulu princess Isiban, whom he first glimpses as she dances alone at night, illuminated by the moonlight. This unlikely love story leads to an even unlikelier marriage , mediated by the couple’s respective grandfathers. N’Diaye’s background as a researcher often shows during the narrative , which includes succinct but frequent background information on Zulu social norms, British colonial policy, religious beliefs among the Boers, and the history of Protestantism in France. The expository historical digressions sometimes take precedence over the storytelling, but the author never loses sight of his narrative thread for long. Around Isiban and Marc gravitates a cast of characters that N’Diaye has clearly sought to make as diverse and representative as possible . Isiban’s sister Pampatha disapproves of her marriage to a white man. Marc’s brother François similarly resents his brother for marrying a black woman. Kuzayo, the Zulu spy and translator, plays a vital role as intermediary between the extended families of the two lovers. A Boer family uses the Bible to justify its vicious racism. The aristocratic British army officers exhibit their own smug level of “civilizational” superiority. By contrast, the small community of family, friends, and colleagues who gravitate around Isiban and Marc seem to prefigure the sort of multiracial community that is the stated goal of postapartheid South Africa (the novel ends with a call for “a true rainbow nation”). There is an unambiguously didactic element to this novel. The author wants his readers not only to learn about history but to learn from it, to understand the mistakes of the past and to avoid repeating them. That said, N’Diaye also knows how to tell good stories and how to tie various subplots together. This is an immensely readable and informative first novel. Edward Ousselin Western Washington University Daša Drndić. Belladonna. Trans. Celia Hawkesworth. New York. New Directions. 2017. 378 pages. Belladonna’s title is a deadly plant; its Latin epigraph warns a society on a suicidal path: “Today it’s me, tomorrow . . . you. Who can escape?” This densely intertextual, selfreferential historical metafiction, its scope and power remarkable, employs Sebaldian techniques to probe the Holocaust, the end of Yugoslavia, and neocolonialism. The protagonist of this apocryphal “manuscript,” its sixty-five-year-old author, Croat Andreas Ban, seeks to “cobble up a whole” from his “fragments.” His targets all too timely, Ban’s psychic odyssey charts our violent century “of cleansing . . . of erasure,” where form has eclipsed content, community the individual, ethnocentrism fellow feeling, dogma and...

L'Appel de la lune

spreads throughout the city, sowing fear on top of the terror that stalks the streets. But as with any great literary work, this novel doesn’t just tell a story. Rather , it unfolds across multiple dimensions, each layer peeling back to reveal something new: the structure of the novel itself (stories within stories, references to the “author” as a character); buildings that, when damaged by bombs, reveal archaeological treasures; and identities that turn out merely to be covers for other (perhaps still false) identities. Exquisitely translated by Jonathan Wright, this novel breaks through the superficial news stories and helps us see more clearly what the American invasion has wrought, how violence begets violence, and how tenuous is the line between innocence and guilt. Brilliant and horrifying, Frankenstein in Baghdad is essential reading. Rachel S. Cordasco Madison, Wisconsin Tidiane N’Diaye. L’Appel de la lune. Paris. Gallimard. 2017. 223 pages. The Senegalese author Tidiane N’Diaye is known for such historical works as Le Génocide voilé (Gallimard, 2008) and Par-delà les ténèbres blanches (Gallimard, 2010). L’Appel de la lune, set in nineteenthcentury South Africa before and during the Anglo-Zulu war of 1879, is his first novel. The “call of the moon” depicts a multiracial , though rarely tolerant, South Africa, before complete British military domination , and long before apartheid. This historical novel’s main plotline sets up a love story that is in some ways worthy of a fairy tale. The idealistic romance, however, develops against a backdrop of widespread and clearly depicted racial, religious, and generational strife. Marc Jaubert, a descendant of exiled French Protestants whose family runs a vineyard, falls in love with the beautiful Zulu princess Isiban, whom he first glimpses as she dances alone at night, illuminated by the moonlight. This unlikely love story leads to an even unlikelier marriage , mediated by the couple’s respective grandfathers. N’Diaye’s background as a researcher often shows during the narrative , which includes succinct but frequent background information on Zulu social norms, British colonial policy, religious beliefs among the Boers, and the history of Protestantism in France. The expository historical digressions sometimes take precedence over the storytelling, but the author never loses sight of his narrative thread for long. Around Isiban and Marc gravitates a cast of characters that N’Diaye has clearly sought to make as diverse and representative as possible . Isiban’s sister Pampatha disapproves of her marriage to a white man. Marc’s brother François similarly resents his brother for marrying a black woman. Kuzayo, the Zulu spy and translator, plays a vital role as intermediary between the extended families of the two lovers. A Boer family uses the Bible to justify its vicious racism. The aristocratic British army officers exhibit their own smug level of “civilizational” superiority. By contrast, the small community of family, friends, and colleagues who gravitate around Isiban and Marc seem to prefigure the sort of multiracial community that is the stated goal of postapartheid South Africa (the novel ends with a call for “a true rainbow nation”). There is an unambiguously didactic element to this novel. The author wants his readers not only to learn about history but to learn from it, to understand the mistakes of the past and to avoid repeating them. That said, N’Diaye also knows how to tell good stories and how to tie various subplots together. This is an immensely readable and informative first novel. Edward Ousselin Western Washington University Daša Drndić. Belladonna. Trans. Celia Hawkesworth. New York. New Directions. 2017. 378 pages. Belladonna’s title is a deadly plant; its Latin epigraph warns a society on a suicidal path: “Today it’s me, tomorrow . . . you. Who can escape?” This densely intertextual, selfreferential historical metafiction, its scope and power remarkable, employs Sebaldian techniques to probe the Holocaust, the end of Yugoslavia, and neocolonialism. The protagonist of this apocryphal “manuscript,” its sixty-five-year-old author, Croat Andreas Ban, seeks to “cobble up a whole” from his “fragments.” His targets all too timely, Ban’s psychic odyssey charts our violent century “of cleansing . . . of erasure,” where form has eclipsed content, community the individual, ethnocentrism fellow feeling, dogma and...

KHARNITA MOHAMED, CALLED TO SONG. CAPE TOWN: KWELA, 2018. PAGES: 288. ISBN PRINT: 9780795708589

Called to Song documents the journey of a woman towards full self-actualisation, after having lived an outwardly perfect life for decades. It examines the intergenerational impacts of gender-based violence on families, and of quasi-religious patriarchy and internalised racism on communities. The novel is located in a South Africa that, far from being the happy-clappy rainbow nation that the political evangelists would have us swallow, continues to be traumatised by its apartheid past and the enduring inequalities which our history has bequeathed us...

Perceptions of teacher education students at a South African university on the relationship between culture and education: implications for social justice

The Constitution of South Africa envisions a socially just society. However, realising this requires an education context that amongst other things, celebrates and promotes cultural diversity. Widely known as the rainbow nation, South Africa is home to diverse cultures, both from within and from all over Africa and the rest of the world. This fact poses particular challenges to education, which is not only required to provide a multi-cultural educational context conducive to effective teaching and learning, but also to promote social justice. However, indications are that SA education fails dismally to achieve both ends. We argue that part of the reason for this failure is the inability of (pre-service) education students to understand, acknowledge and validate the intrinsic relationship that exists between culture and education. As such, they hamper efforts to realise social justice through education. In this paper we report on the perceptions regarding the relationship between culture and education of third- and fourth-year education students at a university in South Africa. We conducted quantitative research amongst a culturally diverse group of students; 266 in total. Findings suggest that students have a limited understanding of this relationship, in spite of the efforts both this university, as well as the education authorities’ attempts. The paper concludes with recommendations for enhancing sensitivity amongst education students about the relationship between culture and education, and the possible implications for social justice as a result of ignorance of this issue.

REVISITING A CULTURE OF TOLERANCE RELATING TO RELIGIOUS UNFAIR DISCRIMINATION IN SOUTH AFRICA (PART 2)

In Part 1 of this article the need to reconsider whether merely tolerating diversity in a multicultural and pluralistic secular South African society is sufficiently addressed. Transformative constitutionalism is the vanguard of ensuring a substantive change in our democratic order. Such change brought about as a result thereof would be meaningless if it failed to embrace the fact that the proverbial South African “rainbow nation” showcases an array of religions from various walks of life. Secularism, multicultural diversity and the necessity of having to live together are a reality, filled with the ever-present possibility of dispute, whether in civil society or the workplace. Ubuntu is instrumental to the success of transformative constitutionalism; especially when effect to its underlying principles is given impetus by the collective. This article is divided into two parts. In Part 1, tolerance was viewed in terms of the origin of the term; its meaning of forbearance and putting up with differences. The question was posed whether commitment to true democracy is not better aligned to the notion of celebration rather than toleration. This article looks at tolerance against the backdrop of Ubuntu and the imperative that we care for others not due to a sense of forbearance but rather through acclamation of a spirit of celebration of our differences. The case of City of Tshwane Metropolitan Municipality v Afriforum provides a crucial plank from which the notion of celebration, as opposed to mere toleration, should be embraced.

Aproximación al estado de la población LGTB Sudafricana en comparación con la española. Similitudes teóricas frente a divergencias prácticas

<p>South Africa and Spain have similar legislation regarding the decriminalisation of homosexuality and equality and access to Human Rights for the LGBT population. But, the real social experience of homosexual people in the two countries is very different. This article explores homophobia in Africa by describing the real social experiences of the LGBT population in South Africa compared with Spain. The so-called Rainbow Nation, despite its progressive constitution which guarantees LGBT human rights and the absence of discrimination, still contains a high level of homophobia, violence against homosexuals, corrective rapes of Lesbians and a high rate of HIV/AIDS among men who have sex with men.</p><p><strong>Published online</strong>: 11 December 2017</p>

Theorising Mandela

SummaryNelson Mandela can be said to be the most celebrated leader so far to have emerged from the African continent. He has been variously written about in literary works and history books, differently presented in [auto] biographies and the mainstream media [newspapers and television], fictionalized and actualised in film, immortalised through art work such as painting and sculpture. In liberal-driven South African and Western media, Mandela is/was presented as a “messiah”, a superhuman character, a humanist, a philanthropist, and a persona who works as an ideal model for what should constitute modern African political leadership. Yet in some academic circles Mandela is viewed as “a terrorist-turned-politician” (Willcock 2013: 1), a political and ideological “construct” of the Western world; a framed “dramatis persona” by the Western media to project and deepen the colonialist agenda in Africa. This article seeks to theorise Mandela and in the process draw some justifications to the worthiness or the shallowness of labels attributed to Mandela as a symbolic figure that embodied the values of “Africanness” and “ubuntuism” or as an “African Cyborg” that was created and controlled by the Western world. The article also attempts to locate and expose to the surface the different layers of present day South African challenges ‒ which can be attributed to the legacy left by Mandela, but are often concealed by the ruling government under the carpet of “Rainbow Nation” and a blind celebration of “National reconciliation”.

Youth identity in desegregated schools of Johannesburg

ABSTRACTSince the end of apartheid, South African schools went through deep changes with the deracialisation of the school system and a fairer allocation of educational resources (funding, equipment, facilities). School vision and mission had to promote values of the rainbow nation in order to enrol learners from different communities. Despite the recognition of diversity, race and ethnic relations still structure social relations inside school. This research shows how South African teenagers from desegregated school of Johannesburg construct their identity in relation to the diverse communities where they evolve. We expose their representation of a world affected by the apartheid legacy of racialised borders and socio-economical divisions but open to identity ‘bricolages’ and aspirations which allow overtaking them. Religion, popular and global culture, and democratic values are sources of identification to analyse to understand youth identity in contemporary South Africa.

“The Woman You Want to Be”: The Changing Face of Fairlady Magazine, 1985–2005

ABSTRACTFeminine identity has always been complicated by race and class in South Africa. The history of beauty pageants, like sporting contests, demonstrates the extent to which culture and contemporary politics intertwine. Examining the cover model choices of women’s magazines offers a fruitful means of tracking the complex interplay between beauty, power and politics. This paper explores cultural endorsements of femininity as they are represented on the covers of one of South Africa’s oldest women’s magazines. Using a content analysis of the covers of Fairlady from 1985 to 2005 the paper asks questions about how Fairlady mediated ideas about beauty, race, gender and nationhood in recent history. The paper reveals the essential role of the popular media in communicating the values of Nelson Mandela’s Rainbow Nation. It finds that this role is highly contradictory, however, and the representation of women is shaped by socio-political and cultural shifts and racialised discourses of beauty, often linked to other cultural industries. The paper argues that this ambiguous relationship to the political transition is partly a result of the inherently racist structures of globalised consumer culture, which have an ever-greater influence on the choice of cover model in the post-apartheid period.

Dominant discourses on what it means to be a ‘real’ man in South Africa: The narratives of adolescent male orphans

South Africa is known as the rainbow nation because of its variety of culture and religion. In essence South Africa is a spiritual nation, and 85.7% of her people affiliate to a Christian belief system. Despite this, crimes against women and children run rampant as some traditional male roles advocate patriarchal values that at times negatively affect relations between men and women. This article postulates that specific patriarchal values inform the development of a masculine identity, in spite of the fact that most South African families are headed by female caregivers. At the same time, however, most of these families are affected by extreme poverty and father absence; therefore, many boys are raised without an adequate male role model. This article, emanating from a broader study, explores the relationship between the development of a masculine identity amidst father absence, influenced by rapid colonisation and in the context of a specific religion and culture. It reflects on some of the narratives of the research participants that relates specifically to the theme of ‘what it means to be a real man’, eliciting the dominant discourses around masculinity and femininity in South Africa, informed by religion, traditional culture and pop culture. This article then postulates that religiosity in South Africa is not removed from the social function and performance of the social constructs of masculinity, cultural values and parental involvement and that these constructs interact with each other in a special way to produce what we come to know as the South African man.

The Inaudible Nation: Music and Sensory Perception in Postapartheid South Africa

The Inaudible NationMusic and Sensory Perception in Postapartheid South Africa Gavin Steingo (bio) In both the social sciences and humanities, it is something of a truism that nations are not only audible but downright loquacious. From a basic phenomenological perspective, this position seems accurate: from the FIFA World Cup and the Olympic Games to State of the Nation addresses and seasonal national music festivals held in many countries around the world, the ubiquity of national or nationalist sound is a contemporary commonplace, or even a cliché. In addition to the proclamation that nations resound, a number of detailed studies in history, anthropology, sociology, and ethnomusicology have traced the mechanisms by which states employ sonic and musical material. At the risk of oversimplification, the most common theorization holds that states create national unity (and by extension, repress difference) by reifying specific "folk" traditions. It is precisely because particular cultural practices are reified in and by the modern state that they are referred to as "invented" (see Hobsbawm and Ranger). In this article I suggest that the dominant position on the audibility of nations outlined above does not adequately explain late twentieth-century liberal-democratic nation-states. Based on my experience both as a white South African who lived through the democratic transition and as an ethnomusicologist who has conducted "formal" ethno-graphic research in that country, this paper seeks to complicate the orthodox view of nationalism, music, and sensory perception by pointing to the rupture between sonic matter and national belonging in late twentieth-century national and nationalist politics. Going against the grain of orthodox theorization, I suggest that postapartheid, liberal-democratic South Africa was made possible only by neutralizing sensory perception and thus, in a sense, becoming inaudible. [End Page 71] Of course, this neutralization was never, can never be, total. In the face of "inaudibility," particular racial, ethnic, and class interests continue to exert pressure and in certain cases attempt to claim sensory dominance. My aim in this paper is to examine the antagonism between particular social groups, on the one hand, and the neutralization of their particular interests, on the other. But I will insist throughout that this antagonism is crucial for our understanding of South African nationalism and that, moreover, an exclusively empirical analysis of music and sound is not adequate. As John Mowitt has recently argued, despite the recent boom in sound studies, "It seems many scholars are making noise about sound but often in ways that feel resolutely empirical" (2011, 168). By theorizing South African nationalism through inaudibility (and not merely through various audibles), I hope to move the discourse beyond empiricism and toward a deeper reflection on the contemporary politics of music and sound. Consider the following example: when the African National Congress (ANC) attained political power in 1994 it sought to foster national unity not by instrumentalizing specific traditions but by advocating nonracialism and reconciliation. President Nelson Mandela, along with Bishop Desmond Tutu, promoted the vision of a "Rainbow Nation" to which South Africans of all cultural backgrounds could belong. The section on national identity in the ANC's "Constitutional Guidelines for a Democratic South Africa" opens: It shall be state policy to promote the growth of a single national identity and loyalty binding on all South Africans. At the same time, the state shall recognize linguistic and cultural diversity of the people and provide facilities for free linguistic and cultural development. (Qtd. in Frederikse, 254) How is unity attained at the same time as diversity? The answer can be formulated in this way: in a set whose members are completely different, the only thing that unifies the members of the set is that they are in the set.1 South African nationalism is thus strictly tautological: South Africans are South African as long as they are South African. Black or white, Christian or Muslim, gay or straight,2 rich or poor: if someone is South African, then he or she is South African. Although South Africa has probably assumed this form of nationalism more forcefully than other nations, I show later in this paper that "tautological nationalism" is the liberal ideal of the nation-state. [End Page 72] The South African...

Publicizing Private Lives in a Rainbow Nation: The Year in South Africa

Publicizing Private Lives in a Rainbow NationThe Year in South Africa Nick Mdika Tembo (bio) Free speech during the apartheid era was not possible, especially for blacks.M. Neelika Jayawardane noted in her 2013 Symposium Magazine article, titled "Memoirs Take a Daring Turn in South Africa," that until recently the apartheid state was obsessed with controlling the national narrative, as well as the stories people told, believed, and internalized about themselves and others. It imposed that control using surveillance, legislation, state-mandated violence, and community policing. But since the fall of apartheid in 1994, the world has witnessed a deluge of life writing—biography, autobiography, memoir, and testimony—from South Africa. My review will be limited to a small fraction of these works, specifically those that have appeared in English from mid-2016 to September 2017. Some of the notable publications that have appeared during this period are works by Glynnis Breytenbach (Rule of Law), David Coplan and Oscar Gutierrez (Last Night at the Bassline), Piers Cruickshanks (Confluence), John Fredericks (Skollie), Rafique Gangat (Bending the Rules), Thandeka Gqubule (No Longer Whispering to Power), Bridget Hilton-Barber (Student Comrade Prisoner Spy), Daryl Ilbury (Tim Noakes), Ahmed Kathrada and Sahm Venter (Conversations with a Gentle Soul), Mandla Mathembu (The Backroom Boy), Herman Mashaba and Isabella Morris (Black Like You), Fatima Meer (Fatima Meer), Sibusiso Mjikeliso (Being a Black Springbok), Bongani Ngqulunga (The Man Who Founded the ANC), Ambre Nicolson (An A to Z of Amazing South African Women), Malebo Sephodi (Miss Behave), Lesley Smailes (Cult Sister), Karina Szczurek (The Fifth Mrs Brink), Lindiwe Hani and Melinda Ferguson (Being Chris Hani's Daughter), recovered drug addict Grizelda Grootboom (Exit), talk-show host Trevor Noah (Born a Crime), fashion and media maven, and TV and radio presenter Bonang Matheba (From A to B), and the indefatigable journalist and politician Helen Zille (Not Without a Fight). [End Page 657] A potpourri of themes inform this extensive collection, ranging from speaking truth to power (Gqubule); politics (Ngqulunga, Hani, and Zille); activism (Sephodi); crime, violence, and poverty (Fredericks and Noah); lack of belonging (Noah and Grootboom); entrepreneurship (Mashaba and Matheba); drug and substance (ab)use (Noah, Grootboom, and Hani); rape and sexual exploitation (Grootboom, Sephodi, and Smailes); sports and entertainment (Cruickshanks, Coplan and Gutierrez, and Mjikeliso); and resisting apartheid and its divisive laws (Hilton-Barber, Meer, and Noah). From this impressive body of life writing, I have singled out three texts for discussion: Trevor Noah's Born a Crime and Other Stories (2016), Malebo Sephodi's Miss Behave (2017), and Grizelda Grootboom's Exit: A True Story (2017). While there is a curious connective thread that cuts across the selected works—the challenges youth face in post-apartheid South Africa—I will explore how the selected authors reconstruct the rainbow nation, which, as Jayawardane claims, is "still obsessed in many ways with using racial classification to structure individual and group identity." trevor noah, born a crime Although Noah's Born a Crime aims at comic relief, it is through this narrative style that one gets to appreciate the seriousness of the issues he relentlessly interrogates: the plight of being biracial in (post-)apartheid South Africa. Noah opens his narrative with the contrite voice of someone who considers his birth a mishap. The "sin" his parents—a black Xhosa mother and a white Swiss father—committed was that the two of them agreed to give birth to him in a country that criminalized sex across the races. "It was illegal to be mixed (to have a black parent and a white parent)," observes Noah (34). "The government went to insane lengths to try and enforce these new laws. The penalty for breaking them was five years in prison" (26). Noah, thus, is the crime born out of his parents' coital arrangement, which leads to feelings of unbelonging in him: "my birth certificate doesn't say that I'm Xhosa, which technically I am. And it doesn't say that I'm Swiss, which the government wouldn't allow" (32). The anxiety of being neither black nor white soon begins to take its toll on him. During his childhood, he couldn't freely walk with his mother, for...