Rainbow Nation Research Articles

The ‘Fuck White People’ Phenomenon in South Africa: A Discursive and Statistical Analysis

ABSTRACTDuring the recent student protests in South Africa ‘fuck white people’ appeared on T-shirts and walls. When understood only as anti-white sentiments, these words could cause panic and fear. However, we need to determine the extent to which these opinions are shared, by whom, and what should be done to people who propagated these views. To address these questions, an item was inserted in the 2016 nationally representative South African Social Attitudes Survey (n = 2988). An overwhelming majority of the adult population (96%) expressed a clear preference for how this phenomenon should be addressed. Of this, 26% recommended that those wearing/writing this phrase should be informed that they are hampering the prospects of peaceful coexistence between different race groups (the social cohesion argument), while 39% advocated refrain from such rhetoric. 16% adopted a retributive stance and little more than a tenth (13%) non-interventionist. Only a nominal proportion (2%) believed such behaviour ‘should be praised’ for drawing attention to persisting white privilege in South African society. We discuss these findings and their socio-demographic variations discursively, as part of ‘white fragility’ and ‘rainbow nation mythology’, observing the provocative and productive dimensions of this phenomenon.

Populism vs. the Popular in South African Literature

While the damage done by populist leaders to the social fabric and aspirations of ordinary citizens is a staple of postcolonial African fiction across the continent, the subject is still relatively under-explored in South African novels written since the end of apartheid. There is a substantial and ever-growing body of dystopian writing focusing on the disappointments of everyday life in the rainbow nation, but the question of leadership has yet to emerge as the subject of serious or sustained attention. The anomaly is doubly curious, given that leaders are sharply scrutinized in the political press, in print and online. With reference to Ernesto Laclau’s On Populist Reason, the essay takes a long view of a century of South African writing and proposes that there is a fault-line between populism, as a manipulative and sectarian appeal to ‘the people,’ and the popular, as an ethically credible and often necessary rallying point. The essay teases out this tension in some key historical fictions of the New African period and then examines further, nuanced elaborations in A.C. Jordan’s Ingqumbo Yeminyana (The Wrath of the Ancestors), Nadine Gordimer’s Burger’s Daughter, correspondence between Mongane Serote and Lionel Abrahams, and later fiction and poetry. The essay reaches the obvious but nevertheless polemical conclusion that the very power and durability of the popular throughout the decades of apartheid might also be the impediment that has to be overcome if the dangers of populism are to be squarely confronted.

Working Scientist podcast: How apartheid's legacy can still cast a shadow over doctoral education in South Africa

PhD programmes in "the rainbow nation" mostly lead to academic careers, but reform is needed to boost collaboration and integration, higher education experts tell Julie Gould. PhD programmes in "the rainbow nation" mostly lead to academic careers, but reform is needed to boost collaboration and integration, higher education experts tell Julie Gould.

Thuma mina! Who sends Whom? How South Africa as a Rainbow Nation has been Perceived in the Church of Sweden

Thuma mina! Who sends Whom? How South Africa as a Rainbow Nation has been Perceived in the Church of Sweden

HIV and Zonke-bonke Syndrome in Mthatha Region of South Africa:Case Reports

Background: South Africa is described as an African rainbow nation, not only in the color of its population, but also in the mixture of HIV infection. Three varieties of HIV infection have been distinguished: HIV-1, HIV-2, and a combination of the two. This is a matter of concern. Objective: To highlight the problem of HIV-1 and HIV-2 (combined) infection in the Mthatha region of South Africa. Case History: The first four cases of HIV-1/2 mixed infection were reported within a period of one year (2009). These cases were reported at Sinawe Center when people were examined after being sexually assaulted. HIV screening tests were carried out for HIV infection. Four patients were found to be positive for both HIV1 and 2. Surprisingly, one was a child of eight years old. Multiple sexual partners who were involved at some or other time with West Africans who harbored type 2 HIV could be the cause of this mixed infection. This kind of promiscuous behavior with multiple partners is called “ Zonke-bonke syndrome ”. The history, mode of transmission of HIV infection, and the consequences of mixed HIV infections are discussed in this case report. Conclusion: HIV-1 and HIV-2 (mixed) infection occurs in the Mthatha region of South Africa. It is a matter of serious concern.

How the Irish became more than white: mixed-race Irishness in historical and contemporary contexts

ABSTRACT Mixed-race people can be caught in a web of stereotypes – being pathologised as tragically ‘mixed up’ or heralded as the precursors of a ‘rainbow nation’. Many of these stereotypes have come primarily from research and popular cultural images in the US and the UK. Recently, within Critical Mixed-Race Studies, there is a call to study mixed-race people outside of these stereotypes, particularly those living outside the US and UK. Ireland is a unique place to look at mixed-race experiences. As a post-colonial nation within Europe with a strongly racialised past (non-white to white) and a global history of emigration, Ireland is actively grappling with contemporary rapid migration and racial/ethnic change from the 2000s to today and is now possibly becoming less white. This paper examines the historical and contemporary contexts of being mixed-race in Ireland to analyse the potential political and social meanings of mixed-race Irishness today. It begins with a demographic snapshot of racial/ethnic changes in Ireland and examines the role of symbolic representations of mixed-race in Ireland. Through indicative qualitative interviews, it concludes with some tentative ideas about how understandings of mixed-race may be shifting within Ireland today.

Favelas and townships: place making, everyday racialization, and the postracial

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to indicate how place making and belonging are still largely governed by race in Brazil and South Africa. As such, it engages with debates about the postracial informed by the study of two urban settings that are discernible by their relationship with race issues: Rio de Janeiro’s favelas and Johannesburg’s townships.Design/methodology/approachThe study provides a brief account of post-racial discourses in each country: Brazilian racial democracy and South Africa’s self-imagination as rainbow nation. Subsequently, these two major national self-understandings are probed using data gathered in the fieldwork (participant observation and in-depth interviews) carried out in Rio de Janeiro’s favelas and Johannesburg’s townships between 2013 and 2015.FindingsThe main accomplishment of the study is to approach debates about senses of place, understood here as place making and belonging, from the everyday experiences of favela and township inhabitants. The study suggests discrepancies between the racialized senses of place in Brazilian and South African urban milieus and any sort of post-racial rhetoric. Despite the existence of norms and institutions promoting equal rights of citizenship in Brazil and South Africa, place making is still largely encumbered by the legacy of racial domination in both countries.Originality/valueBy adding new evidence to the research on everyday racism, the study explores the mutual influences between senses of place and the persistent patterns of racial segregation in two urban contexts of the global South. Beyond this, it offers a comparative approach that connects micro-level social dynamics and macro-level discourses.

Axing the Rainbow

Today, the Rainbow Nation as the central metaphor for postapartheid South Africa falls short of serving as a unifying identification marker due to its tendency to gloss over contrasting living realities of diversified identities and ongoing systemic discrimination. The South African Fallism movements – the student-driven protests against neocolonial structures in academic institutions – spearheaded public criticism with the current state of ongoing social disparity in South Africa and revived the critique of so-called rainbowism, i.e., the belief that a colour-blind society can be created. In an application of Critical Discourse Analysis focusing on mythical metaphors, this article asks to what extent the new president Cyril Ramaphosa in his maiden State of the Nation Address projected a post-Zuma South African nation and answered to the challenges posed by Fallists.

“Plunging into the Mire of Corruption and Pleasure”: Niq Mhlongo’s Way Back Home

This article presents a close reading of Niq Mhlongo’s Way Back Home, particularly its representation of the post-apartheid nation-state as a place of excess or, indeed, what James Ogude might call a “a site of eating”. To begin, I locate Mhlongo’s oeuvre within the long and rich tradition of black-centred artistic expression that is preoccupied with black masculinities and the politics/performance of ‘hustling’. Turning to Way Back Home specifically, I argue that the novel functions as a critique of the excesses, including the kleptocracy, of the ruling elite. I show that the novel ultimately reveals the underside of South Africa’s euphoric discourse of the ‘Rainbow Nation’. I wish to evoke not only his novel’s interrogation of the notions of home, belonging, desire and the unheimlich in post-apartheid South Africa, but also the sense in which failure is always already a certainty in postcolonial states which adopt and function within structures that were never designed for African progress.

(Re)considering the Rainbow

This article seeks to interrogate the Rainbow Nation Project and its ties to the LGBTIAQ movement in post-1994 South Africa. In particular, the paper looks at Joburg Pride between 1990 and 2013, and explores the fragmentation of Pride, and how this was tied up with the Rainbow Nation project. Joburg Pride is South Africa's longest running Pride event, and is unique in that it was the first LGBTIAQ Pride march in South Africa at a time when there were no legal protections for lesbian and gay South Africans The paper proposes that the LGBTIAQ community in South Africa were strategically granted rights in order to further the Rainbow Nation project, and through this came to participate in the erasure of the pain and violence experienced by South Africans under apartheid rule. This research was conducted through a critical discourse analysis of Exit articles, Exit is South Africa's longest running gay newspaper. In addition, interviews were conducted with people involved in the organizing of Joburg Pride and Johannesburg People's Pride.

Affective return: anachronistic feeling and contemporary South African documentary form

ABSTRACTThis paper turns to the critically entangled terms of form and feeling as a basis for exploring post-2012 South African protest and visual cultures. Against the backdrop of a newly ascendant political vernacular characterised by the reluctance to dichotomise emotion and reason in negotiating the terms of contemporary dissent, I examine specifically how the consequences of political disenchantment are affectively negotiated in and through documentary form. Films such as The People Versus The Rainbow Nation Nelson Mandela: The Myth and Me Miners Shot Down and Strike a Rock have recently come to exemplify what Rob Nixon calls “the versatile possibilities of politically engaged nonfiction”. Taking Nelson Mandela: The Myth and Me and The People Versus The Rainbow Nation as case studies, I trace the historicity and aesthetic structures embedded in those aspects of the post-2012 South African documentary image that might be said not only to move viewers, but to be constitutive of each film’s formal arrangement. The films convey the entanglement of documentary intelligibility and feeling in ways that are particularly pertinent to making sense of the contemporary South African “liberation reimagined”.

Reconciliation in South Africa in light of the imago Dei and koinonia

It is evident that the establishment of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) and its consequent findings, together with the dawn of the new South Africa, has not achieved its goal of a unified ‘rainbow nation’. This is because of the fact that South Africans still face racialism and segregation from most quarters of the community. The racialism and marginalising are not only white and black dichotomies, but the fissures are evident in black-on-black and white-on-white anxieties. The infighting in churches and communities represents other contributing factors. The dream of the ‘rainbow’ society, which is raceless, has smothered the vision of peace and harmony of a reconciled society. This smothering has had a divisive impact on the possibilities immanent in South Africa. Despair, the promotion of hatred and polarisation are common anxieties among most South Africans. The race card is used for ‘one’s’ own greediness and personal aggrandisement and there is a need for a solution. This study seeks to establish the theology of the image of God ( imago Dei ) in relation to fellowship ( koinonia ). Then, the study highlights the causes of distress in some denominations, especially those that privilege the name of God and thereby making a comparison between the churches and TRC which was a government initiative in the restoration of peace and fellowship process. From that premise, the article argues that despite the inclusive accommodative TRC sessions, racial intolerance and deep infighting are still rife in South Africa. Then, the study concludes by proposing a mission paradigm that advances fellowship and advocates that all people are made in the image of God, thence they are equal. The article brings forth the political era post-1994 in South Africa and links that to the social setting of churches post-1994. In that way, there is a link between politics and the church and how these have influenced the present in South Africa. The question is: Did the TRC usher in a new era of koinonia and brotherhood from a theology of the image of God? This missiological aspect is linked to socialism and politics.

Unlayering the Intangible: Post-Truth in the Post Rainbow Nation

In KwaZulu-Natal, a province of South Africa, intangible heritage has been a component of provincial legislation since 1997. The promulgation of the KwaZulu-Natal Provincial Heritage Resources Act that year recognized intangible heritage as mainstream. Indeed, whilst KwaZulu-Natal, and the country as a whole was at the forefront of including intangible heritage as a key component of legislation, its complex demographics have celebrated aspects of the intangible for many years. This paper will begin by discussing the intangible heritages of the province in general before examining its multiple facets, including site and landscape, in the interpretation of provincial heritage. Amongst other contextual information, such as contemporary celebration of grave sites, and sites of greater Zulu nationalism, it will examine the sites and practices of religious groups such as the Zulu-based Shembe. These serve to reinforce that intangible heritage is not merely the mothballing of memory, but contemporary, dynamic, and an agent of change, rather than a static concept clutched in the grasp of western thought. It will conclude by suggesting that intangible heritage is a process of authenticity. Further, the authentic is a simultaneous and immutable product of the action, the tradition, the interpretation and the immaterial, rather than a static repetition of a logical and constructed constant which views, digests and describes a system or ritual in order to understand it.

Dancing the rainbow nation as it bleeds: the Surialanga Dance Company in post-apartheid South Africa

ABSTRACTThis article analyzes the work of the Surialanga Dance Company of Durban, South Africa, which debuted at Nelson Mandela's inauguration in 1994. Inspired by Mandela's vision of intercultural harmony and created through sustained engagement with Zulu culture, Surialanga created a uniquely South African version of Indian classical Bharatanatyam that threatens colonial and apartheid constructs of “pure” Indian identity. But the company's powerful decolonial message has become less resonant in a post-apartheid context that continues to be structured by what Ndlovu-Gatsheni has called the “colonial matrix of power,” a legacy of colonialism and apartheid that results in a narrow focus on ethnic and racial identities. Drawing both from direct participation and interviews with the director and company members (2001–2008; 2018), this article traces the history of Surialanga's decolonising praxis from Mandela's inauguration to the present, arguing for the continued salience of Surialanga's dance, even in the face of particularism and violence.

Perspectives on National Identity: The Case of Emerging Intelligentsia in South Africa

ABSTRACTAfter more than two decades since the general euphoria associated with the South African ‘miracle’, the ‘Madiba magic’ and the ‘Rainbow Nation’, it is necessary to take stock whether (and if so, how) the state succeeded in building a national identity. Such an identity includes cultural and ethnic identity and is a strong indicator of the level of cohesion or polarisation in a country. The purpose of this article was to reflect on findings of an empirical survey about the status of national identity conducted among the ‘emerging intelligentsia’ of society. These are young, educated people, represented in this case by undergraduate students at the North-West University. The study determined to which extent they perceive and experience national identity. The factors were identified that enhance or constrain a common national identity. The results highlighted the main elements that hamper the development of a unified South African identity. Among these elements are one culture’s perceived supremacy over another, cultural exclusiveness, cultural inequality, and limited equal opportunities for prosperity.

The Myth of the “Rainbow Nation”: Xenophobia, Sexual Violence, and Racial Tensions in Period Pain by Kopano Matlwa

The Myth of the “Rainbow Nation”: Xenophobia, Sexual Violence, and Racial Tensions in Period Pain by Kopano Matlwa

"Born-Frees" on South Africa's Memory Traps: The Year in South Africa

"Born-Frees" on South Africa's Memory TrapsThe Year in South Africa Nick Mdika Tembo (bio) Can an entire community, or country, be trapped by its own memories? For a society like South Africa—a country that is still struggling with the legacy of apartheid, rising rates of concentrated poverty, the slow pace of the ANC's economic reforms, xenophobic or Afrophobic violence, and a poorly funded education system—the answer might be "yes." At least, in part, this is the sense one gets in reading Clinton Chauke's Born in Chains: The Diary of and Angry 'Born-free' and Malaika wa Azania's Memoirs of a Born Free: Reflections on the Rainbow Nation. In this review I focus on Chauke's diary, as well as recent developments in the new black consciousness movement in postapartheid South Africa, exploring how the complicated and fragmentary nature of racial identities and related memories manifests in the narrative context of the book. The author of Born in Chains is a young man who, like most of his generation of black South Africans, finds the "born-free" label a misnomer. For him, there is a dissonance between living as a black person in post-1994 South Africa—the environment blacks live in—and the idea of freedom. The black person's freedom seems to amount to a contrived abstraction generalized to the point of meaninglessness: Chauke maintains that Democratic South Africa has only produced political freedom; socioeconomic freedom remains a myth. In a review of the book, journalist and novelist Niq Mhlongo also concurs that "because it marked the dawn of our new democracy, the year 1994 is misconstrued as the marker of the end of apartheid, racism and even inequality" ("The Biography"), even when South Africans still contend with what Chauke himself calls "centuries of racial, tribal and religious oppression" (Chauke 60). Chauke acknowledges that it is going to take time for the black-and-white problem to be fixed in South Africa because the problems "are neither black, nor white nor coloured, but problems people face—problems people could overcome" (262). His book is a sobering, realistic, and at times humorous [End Page 140] read, wistfully calling on black South Africans to "humble [themselves], and try to consolidate power with the children of the victors, and teach one another to live together" (261). As a diary, Born in Chains is what Rachel Langford and Russell West call "an uncertain genre uneasily balanced between literary and historical writing, between the spontaneity of reportage and reflectiveness of the crafted text, between selfhood and events, between subjectivity and objectivity, between the private and the public" (8). Yet, as Langford and West also observe, the diary is "a public text" in so far as it sparks powerful memories in its readers of what they, too, might have gone through at some point in their lives (10). It is an assertion that seems to resonate with Mhlongo's life, who has since admitted that reading Chauke's diary "sparked some very powerful memories for me, as I also completed my education at a poor rural school in Limpopo. Through Chauke's book, I am able to compare the standard of education and living that I experienced during the apartheid era with the post-1994 democratic period—and find that not enough has changed." Diaries capture life as it is lived, according to Niall Bolger et al. In the narrative context of Born in Chains, this lived reality is full of emotional and introspective accounts of what it means "to be young and black in South Africa" (214). In Chauke's view, black South Africans have always grappled with racial/ethnic stereotypes that have at times threatened to invisibilize and exclude them from dominant national discourses. These stereotypes are rooted in the apartheid past, understood by Trevor Noah as the epitome of hatred: "Apart hate is what it was. You separate people into groups and make them hate one another so you can run them all" (3). One of the main functions of this system of control and observation was to encourage disaffection—those who think about South African history today often do so not to glorify...

The Born Frees as Assertive Citizens? Student Protests and Democratic Prospects in South Africa

Massive student protests in South Africa in the past few years, largest since the times of the anti-apartheid struggles, raised several questions for political scientists. Are we witnessing a generational change? Or are they a sign of a broader global shift towards “assertive citizenship” present in advanced democracies and democratizing countries? To answer these questions, this paper examines the levels of political support and nature of political participation among the young generation. The paper also points out that generational change is not immediately visible in public opinion polls but is a process of a gradual narrative construction. Protests brought with them a challenge to the founding narrative of a united Rainbow Nation and reconciliation with the past, leading to a fracture in democratic stability. For the democratic project to succeed, it is essential that the national project in South Africa does not fall apart.

Challenges to Political Cosmopolitanism: The Impact of Racialised Discourses in Post-Apartheid South Africa

One of the key challenges of post-apartheid South Africa has been the need to create a South African “nation.” The efforts of the leading African National Congress started with Nelson Mandela’s reconciliatory discourse of a “rainbow nation,” via Thabo Mbeki’s concept of the African Renaissance, to the current stream of racial nationalism articulated as “Africanisation.” The present article attempts to examine the dilemma which the ANC as the major custodian of nation-building has been facing since the 1990s: how to reach a balance between a civic nationalism based on cosmopolitan values and the need to redress the legacy of apartheid and persisting racial inequalities. It is argued that the current culturalist discourse of Africanisation is not only contentious but also dangerous for the cohesion of the fragile democratic society of post-apartheid South Africa.

Ethnic and National Attachment in the Rainbow Nation: The Case of the Republic of South Africa

Previous work concerning the interface between racial and national identification within multiracial states has suggested that dominant racial groups tend to express a firmer grip on ownership of and identification with the nation than is the case for racial minorities. This can occur despite inclusionary political rhetoric to the contrary and within nations regarded as civic rather than ethnic states. In this article, we explored the degree to which there were asymmetries in the interface between racial and national identities within the nation of South Africa, a state whose current political dispensation was founded on the principles of racial pluralism. We examined a large sample of South African citizens from the four officially recognized racial categories: Africans, Whites, Coloreds, and Indian/Asians. The results showed mixed support for the idea of South Africa as a “Rainbow Nation.”