South African Political History Research Articles

Cape mission liberalism and the South African liberation struggle

ABSTRACT To help us better understand the impact of European colonisation on South African political thought, it is important to recognise the role played by both race and religion. Given the outsized role that Christian mission schools have had on South African political history, this article seeks to identify how the Cape mission liberal tradition, specifically, influenced twentieth-century South African political thought. By examining the lives and ideas of Z.K. Matthews and Govan Mbeki, this article shows how both liberal and communist strains of African nationalism present in the liberation struggle were influenced by the mission liberal tradition.

Grabbing the Sharp End of the Knife to Bring Liberation, Peace and Justice to South Africans: lessons from Ellen Kuzwayo and Phyllis Naidoo

abstract The tableware sparkles, the fresh flower arrangements are fragrant, soft, live jazz music tones permeate the air as the luncheon, which is of a world-class standard, gets underway. I am attending the celebration to mark the opening of new teaching venues at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, named after political stalwarts Ellen Kuzwayo and Phyllis Naidoo. Tributes are paid to these prototypical giantesses, who had worked as teachers during a part of their lives. My interest is piqued: Who were these political icons whose memory was being preserved in the buildings? What obstacles did they experience as women in the struggle for political emancipation? How might these insights inform our cultural identity as South African women in modern day society? In the present, pluralistic, patriarchal South African society, women encounter a multitude of challenges, including HIV and Aids, gender-based violence, unemployment, poverty, workplace gender discrimination and child abuse. However, women have broken the shackles of the past by resisting gender oppression and political injustices. Historically, women experienced exclusion within social and political spheres. For example, it took 31 years before women were permitted to join the African National Congress (ANC). Currently, the invisibility of women, compared to men in South African political history, is attributed in a large part to patriarchy. In order to address this vacuum, I use a feminist lens to look into the past to understand the herstorical accounts of these women, and locate the challenges and enablers which can serve to inform the empowerment of women today and in the future.

Notes from underground: fugitive ecology and the ethics of place

In this essay, I argue for “fugitive gardening” as a form of “poaching” or “resignifying,” a radical appropriation of hegemonic spaces and practices that both deconstructs the logics of mastery and hygienic possessiveness that underpin colonial culture, and articulates what we might call a fugitive ecology: a dispossession of self in relation to the environment, a refusal to conceive of land, soil or planet in terms of property. Fugitive gardening sets itself in opposition to the prisons, camps and forts that index South African political history, restorying place, environment, and the self as grounds for community formation, dialogue and cooperation. Through readings of Coetzee’s Life & Times of Michael K and other examples of literary and material gardening, I show how such cultivation represents a gesture of belonging in a context where such claims are revolutionary, even treasonous; but unlike farm, fort or prison, fugitive gardening stakes a claim to belonging without possession, home without property and ecological care without an investment in the future. As such, gardening entails a very different understanding of self in relation to place, to nature and to future generations, and a reconceptualisation of narrative and language as representational modes.

Apartheid, 1948–1994 by Saul Dubow; Inside South Africa’s Foreign Policy: Diplomacy in Africa from Smuts to Mbeki by John Siko

Reviewed by: Roel van der Velde (), School of Languages and Area Studies, University of Portsmouth, UKAs the fourth African National Congress (ANC) leader to become the president of South Africa, Jacob Zuma once boasted that the party which had defeated racial segregation would rule the country until Jesus comes.[1] Twenty years on, the once exemplary democracy sees its very institutions crumbling under cronyism and corruption. Even before his 2016 Speech of the Nation was heckled by opposition, Zuma found himself grappling with disgruntled voters, racial tensions, and a largely self-inflicted economic crisis.[2] To fully understand present-day South African politics requires an understanding of the country's past. Two books published on South African political history in 2014 can help us gain just that.The first study is by Professor Saul Dubow of Queen Mary University of London, who has written extensively about his native country. His latest book focuses on the ideology and practice of apartheid and the way they were understood and resisted. The other book, by diplomat-scholar John Siko, focuses on political networks involved in South African foreign policy formulation. It examines the extent to which formerly disenfranchised groups have overcome the system of apartheid. Siko finished his research while working at the US embassy in Cape Town. Together, the books offer a comprehensive view of political mobilization under apartheid and its democratic successor.Building ideologies, resisting powerDubow has written a reintegrated history of the many sides of apartheid, woven from budding from below and an analysis of apartheid state power (ix). His study in state ideology and the social counter-movements resisting its implementation covers the span from the 1948 Malan government to the election of majority government in 1994. Throughout this period, an ideological conflict was fought between and among generations of government officials, social movements, and affected populations.Interaction constitutes the central theme of Dubow's book: the initiatives and exchanges of government and various societal actors. Dubow reintroduces contingency and historicity to the dusty narratives of apartheid and resistance. He synthesizes old and new scholarship on a host of political, biographical, and cultural dimensions and has a keen eye for diversities of gender, race, and language. This often leads him to revise the actual importance of events that would enter resistance lore. To give but one example, the Sharpeville massacre of 21 March 1960 was neither the worst example of callous government policies at that time, the author maintains, nor was the ANC's subsequent choice for armed resistance as inevitable or uniformly shared as later contended.Dubow's elaborate rebuttal of rise-and-fall histories of apartheid describes the socio-economic, ideological, and spatial dimensions that combined to assure the surprising longevity of that system. From a winning 1948 electoral slogan and then ambivalent administrative segregation, apartheid became a robust ideology of Afrikaner Christian-nationalism that secured the dream of the 1961 republic, free from British tutelage. Separate development would become an article of faith, but its success had not been inevitable, nor was it secure. Accordingly, the eight loosely chronological chapters have the same move-and-countermove character.Retracing the idea of apartheid from its colonial-era components to its 1960s hubris and traversal in the late 1980s shows the many turns in racist policy. Constantly evolving militant and military movements combined with ever-changing economic and international contexts to upset the governmental fiction of segregated and contented tribal nations. Even so, divisive measures and forced relocations hit populations unevenly, and resistance to them was not unified or wholly black. …

Texts and tests of equality: The Women's Charters and the demand for equality in South African political history

abstractSouth African struggles for gender equality have been embodied in two charters produced in 1954 and 1994. To the extent that there is a manifesto of the South African women's movement, it may be found in these documents. The charters articulate a vision for a democratic society, and give content to the idea of gender equality as it may be achieved in the specific context of a postcolonial, post-apartheid future. This article argues that the charters are political signs that constitute the political community of women, lay out the agendas for collective action, and address the holders of power in society. The clauses of the two charters reflect continuities in the ambitions of women's organisations. Importantly, though, reading the charters from the perspective of two decades of democratic government it is also possible to detect how shifts in political and economic context have affected the possibilities for feminist ambitions to be realised. Thus the charters operate both as texts that form part of the democratic tradition, as well as tests for the ways in which the democratic State has advanced gender equality.

Philosophy and the Multi-Cultural Context of (Post)Apartheid South Africa

Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu is the Zulu version of a traditional African aphorism (Shutte, 1993:46). Although with considerable loss of culture-specific meaning, it can be translated as: “A human being is a human being through (the otherness of) other human beings.” Still, its meaning can be interpreted in various ways of which I would like to highlight only two, in accordance with the grammar of the central concept ‘Ubuntu’ which denotes both a state of being and one of becoming. Firstly, it can be interpreted as a statement of fact about the human condition, i.e. as a descriptive claim about the social nature of human being and personal identity; even the constitutive relation between alterity and identity. Secondly, it can also be interpreted as a value-judgement, i.e. as a normative appreciation of social difference and human diversity; even as an imperative to expose ourselves to others, to encounter the difference of their humanness, in order to fully become our own. The meaning would then be — to paraphrase a translation of Ramose (1995: 237, 238): To be human is to affirm one’s humanity by recognising the humanity of others in its infinite variety of content and form. This interpretation is probably closer to the traditional wisdom expressed in the aphorism in question. The intended meaning, however, its presuppositions and implications taken as a philosopheme, remains elusive — at least if we try to grasp it in the standardised conceptual categories of our Western ways of thinking. Nevertheless, my intuition is that this aphorism may provide us with a factual description and a rule of conduct which corresponds to the conceptual difficulties one encounters when one attempts a philosophical interpretation of the multi-cultural reality of (post)apartheid South Africa. To attempt such an interpretation is nonetheless of urgent importance for the self-understanding and social well-being of our society. This is not the place to recall the major events and crises of recent South African political history. Suffice to say that only two years ago it was not unreasonable for many of us to expect the worst possible scenario, a massive civil and ethnic war, the Southern African counterpoint to Bosnia and Rwanda. In retrospect, it is clear that we escaped this fate — at least for a moment in history — not only because of the compromising negotiations of politicians, but also — or even more so — because of the unexpected emergence of an ethos of solidarity amongst ordinary South Africans of all colours, creeds and cultures, a commitment to peaceful co-existence in the absence of uniformity. On the other hand, it cannot be denied that this ethos of solidarity is frail and extremely difficult to uphold once the full implications of our diversity, the recognition of different languages, histories, values and customs are to be realised in various spheres of life. Within a multi-cultural democracy the various ethnic and socio-cultural differences are not blurred, but intensified both because of legitimate claims to institutionalisation on the one hand, and their easy political exploitation on the other hand. Given the fact that South Africa has always been a multi-cultural society one would have expected a rich and strong tradition of philosophical reflection on diversity and the related issues which were forced onto the agenda of philosophy

A S Geyser, teologiese dosent 1946-1961

A S Geyser, lecturer in theology 1946-1961 In this article the academic role of Professor A S Geyser is briefly discussed. He lectured in New Testament Studies and Practical Theology at the University of Pretoria from 1946. He resigned in 1961, after a period of strife. His publications show a consistence in exegetical approach and theological description. His historical-critical investigation was aimed beyond the New Testament into the pretexts which evidenced the commencement of the universal apostolate at Antioch. Inferred from his exegetical results he propounded the unity of the church as an imperative for today. However, against the background of the South African political history from 1948 to 1961, the political and ecumenical implications of Geyser’s theological convictions were not acceptable to the Nederduitsch Hervormde Kerk.

“Local is Lekker”: Or why the New South African Parochialism will not go

Summary Based upon brief comparisons with other literatures, the article examines the current debates on South African literature, isolating four symptoms which seem to indicate national self‐assertion via the high road of literature. These are the pride taken in locally produced artefacts; an increasing “cross‐over” and mingling of different languages which make any quests for purity of language a risky business, challenging control over dominant discursive formations; the attempt to find an “authentic” South African voice in literature, and, finally, a questioning of hitherto accepted critical traditions and boundaries. But although the intense focus upon the local seems both necessary and fruitful at this particular juncture in South African political history, the birthpangs of an emerging literature ought not to blind its practitioners into becoming parochial by cutting themselves off from the international debate.

Index to Periodical Articles on South African Political and Social History since 1902: Vol. 3, Bibliographies on South African Political History. Compiled by P. W. Coetzer et al. (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1982. Pp. xx + 616. $69.95.)

Index to Periodical Articles on South African Political and Social History since 1902: Vol. 3, Bibliographies on South African Political History. Compiled by P. W. Coetzer et al. (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1982. Pp. xx + 616. $69.95.)

Bibliographies on South African Political History. Volume II. General Sources on South African Political History since 1902. Compiled by P. W. Coetzer and J. H. le Roux. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1979. Pp. xi + 763. $58. - South African History and Historians. A Bibliography. By C. F. J. Muller, F. A. van Jaarsveld, Theo van Wijk and Maurice Boucher.

Bibliographies on South African Political History. Volume II. General Sources on South African Political History since 1902. Compiled by P. W. Coetzer and J. H. le Roux. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1979. Pp. xi + 763. $58. - South African History and Historians. A Bibliography. By C. F. J. Muller, F. A. van Jaarsveld, Theo van Wijk and Maurice Boucher. Pretoria: University of South Africa, 1979. Pp. xv + 411. R. 13. - Volume 24 Issue 1

Bibliographies on South African Political History: Vol. I. Register of Private Document Collections on the Political History of South Africa since 1902. By O. Geyser, P. W. Coetzer and J. H. Le Roux. Boston, Mass.: G. K. Hall, 1979. Pp. xix + 150. $21 (U.S.A.).

Bibliographies on South African Political History: Vol. I. Register of Private Document Collections on the Political History of South Africa since 1902. By O. Geyser, P. W. Coetzer and J. H. Le Roux. Boston, Mass.: G. K. Hall, 1979. Pp. xix + 150. $21 (U.S.A.). - Volume 21 Issue 1

The War Policy of South Africa

Neutrality versus support of the British Commonwealth was the issue which confronted the Union of South Africa when Great Britain, on September 3, 1939, went to war with Germany. A glance at recent South African political history will assist the reader in understanding the significance of the political crisis which marked the Union's entry into the conflict. As the outcome of an earlier crisis at the end of 1932, when South Africa abandoned the gold standard, a Coalition Government headed by two Boer generals was formed. Genaral Hertzog, leader of the Afrikaans-speaking Nationalist party, who had been prime minister in the preceding Nationalist-Laborite Pact Government, continued in the premiership. The post of deputy prime minister in the Coalition Cabinet was taken by General Smuts, the head of the South African party (made up of both Afrikaans and Englishspeaking elements of the population), which had formed the Opposition to the Pact Government. When this Coalition of 1933 was welded into Fusion by the formation of the United party in 1934, the rô1e of the official Opposition was assumed by the extreme Nationalists under Dr. Malan. Minor parties in Parliament were the Laborites and the Dominion party, an offshoot of the South African party with strong pro-British sentiments.