As South Africa consolidates its democracy, chieftaincy has remained a
controversial and influential institution that has adapted to recent changes. J.
Michael Williams examines the chieftaincy and ...how it has sought to assert its power
since the end of apartheid. By taking local-level politics seriously and looking
closely at how chiefs negotiate the new political order, Williams takes a position
between those who see the chieftaincy as an indigenous democratic form deserving
recognition and protection, and those who view it as incompatible with democracy.
Williams describes a network of formal and informal accommodations that have
influenced the ways state and local authorities interact. By focusing on local
perceptions of the chieftaincy and its interactions with the state, Williams reveals
an ongoing struggle for democratization at the local and national levels in South
Africa.
Bodies of Truth Kesselring, Rita
2016, 2016-10-12, Letnik:
49
eBook
Bodies of Truth offers an intimate account of how apartheid victims deal with the long-term effects of violence, focusing on the intertwined themes of embodiment, injury, victimhood, and memory. In ...2002, victims of apartheid-era violence filed suit against multinational corporations, accusing them of aiding and abetting the security forces of the apartheid regime. While the litigation made its way through the U.S. courts, thousands of victims of gross human rights violations have had to cope with painful memories of violence. They have also confronted an official discourse claiming that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of the 1990s sufficiently addressed past injuries. This book shows victims' attempts to emancipate from their experiences by participating in legal actions, but also by creating new forms of sociality among themselves and in relation to broader South African society.Rita Kesselring's ethnography draws on long-term research with members of the victim support group Khulumani and critical analysis of legal proceedings related to apartheid-era injury. Using juridical intervention as an entry point into the question of subjectivity, Kesselring asks how victimhood is experienced in the everyday for the women and men living on the periphery of Cape Town and in other parts of the country. She argues that the everyday practices of the survivors must be taken up by the state and broader society to allow for inclusive social change in a post-conflict setting.
Post-apartheid South African elections have borne an unmistakable racial imprint: Africans vote for one set of parties, whites support a different set of parties, and, with few exceptions, there is ...no crossover voting between groups. These voting tendencies have solidified the dominance of the ruling African National Congress (ANC) over South African politics and turned South African elections into 'racial censuses'. This book explores the political sources of these outcomes. It argues that although the beginnings of these patterns lie in South Africa's past, in the effects apartheid had on voters' beliefs about race and destiny and the reputations parties forged during this period, the endurance of the census reflects the ruling party's ability to use the powers of office to prevent the opposition from evolving away from its apartheid-era party label. By keeping key opposition parties 'white', the ANC has rendered them powerless, solidifying its hold on power in spite of an increasingly restive and dissatisfied electorate.
This book publishes Martin Legassick's influential doctoral thesis on the preindustrial South African frontier zone of Transorangia. The impressive formation of the Griqua states in the first half of ...the nineteenth century outside the borders of the Cape Colony and their relations with Sotho-Tswana polities, frontiersmen, missionaries and the British administration of the Cape take centre stage in the analysis. The Griqua, of mixed settler and indigenous descent, secured hegemony in a frontier of complex partnerships and power struggles. The author's subsequent critique of the "frontier tradition" in South African historiography drew on the insights he had gained in writing this dissertation. It served to initiate the debate about the importance of the precolonial frontier situation in South Africa for the establishment of ideas of race, the development of racial prejudice and, implicitly, the creation of segregationist and apartheid systems. Today, the constructed histories of "Griqua" and other categories of indigeneity have re emerged in South Africa as influential tools of political mobilisation and claims on resources.
Truth V. Justice Rotberg, Robert I; Thompson, Dennis
2000., 20100701, 2010, 2000, Letnik:
20
eBook
The truth commission is an increasingly common fixture of newly democratic states with repressive or strife-ridden pasts. From South Africa to Haiti, truth commissions are at work with varying ...degrees of support and success. To many, they are the best--or only--way to achieve a full accounting of crimes committed against fellow citizens and to prevent future conflict. Others question whether a restorative justice that sets the guilty free, that cleanses society by words alone, can deter future abuses and allow victims and their families to heal. Here, leading philosophers, lawyers, social scientists, and activists representing several perspectives look at the process of truth commissioning in general and in post-apartheid South Africa. They ask whether the truth commission, as a method of seeking justice after conflict, is fair, moral, and effective in bringing about reconciliation.
An extraordinary outbreak of xenophobic violence in May 2008 shocked South Africa, but hostility toward newcomers has a long history. Democratization has channeled such discontent into a non-racial ...nationalism that specifically targets foreign Africans as a threat to prosperity. Finding suitable governmental and societal responses requires a better understanding of the complex legacies of segregation that underpin current immigration policies and practices. Unfortunately, conventional wisdoms of path dependency promote excessive fatalism and ignore how much South Africa is a typical settler state. A century ago, its policy makers shared innovative ideas with Australia and Canada, and these peers, which now openly wrestle with their own racist past, merit renewed attention. As unpalatable as the comparison might be to contemporary advocates of multiculturalism, rethinking restrictions in South Africa can also offer lessons for reconciling competing claims of indigeneity through multiple levels of representation and rights.
In Survival in the 'Dumping Grounds', Laura Evans examines the multi-layered social history of apartheid-era relocation into South Africa's Ciskei bantustan.
Masculinities, militarisation and the End Conscription Campaign explores the gendered dynamics of apartheid-era South Africa's militarisation and analyses the defiance of compulsory military service ...by individual white men, and the anti-apartheid activism of the white men and women in the End Conscription Campaign (ECC), the most significant white anti-apartheid movement to happen in South Africa. Military conscription and objection to it are conceptualised as gendered acts of citizenship and premised on and constitutive of masculinities.Conway draws upon a range of materials and disciplines t.
Heritage work has had a uniquely wide currency in Africa's politics. Secure within the pages of books, encoded in legal statutes, encased in glass display cases and enacted in the panoply of court ...ritual, the artefacts produced by the heritage domain have become a resource for government administration, a library for traditionalists and a marketable source of value for cultural entrepreneurs. The Politics of Heritage in Africa draws together disparate fields of study - history, archaeology, linguistics, the performing arts and cinema - to show how the lifeways of the past were made into capital, a store of authentic knowledge that political and cultural entrepreneurs could draw from. This book shows African heritage to be a mode of political organisation, a means by which the relics of the past are shored up, reconstructed and revalued as commodities, as tradition, as morality or as patrimony.
