Dispossession is characteristically associated with the period of colonialism and apartheid in South Africa. Consequently, not much consideration is given to how the previously marginalised continue ...to be dispossessed in their everyday lives by coal mining activities in the current political dispensation. This article reframes dispossession as a perpetual post-apartheid experience in African communities. In this paper, dispossession does not only encompass events of deprivation, and the loss of land and property, but also covers the loss of the incorporeal. The relocation of African ancestral graves in Tweefontein (Ogies) is discussed as an aspect of dispossession. The politics surrounding household relocations and grave exhumations illustrates how communities not only lose the material; land and tombs, but also lose their intangible possessions; ancestral connection, identity, heritage and belonging because of mining.
The Covid-19 pandemic threw into stark relief the multi-dimensional threats created by neoliberal capitalism. Government measures to alleviate the crisis were largely inadequate, leaving women – in ...particular working-class women – to carry the increased burden of care work while at the same time placing themselves in direct risk as frontline workers. Emancipatory Feminism in the Time of Covid-19, the seventh volume in the Democratic Marxism series, explores how many subaltern women – working class, peasant and indigenous – challenge hegemonic neoliberal feminism through their resistance to ordinary capitalist practices and ecological extractivism. Contributors cover women’s responses in a wide range of contexts: from women leading the defence of Rojava – the Kurdish region of Syria, to approaches to anti-capitalist ecology and building food secure pathways in communities across Africa, to championing climate justice in mining affected communities and transforming gender divisions in mining labour practices in South Africa, to contesting macro-economic policies affecting the working conditions of nurses. Their practices demonstrate a feminist understanding of the current systemic crises of capitalism and patriarchal oppression. What is offered in this collection is a subaltern women’s grassroots resistance focused on advancing and enabling solidarity-based political projects, deepening democracy, building capacities and alliances to advance new feminist alternatives.
M.A.--University of the Witwatersrand, Faculty of Humanities, 2012
This thesis examines the legitimacy of chiefs in post-apartheid South Africa through the prism of the Vaaltyn Mokopane chieftainship ...in Limpopo Province. It is used as a case study to understand how chiefs gain and maintain legitimacy. This is studied within a framework of a succession dispute between two candidates, Vaaltyn A (born in 1964) and Vaaltyn B (born in 1974). The claim of Vaaltyn B was legitimized by the local government of Mokopane and the provincial government of Limpopo, irrespective of the fact that that majority of the Kekana tribal council and the community members supported Vaaltyn A. The thesis suggests that the legitimacy of chief Vaaltyn B is maintained through patron-client relations in which the local/provincial government enters into and initiates economically viable relations with Vaaltyn B and mining houses. These patron-client relations are formed and continued within a context of a succession dispute which allows for Vaaltyn A and community members to be sidelined. Finally, the thesis discusses where the legitimization of chief Vaaltyn B by the people stands, in this case where authority has already been awarded by the government. This serves as a platform to probe whether people continue to support the continuing existence of chiefs in a democratic dispensation.
