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This article serves to introduce a short story by Bloke Modisane found among the papers of the late Colin Legum, which are housed in the manuscripts department of University of Cape Town Libraries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws from the paradigm of Critical Theory (CT) and Decolonial Theory to engage in an introductory discussion on the need for a new methodological paradigm, namely a Critical Decolonial Theory. This is put forward in order to both argue for the imperative of introducing multiple narratives to the philosophical practice of contemporary social critique in South Africa, as well as to provide a cautionary note relating to how the decolonisation narrative itself could become a determinative ideology if it engages in what Lewis Gordon terms "epistemic closure." While operating from within the framework and ideals of traditional CT and Amy Allen's subsequent contribution to decolonising CT, we draw specifically from black practitioners of this critical philosophical tradition, namely Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Frantz Fanon, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Paulin Hountondji, and Achille Mbembe, in order to localise and ground our discussion of the need to problematise (i.e., consider both vindicatory and subversive aspects of) the decolonisation project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reads contemporary South Africa through the lens of melancholia and situates the experience of loss at the heart of social entanglements in the country. It argues that the purchase of melancholia lies partly in the fact that the problem of disarticulated and disenfranchised loss is common to post-apartheid modernity in general. It suggests that post-apartheid melancholia is a resultant effect of the country's fraught engagement with loss and (be)longing. It also notes that post-apartheid melancholia is a result of structural traumas and moral anguish that have not been worked through. This paper shows how melancholia manifests in the different modes of attachments to, and identifications with victimhood; it explains why each identity group lays il/legitimate claims to victimhood in South Africa. In addition, this paper conceptualises post-apartheid melancholia along racial and generational lines. That is, it examines the ways in which personal testimonies and meditations shed light on the prospects of white, black and intergenerational melancholia in post-apartheid South Africa. In all, this paper argues that melancholia is an affective structure of the everyday life in post-apartheid South Africa which – if we are not quick to pathologise it – may help combat hurried attempts at closing the door on the past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When Matlala and Matom first began photographing their respective worlds in the 1980s, demand for political images of apartheid overshadowed quotidian concerns. Since then, a shift away from the political to the personal in South African photography has offered a space of reflection for the kinds of images that they sought to make. This paper focuses on the historical, social and political aspects of these two photographers' photo-archives. It attempts to place their work and photographic concerns within the broader archive of South African photography and to demonstrate continuities and ruptures between the past and the present.Photographs are first and foremost, records, and markers of time. Although photographs might be seen to be of their time, of everyday occurrences, they also transcend time. Thus, their relationship to time is necessarily complex, and requires interpretation and analysis within a disciplinary and discursive frame, which in this paper is work and the everyday. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers the ways in which characters are presented as "out of place" in different apartheid city spaces in anti-apartheid era films of the late 1980s: A Dry White Season (1989, dir. Euzhan Palcy) and Mapantsula (1988, dir. Oliver Schmitz) and, to a lesser degree, Cry Freedom (1987, dir. Richard Attenborough). The article explores the manner in which the protagonists relate to each other through interracial friendship, relationality and mobility in the domestic spaces of cities and townships. It reads these relations as occupying and redefining apartheid sensibilities in distinct ways that filter into how postapartheid sensibilities are and can be navigated. The paper thus grapples with how seemingly fixed apartheid spaces and characters in the films can also be part of complex, real-life repositionings of racial identities in postapartheid South Africa that are not always clear and/or neat. The paper therefore argues that through their representations of the past, these films perform memory work and map our memories and historical constructions of apartheid. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through land restitution, a component of land reform, the state seeks to restore the dignity of black communities who lost their land during colonial and apartheid times. Land restitution seeks to return the land that was unfairly grabbed from black people or to offer alternative land or cash compensation. Much public discourse and research on South African land reform has been on the failure of land reform projects and on land acquisition debates. Little research has been published foregrounding the voices of beneficiaries. By capturing their lived experiences after land transfer, this paper examines whether these beneficiaries have been "restituted." My study in the Macleantown and Salem restitution cases shows that access to land has restored the dignity of beneficiaries and produced nostalgia because of the return of ancestors' land, although the livelihoods of beneficiaries have not improved and these projects have failed to function. I argue that these land compensated beneficiaries have not been properly 'restituted,' because the programme has failed to improve their livelihoods or to produce modern solutions for the restitution programme. Land restitution in these areas has largely not led to land justice because beneficiaries are living in poverty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How African migrants establish themselves within new contexts through struggles for education is a relatively under-researched phenomenon in South Africa. The notion of "idioms of rootlessness" has been developed to make sense of migrants' understandings of new hostile environments. This article troubles this botanical metaphor through an exploration of the life-history of one Zimbabwean woman who migrated to South Africa and the specific role of education in her trajectory in Zimbabwe and South Africa. Her story is examined against the backdrop of the changing political economy of education in Zimbabwe and South Africa. In highlighting how she navigates borders for the education of her children and decides which children to educate where it shows how educational values, beliefs and practices also migrate. The paper argues that her struggle for the education of her children can also be interpreted as an expression of the desire for attachment in both spaces and as a means of claiming a place in both countries, across borders, for herself and her children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The marked PDF has been uploaded for reference and acceptance of grammatical changes] Post-apartheid South African legislation for the protection and management of the ocean environment, has been dominated by the language of sustainable development. Deeply embedded in the notion of sustainability is that of resilience. I propose in this paper, through the medium of the ocean and the Dwesa-Cwebe community in the Eastern Cape Province, that the expectation for human resilience in the age of climate change and global warming is promoted as a reasonable and necessary condition. I will argue that coastal communities, as citizens, are expected to perform resilience within the national rhetoric 'for the greater good,' to support a development narrative which uses environmental protection to veil a government policy of economic gain over social equality. To explore the above claims, I turn to a case study focused on a ground-breaking judgement in the Supreme Court of Appeals which saw fishers gain access to Marine Protected Areas on the grounds of customary rights. A close reading of the judgement together with a historical view of the legislative framework support the argument that the neoliberal legislative frameworks used to govern today continue to be informed by their predecessors conceptualised in the colonial and apartheid eras. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

South African municipalities increasingly celebrate prepaid water and electricity meters for enabling them to build more resilient cities. This framing has been critiqued for its neoliberal underpinnings, where the discourse of resilience masks the reality that people are being coerced into surviving with consistently diminishing resources. While these infrastructures undeniably materialise neoliberal logics, this paper considers the labour compounds of nineteenth-century Kimberley to suggest such infrastructures also have a racialising function with a much older lineage. The Kimberley compounds were designed and managed by various technical experts tasked with maximising productivity and balancing economic constraints with mortality rates. In so doing, they relied upon and produced racialised theories of the body. Where the experts framed their work as turning on the observation of "the native races," in fact those experts were producing the very racial truths they claimed only to uncover. The compound, most often studied as an infrastructure of racial domination, has rarely been recognised as productive of emergent notions of "race." Read through this lineage, continued infrastructural coercion in contemporary South Africa, which relies on the techno-racial expertise developed in earlier eras, reveals itself as critical to race's continual reproduction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores Black men's narratives of sex work in Cape Town. Sex work in South Africa takes place in a complex context of poverty and unemployment, which plays a part in men's entry into the profession. Much research on sex work has focused on female sex workers to the detriment of men who sell sex whose experiences are silenced. Narrative interviews were employed and the study investigated how Black men who sell sex position themselves and others and construct their identity within a workspace dominated by women. This paper is concerned with how men narrate about themselves, the language they employ to do so and its purpose. It is focused on the narratives that are told about the self and how these are co-constructed. It is additionally concerned with how men's talk constructs their experiences as intersectional. The analysis provides insight into how masculine identities are constructed in men's narratives about sex work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This editorial introduces and frames the six papers of this special section. It begins by proposing that youth unemployment needs to be understood in relation to a range of patterns of "getting by" in the global south. We suggest that the many practices of work, including informal ones, discussed in the collection do not attest to a society in "need of development" but rather point towards the future of work, here and elsewhere. While taking transformations in capitalism seriously, we argue that renewed pressures on secure wage work may not lead to a precarity in quite the same way that it has been theorised in the global north. Instead, especially through a focus on youth and generation, we point to multiple experiential circumstances in which work and its futures are enacted. These pertain to time and value and to the importance of space in positioning actors in enabling or foreclosing opportunities for earning income. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Young migrant street traders are often pulled to the informal economy in South African cities in pursuit of work opportunities and financial independence. However, they often have to work long hours and endure periods of uncertainty as they hope for better futures. This article highlights the way the concept of waithood emerges in the narratives of street trading work of seven migrant youth from The Gambia, Senegal, Nigeria and Malawi in Durban, South Africa. This paper focuses on the way in which "dual waithood" – the period of uncertainty that characterises both migrant and youthful life – intersect to orient these young migrant street traders to continually strategise and pass their time. The narratives shed light on the way hope emerges in the overlapping urban spaces of work in the informal economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the ANC government's approach to welfare and, in particular, its de facto rejection of a Universal Basic Income Grant. In the first part of this essay we argue that the current welfare model in SA is underpinned by a naive conception of the South African economy as potentially fast-growing and labour absorbing across all skills types. In the second part of this essay, we consider the gendered character of welfare and of unemployment arguing that under current conditions young men are effectively excluded from social protection. We propose that this situation interrupts the transition to male adulthood and fuels violence against women and children. We conclude by proposing that a Universal Basic Income Grant is necessary under conditions of mass, structural unemployment and widespread 'waithood'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many Afrikaans-speaking people in Pretoria's white working-class suburbs during the apartheid era lost their jobs in the 1990s when the heavy industries in which they worked were downsized or closed down. This paper explores the livelihood strategies open to the next generation – the ex-workers' children who are confronted by wage employment opportunities very different from those open to their parents. Popular interpretations of the position of members of the apartheid-era white working class in South Africa today are contradictory. One narrative holds that their present circumstances mark the return of the "Poor Whites" of the early twentieth century, while a second contends that they continue to benefit uniformly from the "wages of whiteness." The evidence we draw from our ethnographic field research in the former white working-class suburbs suggests that both of these understandings simplify a complex situation. We show the ways in which young people endeavour to fashion livelihoods at present, and discuss how the differences between their various livelihood strategies shape their understanding of what it means to be Afrikaans and white in the post-apartheid era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

South Africa's (SA) National Health Insurance Policy (NHIP) underpins the establishment of a unified health system in the country based on the principles of social solidarity, progressive universalism, equity and health as a public good and a social investment, underscoring the values of justice, fairness and equity. The right to health contains both freedoms and entitlements with the latter providing for equality of opportunity to allow for everyone to enjoy the highest attainable level of health which is analogous to an ethically acceptable minimum standard of quality (EAMSQ). Inequalities in health coupled with striking increases in the cost of healthcare have inevitably stimulated debate on the role of justice and its requirements of particular societies. The level of access is dependent on distributive justice principles. This takes into consideration available social resources and a fair approach to the process of decision-making, necessitating another critical process; that of priority setting, which ranks services according to their importance and hence determines the distribution such that both winners and losers are created. Priority setting is assisted by the right to health principle. Health equity is central to the understanding of social justice with priority being given to the worst off. The aim of the paper is to develop a set of ethical elements of the EAMSQ, which aligns with the Constitution's commitment to the right to healthcare. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The dawn of democracy in 1994 ushered in a period of radical change in the higher education sector of South Africa. This rupture represented an opportunity to avoid the replication of patriarchally informed, racially charged, neoliberal practices. More than twenty years later under the banner of Fees Must Fall, students, workers, and academics challenged the exclusionary, racist, exploitative and sexist nature of Higher Learning Institutions that have persisted since this transition from apartheid. In this paper, we reiterate a tested argument in (South) African feminist scholarship by proposing that to fulfil this goal towards transformation and change in and across HLIs, a critical starting point is to use feminist theories to deconstruct parochial, patriarchal ideologies. We review some of the key arguments that various feminists have put forth in relation to meaningfully transforming institutional cultures and pedagogies, ranging from anti-apartheid feminisms to more contemporary, intersectional feminisms and further argue that the neoliberalisation of HLIs, manifested in the capturing of private markets within the education sector, and practices of output-based productivity measurements that create bedrocks of racially charged epistemic exclusions, echo hierarchical patriarchal elements that are remnants of colonialism and apartheid. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I explore kinship and other networks of support for young mothers and their babies after an unintended, ex-nuptial pregnancy in a resource-poor urban setting. I draw on in-depth interviews conducted with 30 young mothers aged 18 to 20 years old and follow up interviews conducted with 9 of them. The interviews focused on three main areas: pregnancy and birth, education and income generation, and support networks. I present three cases that reflect variability in support and kinship network patterns. I use genograms and kinship network maps to identify sources of support and kinship networks within and outside households. Paying attention to the location and distribution of networks, I engage with the role of kinship capital and other forms of support in mitigating some of the negative consequences of early, unplanned motherhood. I show how young mothers draw on support from kinship networks which in turn adapt and reconfigure to provide support, allowing young mothers to exercise agency in relation to aspirations around educational attainment and income generation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper examines the history and politics of sanitation and urban belonging and citizenship in Cape Town. It traces the cultural histories of waste and odour in order to reveal the embedding of liberal citizenship, as well as technology, in the body. We do this to make sense of why and how toilets and waste have become recent objects and instruments of struggle in Cape Town, and elsewhere. The paper shows that these political struggles did not arise from nowhere; their emergence is the outcome of historically and materially sustained contradictions that are fundamental to liberal governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reflects an effort to speculate at the nexus between a collective consciousness in a capitalist society in the wake of apartheid, and the operations of a predominant pedagogy. I pose several questions in terms of the political imagination and its regulation by capitalist realism: what is the relation between the university, ideological reproduction, and the political imagination? Politically speaking, what can we claim in the name of the commons? I am interested in the theoretical nature of the State that is being contested, as well as the state of mind, where the word state implies a mental or emotional condition. Thinking with Lauren Berlant's work on cruel optimistic relations, as well as the educational philosophy of Paulo Freire and W.E.B. Du Bois, I speculate on the South African university's shared ideological complicities. I argue against its emphasis on the production of a subject that is in synch with the reproduction of capital, and well suited for insertion into its structures. This is evidence of the role universities plays in sustaining the enduring fantasy of "the good life." What magnetises the university's desire and fidelity to a certain mode of production, even when that mode proves painfully unsustainable? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to explain the survival of the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) and to identify lessons it may offer on how social movements may resist demobilisation. It considers the role the TAC plays in the creation of social accountability dynamics around primary health care but with broader implications for strengthening rights-based notions of citizenship. The paper examines the TAC’s relative success in democratising public health care provision and explores shifts in the relationship between this social movement organisation and the South African state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While studies on soldiers who leave the army have focused on them as perpetrators of political violence in war and peace, little is known about the ways in which soldiers have been subjected to violence. This paper examines the ways in which Zimbabwe National Army deserters who are currently in exile in South Africa experienced politically inspired violence in the army barracks and the ways in which they mediate and reify it through the image of the “torn underwear.” The ‘torn underwear’ signifies the violence experienced in the army barracks but also represents its reification in their present exile condition and the ways in which it is embedded in the body psyche. In analysing the army barracks as a ‘total institution’ and as a ‘surveillance unit,’ the paper, respectively, situates itself in the discussions of Goffman and Foucault, drawing from life history interviews and conversations with deserters who live in exile in South Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Framed around a public and legal debate about the boundaries of responsibility and obligation to care for children in post-apartheid South Africa, the paper interrogates key assumptions regarding family structure and care patterns, as embedded in policies and programmes intended to offer support to “vulnerable” young people. Drawing on a legal contestation of eligibility for the foster care grant, the piece examines the South African state’s definitions of the duty of support and the right to care for children. Then, to explore how responsibility for children is conceived of and distributed, the article briefly describes what one could refer to as “the problem of the patriline” in Zulu kinship, that is, the tensions between the rules governing descent, ownership of and obligations to (and from) children and shifting experiences of kinship and care. Finally, by exploring how responsibility for children is conceived of and distributed for a small group of young people in one locality in KwaZulu-Natal, the paper opens up broader questions of about the forms of belonging, inclusion and exclusion that determine systems of care for young people in contemporary South Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Newspapers and magazines in South Africa are acknowledged as having played a significant role in the fostering of literary journalism and criticism amongst black writers. Drum is commended for inaugurating the flourishing of the short-story genre. The launch of Drum in 1951 was preceded by the departure of Abrahams from South Africa to England in September 1939. Yet Drum and Abrahams – through his novel Wild Conquest, travelogue and autobiography Return to Goli and Tell Freedom – initiated an important conversation on the limits and possibilities of the synergies between the different platforms and genres in print culture and the extent to which they can capture and navigate the divergent aesthetic and socio-political imperatives that informed the magazine, writers and readers. This paper is an examination of Drum's promotion of reading and writing amongst black South Africans from 1951–1960 as reflected in its intermittent forays in the serialisation of novels. It uses the magazine's interpellation of Peter Abrahams and his work during 1951–1960 as a case-study into the intricate web and tensions of context, form and theme as well as the genealogies of writing and hermeneutics in black South African literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The identification of one household member as the head of the household remains a feature of household surveys conducted by Statistics South Africa. While the analytical relevance of this practice has been critiqued and while many national statistics agencies have abandoned the concept of a household head altogether, researchers in South Africa often use the characteristics of the household head in order to classify households. In particular, recent research has documented a rise in female headship in South Africa and a growing gap in poverty risks between female- and male-headed households in the post-apartheid period. Some of this work has also shown that the increase in female headship is due to the growing incidence of women living in households without men. The way that headship is assigned and what it actually means, however, is something of a “black box” in social science research. This paper presents the findings from a qualitative investigation of headship in South African households. The results suggest that most respondents attach meaning to the notion of a household head but that, as expected, some clear contradictions in the way that headship is assigned were encountered in the data. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications for using the characteristics of the head (and gender in particular) as a way to classify households and identifies some lessons for survey research protocols. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Michael Titlestad has suggested that jazz serves "to mediate, manage and contest" what he terms a "staggered, but also cruel and unusual South African modernity." His volume Making the Changes (2004) uses the "pedestrian" as a chronotope to describe the "local peripatetic appropriations of global symbolic possibilities" that jazz affords there. This paper proposes a different "chronotope": that of the train. This substitution facilitates the reading of jazz history in South Africa in tandem with histories of labour migration and other forms of displacement - including trajectories of exile that intersect my account elsewhere of the "global itinerary" of South African cultural formations under apartheid. The deterritorialisation of South African works of expressive culture and social actors associated with antiapartheid resistance, I have argued, affords the cultural historian strong historiographic purchase over conjunctures outside of South Africa. The present discussion explores this claim in relation to Miriam Makeba's memoir Makeba, My Story (1988), written during her stay in Guinea. Makeba's life-writing shows the strategies of the black South African performer in exile to be embedded in the conviviality that shaped jazz performance culture during its emergence in urban South African. Conviviality can be shown to offer an implicit critique of nativist imaginaries in decolonising Africa -- including in this instance, the doctrine of authenticité promulgated by Guinea's controversial leader, Ahmed Sékou Touré. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

South Africa is a regional hub for migration on the African continent and is home to a growing documented international migrant community. Foreigners in the country, however, often face violations of their established rights and are the victims of abuse. This paper examines public support for policies that would exclude international migrants from the country. Data from the 2013 South African Social Attitudes Survey, a nationally representative opinion poll (N = 2739) of all adults in the country, are used. This poll found that many South Africans favoured restrictive immigration policies and opposed granting foreigners the same rights as citizens. Multivariate analysis is employed to discern determinants of this opposition. Respondents’ perceptions of the population sizes of foreigners in their communities did not affect support for inclusion. It can be inferred, therefore, that the growth of the immigrant population has not provoked exclusionary attitudes in the country. Rather, results revealed, it is national pride (cultural versus political) and fears about the consequences of immigration that drive such attitudes. Programmes and policies designed to improve public perceptions of how foreigner impact society and the promotion of a nationalism characterised by inclusive multicultural civic patriotism may improve public support for the inclusion of international immigrants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the lesser-known histories and present-day realities of small towns and non-metropolitan areas in the internal provinces of South Africa. It is different inasmuch as it focuses on transformations that have taken place at the local level, and where possible, generalises from these, rather than following the normal route taken by social scientists – at least from 1994, which has been to examine them from the top down. One feature of such changes has been the growth of gated communicates across the length and breadth of South Africa, but there are many more. One reason for their anonymity is that their evolution has been gradual and corpuscular, that they have become unconsciously familiar and are left unexamined. Another is our collective preoccupation with the metropolitan areas rather than the smaller localities where such processes are subterranean and confined. This paper presents very briefly some of the results of the researchers of the Local Histories and Present Realities programme over the past five years, in 19 separate centres. It examines the history and present circumstance of chiefdoms of Ga-Mphahlele and reveals the surprise finding that much of recent and contemporary politics revolve around events 200 years old. An analogous situation has arisen in Venda as well as in Mpumalanga and elsewhere, where a combination of new legislation to revive chiefly powers, and land reclamation legislation have lent a new legitimacy to chiefly powers, and inspired hundreds of phantom – and time-consuming – quests. Another massive development which has gone on around us but whose internal dynamics have never been observed is the rise of game hunting and ranching all over the interior of South Africa. This is a monster subject which is likely to have influence on all of our lives into which our group is now in a position to offer insights. A change of equal proportions is the rise of mining all over the interior Bushveld Igneous Complex – Mokopane is a good example of this and the huge social consequences this has brought in its wake. One final theme which embraces all the communities that we have studied is the local histories of transformation – collectively the most important – since 1994. This is almost entirely hidden to a wider world, including the transformed positions of local Indian residents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses South Africa’s land reform policies post-1994 against the backdrop of the apartheid government’s manoeuvres through the repeal of the notorious Land Acts in 1991. The paper concludes that the democratic government could have avoided the challenges of ineffective land reform by taking into consideration land dispossession prior to 1913. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses land tenure reform in South Africa from the perspective of land redistribution and restitution projects. It takes the absence of a clearly defined tenure reform in the country as its point of departure to argue that land redistribution and restitution projects serve as a vehicle through which forms of land tenure in post-apartheid South Africa are expressed. There is dissonance between the official position on giving land to large groups under the legal entity of the CPA and the practice and preferences at project sites. The paper suggests that a progressive land tenure reform policy requires a bottom-up approach that takes into consideration various ways in which beneficiaries of land reform could own and use land. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to explore the place of kramats the graves of Muslim saints or Auliyah – in the landscape of contemporary Cape Town. The kramat sites have been proclaimed as heritage sites because of their importance as tangible signs of Islam at the Cape. At the same time, the process of the kramats becoming heritage sites has contained moments of intense, often sensational, public contestation. Offering a reading of the discourses surrounding two contested kramats in Cape Town, this paper explores the way kramats mark out a miraculous space in the prosaic modern city and introduce into the post-apartheid evaluation of heritage, alternative conceptions of space and notions of temporality. They are sites of impossibility where, it is claimed, the laws of nature themselves are interrupted to mark the intangible particularities of the site. This paper explores what happens when this miraculous space is subject to the demands of private property and municipal law and the conflicts that arise from this collision of different conceptual and experiential modalities. It considers the effects of the entanglement of legend and history that result from the production of these sites as heritage in a market-driven economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on South African Muslim women’s experiences with engaging religious leaders in matters pertaining to divorce initiatives. By presenting a selection of Muslim women’s narratives on divorce initiatives, this paper argues that particular problematic power relationships rooted in outmoded patriarchal legal norms dominate religious leaders’ engagement with Muslim women. Three central themes are analysed in order to exemplify some of these dynamics: (1) the Muslim Judicial Council’s (MJC) reconciliation-at-all-costs approach; (2) the husband’s reputation; and (3) women’s experiences of marginalisation when presenting their case at the MJC. On the basis of these data, this paper argues that it is imperative to change the current modes of engagement so that women’s particular experiences in marriage are taken seriously and dealt with in ways that are concomitant with ideals of gender justice and equality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Against the background of rising levels of anxiety around the state of the social fabric in South African society, this paper explores the disjuncture between the post-apartheid state’s policy discourse on social cohesion and the local discourses of South African residents in 24 focus groups held in townships around the country, which reveal significant levels of social fragmentation and intense contestation regarding the new regime of rights. The paper argues that the state’s policy discourse on social cohesion is part of an attempt to manage a complex social environment in terms of a project of developmental nation-state building that seeks to constitute the social domain as a normative realm of imagined homogeneity in which citizenship is premised on constitutional values. I argue that while the state’s concern with the ‘social’ relates to the critical question of solidarity in modern democracies, this has led, in the South African context, to the constitution of the social domain as a site of pathology, divorced from the broader political and economic relations of power in which this ‘pathology’ is embedded. At issue in this interaction between state and local discourses on the question of solidarity are the terms of membership in the political community. Who will and will not be part of the ‘new’ nation? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the renaming of South Africa’s public places, following the country’s democratic breakthrough in 1994. The process has unfolded unevenly throughout the country’s nine provinces. The paper explains this unevenness. Fundamentally, it contends that the act of renaming has unfolded largely as a restoration of indigenous memory, which, in turn, is mediated by a number of factors. The lopsided nature of renaming is indicative of the similarly uneven manner in which South Africa’s black population recalls indigenous memory. How black people relate to colonial memory also determines whether or not they would want to change it: some came to identify with colonial memory, while others were offended by it. This contrasting symbolism of colonial memory is a result of the varying ‘native policies’ pursued by the Boer republics, on the one hand, and the British colonial states, on the other. In other instances, indigenous memory simply vanished due to the absence of reminders, while some descendants evolved a new identity that to some extent erased the memory of their ancestry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Durban, a city situated on the east coast of South Africa in the province of KwaZulu-Natal, has always been marked by layered, imbricative and intricate meanings. Through narrative slices, this paper considers the interwoven relationships between identity and urbanity and presents Durban as a palimpsest space. The paper illustrates the co-constituting nature of pre-colonial Durban's form and society, highlighting the manner in which the context of contact left an impression on identity, urbanity and cultural memory. It thereafter suggests that contemporary attempts, through arts and culture, to contour the city in a more inclusive manner, have a long embedded precedent and history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the discourses that students draw on and propagate in a course on rural development in a first-year engineering foundation programme. It looks at the way 'rural' is often constructed as 'lack' and therefore 'other', the dangers of constructing development as linear, the ways nostalgia and utopianism feed into discourses of development and how 'propriety' serves to maintain boundaries between nature and people, society and individuals. Different modes and media, coupled with the degree of regulation in the classroom, may enable alternate discourses to emerge or to be suppressed. This paper argues that the curriculum needs to engage with students' views in order to understand, interrogate and critique the kinds of realities they feed into. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite constitutional commitments to environmental justice in South Africa, evidence indicates that the poor and the natural environment continue to be marginalised in decision making. This paper examines the role of environmental assessment procedures, specifically Environmental Impact Assessments, in shaping outcomes at the local level to understand how injustices are perpetuated and maintained. Injustices are understood here by examining the relationship between power, knowledge and rationality, and the effects these have on including the public in decision-making processes. In the revamping of environmental assessment regulations in South Africa, much attention has been paid to streamlining the process of assessment. However, this paper argues that environmentally just decisions cannot be made in a context where debates are centred on process. Instead, debates need to be redirected to qualities of outcomes, foregrounding the need for an approach grounded in questions of value. Recognising that the poor and the natural environment tend to systematically lose out in a context where environment is pitted against development, environmental assessment must be able to take into account the distributional consequences of decisions. Furthermore, the paper makes a case for the need to challenge the broader political context within which environmental assessments are conducted, as environmental assessments cannot replace broader strategic and policy debates. In the absence of this broader institutional challenge, political power will continue to work through decision-making tools to perpetuate and maintain systems of injustice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do male youngsters growing up on the Cape Flats in Cape Town avoid violence in their everyday lives? When are they perceived as a risk and at risk, and how is their way of navigating in those situations related to negotiations of social change? This paper seeks to explore, by way of insights generated through ethnographic fieldwork, how young males coming of age in townships around Cape Town navigate courses of action in contexts of endemic violence - contexts in which they are ambiguously at risk and are themselves perceived as sources of risk. It investigates a set of identifiable strategies for managing the implications of violence in pursuit not only of self-preservation, but also of core projects and values of future-making, and argues that the dichotomy between being at risk and being a risk does not counter for the intersubjective character of the process of navigating terrains of violence. In examining four differently located actors living on the Cape Flats, the paper seeks to counter more conventional analyses of such youth as a thoroughly 'high-risk' group of victims and perpetrators. It suggests that this picture may be rethought by means of a qualitative, grounded focus on the large number of young men who manage to live relatively 'normal' lives in highly challenging circumstances. Such an approach serves not merely to balance an excessive preoccupation with the production of violent masculine subjects; it also shifts the analytic focus to a concern with the manner in which actors navigate their way with respect to the complex implications of 'violence', which should itself be viewed as an ambiguous, multi-faceted social force, as both a structural characteristic and a means that can be harnessed by those experiencing it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Taking Arjun Appadurai's suggestive argument about the 'social lives' of things as its starting point, this paper traces the pathways of two commodities for sale in South Africa: a pottery bowl and a resin spoon. Both these objects acquire their value in part from the quality of being handmade. The aim of this paper is not to demystify the claim to value made by either the pottery bowl or the resin spoon, nor to judge one or the other as the more 'authentic' expression of a resistance to the contemporary reifications of the everyday. Instead, it explores a family resemblance between these two objects and traces the way in which, within contemporary global 'regimes of value', what is handmade acquires value. If, as Jean and John Comaroff suggest, neo-liberalism ideologically constructs a world of increasing abstraction, the trajectories of these two objects reveal how both locality and work return in an attenuated form as attributes of commodities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper engages transformation processes by focusing on the racism that characterised pre-1994 South Africa. Through analysis of an individual life-history, it argues that individuals engage with contexts of racism in ways that are particular to their intrapersonal and intrapsychic processes. Foregrounding these, the paper argues for the legitimacy of the individual as a site of intervention in transformation processes, and posits that transformation processes that do not account for intrapersonal and intrapsychic dynamics are compromised at best and futile at worst. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the entwining of city and song with a focus on the genre of isicathamiya in the city of Pietermaritzburg. It argues that the making of song involves the shaping of new subjectivities and it looks in particular at the role of isicathamiya performance in the making and re-making of a particular urban space. It argues that the life and history of a city or town holds within it the songs and singers that shape it culturally and thus write themselves into the memory and being of the place. The paper searches for a new cultural topography of place that embraces this view. It situates a study of two isicathamiya groups, the Washing Boys and Naughty Boys, within a study of the life of the changing and suffering city and argues that the resilience of the genre and of its singers gives it a unique place as an interpretive voice in the New Era of post-1994 and in the Pietermaritzburg of the present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reviews the purposes of higher education in South Africa through to lens the 1997 Education White Paper. It is argued that, while the principles of the White Paper have shaped the development of the higher education system over the following decade the primary objectives of transformation have yet to be realized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the South Atlantic Oceanic World, and the pivotal place of the Island of St. Helena within that world, as both a context and a conceptual tool for thinking about race-making and race-mixing in South Africa. Drawing on various historical ‘snapshots’ from documentary and archival sources on St. Helena, as well as from exploratory fieldwork in South Africa, St. Helena, an Atlantic World of flux and fluidity, is invoked as a contrast to an Apartheid world that insists upon fixity. These contrasting worlds are the context for thinking about the racial identifications made by St. Helenian immigrants, and their descendants in South Africa. Following Robert Young the paper is interested in ‘counter-active’ constructions of race, which means that the context of race-mixing that this paper invokes is simultaneously a context for race-making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the depiction of dwellings in order to locate the emergence of a particular framing of the interior in South Africa. I suggest that in the first half of the twentieth century, images of domestic spaces pointed both to racially distinct interiors and racialised forms of interiority. As an aesthetic technology of the late nineteenth century, photography aided in the production of visual motifs that fixed the appearance of race in a new way, and located such an appearance in particular places. The visual intertwining of race and place – designating racially proper and improper places – was instrumental to apartheid’s attempt to curtail racial mixing and unregulated mobility. In contrast with the imposed movement engendered by migrant labour, I suggest that the figure of the interior becomes a privileged standpoint from which to view the triumph of race as a form of fixity in modern South Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I draw on analyses of the brand in the commercial world to explore the implications of branding when applied to political parties and politicians. Specifically, I examine the ramifications of the logic of the brand for accountability within a multi-party democracy. I argue that in branding discourse, the brand serves as a risk-management strategy by creating relations of loyalty with consumers, designed to secure forgiveness for possible transgressions on the part of the brand and thus protect brand equity. Through an analysis of how branding discourse is applied to South African politics by journalists, political parties and participants in social media, I show how in this arena, branding logic works to defer accountability for political parties and politicians who fail to deliver on election promises. Culpability becomes assessed in terms of damage to brand. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hostels and compounds have held a compelling fascination for South African photographers over many decades, from the colonial to the post-apartheid era. The photographic representations of these spartan barracks have permeated the narrative of South Africa as the photographers showed the lives, recreations and living conditions, the institutionalised, alienating nature of the environment, its dehumanising conditions, and the cultural and geographical schizophrenia experienced by the migrant labourer navigating the urban/rural divide. In the last two decades, the monolithic structure of the hostel compound has become fractured, as aspects of this environment have altered due to changes in the political, social and economic landscape of South Africa. But it is not just the hostel that has changed, post-apartheid: the photographic representations have transformed too. These adjustments include: a shift from black and white to colour; an increased reluctance to present the hostel dweller as victim; decreased prominence ofexposé; a more optimistic and less violent image of the hostels; essays which highlight the permanence of the hostel dweller; a trend which puts less emphasis on the hostel dweller and more on his or her environment; and new narratives around gender, sexuality and individuality have emerged. As a result of the use of colour, the display of these works in commercial art galleries and the decline of the human figure in the picture, the works are arguably less political. It is the complex nature of these shifts in post-apartheid hostel imagery that will be investigated in this paper, with specific reference to the work of Peter Magubane, T.J. Lemon, Sabelo Mlangeni, Angela Buckland, Jodi Bieber, David Goldblatt, Zwelethu Mthethwa and Sam Nhlengethwa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since South Africa’s transition to democracy, civil society has been considered a critical component of new inclusive “democratic” societies, acting to ensure human rights for all. Government and donor agencies require the incorporation of this sector within project documents and programmes. However, is civil society merely a loosely defined term used to satisfy the requirements of project proposals and interests of the state, donors and big business, while not directly addressing the concerns of citizens subjected to macroeconomic risks (e.g. industrial pollution, unemployment and service delivery)? Since the transition, it is mainly established civil society organisations that have become well resourced and who have developed collaborative relationships with the state and industry, which has eroded their accountability to and support from the marginalised communities they claim to serve. Can such organisations then claim to be part of an “authentic” civil society striving for inclusive development? By reviewing contemporary and historical literature on civil society, and through empirical work, this paper argues that there has been a shift in the conception of civil society since the transition, with established forms of support for the grassroots remaining doubtful. Civil society has not effectively engaged with the grassroots to project their concerns about macroeconomic risks, largely due to integration into government/donor institutions. Fragmentation within the grassroots arena has also limited coherent actions against dominant groups. Although civil society can support the grassroots to address their concerns through formal activities, for example, by employing legal strategies, there is no guarantee of success. Connections between an “authentic” civil society and coherent grassroots actions engaging in a combination of strategies (formal and informal) will be required to achieve true democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A shell of white gauze floats against a split background in Tracey Derrick’s 2009 photograph,Inhabit – Habergeon – middle English, piece of armour to protect the neck and chest(Inhabit), both autonomous and materially frail. The shadowed wall lifts the calcified gauze towards the viewer, as its lithe body hovers above the vertical divide that separates light from dark. This position apart from the edge may be read as a passage missed or overcome. A year of invasive treatment following her diagnosis of stage two breast cancer in March of 2008 led South African documentary photographer Tracey Derrick to create a photographic series that combines her humanist sensibility with personal reflections on illness. Derrick represents meditations on her trajectory through illness in “One in Nine: My Year as a Statistic,” a collection of reposeful digital colour photographs – includingInhabit– that features the cast Derrick made to obtain accurate measurements for her prosthesis. This body of work complicates a widely held assumption that post-apartheid photography in South Africa focuses more on the individual than collective societal issues. Derrick’s unusual series warrants methodological treatment that attends to the complex ways in which the visual vocabulary and concerns of apartheid-era documentary photography overlap with the personal explorations associated with post-1994 photographic production. In this paper, I utilise socio-historical, psychoanalytic and phenomenological readings of Tracey Derrick’s photograph and “One in Nine” series to elicit an interpretation of the image and series as statement of agency within a metaphorical battle against an invisible, yet pervasive disease. By reading Derrick’s photograph through these theoretical lenses, I reveal her image to be a metaphoric assertion of tenacity and Derrick’s agency, and highlight the areas of overlap between Derrick’s documentary practice and her more personal “One in Nine” project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following the drafting of the Heritage Transformation Charter, an academic study investigated one of the mandates of the Charter, that of oral traditions as part of South Africa’s living heritage. Through an engagement with the discursive elements of both the draft and final texts of the Charter, it found that the authors of the Charter considered Ubuntu as its underlying philosophy, which should inform not only the heritage sector but become an overarching principle for nation building. This approach transpired mostly through the use of rhetoric in the Charter texts, which seemingly placed the discussion of the concept of Ubuntu and to a certain degree the entire Charter firmly within a postcolonial Afro-centric position. Following some of the rhetoric with regard to Ubuntu, and considering the characteristics of rhetoric, its functions and manifestations, the paper will trace the effects of such rhetoric from within the context of a public document such as the Charter to the context of the wider South African society. Thereby, elaborating on the rhetoric around Ubuntu in the Charter texts, it will demonstrate in part how such rhetoric is used in shaping the wider postcolonial and post-apartheid discourse in the present socio-economic dispensation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I argue that museums in general are utopias, “no-places” in which categorisations of objects can be opened up for destabilisation. Following a discussion of the ways in which the categories “material culture” and “art” are reflected in museums, I argue that once the museum is transposed to Africa, its function as a space in which heritage is maintained through the conservation and preservation is thrown into disarray. I argue further that this is particularly the case with the most utopian of museums, the art museum. I argue that most African nation states do not have national art museums, and offer an argument about why they have museums of “arts and cultures” instead. I end with an analysis of the history and situation of art museums in South Africa and possibilities for alternative ways of conceiving the art museum as an inclusive rather than exclusive space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Information on several papers discussed at a symposium regarding the change and mobility in Southern Africa is presented. It notes that the papers presented offer accounts for everyday practices of people and how they deal with unstable conditions in the Africa. Topics include the impact of social processes on the patterns of stasis and movements, the histories of mobility among Zimbabweans who are living in Cape Town, and the way individuals cope in the privatization on the Zambian Copperbelt.