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The right to sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) are integral to and manifest in LGBTIQ rights including homosexuality and same-sex marriage. International law promotes these rights and prohibits discrimination on these grounds. Many western countries endorse these rights and prohibitions in parliamentary legislation or judicial fiat. In comparison with all other jurisdictions worldwide, and within the African sub-region, only South Africa specifically prohibits unfair direct or indirect discrimination based on "sexual orientation" in its national constitution. This paper explores African approach to SOGI and LGBTIQ rights including homosexuality and same-sex marriage. It argues that despite the threat of homocapitalism, prevalent Afrocentrism and religions reject these form of "new rights" for being immoral, ungodly, unnatural and un-African, thereby underlining the limits of human rights in the sub-region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The professional stage act of one of South Africa's newest musical prodigies, Sho Madjozi, may be analysed as a quintessential Afropolitan example of the innovative and hybrid combination of music, costume, and dance in urban youth popular culture in Africa. This paper analyses the dynamic intersection between costume, music, and dance, presenting it as a crucial site where urban youth popular culture can reimagine tradition, while simultaneously demonstrating that contemporary African cultural identities exist in a constant state of flux. The paper borrows from scholarly insights on hybridity, identity, the Afropolitan and popular culture, as well as other writings in youth agency and popular culture, to argue that South Africa's Sho Madjozi belongs with a tradition of contemporary urban youth performance culture that continuously resurrects and destabilises elements of the past as it reimagines the future. Sho Madjozi's unique style as a rap artist in Tsonga is presented as an illustration of the progressive role that contemporary urban youths in Africa can play as proponents of cultural preservation, even as they stand at the cross-roads between the old and the new. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A noticeable tendency in the first generation of scholarship on sexual orientation and gender identity/expression (SOGIE) in Africa has been the focus on urban or modern institutional settings. A dominant theme is to document people's struggles against stigma, fear and violence to better inform interventions to strengthen human rights and sexual health for all. In some cases, unintentionally, the impression conveyed of Africa is of a continent with cultures that are uniformly, hostile to SOGIE rights. The present study arises from a large survey among boys and men in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa that problematises that impression. The study revealed unexpectedly high levels of same-sex sexual experience among boys and men in a mostly rural, culturally conservative setting. Following from that revelation, we conducted in-depth interviews to gain insight into their lives. Informants did indeed recount many incidents of discrimination and violence and admitted to sometimes severe emotional health problems. Yet they also spoke of finding love, acceptance, allies, resources, humour and hope for the future. In this paper, we tease out key themes from the interviews in relation to trends in the scholarship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social Reproduction Theory (SRT) rejects the classical political economy distinction between productive and unproductive labor, the latter defined as all labor that does not produce surplus-value. Rather, much non-commodified labor, particularly that done in the domestic sphere, is not unproductive but necessary since it produces labor-power. Hence, SRT has proposed an alternative distinction: productive versus reproductive spheres of labor. This article argues that this opposition too is analytically and politically misleading. Capital is concerned with profit, not with the reproduction of the living labor within which labor-power is always embedded. It is the everyday struggles of living labor that determines its reproduction. These take place not just in the kin-based sphere of the family but in overlapping, shifting places and processes, including struggles for better wages and working conditions in capitalist firms. This paper uses two different contexts in southern Africa to make this argument: an influential debate over how to understand changes in apartheid in South Africa in the 1970s; and a sugar-cane plantation in Mozambique where interdependent contradictions of class, gender and race defined a social division of labor that systematically compromised the reproduction of living labor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 17th Sustainable Development Goal seeks to promote partnerships at various levels. To this end, COVID-19 vaccines development partnerships in the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) are inevitable in facilitating ethical access to affordable and safe vaccines the world over. With South Africa being part of the BRICS, its presence can assist in leveraging the partnership to ensure that COVID-19 vaccines developed by the BRICS are efficiently deployed in Africa. Through the tracking of announcements, documents and critical discourse analysis, and Geographical Information Systems, this paper investigates COVID-19 vaccines development collaboration in the BRICS and its implication for Africa. It emerges that there is an inherent discord in the BRICS, with bilateral arrangements both within and outside the forum being evident. This has resulted in advance breakthrough COVID-19 vaccines from China and Russia not widely tried across the BRICS. The paper notes that these developments weaken the global south and affect its potential to develop COVID 19 vaccines. The work recommends a reconsideration in terms of COVID-19 vaccines development and future proofing of collaboration within the BRICS and finding a way of having South Africa continue to lobby for affordable and accessible vaccines for Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There has been little empirical investigation of Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) performance towards safeguarding conservation and promoting responsible tourism within protected areas. This paper examines the quality of EIA Reports (EIARs) prepared for tourism developments in the world-renowned Kruger to Canyons (K2C) Biosphere Reserve, one of the largest in Africa. An adapted version of the internationally recognised Lee and Colley report review package was used. The review results indicate that the EIARs are, overall, of satisfactory quality and that the reports provide adequate information to support the incorporation of sustainable and responsible tourism principles in decision-making. However, inadequacies are observed in certain review areas, namely public participation, provision for mitigation and monitoring, and content of non-technical summaries. Notably, the analytical review areas (e.g. impact assessment) perform better than the descriptive ones (e.g. presentation of assessment results), which contrasts with review findings reported in the international literature. This research provides important insights and contributes to advancing review frameworks and to ongoing debates around the potential of EIA to foster environmental protection and sustainability within protected areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper articulates a model of urban governance, developed through emergent analysis of the rulers, methods, rules and logics evident in the practices of security governance in Hout Bay, Cape Town. Informed by the concept of hybrid governance, this grounded theorising draws on extensive fieldwork on security governance practices in a complex urban neighbourhood to present a model of multiple and sometimes contending forms of governance that include, but are not limited to, bureaucratic, market, developmental, network and informal governance. Our model emerges from a critique of top-down approaches to understanding governance that starts with the state, institutions and law, or approaches that primarily focus on formal partnerships between the state and business or other social partners. The view from above can miss important aspects of how residents are governed 'from below' and informally. Hence it is impossible to understand from the formal, and in advance of grounded research, exactly how many places in urban Africa are governed. Exposing the particular and local forms of governance in urban Africa can support improved forms of service delivery and citizen's experiences of living in their city. In addition, while our model may be relevant in other places, more important is the methodology of identifying the rulers and methods, but especially the rules and logics of practice, to surface the specific, and complex, forms of governance in an urban place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

South Africa experienced since 2008 high escalations in rhinoceros poaching. It is essential to protect southern Africa's heritage by developing/adapting new research methods and techniques that can assist prosecutors to improve their successes in achieving convictions. The paper aimed to investigate the use of forensic geomorphology in the context of a poached rhino to assist in the prosecution of suspected poachers in the absence of any DNA linkages. Two experimental study sites mimicked the aspects of the landscape in which rhinoceros normally occur. Trace evidence was removed from the suspects that moved through the landscape in order to verify if any significant similarities could be identified against control samples collected at poaching sites and at locations based on the terrain utilized by the poachers during the simulated poaching incident. The paper concluded that a linkage could be recognized between the selected landscape and the collected trace evidence. The results indicate that the first experimental study site illustrated a definite linkage between the suspects and the poaching site, whereas the second experimental study site suggested that there was a possibility that a linkage could be made. This study only used inorganic material such as sand grains to link suspects to scenes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chinese migration to Africa has been limited both in size and scope until relatively recently. It was only in the late 1990s and the 2000s that significant numbers of Chinese migrants began arriving in Africa, with the first significant waves hitting South African shores. Chinese entrepreneurs, fortune seekers, and professionals, together with temporary workers – from across China – made their way in increasing numbers to destinations across the African continent. Many entered Africa with or following Chinese state-owned and private companies, on contracts to work on construction, oil, and mining projects. Beyond these large state-sponsored and private-sector projects, reports of the development of Chinatowns, Chinese shops, and Chinese farms and factories across the African continent have been circulating for nearly three decades. This paper examines these new, intensified Chinese flows to Africa and explores the possibilities of their future on the continent. Based on my in-depth examination of developments in South Africa, I argue that while the Chinese state's global ambitions and African ambivalence towards these latest arrivals influence Chinese migrant lives and destinies, the migrants themselves are also having impacts on their African host nations and changing the way we understand human flows. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Africa has rich energy resources but continues to remain an energy poor continent. The industrialization potential of the continent and its rapidly growing population have caused a sharp increase in demand for electricity. South Africa and Nigeria are the biggest economies in Africa with large appetites for energy. South Africa, using its vastly developed and industrial economy, produces about 50 GWe of electricity, the highest of any African country. In contrast, Nigeria produces far less for a population four times the size of its African economic rival, South Africa. Without solving the energy deficit, neither economic growth nor sustainable development and improvement of citizens' welfare will be possible. An effective way to solve the energy shortage may be the introduction of nuclear power plants. Nuclear power is not only able to overcome the electricity deficit in African countries, but can also contribute to a soft transition from environmentally polluting fossil-fuelled power plants to carbon-free technologies. However, for various reasons, there is strong opposition to nuclear energy development in these countries. This paper seeks to answer the question of whether the construction of nuclear power plants in Africa is the optimal solution to the continent's acute energy deficit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The visual arts were fully represented within the culture of liberation that flourished within South Africa’s liberation movements. However, relatively little has been written about visual arts representing the armed struggle. This paper aims to explore the visual arts created around the armed struggle; and begin to position this within a broader understanding of the culture dynamics that emerged as part of Southern Africa’s liberation movements, and the armed struggle in particular. Most scholars agree that music, poetry and dance were integral cultural expressions within the liberation movements; styles often developed within military camps, then were adopted throughout ‘liberated zones’. In contrast, military structures provided little or no space to practice the visual arts. Active military personal had little time or resources to create visual artworks, no storage and exhibition space, and little access to reproduction or distribution. Visual representation of fighters - both in photographs and realistic portraits - could create a security risk if taken by the enemy. Unlike music and writing, most visual art of the armed struggle was therefore produced within the mass movements, and in solidarity movements supporting the armed struggle. This paper discusses direct (in some cases personal) experiences of problems confronting visual artists of the armed struggle; and solutions artists found for these. It places the failure to recognize the visual art of the armed struggle within a broader failure to explore the integration of armed resistance with cultural practice and belief in the struggle for democratic societies in Southern Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While post-development theory is very concerned with the ways in which development has impacted upon the countries of the Global South, there has been relatively little written on post-development theory from an African perspective. This paper identifies some of the ways in which post-development theory fails to adequately understand the African experience of development. In particular, I explore the difficulty that post-development theory confronts when faced with the continued desire on the part of many people in Africa for development. In his introduction to the new edition ofThe Development Dictionary, Wolfgang Sachs discusses this desire, noting that despite development’s many failures, many still associate the concept with self-affirmation and redress. He explains this continued desire for development as being indicative of the need for the decolonisation of the imagination. In this paper, I show some of the problems with this explanation and present alternative ways of understanding the persistence of the desire for development in Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The recent court judgment of Uzani Environmental Advocacy CC v BP Southern Africa (Pty) Ltd 2019 (5) SA 275 (GP) found BP Southern Africa (Pty) Ltd (BP) guilty of environmental offences. The Court held that BP commenced with listed activities related to upgrades and construction work of filling stations without the necessary environmental authorisations (EAs) required by the National Environmental Management Act 107 of 1998 (NEMA) and the Environmental Conservation Act 73 of 1989 (ECA). Section 24 G of NEMA, however, allows for the rectification of the unlawful commencement or continuation of a listed activity conducted in the absence of the required EAs. Section 24 G therefore permits the ex post facto legalising or retrospective authorisation of the unlawful acts. In the case at hand, BP was found guilty, despite having applied for an ex post facto authorisation. This paper engages with the arguments put forward by the court, reflects on insights brought about by the foreign law, and provides possible recommendations for the retrospective environmental authorisation regime in South Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Commenting on the utility of sports as a development facilitating instrument, Nelson Mandela, in 2000, remarked that it "has the power to change the world. It has the power to inspire. It has the power to unite people in a way that little else can. Sport can awaken hope where there was previously only despair". Madiba's iconic statement captures the changing reality of the international system wherein states appreciate the soft power potential of sports as a subtle alternative for gaining political advantage in the international arena. This also lends credence to the argument that politics permeates all elements of social existence, including sports. In view of the preceding, this paper interrogates the rising attractiveness of South Africa in Africa and perhaps globally through the lens of its sporting engagements. From the last decade of the 20th century, South Africa's status in the sporting world has attracted much international and scholarly attention. The article examines how South Africa negotiates the overlapping arena of politics, sports and foreign policy to normatively secure a regional hegemonic posture through a blend of strategies. These include successful bidding and hosting of sporting mega-events; involvement in the development of sporting codes and local sports content across Africa and a positive cumulative ranking in international competitions vis-à-vis other contenders for regional powerhood. The analysis takes the position that South Africa's strategy of sports diplomacy masks its aspiration for regional hegemony and this pattern is uniquely relevant for shaping empirical understanding of power politics in Africa as well as appreciating the ideational potency of soft power as a constitutive element of what makes a regional hegemon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The literature on intergenerational sexual relationships in Africa focuses predominantly on economic motivations. This paper aims to identify the common reasons for older male sexual partners among young women in South Africa. Data for the study came from the Fourth South African National HIV, Behaviour and Health Survey 2012. A representative sample of 620 young women (15-24 years old) with older male sexual partners was extracted. A multiple logistic regression analysis was conducted to adjust for potential confounders. The authors found that more than a quarter of sexually active young women engaged in age-disparate relationships. The majority of the respondents did not see age as an important factor, while financial support ranked fourth in the list of reasons for having older partners. Women who were 20-24 years old (AOR 1.16, CI: 0.59287-1.87493), divorced, separated or widowed (AOR 1.38, CI: 0.65360-1.92105) and who were students or learners (AOR 1.85, CI: 0.41943-1.29402) were more likely to have an older partner for financial reasons. Thus, financial motivations are not the predominant reason for age-disparate relationships; instead, other reasons including age not being important and feeling secure were more cited. Not all young women in South Africa are seeking financial assistance from older sexual partners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars studying race in post-apartheid South Africa have largely focused on South African nationals. Little is known about the ways in which non-South African migrants and refugees navigate the South African racial classification system. In the context of continued immigration to South Africa, it is important to examine how refugees negotiate South African racial categories. This paper addresses this gap by interviewing Eritrean refugees and asylum seekers, who originate from an ethnicity-based classification system, to examine how they racially self-identify in everyday life as a result of their exposure to a race-conscious host society. Convenience and snowball sampling were used to select participants. The research sites were Johannesburg, Durban and Cape Town. A qualitative interpretative phenomenological analysis approach was employed to analyse data. The results presented here (patterns of Black self-identification) form only part of a larger project involving 46 Eritrean asylum seekers. Only 16 or one-third of the participants appropriated South African Black identity for a variety of reasons. Five themes were identified within Black self-identification: (1) "my phenotype makes me Black"; (2) "I feel Black when around Black South African friends"; (3) "living in Black neighbourhoods makes me feel black"; (4) "I am Black as I identify with the black experience"; and (5) "I check Black on forms to benefit from affirmative action". Participants appropriated Black identity for various reasons depending on different circumstantial factors. For some participants, their physical appearance did not inform their Black self-identification, but other social factors. Through their various tactics and strategies of Black self-identification, participants redefined and re-casted what it means to be Black in post-apartheid South Africa. Their reasons for Black self-identification violate traditional understandings of Blackness in South Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2015–2016 student protest movements to decolonise universities and to bring about free education in South Africa have been accompanied by striking images that capture the Zeitgeist of the post-apartheid state. This paper focuses on photographs taken by students who also took part in the protests and argues that a new iconography has emerged that references the past but that also breaks away from the social documentary forms of representation that characterised the struggle against apartheid. I explore how the resurgence of black consciousness is made manifest in visual images and argue for reading photographs by student-protestor-photographers as tangible signs of the emerging ‘woke’ subjectivities of young black people in South Africa today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper takes as its subject the fact that digital archival production – of existing materials and born-digital records – has collapsed in contemporary South Africa, and it offers some arguments about why it is important to reverse this process. The current situation can be explained by the fact that digitisation has been widely described as a form of intellectual imperialism, a characterisation that echoes influential strands of postcolonial theory and South African nationalism. The reasons for this unusual understanding lie in the difficult history of the last major digitisation effort, the Mellon-funded collaboration between Aluka and the Digital Imaging Project of South Africa (DISA). The paper reconstructs that project in some detail in an effort to understand what went wrong, arguing that in place of the geopolitical explanation that many participants adopted, most of what went wrong was much more narrowly technological. Yet, the same technological issues have already been great assets to South African researchers, holding out the promise of solutions to some pressing local difficulties of digital preservation and archival assembly. The last section of the paper takes up some of the reasons why scholars need to take digital record-keeping much more seriously than they have to date – chief amongst these being the fertile possibilities of forgery and impersonation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Open Science (OS) movement promises nothing less than a revolution in the availability of scientific knowledge around the globe. By removing barriers to online data and encouraging publication in Open Access formats and Open Data archives, OS seeks to expand the role, reach and value of research. The promises of OS imply a set of expectations about what different publics hope to gain from research, how accountability and participation can be enhanced, and what makes science public in the first place. This paper presents empirical material from fieldwork undertaken in (bio)chemistry laboratories in Kenya and South Africa to examine the extent to which these ideals can be realized in a sub-Saharan context. To analyse the challenges African researchers face in making use of freely available data, we draw from Amartya Sen’s Capabilities Approach. His theorisations of ‘conversion factors’ helps to understand how seemingly minor economic and social contingencies can hamper the production and (re-)use of online data. In contrast to initiatives that seek to make more data available, we suggest the need to facilitate a more egalitarian engagement with online data resources. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The world is confronting a range of ‘wicked problems’ that defy simple, linear solutions. Increasingly, the range of challenges including poverty, climate change and environmental degradation require solutions that cannot be drawn from a single knowledge base. Although excellent environmental legislation exists in South Africa (including that relating to climate change), it alone is not sufficient to solve the challenges the country faces. Rather, science that builds knowledge through engagement with a variety of actors, their views, expertise and perspectives, including mutual and transgressive learning, is required. This paper presents three South African case studies that reflect on the value of adopting transdisciplinary (TD) and co-production of knowledge (CPK) approaches to environmental problem-solving. Although not without their challenges, TD and CPK are inclusive approaches which usually enable a wider framing of environmental challenges and their ownership by various publics, and pave the way for effective implementation of solutions and actions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The question of who controls Indigenous tourism is of wide and growing relevance in post-colonial societies, especially in so-called transition economies, that are moving from state-led economies to mostly market-based economies. This paper explores such global–local dynamics for an Indigenous group in South Africa in relation to authenticity, development and power relations. Based on ethnographic fieldwork among the Indigenous South Kalahari Bushmen (≠Khomani) and their interactions with the tourism sector, especially up-market accommodation projects, it questions assumptions that economic and educational benefits will “trickle down” to the poor. It exposes two key contradictions in the capitalist tourist system. The first is that authenticity is opposed to becoming inauthentic; the Bushmen stay “authentic” for tourists who impose modernity as consumers, making the Bushmen merely an “Indigenous brand” that attracts tourists, creating revenue that trickles down into the area but hardly to those whoarethe brand. The second contradiction is that of poverty alleviation through a system that marginalises the Indigenous, and critically probes the concept of tourism “developing” (educating) Indigenous people. This assumed education is minimal: Bushmen and white managers are entangled in colonial paternalism (baasskap), with managers often lacking broader understanding of development, focusing mainly on economic growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers a prelude to the reconsideration of the writing life and contribution of an African intellectual and nationalist who, studiously and courageously, subjected the concepts of race, culture and nationalism to critical evaluation. Molema's engagement with popular politics began after his return from years of studying medicine at Glasgow University. However, from 1912 to 1921, he engaged with the history of South Africa intellectually, only later producing essays and speeches for more popular audiences. His study of black South Africans, The Bantu Past and Present (1920) challenged racist interpretations of the past, while also taking subtle aim at racism in Scotland during and after World War I. The text is multi-layered, moving from first- to third-person narration, which suggests that the author's own identity was subtly entangled with this project. In the Preface, the young writer defines his writing identity, revealing that the book's purpose is historical, ethnographical and, implicitly, nationalist. This paper examines the Preface's crucial role in defining the author's writing identity as nationalist and intellectual. Molema used his standpoint knowledge as ‘a member of the race’ whose story he ‘unfold[ed] to the world’ to begin the task of carefully reclaiming black history from the margins of South African cultural life. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Between 1925 and 1950, Robert Broom described one new genus and four new species of extinct suids from Plio-Pleistocene sediments in South Africa – three of them of giant proportions and one the same size as the extant Wart Hog (Phacochoerus). Since the end of the Second World War, dozens of papers have been published on Plio-Pleistocene African suids, yet only one of the genera has had a detailed scenario of its origins published: Broom's genus Notochoerus, which is widely admitted to belong to the Tetraconodontinae and to be a descendant of Nyanzachoerus. The aim of this paper is to examine the well documented Late Miocene and Pliocene suid fossil record of Eurasia in order to determine whether any of the taxa could be closely related to the other African taxa described by Broom. A new species of suid from Egypt is described, which probably represents the earliest African record of the lineage that eventually gave rise to the kolpochoeres. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Scholars who have been writing on the problems of classifying the oral song genres of Africa have tended to be inflexible. The oral song has been approached using functionalist and other anthropological theories. While these theories have shed some light on the nature of African oral song, this has been at the expense of exploring the actual song texts in their own right. This paper samples and explores some selected songs from the iSiXhosa cultural traditions by means of textual analysis. The paper intends to show that song genres cross-pollinate each other and that the recurrent themes in the songs contextualize and underpin the social and philosophical lives of the Xhosa people. Since the Xhosa people are differentiated in terms of age, class and gender, it follows that the themes of the songs reflect and mediate this reality. Songs can suggest new themes or can be interpreted in new ways which, when accepted in the Xhosa community, can then become dominant and recurrent ways of interpreting reality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes how South African soldiers draw on notions of gender, sexuality and morality in their constructions of identity and heterosexual sexuality. Popular discourses around HIV and AIDS in South Africa and elsewhere have highlighted the centrality of notions of morality, many of them problematic, in the response to the epidemic. In Southern Africa, the centrality of heterosexuality to HIV transmission has triggered a focus on morality in sexuality, including calls for abstinence or, in married relationships, monogamy. This paper discusses the findings of a research study that explored male soldiers' constructions of masculinity, sexuality and risky sexual practices. Discourses that emerged reflected dominant attitudes regarding men and women's sexual rights and, in particular, the moralisation of women's sexuality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1905 the Campos Rodrigues Observatory (CRO) was founded in Lourenço Marques (nowadays Maputo), the capital of Mozambique, by then part of the Portuguese overseas empire. In this paper the inception and early history of the CRO are analysed in the broader context of the interwoven history of the Portuguese and British empires in Africa, and specifically with respect to the scientific relations between Mozambique and South Africa. The equipment, personnel, practices and networks involved in the inception and early development of the CRO are brought into focus in order to illustrate the problems and strategies that shaped the establishment and functioning of this observatory, which was conceived essentially as a symbol of imperial stamina and colonial prowess. It is suggested that by providing a focal point for the development of scientific relations between Mozambique and South Africa, the CRO served both Portuguese ambitions for recognition as an imperial power and the emergence of South African nationalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite changes in how disability is viewed, ethical requirements for disability research have hardly changed. Some ethical clearance procedures, processes and practices still consider persons with disabilities as not able, creating unease among researchers and research participants with disabilities themselves. This paper considers five ethical contestations arising from research in the area of disability in an African context: positionality, vulnerability, signed consent, anonymity, and research committee composition. We argue that ethical requirements in practice are still largely based on a medical model of disability and propose that culturally sensitive social and human rights models should influence disability research ethics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The focus of this paper is the availability and use of resources in disadvantaged schools in South Africa 20 years after the country attained democracy. It examines the extent to which teachers working in these deprived environments use available resources to perform their key pedagogical functions. The unit of analysis is a group of teachers registered for an in-service subject didactics English module at the University of South Africa (Unisa). A qualitative paradigm was adopted for the study and two instruments were used to gather data: semi-structured interviews and a lesson observation protocol. The results show that while much has been done since independence to improve the quality of education in disadvantaged contexts, teachers are still too burdened by constraints presented by their teaching environments; they are therefore unable to take control of available resources. Improving the quality of teaching and learning would entail a re-imagining of the entire education system with a view of empowering the teacher. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contributes to a growing literature on the character of leadership, democracy and governance espoused by post-liberation governments, focusing on the African National Congress (ANC) as a political party. The article provides a brief overview of the two most common approaches to analysing the ANC's transition from a national liberation movement to a political party in an electoral democracy, the dominant party approach and what is termed the Fanonesque perspective. Neither is found to be wholly satisfactory, for largely the same reason – their tendency to present what is effectively a caricature of the ANC, by selectively highlighting features of its practices that conform to a pre-determined pathology, rather than acknowledging the ANC's complexity, variability and essentially contested nature. In developing an alternative approach, the paper draws from an earlier body of literature on single-party–dominant states in post-independent Africa that was empirically driven and comparative in nature. Such an approach can help us develop a more realistic, less sensationalist interpretation of ANC rule in South Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The April 1974 coup in Lisbon and the ensuing rapid decolonisation of Portugal's colonies marked the birth of the Southern African theatre of the Cold War. It also heralded the steady decline of Pretoria's apartheid regime. This paper seeks to illuminate why South Africa was so profoundly affected by the collapse of Lisbon's authority and the upheaval of the regional status quo that occurred as a result. It argues that in contrast to its creative and formative foreign policy endeavours in Africa, by 1974 South Africa's national security hinged fundamentally on a profound reliance on Lisbon to combat radical black nationalism and on Washington to provide diplomatic cover for their joint efforts. The primary impact of the coup, therefore, was to undermine South Africa's entire security and thereby produce the sense of acute isolation that drove its shift towards the more radical security policies of the late 1970s and 1980s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the Broadcasting Amendment Act of 1960, the South African government began to regulate forms of entertainment intended for public and private consumption. Radio broadcasts were controlled and musical recordings were regulated under this and subsequent legislation, with over 100 albums being banned outright and many more individual songs classified as ‘undesirable’. This legislation was applicable in the ‘homelands’, and musical productions – especially for SABC Radio Bantu – were censored. However, enforcing censorship laws in terms of live performances in the ‘homelands’ proved more problematic. Whilst the evidence from Venda lends some support to the established, romantic notion that musicians – and their music – were deeply embedded in the struggle against apartheid, there is equal evidence to suggest that many musicians at the time had little interest in revolutionary activity. Whilst self-censorship was prevalent on many levels, the motivation for this was not clear-cut. Christian convictions that those in power had been put there by God, or the liberating conviction that musicians were ‘simply entertainers’ and not politicians, prompted musicians to abide by censorship laws. Even for those who were politically aware, challenging the system was generally perceived to be not worth the risk. In the former ‘homeland’ of Venda, important exceptions to this stem from one family – the Mukwevho of Tshitomboni – whose most famous son, Colbert, made himself a target of the state by adopting reggae as his genre of choice. By charting Colbert's transition as a musician from the late 1970s to the present day, this paper demonstrates that musicians in the former ‘homeland’ of Venda had more freedom to record and perform ‘undesirable’ songs than has previously been accepted. However it does not follow that they all did so. The story of the Mukwevho family shows how different artists reacted in diverse ways to the political situation in which they found themselves. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Provision for environmental flows (EFs) in water use and water-resource developments has been legislated in several southern and eastern African countries. While much of the focus has been on the assessment of EFs for new water-resource developments, some attention has been paid to the possibilities of modifying the operation of existing infrastructure to deliver EFs. This paper summarizes research done to support the re-operation of the Katse Dam in Lesotho, the Clanwilliam and Kogelberg Dams in South Africa, the Cahora Bassa Dam in Mozambique and the Nyumba ya Munga Dam in Tanzania in ways that would reduce their downstream impacts. For each, the original and suggested new operating rules are presented, and the reasons for the suggested changes are summarized. The negotiation and decision-making processes relevant to each dam are also discussed, and some of the challenges faced at two of the dams (Katse and Kogelberg), where revised operating rules have been implemented, are reviewed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

“Megamiddens” appear along the West Coast of South Africa c. 3000–2000 BP. Kalahari San ethnography was used initially to explain them as processing localities given the massive volumes of marine shell and low densities of other remains. However, recent research in Lamberts Bay using a resource intensification model seems to explain more of the observed archaeological variability. In this paper, the evidence of Elands Bay megamiddens is studied in this same light and similar conclusions are arrived to. Rising population levels between 3500 and 2500 BP are followed by a reformulation of the foraging ecology of both marine and terrestrial prey, with isotopic values from human skeletons and archaeological data showing high marine food consumption during the megamidden period when compared to other stages. Signs of black mussel overexploitation are apparent by 3000 BP, although shellfish harvesting is most intense c. 2600–2200 BP. Further sampling of Elands Bay megamiddens is needed to better understand shellfish foraging between 3000 and 2500 BP. Foragers hunted less large mobile game by 2600 BP and instead small territorial bovids were procured more heavily at this time with tortoise collection being intensified between 3000 and 2600 BP. Cave usage may have been very different to that before and after the megamidden millennium given the lack of visits to these sites in Elands Bay at this time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the so-called `cultural defence' in South African criminal law. The expression `cultural defence' refers to the phenomenon where indigenous customs are taken into account in the processes of a criminal trial and may have an effect on the outcome. In South Africa they may play such a role in two respects: first during the process of inquiry to ascertain if the requirements for a particular crime have been met; and secondly when a suitable punishment for a convicted accused must be determined. By making use of case law, illuminated by some comparisons with the role of Aboriginal customs in criminal trials in Australia, it is shown that culture played a definite role in South African cases prior to 1994, albeit not strictly in the sense of a true cultural defence. The paper then examines whether the South African Constitution and, in particular, its human rights provisions, brought about a new approach to be taken in matters where custom has been an element in the motivation for an act which would normally be a crime. Making particular reference to the examples of the twala custom (a form of abduction, with or without the consent of the girl or her parents, as a preliminary to a customary marriage) and belief in tokoloshe spirits, it is shown that South African courts have sometimes, although often reluctantly, given attention to these customs, although sometimes showing little understanding of them. The major question which emerges today is whether the constitutional provisions demand a formalisation of the cultural defence or whether the existing principles used in the evaluation and punishment of crimes could continue to be applied. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that, while the demise of apartheid has led to many situations in which South Africans now come into closer contact with one another, this increased 'contact' does not amount to greater racial integration. Contact occurs within a context of unequal power relations in which 'whiteness' continues to be privileged over 'blackness'. The result is that white people tend to benefit more from contact with the racial 'other' than black people, who often experience this contact as reinforcing their expectations of continued white dominance and privilege. While contact may undermine blatantly racist practices and overt racial conflict, racialized patterns of reasoning continue to exist, often unnoticed and unchallenged. These include the assumption that race is an incontrovertible fact of experience, the privileging of whiteness, the assumption that there exist different (biological) races which evince different forms of social behaviour and that these are essential properties of people rather than being historically or socially contingent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The commercial agricultural sector in South Africa has historically been dominated by large-scale operations run by white owners and managers. In redressing this imbalance, black farmers classified as 'emerging' are being encouraged to engage in high-input agricultural production in order to obtain 'commercial' status. Since existing practices in commercial agriculture rely heavily on pesticides, emerging farmers aspiring to become commercial are pressured to adopt and/or increase the use of pesticides. However, problems of access to land, finances, resources, skills and markets overshadow the health and safety of these farmers and their labour force that may be affected by exposure to pesticides. This paper presents the results of a policy study based on primary interview data with key stakeholders and secondary documentary review data, to illustrate how pesticides are used in an occupational health and safety vacuum because the focus of key institutions is rather on economic productivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The dominance of English in particular domains of language use in South Africa, such as higher education and the economy, has led to the fear that other languages may be threatened by an increasing shift to English in all domains, especially among the young. However, this paper reveals the strong vitality of the mother tongues in the intimate domains and increasing multilingualism becoming the norm in new shared spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The central aim of this paper therefore is to critically assess the pertinence of this concept as a development planning strategy within the new neo-liberal economic climate in Southern Africa with particular focus on South Africa. This assessment is made in order to question the spatial orientation of this concept and to point out the dangers of focusing on spatial development within the broader scope of the global economic conditions: The ultimate goal is to show that the novelty of spatial development is occurring in a different economic environment that is less favourable to third world countries if it is undertaken with little caution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In South Africa, tourism development has become a critical site for government interventions through a range of policy frameworks and supporting institutions. Increasingly, these interventions are reflected in provincial governments' development planning frameworks. As tourism development has gained prominence at the regional level, a growing body of research focused on major tourist destination areas such as Gauteng, KwaZulu-Natal and the Western Cape has developed. This has facilitated the development of a further round of informed policy frameworks and institutional support systems. However, regions such as the Free State lack even the most basic analyses of its tourism products and product providers to inform the development of appropriate policy frameworks and institutional support systems. The aim of this paper is to address the paucity of regional data concerning the Free State tourism system by providing baseline data of the main tourism products and product providers of this province. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In South Africa less than 7.5 percent of the population are aged 60 and over. However, this is the highest proportion of elderly people in Africa. While more than 16 percent of the white population are aged 60 and over, only 6.2 percent of blacks are in this situation. Ageing is becoming a concern in South Africa. Since the 1980s the provision of housing for the elderly in South Africa has been regarded as a joint venture of the public and private sector. However, the new social welfare policy introduced by the Department of Welfare and Population Development in 1997 proposed the phasing out of all state-funded homes for the aged by the year 2000. This paper focuses on the provision of housing for the elderly in the Free State Province. Firstly, the housing needs of the elderly in the form of three social variables — social interaction, perception and fear of crime, and residential satisfaction — are considered. Secondly, the distribution of the aged in the Free State is examined and finally, housing for the elderly, provided by public and private sector (NGOs, churches, developers and others) in the province, is investigated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the late 1940s and 1950s, there was a cluster of films made in South Africa that focused on the black experience. The first of these were Jim Comes to Joburg released in 1949 and Zonk! in 1950, both representing black identity in ways that mark a shift away from earlier fomulations of black people as savages or servile. Zonk! and the later film Song of Africa (1951) both made by African Film Productions are presented as musical revues within a theatrical context, featuring a range of black songs and performance styles. Zonk! is extraordinary in that a small set of songs opens up questions of sexual identity. These songs are enacted by two men as a central couple, with an all-male backing troupe that sometimes mirrors or re-enacts aspects of the central couple's performance. One of the songs, for example, features a routine chorus: Oh Jan tog, squeeze my… ('Oh Jan please, squeeze me…') where all the singers dance together as couples, 'squeezing' their partners. Later in the film, a detailed narrative display and song-and-dance routine is developed around one of the same all-male troupe cross-dressed as the female manager in a compound 'restaurant', and playing the stereotypical heterosexual role of 'woman' in relation to the men's sexual advances. Zonk! is an essentially conservative film, both in its production base and the values it expounds overall, yet it embraces what might be seen as a radical crossing of boundaries that questions established perceptions of identity and particularly of black sexual identity in the early 1950s. In this sense it proposes identities, albeit ambiguously, beyond perceptions of national identities at that time. This is the terrain that this paper seeks to explore. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers an interpretation of the political culture which has emerged in South Africa since President F. W. de Klerk's reforms of February 1990. A useful way of approaching political cultures is to see them as syntheses of contradictory elements or impulses. For instance the sometimes contrary demands of liberty and equality, or of ethnicity and common citizenship might struggle for expression. Elements of continuity and change will mark a political culture in either evolutionary or revolutionary transformation. To observe that the political culture which has been evolving since February 1990 is marked by deep contradictions does not make South Africa unique, but there are aspects of these contradictions which make it singular among others with similar experiences. It is the argument of this paper that South Africa's prospects of a settled future can be seen in terms of five contradictions in search of a synthesis and that the April 1994 election will provide an important pointers as to whether and how this synthesis is likely to be achieved.

There is an alarming tide of cardiovascular and metabolic disease (CMD) sweeping across Africa. This may be a result of an increasingly urbanized lifestyle characterized by the growing consumption of processed and calorie-dense food, combined with physical inactivity and more sedentary behaviour. While the link between lifestyle and public health has been extensively studied in Caucasian and African American populations, few studies have been conducted in Africa. This paper describes the detailed methods for Phase 1 of the AWI-Gen study that were used to capture phenotype data and assess the associated risk factors and end points for CMD in persons over the age of 40 years in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). We developed a population-based cross-sectional study of disease burden and phenotype in Africans, across six centres in SSA. These centres are in West Africa (Nanoro, Burkina Faso, and Navrongo, Ghana), in East Africa (Nairobi, Kenya) and in South Africa (Agincourt, Dikgale and Soweto). A total of 10,702 individuals between the ages of 40 and 60 years were recruited into the study across the six centres, plus an additional 1021 participants over the age of 60 years from the Agincourt centre. We collected socio-demographic, anthropometric, medical history, diet, physical activity, fat distribution and alcohol/tobacco consumption data from participants. Blood samples were collected for disease-related biomarker assays, and genomic DNA extraction for genome-wide association studies. Urine samples were collected to assess kidney function. The study provides base-line data for the development of a series of cohorts with a second wave of data collection in Phase 2 of the study. These data will provide valuable insights into the genetic and environmental influences on CMD on the African continent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: South Africa has a serious burden of avoidable blindness and visual impairment, which may be due to poor ocular health promotional policies and programs or implementation. Therefore, this paper sought to critically analyse the South African primary health-care policies and programs, to identify the components of ocular health promotional policies and programs as well as how they are currently being implemented and to suggest areas that can be improved in order to minimise the burden of blindness and visual impairment.Methods: Triangulated quantitative and qualitative research methods were used in the study. Questionnaire and interviews were used to solicit data from national and provincial managers of different health directorates. Eye-care managers from each province also completed the questionnaire. Furthermore, relevant health policy and program documents from national and provincial departments of health were studied to identify areas relating to ocular health promotion.Results: The study found varying degrees of implementation of various ocular health promotional activities in the provinces with the majority of respondents (62 per cent) indicating that ocular health promotion was not part of their responsibility and another 81 per cent revealing that vision screening does not form part of their health promotional programs. It further revealed a lack of a dedicated directorate for ocular health-care issues and the absence of an integrated ocular health promotional policy.Conclusion: Ocular health promotional activities were absent in other provinces. This may be a major contributing factor to poor ocular health promotion in South Africa and hence, the high prevalence of blindness and visual impairment. Therefore, it is recommended that an integrated ocular health promotional model (directorate and policies) be developed and be part of the South African primary health-care system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]