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From the mid 2000s, militant local political protests have been widespread in poor townships and shack settlements across South Africa, recalling mobilisations of a previous decade. Youth have been at the forefront of these protests, as the weight of the job and housing crisis has fallen disproportionately on those under 35. Similarly to the 1980s, this has created fears over a youth-led rebellion, with youth portrayed as militant, angry, disillusioned and available for direct action. Significantly, very little research has captured the role of youth in these urban uprisings from the perspective of youth themselves. This paper provides insight into the lives of a number of youth who participated in the 2011 protests in Zandspruit informal settlement, on the outskirts of Johannesburg. Situating the protests within a larger context allows an exploration of the complex web of structural factors which motivate youth involvement, and the ways in which youth actively shape and transform their social reality. This includes an understanding of the nature of youth unemployment, the politicisation of access to resources and services, and the relationship between leaders and youth. Through an analysis of the shared grievances and frustrated aspirations of youth within a context of perverse social inequality and intense competition for power and access to resources, the motivations of youth are analysed through two key concepts: waiting and envy. This paper draws attention to the changing nature of political action among youth and the implications for broader politics and society in South Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

James Thompson Bain, a Scottish-born trade unionist, became one of the most important figures in the white labour movement of early Johannesburg. His career culminated in his leadership of the 1913 general strike in that city, and his deportation by the Botha-Smuts government in the following year. The activities of the union movement led by Bain were crucial to the formation of segregated labour relations in South African industry. Bain's path to the 1913 strike ran through service in the British Army in his teens, conversion to the socialism of William Morris in Edinburgh during the 1880s and intelligence work and combat in the cause of the Boers' Transvaal Republic. The paper seeks to explore Bain's intellectual formation through an investigation of the impact that literary culture, and especially the writings of Thomas Carlyle, Morris, and Robert Blatchford, had on his politics. Carlyle's work quite inadvertently provided late nineteenth century British, and especially Scottish, labour activists with an intellectual bridge between a protestant world view and new secularist and socialist ideas. The anti-industrialism of Carlyle and Morris predisposed Bain to see the Boers' defence of their interests against the Randlords and the British government as compatible with socialist ideology. Carlyle's ideas fed into a vision of working class interests, held by Bain and many of his contemporaries, which stopped at the boundaries of Britishness, and which was therefore compatible with certain forms of colonial politics. The paper argues that the scholarship of Jonathan Rose and other historians has missed the global dimension of late nineteenth and early twentieth century British working class literary culture and the way in which its radicalism was entirely compatible with racial segregationism. The white labourism of men like Bain was not a specifically South African phenomenon, but part of the common politics of the labour movement in Britain and across its Empire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The staging of an Empire Exhibition in Johannesburg in 1936 brought together people, objects and ideas from across South Africa and the Empire. This paper will explore the implications of the encounters and juxtapositions that took place there for understanding the meanings of interaction, and segregation, in South African cities at that time. The Exhibition also brings into relief many of the practices of observation and presentation that had developed around the world's fair tradition for almost a century. The paper offers an account of visitor responses to the display of the 'modern' and the 'traditional' at the Exhibition. Overall, alongside the practices of segregation and dominance played out through the exhibition as well as in the city more generally, a range of shared enthusiasms across racial and cultural divides, as well as more sympathetic responses to displays of difference, are also reported. The implications of the historical analysis for contemporary attempts to transcend divisions in South African cities are referred to, and the possibilities for exploring histories of racial and cultural interaction are signposted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hillbrow, a high-rise, inner city suburb in Johannesburg was one of the first neighbourhoods to become racially diverse in spite of the Group Areas Act of 1950. From the late 1970s, its whites-only policy started crumbling and by 1993 when the data for this study were collected, under 20 per cent of its population was white. The central questions that are addressed in this paper are: how did racial propinquity impact on race relations and interracial interaction in the neighbourhood in the early 1990s? Did it increase racism amongst residents or did it lead to its diminution? Related questions are: how were the respective racial categories and other 'races' constructed, and what traits were assigned to the various racial categories? In order to establish the extent to which an integrated, rather than a merely mixed neighbourhood emerged, this study explores the range and limits of interracial friendships and socializing. Data for the study were obtained mainly through a household survey and in-depth interviews with apartment-dwellers. The study found that racial propinquity had a mixed impact. Almost all respondents felt that racial barriers had declined, overt acts of racism were minimal, and there was evidence of signficant racial tolerance, interracial contact and mutual assistance. On the other hand, many of the residents in the face-to-face interview situation voiced racist sentiments. White residents were most likely to express racist views. Another significant finding was that racial clustering was a dominant trend. Most apartment blocks were occupied solely or mainly by one particular racial category. The neighbourhood was certainly racially diverse but not significantly integrated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the anomaly in apartheid history of the ruling National Party's (NP) fielding a 'pro-gay rights' candidate in the Hillbrow constituency during the 1987 whites-only election in South Africa. The NP was aided in its Hillbrow campaign by the gay magazine Exit, which encouraged its readership to 'vote gay' in the election and published a list of candidates who were favourable to gay rights in South Africa. The Hillbrow campaign is intelligible when the intersections between race and sexuality are analysed and the discourses wielded by the NP and Exit are spatially and historically situated. The Hillbrow/Exit gay rights campaign articulated discourses about the reform of apartheid in white self-interest and conflated white minority and gay minority rights, thereby contributing to the NP's justification for apartheid. The NP candidate's defeat of the incumbent Progressive Federal Party (PFP) MP for Hillbrow, Alf Widman, was trumpeted by Exit as a powerful victory and advance for gay rights in South Africa, but the result provoked a sharp backlash among many white gay men and lesbian women who organised to openly identify with the liberation movement. The Exit/Hillbrow campaign problematises the singular assumptions that are often made about race and sexuality in apartheid South Africa, and illustrates how political, social and economic crisis can provoke reconfigurations of identities vis-a-vis the status quo. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction presented in whice editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including bouncer gangs and security crews in Johannesburg, South Africa, the relationship between Brazilian and Mozambican cities, and urban and peri-urban growth in Luanda, Angola.

This article examines the strategies used by Johannesburg writers Phaswane Mpe and Ivan Vladislavić in their texts Welcome to Our Hillbrow (2001) and Portrait with Keys: The City of Johannesburg Unlocked (2006) to make sense of the bewildering transformations of post-apartheid Johannesburg. I begin by sketching the transformations of the city in the wake of the dismantling of apartheid-era segregation, sketching in particular the way in which the city has been turned ‘inside out’. Then, in the texts by Mpe and Vladislavić, I examine figures of the ‘inside out’, specifically Mpe's use of narratological loops and Vladislavić's implementation of the figure of the Möbius strip, to show how these recent literary texts have attempted to elucidate the vertiginous demographic changes in the city. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Migration studies in South Africa have partially taken the spatial turn, giving some attention to questions of territoriality and spatial relationships. Recent literature has drawn on de Certeau's distinction between the strategies of the powerful and the tactics of the subordinate, revealing for example how migrants occupy hidden spaces to evade control and social hostility. Within the broad aegis of de Certeau's work, we engage the historical and contemporary spaces of the Chinese diaspora in Johannesburg. We describe a highly differentiated grouping of migrants that has deployed, and continues to deploy, varying tactics over time and across space. There are, for example, processes of clustering and processes of dispersal. There is also the use of visibility and cultural marking as a spatial tactic, as well as of invisibility and hidden spaces. We also reveal that the spatial practices of the Chinese migrants do not only relate to the strategies of the powerful but are also a response to the competition and threats posed by other subordinate individuals and groupings in society, including other Chinese migrants. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article analyses FoodBank Johannesburg's impact on the network of food security organisations in Johannesburg, South Africa. The introduction of the American food banking model into Johannesburg has led to many positive outcomes, including expanding the number of institutions committed to food security, streamlining food donation processes, increasing the amount of food delivered, and reducing waste. While FoodBank Johannesburg's alignment with the state and capital has assured some level of state funding, it also has the potential to delegitimise particular food security interventions, depoliticise hunger, deepen central state penetration, create new bureaucracies, and allow government to shirk responsibilities towards the food insecure. Additionally, even though food retailers and food manufacturers have committed to the food banking concept, it is not clear whether the food bank's dependence on food business inefficiencies, such as overproduction and incorrect packaging, is an appropriate way to ensure food security. Moreover, FoodBank Johannesburg has transformed non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and community-based organisations (CBOs) through processes of inclusion and exclusion and legitimised a top-down approach towards food security that privileges particular food security interventions over others. For some NGOs, institutional stability has been ensured by changing the organisational mission, accessing private sector funding, or joining forces with FoodBank Johannesburg. Yet, for many NGOs and CBOs, resource unavailability, ineffective governmental policy, and new food bank bureaucracies pose potential institutional challenges and an uncertain future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Zimbabwean immigrants in Johannesburg are typically beset by a complex set of material demands and ethical constraints. These may include the demand to send money, food, durable goods, and clothing to relatives back home. They may also include the demand to physically host and provide for relatives and friends in unending succession. At the same time, a migrant may have competing ethical obligations to a diverse network of people in Johannesburg: spouses and in-laws, siblings and children, friends and allies, or church members and business partners, who together constitute an everyday social milieu. One of my emerging research interests lies in tracking the strategies by which migrants maintain social relations (and the flow of resources) across the Zimbabwean-South African border. But I am equally interested in strategies of social disconnection - of remaining out of sight or 'incommunicado'. While one might plausibly analyse such strategies in light of a rational calculus aimed at protecting hard-won assets from the claims of kin, such an analysis would take a theoretically impoverished account of the ethical judgements involved. What are the ethical implications and consequences of not forwarding one's address or cellphone number, or of not replying to calls and letters? The open-ended condition of displacement brought about by violence, insecurity and the present political impasse within Zimbabwe lends itself to a particularly vexing moral economy for Zimbabweans abroad - one in which the temporal horizon for reconciling credits and debts, present capacities and future dependencies, is unknowable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ryan Carrier (1999), reflecting on policing in South Africa, has pointed out that there may be different types of order that are not necessarily mutually exclusive: he argues that the type of order that the state seeks to guarantee may be different from the type of order that businesses, affluent suburbs, townships and corporations wish to establish or preserve. He concludes by saying that different types of order may call for different types of policing. Whilst this idea seems interesting regarding the way communities can gain control over their direct environment, it is also quite challenging when thinking of equality in the access to security - especially in South Africa, where the idea of 'separate but equal' development has sinister overtones. In the current worldwide context of security governance and of development of community policing principles, the line between what communities are entitled to do and what they should leave to the police is very blurred, particularly so when norms regarding social order vary in space and time. Security norms to be implemented at the neighbourhood level have to be negotiated between communities and public authorities, and within communities themselves. This article, based on field study in suburbs and townships in post-apartheid Johannesburg, argues that there are different 'cultures' of policing and different conceptions of local social order embedded in different local histories and contrasting socio-economic settings. The South African state is currently attempting to homogenise security practices and to 'educate' people in a democratic policing culture. At the same time it is also firmly setting some limits (for instance by rejecting road closures and vigilantism) to the local security experiments developed in the period following the demise of apartheid. However, its current policy, supposedly designed to 'unify' the policing systems under common principles, is based on the broad encouragement of community participation in the production of security, as well as on the promotion of zero-tolerance principles. These policies actually serve to exacerbate local differentiation regarding the content and practice of policing as well as the undemocratic principles rhetorically resisted by the state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From Johannesburg's origins as a mining camp, the principal and general white discourse of urban segregation for Africans was not questioned. However, no blueprint existed for how to enforce urban segregation prior to the Natives (Urban Areas) Act of 1923. Contestation over the details of how to manage African shelter in Johannesburg around the time of Union reveals that, despite powerful segregationist legislation and political consensus among the ruling white population, municipal strategies for managing African settlement were more contingent. The argument presented here is that the Council's shift in policy, from initially condoning and facilitating inner city slum yards to the subsequent vilification of the 'African slum problem' reflects in part a change in the balance of power between manufacturing and mining interests, and in part the reassertion of a popular white discourse connecting 'race' with disease, criminality and drunkenness, propagated in particular by working class ratepayers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In South Africa today, the cremation of the dead constitutes a major component of white South African mortuary practices. Until the 1930s however, the practice was virtually unknown among this population group, whereas by the 1940s it had become firmly rooted among a small but growing number. This article argues that white South Africans' embrace of cremation represented a virtual 're-inventing' of cremation from a set of ideas and practices primarily confined to local Hindu communities — and represented by white South Africans as barbaric, primitive and alien — to a newer set of ideas that proclaimed cremation a rational scientific solution to the problem of finding the most efficient means of disposing of the dead body. The article explores the earlier successful struggle of Johannesburg's Hindu community to win for themselves the right to cremate their dead in a crematorium of their own and points out that, in so doing, the Hindu Crematorium Committee also became the first provider of cremation services to Johannesburg's white residents. It observes, however, that the cremation of white bodies in a Hindu furnace sheds light on a hidden area of racial thought and practice in Johannesburg. For when white Johannesburgers chose to be cremated in the Hindu crematorium, the white advocates of cremation seized this moment to characterise the Hindu crematorium and the Hindu cremation process as inimical to the preservation of the dignity and sanctity of the white body and began a successful campaign for the construction of a 'Whites Only' crematorium. At the same time, however, significant sections of Johannesburg's white community remained suspicious of, or even hostile to, the cremation of the dead. This study thus explores how deeply embedded, within these concerns about the treatment of the dead body, are more profound, although often less fully articulated ideas, about the changing meanings of life and death, race and faith in twentieth-century... [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Urban water supply, sanitation and electricity have been identified as basic needs by the post-apartheid government and the Greater Johannesburg Metropolitan Council (GJMC). This article explores the relationship of Johannesburg's poor to the urban environment and, in particular, these three key urban services. On the basis of survey data, case studies, textual analysis and in-depth interviews with policy makers and planners, it reviews how poorer citizens were, for a long time, seen as victims under apartheid urban planning. During the rent boycotts that characterised urban struggle politics during the era of late apartheid in Johannesburg, they were often represented as villains. This perception persisted well into the post-apartheid period, where refusing to pay for services was seen as tantamount to a lack of patriotism. Today, Johannesburg's poorer citizens are increasingly being seen as fixers. The GJMC in its policy document, iGoli 2002, is committed to establishing the commercial viability of service delivery. Cost recovery is seen as important for solving the tension that exists between maintaining established service levels (in historically white areas) and extending services to new and historically under-serviced (mainly black) areas. We conclude that there are opportunities to address urban poverty, inequality and environmental management in an integrated way. However, these are predicated on the GJMC and its advisers understanding the ways in which pro-poor and social justice strategies interface with urban services and the urban environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Analyzes the communal policing initiatives in the western areas of Johannesburg from 1930 to 1962. Crime and policing in the 1930s; Expedients and solutions; Rise and fall of the civic guard.

Explains the policy of the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa in admitting black students. Process by which the university adopted an open policy in admitting black students in the 1950s; Implementation of quotas in admitting black students driven by demands from the Nationalist Party; University policies on the issue influenced by political and social pressures.