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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]

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]

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]

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]