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Since the ending of apartheid, the state, political parties, civil society and ordinary people in South Africa have attempted to deal with the traumatic legacies of the past to engender a common sense of nationhood. This paper examines this process of dealing with the past through the theoretical lens of post-colonialism, focusing, in particular, on attempts to establish historical truth and collective memory for black women, who have often been most marginalised by colonialism and apartheid and excluded from dominant accounts of history. It argues that if black women are denied a presence and agency in the construction of collective memory, their belonging and citizenship is consequently mediated in the process of nation building. It considers how exclusionary and discriminating patterns are reproduced through attempts to construct national memory-archives, focusing on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). It then explores the measures being taken to create a more inclusive process of restoring collective memory. In particular, it discusses the importance and possibilities of creating a postcolonial archive, where the voices and texts of historically marginalised people can be incorporated into national projects of remembering and notions of belonging. The paper focuses specifically on recent attempts to archive black women's pictorial and written testimony in a memory cloths programme. It concludes that representations of the past by women are a valuable tool in tracing the ways in which the legacy of their belonging and social standing shapes their contemporary citizenship. The radical potential of postcolonial archives lies in the fact that they can work against more sanitised representations of contemporary South Africa and towards the requirements for social justice (especially for black women) that are embodied within, but were arguably not met by, the TRC and broader nation building processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Railways played a crucial role in building the modern South African nation during the early decades of the Twentieth Century. After 1910, the SAR&H became not only the white state's primary means of building the economic independence of the newly-formed Union, but also its sole agency for promoting tourism, settlement and investment. The many thousands of images of the South African landscape it commissioned and distributed at home and abroad in various formats and contexts were a key to this promotion. The synergistic relationship that developed between this photographic array and the transformation of the lived space by the SAR&H's lines and services helped construct an imaginary geography of emergent nationhood. This paper explores how this joint social spatialisation by travel and landscape representation underscored the discourse of a modern, non-partisan white national identity during these politically-formative years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focuses on the symposium on historical geographies of modern southern Africa held at University of Sussex, Great Britain in April 2002. Analysis of developments in tradition of historical geographies; Effect of structuralist Marxist history on historical geography.

Proposes to examine the deployment of scientific discourse in the formation and contestation of dominant ideologies and policies in South Africa. Role of science in the making of national identities; Professionalization of scientific inquiry; Conflicts between metropolitan scientific ideas and local knowledge; Generation and dissemination of scientific ideas.

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]

The documentation and analysis of the impacts of agrarian change and population displacement on the livelihoods of black South Africans under apartheid have occupied a central place in empirical research on South Africa. The country's transition to democracy and associated institutional and socio-economic transformations raise new questions about changing livelihoods in rural areas. This paper analyses processes of differentiation in Qwaqwa, Free State Province, in order to contribute to an understanding of the challenges faced by people in South Africa's former 'homelands'. The paper focuses both on the important economic, political and institutional changes that have taken place in one region of South Africa and on the particular household circumstances and social relations that affect livelihoods. Using evidence from the life histories of Qwaqwa residents, it demonstrates the complexity of livelihood diversification and ordinary people's attempts to alleviate risk and insecurity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rural development policies in South Africa changed in the 1990s. The new framework combined poverty alleviation strategies with an attempt to shift rural communities away from subsistence-oriented agriculture to more market-oriented development options. While many of those who are currently assessing the impact of these policies in rural areas have focused on the extent to which they have contributed towards the creation of 'sustainable livelihoods', relatively little attention has been given to their impact on rural social relations and identity politics. This paper seeks to fill this gap by focusing on transformations in gender relations and identity politics in one rural location in the Eastern Cape. It argues that, although the new initiatives have been unevenly implemented and have not significantly reduced poverty in this area, they have nevertheless activated new discourses around identity and development. The paper traces these changing discourses by comparing and contrasting the polarised identity politics associated with the introduction of agricultural betterment in the 1950s and the increasingly hybrid identities and strategies constructed by rural women, in particular, in response to the new development opportunities. The paper concludes by investigating the implications of these responses for gender and power relations in the village. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Payment of bridewealth or lobola[sup 1] is a significant element of marriage among the Basotho of Lesotho and the Shona of Zimbabwe. However, the functions and meanings attached to the practice are constantly changing. In order to gauge the interpretations attached to lobola by young people today, this paper analyses a series of focus group discussions conducted among senior students at two rural secondary schools. It compares the interpretations attached by the students to the practice of lobola with academic interpretations (both historical and contemporary). Among young people the meanings and functions of lobola are hotly contested, but differ markedly from those set out in the academic literature. While many students see lobola as a valued part of 'African culture', most also view it as a financial transaction that necessarily disadvantages women. The paper then seeks to explain the young people's interpretations by reference to discourses of 'equal rights' and 'culture' prevalent in secondary schools. Young people make use of these discourses in (re)negotiating the meaning of lobola, but the limitations of the discourses restrict the interpretations of lobola available to them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Max Gluckman's essay, 'Analysis of a Social Situation in Modern Zululand' (the 'Bridge Paper' to his students), first published in 1940, came to be recognised in the postwar period as constituting a major methodological breakthrough for British social anthropology. His chief innovation was to describe in great detail the events of a single day – a 'social situation' – from which he then proceeded to abstract the sociological patterns of the wider society. In addition, the 'Bridge Paper' is also recognised as one of the most significant anthropological critiques of segregationist policy in South Africa in the first half of the twentieth century. This article will argue that the coexistence of methodological innovation and incisive critique of segregation was not coincidental. I will demonstrate that by using what became known as 'situational analysis' or the 'extended case method', Gluckman was able to provide a more effective critique of segregation than his mentors, A. R. RadcliffeBrown and Isaac Schapera, had done. Indeed, it also enabled him to answer effectively W. M. Macmillan's criticism of anthropology by demonstrating that anthropology's theory and method could defend the coherent vision of the 'common society' that Macmillan fought so hard in intellectual circles to advocate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines Seetsele Modiri Molema's World War I stay in Glasgow during which, in addition to his medical studies, he completed a lengthy argumentative history of African southern Africans. In analysing this vital episode of Molema's life, this paper engages with one of Shula Marks's most substantial contributions to the historiography of the past three decades: the concept of ambiguity as a means of understanding the complex relationship between class and consciousness. Ambiguity characterised Molema's Glasgow experiences, and fuelled the history he wrote during this temporary exile. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates fertility among African women in South Africa. Variation in fertility levels is influenced by such factors as rural or urban residence, and level of education and household income. Differential fertility between women of different language groups is accounted for largely by underlying socio-economic factors. A further factor investigated by this paper is the impact of household structure on fertility in South Africa using the 1993 South Africa Living Standards and Development Study. Household structure is examined from the perspective of women. We focus on whether women live with a husband, or with relatives of their parents' generation, or with relatives of their own generation. The analysis concentrates on women aged twenty or over who are already mothers. For these women, we hypothesise that living arrangements mediate between their socio-economic and cultural characteristics and the number of children that they have borne. Living with relatives from the previous generation is found to have a negligible net impact on the lifetime fertility of mothers. However, women who live with relatives from their own generation have borne about a fifth fewer children than other women of the same age after controlling for the impact of household income, the woman's schooling, regional differentials and urban–rural residence. Women from Nguni language groups have relatively large families. While this largely reflects economic and educational disadvantage, it is also conditional on their living arrangements. Unmarried and separated mothers have about a fifth fewer children than married mothers of the same age. It is within the domestic context that the influence of other characteristics is transmuted into differences in numbers of children. Women's living arrangements have become more diverse over the past thirty years in South Africa. They both modify and mediate the effects of other factors on fertility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rapid growth of sub-contracting in South African mines has been virtually ignored to date in the mainstream research literature on mining and migrant labour. In part, this is a result of the tunnel vision of researchers; and in part it is because of the difficulties of research and access to the mines. This paper explores the growth and implications of sub-contracting in South African gold mines since 1990. It has three main objectives. The first is to document the dimensions and trends of sub-contracting operations in the industry. Secondly, the veracity of claims about the negative impact and implications of sub-contracting on the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) and the working conditions of black miners is tested. Thirdly, the paper explores the perceptions of sub-contracting by workers themselves, many of whom are not, or are no longer, NUM members. Lesotho was chosen as the research field-site. A companion survey of ordinary miners in Lesotho in 1997 allows systematic comparison between regular and sub-contract workers. As this study shows, the conditions of employment under contractors are significantly worse than for regular miners. Sub-contracting has also been very damaging to the NUM. It produces new tensions within the union, between regular and sub-contract miners, and between union and ex-union members. Without a more informed understanding of what drives sub-contracting and an assessment of the real need for sub-contracting companies, it is unlikely that the NUM's attempts to regulate sub-contracting will bear fruit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the ways in which the formulation and implementation of strategies of soil conservation in South Africa during the period 1930–1970 were powerfully influenced by racist attitudes and by the differential political and economic position of whites and blacks within the systems of segregation and apartheid. The paper traces and compares the evolution of state intervention in pursuit of soil conservation in relation to white farmlands and African reserves with a particular emphasis on processes in the Transvaal. The forms of state intervention that emerged provoked bitter resistance in many African communities while they unintentionally supported inefficient and destructive practices amongst many white farmers. The policies took different forms, changed over time and had diverse consequences. But they did achieve an overall uniformity of outcome – they failed to live up to the expectations of conservationists. The paper seeks to demonstrate that there were problems both with excessively coercive and excessively cooperative policy approaches, which suggests that a policy framework that strikes a balance between the two extremes is likely to be more successful. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines two inquiries into poverty in South Africa funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the first in the late 1920s to early 1930s and the second during the 1980s. When analysed together the inquiries offer insights into the dynamic relations and tensions between this American foundation, normative science and interpretations of poverty in South Africa during the twentieth century. The paper highlights the common ground as well as the profound differences between the inquiries and the national and international, political and institutional contexts within which they were conducted. It suggests that far from being deployed with confidence and certainty, underpinning both inquiries were contextual, institutional and intellectual uncertainties which were associated with particular visions of South Africa and the United States held by the Corporation and their funding recipients. Reference is made to the strategies employed to overcome these anxieties including the shifting notions of co-operative science they sought to promote, the contrasting meanings attached to the cultural technologies employed and the complex associations which they endeavoured to encourage. In offering a more nuanced interpretation of North–South relations than many contemporary analyses, the paper examines, through these strategies, the attempts made to satisfy the objectives of both the Corporation and its funding recipients in South Africa and the tensions which emerged over the locations of knowledge and institutional control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the connections between the public and the private sphere through a case study of political protests by women in Mpumalanga Township, KwaZulu-Natal. The paper begins by reflecting on the public/private dichotomy and argues that the concepts of public and private seem to suggest a rigid set of socio-spatial practices, as if particular places have fixed social relationships and boundaries. It proposes a conceptual framework which focuses on the sites where women challenge the dominant power relations, rather than a simple public/private dichotomy; this conceptualization illuminates the reformulation of gender power relations across a variety of spaces. A key theoretical argument which is explored empirically is that challenges to power relations in one space reformulate subjectivities and so impact on power relations in another site. The paper then goes on to examine how space was constructed in Mpumalanga township prior to the violence and then the way in which political violence reconstructed this space (in particular, it focuses on the schools, the streets and domestic space). The paper then moves on to examine how women, through protests of different kinds, challenged the way in which these spaces and their accompanying gendered power relations had been reconstructed by the violence. The final section of the paper examines whether and how gender relations in the household have changed as a result of these processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Women have occupied a central place in the ideological formulations of nationalist movements. In particular, the figure of woman as mother recurs throughout the history of nationalist political mobilizations. In Afrikaner nationalism, this symbolic female identity takes the form of the volksmoeder (mother of the nation) icon, commonly assumed to describe a highly circumscribed set of women's social roles, created for women by men. The academic orthodoxy holds that middle-class Afrikaner women submitted to the volksmoeder ideology early on in the development of Afrikaner nationalism but that the working class Afrikaner women of the Garment Workers' Union (GWU) represented an enclave of resistance to dominant definitions of ethnic identity. They chose instead to ally themselves with militant, class-conscious trade unionism. This paper argues that Afrikaner women of different classes helped to shape the contours of the volksmoeder icon. Whilst middle class Afrikaner women questioned the idea that their social contribution should remain restricted to narrow familial and charitable concerns, prominent working class women laid claim to their own entitlement to the volksmoeder heritage. In doing so, the latter contributed to the popularization and reinterpretation of an ideology that was at this time seeking a wider audience. The paper argues that the incorporation of Afrikaner women into the socialist milieu of the GWU did not result in these women simply discarding the ethnic components of their identity. Rather their self-awareness as Afrikaner women with a recent rural past was grafted onto their new experience as urban factory workers. The way in which leading working class Afrikaner women articulated this potent combination of 'derived' and 'inherent' ideology cannot be excluded from the complex process whereby Afrikaner nationalism achieved success as a movement appealing to its imagined community across boundaries of class and gender. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Apartheid's bantustans reflected extreme forms of territorial fragmentation and (neo)colonially-derived dependency. Whilst the bantustans have been dismantled, paradoxically, the imagery of dependency which they came to symbolize has been used recently to characterize other 'nation-building' situations. In order to provide a more thorough account of the complexity of bantustan nation-building, background to its subsequent collapse and ambiguous legacy, the paper re-examines one 'independent' bantustan, namely Bophuthatswana. Unlike previous approaches, the paper links apartheid's particularities and generalities: its explicit grounding within a wider generic Eurocentric framework and especially the manner in which ideas of progress and identity were played out locally within South Africa's periphery are explored. Under the guise of 'independence', marginalized groups sought power and influence through vigorous efforts to promote a new national identity in Bophuthatswana. Bophuthatswana's shifting strategies and regional discourses, however, must be seen in conjunction with the effects of the implantation of the modern facade of a 'nation-state' and its incursion into rural and urban society. Subsequent efforts towards nation-building by this pseudo-state were based upon evolutionary imagery of Bophuthatswana as a 'less developed' peripheral territory requiring modernization and maturation. This had severe consequences for any state-led efforts to mobilize cultural identity, 'invent tradition' and to implement 'national' development in Bophuthatswana. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is concerned with understanding current transformations in migrant culture and identity in South African urban areas. It approaches the topic by revisiting Philip and Iona Mayer's classic study of migrant culture and identity in the Duncan Village township of East London. The article uses the their work as the starting point from which to construct a detailed historical analysis of the tranformations in amaqaba migrant culture in the city from the 1950s to the mid-1990s. The first part of the paper attempts to show that the Mayers greatly underestimated the resilience of this cultural form in the face of far-reaching social and political change in East London. In documenting the survival of amaqaba culture well into the 1980s, it focuses not only on the external forces that shaped migrant responses to change, but also on the internal social dynamics and relations that facilitated cultural reproduction. The second part of the paper is devoted to an analysis of the decline of amaqaba culture as a rural resistance ideology in the city in the late 1980s and its reconstruction as an urban resistance ideology predicated on the defence of particular urban spaces, identities and power relations. The paper concludes by considering the significance of the analysis for the understanding of migrant identity politics in South Africa in the 1990s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the urban literature in South Africa considerable attention has focused on the forced relocation and destruction of integrated communities under apartheid. The best known examples are the destruction of Sophiatown in Johannesburg, the razing of District Six in Cape Town and the annihilation of Cato Manor in Durban. In contrast, this paper focuses on the Warwick Avenue Triangle (WAT), an inner city community, and attempts to explain how one of the oldest mixed residential areas in Durban defied the apartheid state's strategies to destroy it. The paper traces the history of integrated residential development in the area and examines how slum clearance laws, the Group Areas Act and urban renewal programmes were used to try to destroy the community. Attempts by the residents to resist removal and relocation are assessed. Reconstruction and planning strategies to redevelop the area in the post-apartheid era are evaluated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Explores the idiosyncratic evolution of `The Citizen' newspaper and the factors that allowed it to survive and flourish in the wake of the Info Scandal. Paper's functioning since the transition; Possible scenario for the paper's future in the new South Africa.

Recent studies have begun to sketch the history of the Anti-Apartheid Movement in Britain, providing a convincing framework for understanding the transnational nature of the movement and its significance within the emergence of a global civil society. This article expands upon this work by exploring aspects of the ideological and the moral framework around which anti-apartheid sentiment began to crystallise in Britain in the late 1950s. Drawing on archival material from Church archives in both Britain and South Africa, as well as the expansive papers of the Africa Bureau, it focuses upon the activities of the well-known 'turbulent priests' who pioneered the campaign against apartheid in Britain: Michael Scott, Trevor Huddleston and Canon John Collins. It considers their status as the heirs of nineteenth-century humanitarianism before sketching the development of a Christian critique of South African racial policies during the 1930s and 1940s. The article then outlines the emergence of Michael Scott as a pioneer of anti-apartheid protest in the late 1940s, and his role in the parallel development of an international critique of South African policy and an embryonic language of human rights. In the early part of the 1950s, anti-apartheid protest evolved within the small and fissiparous British anti-colonial lobby, as its most vocal proponents began increasingly to articulate protest against apartheid in terms of solidarity with African political aspirations. The final section of the article describes how key ideological and strategic features of anti-apartheid protest were firmly established by the end of the 1950s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On 25 August 1985, a crowd of a hundred people, led by the mayor of Imbali, Patrick Pakkies, and a member of the KwaZulu Legislature, Velaphi Ndlovu, demanded that the staff and students of the Federal Theological Seminary of Southern of Africa (Fedsem) leave their premises by the following Friday, allegedly because they had been instrumental in the school boycott and the street demonstrations organised the same month by the youth in protest against the Imbali Township Council. The seminary community left the area, but they won an interim interdict and came back two weeks later. It is to the history of this episode that this paper is devoted. Did the seminary constitute a threat to the authority of the Imbali Council? To some extent, the Imbali residents who accused Fedsem of being involved in the politics of the township were right. Since the time of the seminary's expropriation from the land it occupied in Alice, staff and students had multiplied the acts of defiance against the apartheid regime. Yet, with a few exceptions, none of them played an active role in the democratic movement. Clearly, the Imbali residents and their leaders overestimated their influence upon the local youth. Many of them belonged to the very churches that were sending their candidates for the ministry to Fedsem. For them, this institution was nothing other than a terrorist organisation. Chief Buthelezi, who had been supportive of the seminary during its early years, refused to discipline his supporters. The Department of Development Aid, under whose jurisdiction Fedsem fell, would have liked to close the seminary, but it never managed to prove that it represented a threat to law and order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents an introduction to papers about heritage in Southern Africa that appear in this periodical.

The European Union-South Africa Trade, Development and Cooperation Agreement, signed in October 1999, is an important symbol of South Africa's formal reintegration into the world economy after many years of debilitating isolation. However, the negotiations to establish the most important component of this Agreement, the free trade area, were protracted and acrimonious. This article examines the key issues at the heart of these negotiations. A central contention of the paper is that the multilateral regulatory environment governing the world economy had a determining influence over the content and character of this Agreement and, in so doing, acted to reinforce a profoundly unfair trading relationship. This case study is a microcosm of events taking place on a larger scale, with many African states being integrated into the global economy on unequal and disadvanta geous terms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I take advantage of a space of interdisciplinary research that has emerged at the intersection of human and social sciences since the advent of radical revisionist scholarship in South African Studies in the 1980s. Within this space, I argue for a rethinking of the geography of cultures of migrancy. By focusing attention on rural (rather than urban) contexts of the cultures of mobility that accrue with migrancy, I argue that we can look at migrant labour as a constellation of cultural arguments in much the same way that recent scholarship has analysed media such as radio, newspapers and schooling, all of which similarly connect the 'local' with the national and the global. In particular, I look at how a gendered culture of migrancy, reflected discursively, materially and performatively, orchestrates struggles over the household. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on a case study from North West Province, this paper examines how, and why, rural livelihoods have changed in one of the former 'homelands' over the past four decades. It focuses on the nature and extent of processes of differentiation and the resources that have been critical in such processes. It examines the major risks different kinds of people face in their efforts to construct and reconstruct livelihoods and their responses to these risks. The sources of these risks include institutions governing resource access and contract enforcement, together with labour and commodity markets. Responses have often taken the form of livelihood diversification, between activities and across space, putting a premium on access to information and social networks, as well as to the state. Others have responded to risk by clustering around a person with a regular income. Policy interventions to promote poverty reduction must combine support for the generation of livelihoods with institutional reform to reduce vulnerability to risk. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On 17 September 1968, B. J. Vorster, the South African Prime Minister, announced that he would not allow into South Africa the MCC cricket team that included Basil D'Oliveira, the South African-born Coloured cricketer who played for England. D'Oliveira's inclusion in the team was belated, and was represented by Vorster as a capitulation to anti-apartheid agitation. Had D'Oliveira been selected in the first instance, Vorster told the British ambassador, he would have been allowed in. With the aid of new evidence from the National Archives in Pretoria, this paper firmly establishes that this was untrue and that Vorster would never have accepted D'Oliveira. His concern throughout was to avoid having to impose a formal ban, so as not to further imperil South Africa's international sporting ties, and to ensure instead that D'Oliveira was not included in the MCC team. To this end, the plan to bribe D'Oliveira to make himself unavailable for the tour was hatched in Vorster's office, and various emissaries were sent to MCC headquarters to warn privately that D'Oliveira would be unacceptable. The full story of how the MCC handled this information remains to be told, but the initial decision not to include D'Oliveira in the team for South Africa was not taken in ignorance of Vorster's intentions should he be selected. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the ambiguities and contradictions of donor and NGO development discourses in relation to local constructions of 'community', cultural authenticity and San identity. It deals specifically with the cultural politics of the successful 1999 ≠ khomani San land claim in the Northern Cape Province of South Africa. The study investigates local responses to state, NGO and donor discourses on indigenous identity and 'cultural survival'. It shows how strategic narratives of community solidarity, social cohesion and cultural continuity, were produced by claimants and their lawyers during this process. In the post-settlement period, however, social fragmentation and intra-community conflict between 'traditionalists' and 'western bushmen' became increasingly evident. These conflicts drew attention to the difficulties of creating community solidarity and viable livelihood strategies in a province characterised by massive unemployment and rural poverty. The paper suggests that these divisions were also a product of the contradictory objectives of NGOs and donors to provide support for traditional leadership, San language and 'cultural survival', and to inculcate modern/western ideas and democratic practices. Furthermore, despite the thoroughly hybridised character of contemporary San identity, knowledge and practices, San traditionalists appeared to stabilise 'bushman' identity by recourse to notions of a 'detribalised Other' – the 'western bushmen' living in their midst. It is evident, however, that the 'traditionalist' versus 'western bushman' dichotomy is itself at the heart of donor and NGO development agendas. Consequently, the donor double vision of the San – as both 'First Peoples' and modern citizens-in-the-making – contributed to these intra-community divisions and conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In early twentieth century South Africa, where white and capitalist domination of Africans was the central feature of the country's political economy, various elements of African society tried to use 'tradition' in a defensive manner to resist the pernicious effects of social and economic dislocation. During the 1930s and 1940s, the Zulu king and chiefs held popular support, despite their incorporation into the white state that threatened to undermine their legitimacy. This was, in part, because of their power over land allocation, and in part because they represented a symbolic and idealised past in which the Zulu kingdom fought to defend itself against colonial conquest and intervention. Shula Marks first highlighted the importance of the Natal-Zululand case for understanding chiefly authority, as well as the chiefs' opposition to, and co-option by, the state. This paper draws on her work to expand the discussion of Zulu chiefs and headmen, especially in the economic sphere, and argues that insufficient attention has been devoted to differences between northern and southern Zululand, and to the strategies of non-royal headmen in shaping the pattern of local authority. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the predicament of the postcolonial nation-state through the prism of environmental catastrophe. When are plant 'invaders' likely to become an urgent political issue? And, when they do, what might they reveal of the shifting relations among citizenship, community, and national sovereignty under neo-liberal conditions? Pursuing these questions in the 'new' South Africa, we posit three key features of postcolonial polities in the era of global capitalism: the reconfiguration of the subject-citizen, the crisis of sovereign borders, and the depoliticisation of politics. Under such conditions, we argue, aliens – both plants and people – come to embody core contradictions of boundedness and belonging. And alien-nature provides a language for voicing new forms of discrimination within a culture of 'post-racism' and civil rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper deals with issues of sexual threat in South Africa before the First World War, particularly in the context of the perceived crumbling of racial boundaries which threatened racial dominance. Masculinity, inseparable from the exercise of racial power, was in a state of malaise; and anxieties about black sexual subversion and white women's secret sexuality fed into enraged campaigns against imagined black sexual aggressions, and indeed against those white men who dared impugn the honour of white women. The ideology of chivalry, it is argued, was a weapon of control against the agents of subversion, white women as well as black men. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The age pattern of fertility in a rural area of South Africa under health and demographic surveillance (Agincourt subdistrict) was investigated over the 1992–1997 period. The total fertility rate (number of children born, on average, to the women of this population) averaged 3.3 over the period, a major drop from earlier estimates in the same area (6.0 in 1970–1974). Age-specific fertility rates showed an atypical bimodal pattern composed of two components of similar magnitude: premarital fertility (ages 12–26) and marital fertility (ages 15–49). These two components demonstrate a peak of premarital fertility (around age 18–20 years) and a peak of marital fertility (around age 28–30 years). Premarital fertility accounted for 21 per cent of all births, and for 47 per cent of births to women aged 12–26 years. Thus, in the Northern Province of South Africa at least, premarital fertility is a significant demographic and social phenomenon that contributes to a deeper understanding of both teenage and adolescent pregnancy. In addition, it extends these two concepts to cover the important social and economic consequences of pregnancies among those aged 12 to 26 years. The paper discusses a number of qualitative studies that provide insight into the social and cultural context of marriage, fertility and sexuality in the area. It also considers how this pattern of very high premarital fertility appears to reflect a lack of contraception before the first birth, especially among adolescents, a low prevalence of abortion, and a high contraceptive prevalence thereafter. This finding calls for a reorientation of the family planning policy, which so far has targeted married women and women after their first pregnancy, but has failed to address the contraceptive needs of young women before the first pregnancy, especially adolescents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Approaching Hogsback from the small university town of Alice, travellers face a wall of forested mountainside. At the base is the sprawling village of e-Hala, or Auckland, easy to ignore in the haste to climb the spectacular road to the mountain resort. Particularly at weekends, travellers are certain to encounter boys and young men along the road frantically trying to gain attention. If they stop, they will find that these youths are selling small clay models, generally of animals. These are often of striking and unusual beauty: stiff-legged, bristling hogs; proud horses reminiscent of ancient Greece; sinuous antelopes with curled and twisted antlers. Thinking back, travellers may remember having seen a youth with a plastic bag digging in a gash of red clay beside the road at the foot of the mountain pass. It is from this clay that the models are made. In this paper, we try to understand the historical process and the current social milieu that has produced these beguiling objects, sold by the poor to the relatively rich, but imbued with a vigour alien to banal airport art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Crosby has portrayed the plants and 'weeds' that accompanied European colonial expansion as often beneficial to settlement. In fact, many settlers throughout the temperate zones expended vast amounts of capital and labour on the eradication of those imported plants designated as 'noxious weeds', which they deemed a direct threat to the development of the new colonies. This paper explains the spread of key weed species in the nineteenth century Cape Colony where the number of livestock soared, cultivation was extended, and some plants thrived in conditions of rapid environmental change. It analyses the problems experienced in defining plant species, understanding their spread, and devising systems of extirpation. The colonial state, without the finances or powers to impose its will on the rural populace or the technology to re-engineer the environment without their assistance, increasingly focused its attention on changing the culture of settler agriculture, instilling a work ethic, and demonising weeds through a mixture of military, medical and moral metaphors. Nevertheless, weeds sometimes directly imperilled the settlers' tenuous hold on the land. Europeans experienced protracted wars of attrition not only with indigenous people but with drought, pathogens, vermin, and the like. Weed history further qualifies the prevailing picture of colonialism by casting a very different light on the colonial state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Windmills and wire fencing entered the farming practices of the north-eastern Karoo in the final decades of the nineteenth century. A new grazing system came into being comprising artificial water sources and camps in which sheep and other livestock ranged freely. By the late 1920s this had displaced the old shepherding-plus-kraaling arrangements. At the time, the coming of the new methods was predicted to raise stocking rates, improve veld cover and lessen soil erosion. This paper asks what the ecological consequences have been when viewed historically. Information is drawn from available sources, and the replies are summarised of current farmers and other land resource managers in the Sneeuberg in response to questions about the impact of the camp system. Recent debates about alternative models of rangeland ecology are surveyed as an essential preliminary to the construction of historical hypotheses. Finally, more far-reaching and demanding questions on environmental change in the Karoo are posed for future research work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Yiddish-speaking Jewish immigrants who came to South Africa from Eastern Europe were thrust from one racially discriminatory society into another. Ignorant of the languages spoken in the country they had made their refuge, largely unskilled in any trades and poorly educated, these immigrant Jews found themselves ambivalent parts of a social formation that left them marginalised by the white ruling class, but socially and politically privileged over black workers. This dislocating experience was most keenly felt when they sought their livelihoods in the South African trading phenomenon known, in the racist parlance of the day, as 'kaffir eating-houses'. From the turn of the century, white South African racist attitudes held in contempt any occupation that provided basic services for blacks, but prevented the opening of such trade to black entrepreneurs. The only whites prepared to take it on were socially despised Eastern European immigrants, chiefly Jews. By entering the only occupation open to so many of them, these Jewish immigrants became victims of multiple prejudice. They found their existence predicated on the necessity to negotiate an identity for themselves along a number of complex and ever-shifting frontiers. Many of the most profitable of these 'kaffir eating-houses' were run by well-off Jews, generally earlier immigrants who had 'made good'. Having become employers, they in turn employed, for exploitatively low wages, poor fellow-immigrant Yiddish-speaking Jews to do the day-today work. Consequently these severely disadvantaged Jewish immigrants found themselves both the recipients and the administrators of a many-sided exploitation. Empowered whites equated them with the blacks they served at fixed and meagre weekly wages for the profit of those who, socially despised themselves, were nevertheless their sole economic means of support. Yet in dealing on a daily basis with their black clientele, these shop assistants were placed by the discriminatory practices of a discriminatory society in positions of racial superiority over black mineworkers and labourers. The confusion they experienced as a result of their marginalised condition created a site of multi-faceted conflict that South African Yiddish writers repeatedly confront and explore. The predicament of the kaffireatniks, as they were contemptuously called, becomes a metonym for the problem of defining immigrant Jewish identity along the unstable social, economic and political frontiers of racist South Africa. This paper, drawing on seminal texts, investigates the way South African Yiddish fiction problematises questions of race and gender identity formations, and the moral ambiguity inherent in occupational segregation for Eastern European immigrants who found themselves part of a racist social formation that continually demanded ethical compromise as a precondition for social acceptance and economic success. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is a study of letter writing amongst migrant workers on the Witwatersrand before World War II. It moves from a consideration of the paradoxical character of literacy amongst migrant mineworkers to a discussion about the history of privacy in South Africa. The paper suggests that both the field of popular culture and the politics of democracy can be better understood by paying attention to the particular forms of letter correspondence that have developed in 20th century South Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper analyses how the lively tradition of Indian community theatre has reflected and contributed to the formation and contestation of identities among Indians in Durban since the 1960s. Starting from a popular piece of political satire, Mooidevi's Muti, staged in 1998, the recent history of South African Indian theatre is described as the emergence of a canon: two main genres, political satire and the family drama, that since the 1960s have developed within an 'Indian public sphere', and which today seem to constrict the opening of this rich tradition towards other forms of theatrical expression. It is argued that this closure of theatrical forms correlates with the broader tendency towards 'ethnic closure' among Indians in post-apartheid South Africa. [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]

The new-found democracy in post-apartheid South Africa was bound to confront the legacies of apartheid, one of which was the segregated spaces designed to foster a separate existence of different officially defined racial and ethnic groups. As apartheid came to an end and a negotiated settlement ensued in 1992, attention was paid to the reorganisation of society and its spaces in line with the vision of a non-racial democratic South Africa. Attempts to reorganise the apartheid territorial divisions by means of new boundaries created some new problems. This paper analyses the provincial boundary dispute between Mpumalanga and Northern Province over Bushbuckridge which began in 1993 and remained unresolved at the end of 1998. It argues that the dispute is not only about the boundary in question but also about opportunities and constraints offered by the process of transformation. The Bushbuckridge boundary dispute became more pronounced after the 1994 national election, although the problem itself pre-dated the election. Its later complications can be primarily laid at the door of the African National Congress, as the leading player in the post-apartheid government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the international reception of the fiction of South African novelist and critic, J. M. Coetzee, in order to examine the institutional and rhetorical conventions which shaped the selection and circulation of particular forms of writing as exemplars of 'South African literature' from the 1970s through to the 1990s. The representation of Coetzee's novels in two reading-formations is critically addressed: in non-academic literary reviews; and in the emergent academic paradigm of post-colonial literary theory. It is argued that in both cases, South African literary writing has often been re-inscribed into new contexts according to abstract and moralised understandings of the nature of apartheid. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reports on the conference entitled `Symbols of Change--Transregional and Local Practice in Southern Africa'. Underlying theme; Issues explored; Papers emerging from the conference.