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An important but surprisingly neglected player in the history of the struggle for independence in the African Portuguese colonies is the Conferência das Organizações Nacionalistas das Colónias Portuguesas (CONCP), an umbrella organisation uniting the Partido Africano da Independência da Guiné e Cabo Verde (PAIGC), for Guinea Bissau, the Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola (MPLA), for Angola, the Frente de Libertação de Moçambique (Frelimo), for Mozambique and the Movimento de Libertação de São Tomé e Príncipe (MLSTP), for São Tomé e Príncipe. Founded in Casablanca in 1961, the CONCP was not a participant in military action, but it strengthened the movements' ideological cohesion and international diplomacy. Its most controversial goals were perhaps the settlement of internal divisions among the nationalists of Angola and Mozambique and the endorsement of the MPLA and Frelimo as the sole legitimate liberation movements in their countries. To this end, it also established a strategic relationship with specific nationalist movements in southern Africa opposing the white minority regimes and with the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) Liberation Committee. After its second conference, held in Dar es Salaam in 1965, the CONCP intensified its pressures to secure the MPLA and Frelimo exclusive recognition and support by the OAU, but it was successful only in the second case. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction to the journal is presented which discusses various reports within the issue on topics including the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) vaccinations in South Africa, the German colonial occupation of Namibia, and Chinese investments in Africa.

During the interregnum between the announcement of the election results in March 1980 and the independence ceremony in April, approximately 16,000 workers staged wildcat strikes across Zimbabwe. While previous scholarly analyses have focused on the failure of these strikes to catalyse a sustained movement, this article reads them as timely enactments of the workers' vision of decolonisation during a fragile moment of transition. First, rather than reacting to state policy making, the strikes seized the brief opening to make demands to which the incoming government was forced to respond. Second, the strikes intervened in a broader debate about the speed at which political change ought to unfold in the new state. This debate was reflected through the terms 'reconciliation' and 'transformation', which circulated in public discourse and framed ZANU(PF)'s approach to governance. These terms captured two different approaches to the predicament that the party found itself in once it acquired power. Reconciliation centred on gradualism and moderation, while transformation emphasised the rapid change of extant colonial institutions. Caught in this bind, through the mechanism of the wildcat strike, workers refused the injunction to wait for the formal transfer of power to access the freedoms promised to them, enacting a sense of anticipation that made distinct claims on the future government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores a history of self-organisation among the Basotho traders in Lesotho's colonial and post-colonial commerce from the 1870s to the 2010s. Using historical sources, the article argues that Basotho's forms of self-organisation – voluntary business associations and co-operatives – are indispensable in their persistent struggle for economic democracy. Under colonial (1870s–1966) and post-colonial (1966–2010s) conditions of poverty, exclusion and authoritarianism, their forms of self-organisation, outside state intervention, blends their economic and political aspirations to have a meaningful say and participation in the economic affairs of their country. Their associational life illuminates particularised normative forms of humanism embedded in the historic and social fabric of their society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the author discusses a part special issue on the subject of South Africa film history and the social aspects of South African films since the 1980s.

The 2015–16 fallist student protests across South African university campuses highlighted the shortcomings of the post-apartheid political system in resolving persistent inequalities based on race, class and gender. However, the experiences of Southern African Development Community (SADC) international students at South African universities have received little attention. Using qualitative interviews with SADC students studying at Rhodes University in Makhanda during the campus protests, this article argues that the protests also created new forms of exclusion. The protest movements adopted identity politics that attacked all perceived forms of privilege, and SADC students on South African campuses felt excluded from the protests because they were described by the protesters as 'too rich to care'. SADC students themselves rejected this assumption and instead emphasised their specific challenges regarding their status as immigrants, and the precariousness of the middle classes in southern Africa. By drawing together the concepts of migration, social class and higher education, this article addresses the important subject of transformation at South African universities through the intersections of transnationalism and class. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is based on a public lecture I gave at Oxford University in May 2019. It looks at my critically acclaimed novel House of Stone and the role of literature in shaping the complex human experience, particularly through conflict and trauma. House of Stone explores Zimbabwe's history, from the fall of Rhodesia right through the early years of Zimbabwe, during Gukurahundi, to the contemporary moment in 2007, going back in time and memory to the arrival of Cecil John Rhodes and his British South Africa Company in the late 19th Century. In looking at literature and trauma, the article analyses the relationship between the particular and the universal and the importance of nuance when approaching complex lives written on the page. In considering nuance, I explore the fascinating process of hewing fiction from history, and how it is that fiction does something different from the narration of history as 'real events'. In looking at the novel as historical fiction, importance is placed on the connections and continuities between various demarcated histories and relationships – such as what we think of as pre- and post-independence, colonialism and post-colonialism, and liberation war and post-independence genocide. Equally important is the challenge of how to present the violence inherent in this history. Zimbabwe has had a long, violent, bloody history, from the 1890 s right through the 1970s and the 1980s to the contemporary moment of the novel, the 2000s. How does one not wear down the reader with 'violence fatigue'? Which violence should one portray and how? The article considers the various ways in which the novel portrays violence and the reasons for some of these strategies. At the heart of the question about violence and its portrayal in fiction is the question of how to give the novel a human, rather than inhuman, shape – the shape of humanity. It would be all too easy to fall into the trap of portraying a continuous violence that could quickly become gratuitous and pornographic, its own reason for being. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Child narrators and protagonists have been a recurring feature of much of the literature produced in and of Zimbabwe since independence 1980. Their experiences of growing up have often been seen as mirroring that of the nation itself, such as in Nervous Conditions (1988) and We Need New Names (2013), depicting childhood as inherently political and directly involved in social and historical transition. This article asks what happens when the child is not an explicit embodiment of the nation's growth and development through painful historical phases, and examines the child narrator in The Voluptuous Delights of Peanut Butter and Jam (2008) by Lauren Liebenberg and Peace and Conflict (2014) by Irene Sabatini. Instead of being placed centre stage in the midst of turbulence, war and social change, the child narrator in Sabatini's novel remains at the periphery of repressive politics, acting as a spectator, commentator and investigator. Liebenberg's narrator is more politically informed than Sabatini's, and family tragedy converges with the end of white rule in Rhodesia. Both narrators depict the disconnect between past, present and future through their innocence and naivety. This position enables an instructive approach in the novels to the nation's past and present. Through their separate trajectories, the novels channel a nation left behind, stagnant in its repressive measures and unable to move forward. Instead of representing the nation and its development, the child narrators in the two novels suggest that the colonial past and violent present of Zimbabwe cannot be reconciled. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The British Empire formally emancipated its slaves in the Caribbean on 1 August 1834, then in South Africa on 1 December 1834 and in Mauritius on 1 February 1835. This arose largely in response to humanitarian pressures. Groups such as the Anti-Slavery Society sought not only to end the brutal system of enslaved labour but also to address the systematic marginalisation of people of colour from colonial society and to reform standards of social and moral conduct among both black and white populations. With the benefit of tuition by humanitarian agents, former slaves would take their place within a new society of free labourers, negotiating with planters and farmers for the terms on which their labour would be sold, and working more productively because they were now to be driven by their own desire for consumption rather than by the lash. The intention was, therefore, not to destroy the plantation sectors of these colonies but rather to rebalance them away from slavery towards a more efficient, humane system of free labour, but one ultimately still marked by social and economic hierarchies. The grant of £20 million to slave-owners in compensation was intended to aid this process by enabling planters to clear their debts and retool their plantations to meet the new conditions of free labour. This article examines one aspect of the system, the £1.5 million of this compensation that found its way into the banks founded in these territories between 1835 and 1840, and how it helped the process of transition in South Africa in particular. In the sugar colonies of the Caribbean and Mauritius, the money supported a new system of indentured plantation labour; in South Africa, it was channelled into banks that supported the existing agriculture of the western Cape and the expansion of settler capitalism in the eastern Cape. This enabled planters and farmers to ride out emancipation with far fewer changes to the wider societies and economies of the former slave colonies than humanitarians and abolitionists had hoped. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on language policy in Zimbabwe and argues that both the colonial and post-colonial governments advocated a unitary language policy in which English and the two major indigenous languages – ChiShona and IsiNdebele – were adopted as national languages. For the post-colonial government, this language policy was influenced by prevailing ideas about linguistic unity as a prerequisite for economic development and the construction of a cohesive national identity. This approach led to the marginalisation of minor languages and their associated cultures in education and the wider public sphere. The article shows how one marginalised linguistic community, the Kalanga of south-western Zimbabwe, responded to the government's exclusionary policies. It traces the resistance to such government policies and the promotion of the TjiKalanga language and culture by two organisations – the Kalanga Cultural Promotion Society, relaunched in 1980, and the Kalanga and Language and Cultural Development Association, founded in 2005. It also engages with the various activities and interventions carried out by the two groups, leading to the introduction of TjiKalanga in schools, among other achievements. Furthermore, the article argues that the rise and development of the two TjiKalanga language and cultural promotion organisations illustrate the pitfalls of centralising and unifying tendencies in both the colonial and post-colonial governments in Zimbabwe. It also demonstrates the agency and resistance of minority groups in relation to these flawed policies. By assessing the performance of the two organisations, the article views their activities as a form of cultural resistance to the hegemonic and exclusionist policies of post-independence Zimbabwean government. Cultural resistance is used as a conceptual approach through which the limits of the impact of hegemonic monolithic language policies on minority groups, such as the Kalanga in the post-colonial Zimbabwean context, are illustrated and illuminated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Independent Tanzania became a prominent frontline state in the struggle against white minority regimes in the early 1960s and remained committed to the total liberation of Africa until South African repatriations in the early 1990s. For three decades the country was a hub of Pan-Africanism and saw an extraordinarily high involvement of Tanzanians in supporting the southern African liberation movements in ways that went beyond TANU/CCM's primary directions. While some research has been done on the daily interactions, relationships and tensions in the ANC/MK and SWAPO settlements and military training camps as well as in the nearby towns and villages that hosted them, this article shifts the focus from the camps and their surroundings to the forging of solidarity and transnational connections in urban leisure spaces, particularly the music scene. It seeks to bring to light both the enduring and fleeting intimate relations and everyday forms of conviviality between South Africans and Tanzanians which were produced in Dar es Salaam's nightclubs. The central argument is that artistic collaborations with South Africans outside the camps not only amplified and solidified Tanzanians' ability to transcend the idea of the national, but were key to the shaping of a specific form of grassroots pan-Africanism that I will call 'convivial transnational solidarity'. The latter is intended as a practice rather than as an ideology. As I will show, the urban soundscape was central to its emergence. The article first charts how national politics – a key aspect of which was the duty to embrace transnational solidarity – extended into the lower echelons of Tanzanian society through the airwaves, the press and liberation songs. Following the trajectory of the Tanzanian band Afro-70 and its leader Patrick Balidisya, it then examines the everyday acts of welcoming that unfolded in Dar es Salaam's music scene during the brief historical juncture between 1969 and 1977, which coincided with ujamaa and with Afro-70's rise and demise. The last part of the article problematises the process of total liberation and the idea of transnational solidarity by exposing their fragility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the Hani Memorial, an annual state-led ceremony held in Ekurhuleni on the anniversary of Chris Hani's assassination. By analysing the memorialisation, appropriation and performance of Hani's legacy at this site, it seeks to contribute to debates surrounding the production of liberation struggle historiography in southern Africa, to expand upon Richard Werbner's 'post-colonial memorial complex', and to probe how, through these practices, the Tripartite Alliance has attempted to consolidate political power in post-apartheid South Africa. It takes its cue, though, from Jenny Edkins' notions of 'state time' and 'trauma time', which I read as representative of, or analogous to, different modes of organising or disrupting the ways in which people experience time and therefore make sense of the world. According to Edkins, the time of the state is that of 'linear, procedural time of process and organisation, history, heroes and nations', whereas trauma time is representative of a 'collective scream', 'a protest against the way people have been treated, a demand to hold open the temporality of trauma and a demand for a different politics'. This article argues that remembering Hani extends far beyond the temporality of the state, its tangible monuments to the past, and its forms of governmentality. In other words, Hani's legacy cannot be contained or governed by the discursive frames, monumental projects, and temporality of the state, which ultimately seek closure and the end of a politics that has the state as its target. Furthermore, the very performative and operative character of memorials themselves makes them particularly vulnerable to alternative memorialisation and invocations of the past. In short, although national memorials are conventionally understood as sites of state power, authority, governmentality, and historical certainty, they are more generatively understood as sites of temporal rupture through which the 'time of the state' is exposed and challenged. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By late 1970, the University of Dar es Salaam had developed an international reputation as a leading centre of Third World socialist thought, with the emergence of a small, but increasingly influential, community of leftist students organising on campus. Over the course of the 1970s and 1980s, the prominence of this fledgling student left rapidly declined. Rejecting arguments which attribute this demise primarily to the university's growing material crisis during this period, this article argues that the introduction of a series of institutional reforms implemented by the TANU/CCM government over the course of the 1970s and 1980s on campus effectively institutionalised the ruling party's control over the university and its students. These institutional reforms ensured that, even as the ruling party's ideological hegemony began to wane as early as the late 1970s, the party was able to insulate itself from the kind of disruptive student protests that would undermine the stability of many of its African counterparts during the decade of the 1980s. Furthermore, this article demonstrates that the TANU/CCM regime's management of the university during these decades provides critical insights into some of the prime limitations of Tanzania's socialist project under Julius Nyerere: namely, that at the university, as elsewhere, the regime's need for political order and obedience from its citizens far exceeded, and often conflicted with, the ruling party's avowed desire to cultivate socialism among the Tanzanian masses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editors discuss reports published within the issue on topics including the role played by the underground in the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, leftist student activism in Tanzania and the epistolary relationship between two gay men.

This article discusses the life and times of Katoba Flax Musopole, an anti-colonial politician, leftist and rare committed atheist in a predominantly religious Malawi. It examines him in the context of the many 'transnational' Malawians whose activism was rooted in the intellectual influences to which they were exposed during periods of work and study abroad. Following many years living and working in South Africa, Musopole returned to Nyasaland, where he became a local organiser. His prominence and notoriety increasing during the state of emergency in 1959. A study of Musopole gives us the opportunity to understand more fully the nature of problems that rural small-scale farming communities had to contend with under colonial rule and the manner in which they mobilised their reaction in the post-Second World War era. In this regard, the article highlights the significance of local organisation in the process that led to decolonisation. Musopole's career in post-colonial Malawi also shows how some independent-minded people fared in the evolving single-party system that was to become a dominant feature of the country under the presidency of Hastings Kamuzu Banda. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses articles in the issue on topics related to Southern Africa including land use and conservation in Namibia, crime writing in South Africa, and land ownership in post-apartheid South Africa.

An introduction to articles published within the issue is presented on topics including the childhood and early years of South African politician Nelson Mandela, Mandela's own account of his descent and legacy and his Thembu identity, and Mandela's association with South Africa's Communist left.

Winnie and Nelson Mandela had one of the most iconic political marriages in history. For most commentators, this was a one-sided marriage in which Nelson was by far the more significant actor and Winnie was the burden he had to bear. However, it is not possible to conceive of the public persona of Nelson Mandela after his imprisonment on Robben Island without also understanding Winnie's role, not merely as upholder of the family name but also in terms of the ways in which she built an independent career out of her position as Nelson's wife. This article reads the marriage at two levels. First, it argues that there were two actors in the marriage, both central to its narrations and both with political ideas and ambitions. Winnie Mandela was building a genealogy of heroic nationalism for herself from at least the 1960s, in parallel with that of her husband, and her rise to political status was both dependent on the marriage and at odds with its demands. Understanding Winnie as an actor, treating her own biography as seriously as that of Nelson, changes the way in which the marriage is read politically. Second, it draws on the small archive of letters between the spouses that are publicly available to show the ways in which Nelson's benevolent, patriarchal (albeit loving and compassionate) approach to his wife contrasted with her increasing independence and political power. The separation caused by almost three decades of imprisonment had done more than impose a physical and emotional absence. Their politics, too, had taken extremely divergent paths in which she became a representative of radical politics while he was positioned as reconciliatory visionary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since coming to power in 1975, the MPLA (Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola) government of Angola has constructed a nationalist narrative that serves to honour and legitimise its rule. This article analyses the concrete and symbolic articulations of this dominant national narrative through the lens of monuments: the Heroínas monument, the Agostinho Neto Mausoleum, the Kifangondo monument, and the Museum of the Armed Forces at São Miguel Fort. Due to the exclusivist nationalism presented in these spaces, alternative narratives and dissenting voices use unofficial arenas such as blogs to exchange ideas and question dominant narratives. Activists have also appropriated certain monuments to challenge dominant discourses publicly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For several years, livestock farmers from different parts of Namibia have settled in the N≠a Jaqna Conservancy – an area mostly inhabited by San (Bushmen) – and have illegally erected fences to keep livestock. As a result of this encroachment, communal land in N≠a Jaqna has become de facto privatised. In response, the local San present themselves as the 'indigenous' inhabitants, even though many of them do not originate from the area. They have mobilised the Conservancy as their legal entity – including in a court case – despite Namibia's lack of a legal framework for the recognition and enforcement of global indigenous rights. We analyse their strategic usage of 'traditional community', which is a legal term in Namibia, in this land politics. To this aim, we use the four core pillars (characteristics) of the global concept of 'indigeneity', namely genealogical ancestry, cultural difference (in this case 'San-ness'), non-dominance and self-ascription, with specific emphasis on the first two. Whereas genealogical ancestry appears to be a 'weak' argument for the San at first glance, cultural difference (supported by non-dominance and self-ascription) has proven crucial to winning the court case. We show that the use of 'traditional community' enables these four pillars to play an important role in defining who has access to the land and its resources. As such, we argue, traditional community and indigeneity (even though the latter is not formally acknowledged) provide the San of the N≠a Jaqna Conservancy with 'immaterial indigenous modernities': modern values or ideas in society that can be used strategically by local, marginalised groups to reach political goals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the aftermath of Rhodesia's Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) on 11 November 1965, Queen Elizabeth II became a contested icon in a struggle to define Rhodesian nationhood and identity. After UDI, rebel Rhodesians were forced to reconcile an act of treason against the Crown with a monarchism that permeated white settler society. This article moves beyond existing studies that focus upon the Queen as a diplomatic bargaining chip in the negotiations between the British and Rhodesian governments to consider her symbolic position within white settler society in the years after UDI. It argues that debates about the Monarchy were an important aspect of white Rhodesian attempts to define themselves and their nation in a decolonising world. The article also shows how the Rhodesian Front's changing position on the Monarchy reveals its nationalist project to be essentially reactionary in character, and how the shift over time from settler colonial discourses of 'loyal rebellion' to discourses of independent nationhood demonstrates the wider comparative potential of the Rhodesian case study resulting from its peculiar post-UDI position between settler and non-settler colonies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The stimulus for this article arises from a comparison between missionary collecting in two of the earliest mission fields established by the London Missionary Society (LMS): the Pacific (1797), and southern Africa (1799). As the location to which a large number of Polynesian ‘idols’ were sent following conversion to Christianity, the LMS museum (1814-1910) has gained an important place in Pacific historiography, but the same cannot be said for southern Africa. This article explores the significance of the LMS museum as a site of deposition for material that originated in missionary encounters and exchanges in southern Africa during the first third of the 19th century. It highlights the museum’s potential to provide a source of material evidence that complements not only the texts associated with the documentary archive, but also the material remains associated with the former mission site, the usual foci for historical and archaeological engagements. Particular attention is given to material associated with John Campbell (1766-1840) and Robert Moffat (1795-1883), who travelled extensively in the region and subsequently published accounts of their journeys. Re-situating particular museum artefacts within the specific circumstances of these missionary encounters enables them to stand, not as exemplars of African cultural practices prior to European contact, but rather as forms of evidence that chart historical transformations in material culture across the southern African contact zone. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including religious change, grassroots ecumenism, and Christianity in Africa.

This article sheds light on grassroots ecumenism by pursuing a largely neglected interest in the participation of Afrikaners, from the late apartheid period to the present, in far-reaching religious and social change in South Africa. The account comprehends an apparent paradox. The more Afrikaners have sought to be inclusive, reaching across differences towards some consensus (humanitarian if not doctrinal), the more strongly and intimately has conflict among them intensified. In their struggles, an old, once formidably entrenched Christian public culture has been profoundly questioned. Now challenged by counterpublics concerned about racism and inequality, that Christian public culture is still being reconstructed, if somewhat fitfully, in ways that are deliberately reasoned and morally passionate. Based on long-term anthropological fieldwork, the present analysis shows where and how grassroots ecumenism emerged in various forms in tandem with the institutional ecumenism that was once banned among Afrikaners by their dominant church, the Nederduitse Gereformeerde Kerk (NGK) or Dutch Reformed Church. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Informed by recent scholarship that underscores the centrality of death, corpses and funerals in contemporary African politics, this article explores the ways in which political actors in the ruling Movement for Multiparty Democracy (MMD) and the opposition Patriotic Front (PF) in Zambia appropriated the corpse and legacy of President Levy Mwanawasa to mobilise political support in 2008. The article insists that in order to secure support indispensable to winning the presidential by-election necessitated by his death, leaders in the MMD and PF deployed the president’s corpse in their conflicting bids to retain power and to construct an alternative political order, respectively. In placing Mwanawasa’s death, corpse and funeral and resultant rival discourses at the centre of its analysis, this article distances itself from secularist and modernist scholarship that disconnects death and mortuary ceremonies from contemporary African politics. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article reconsiders the political thought and practice of Hastings Banda, prime minister and then president of Malawi from 1963 to 1994. Often side-lined and maligned in considerations of post-colonial African leaders for being an authoritarian comprador in service to western interests, the article suggests that Banda’s life and practice illustrates a complex interplay between two types of conservatism: a more radical anti-colonial conservatism, and a more reactionary post-colonial conservatism. This approach has important implications for how we consider independence-era African political leadership more generally, and for understanding contemporary public protest in Malawi, and more broadly. Mainstream scholarly interpretations of anti-government protests in Malawi in July 2011 presented them as a response to an uninterrupted continuum of authoritarianism in the country stretching back to Banda, playing on ideas of innate African autocratic tendencies. This article, however, argues that such comparisons result in an ahistorical consideration of post-colonial Malawi, leading to analyses that mistakenly suggest that protests in Malawi, as in other African countries in recent years, are the result of liberal rights claims, as opposed to a nostalgic and markedly different reclamation of the cultural, national and economic promises of African independence. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

South Africa and Brazil are burdened with persistent inequality and poverty two decades after democratisation. Both countries have developed ambitious social policies aimed at addressing these challenges. In this article, I seek to answer the following question: to what extent are the social policies pursued in South Africa and Brazil leading to the realisation of a new social contract? The article will compare the two countries' social policy architectures in their evolution under the governance of the African National Congress and the Partido dos Trabalhadores. This analysis should be read in a dynamic global context where cash transfers have shaped their social policies, the Social Grant in South Africa and the Bolsa Família in Brazil, culminating in a re-invigorated discussion and debate within the global social policy architecture. The article departs from the mainstream approach of social protection as an instrumental tool for reducing poverty and inequality, which, I argue, is a narrow vision of social policy. I advocate an institutional analysis to social policy, where mechanisms of production, protection and redistribution are pivotal in addressing the socio-economic challenges that face both countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses how the deep-rooted Shona hegemony across all fields of cultural practice in Zimbabwe has compelled some Ndebele arts performers to use Shona language in order to appeal culturally to a Shona audience. Ndebele performing artists have been marginalised if they have not produced artistic works that align themselves with Shona-oriented world views. Primarily using a Bourdieu-inspired theoretical framework, we expose Zimbabwe’s ‘Shona-centrichabitus’,and how it functions as an unspoken law that devalues non-Shona towns and cities, particularly how it generates self-censorship and self-subordination among some Ndebele artists. Through an analysis of cultural productions by artists of Ndebele origin, this article analyses how power operates, how hegemony is constructed and ultimately how culture is constrained in Zimbabwe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sugar has played a contentious historical role in the development of Mozambique. Following the country’s 16-year civil conflict, the industry has re-emerged as an important sector for investment and national rebuilding. This article explores how the industry’s narratives of technical efficiency and success in increasing production mask dynamics of agricultural labour in the country’s largest sugar estate at Xinavane, southern Mozambique. Based on archival and ethnographic investigation, the paper interrogates the recent transformation of sugar cane production by South African investment and management. The paper identifies gender- and migration-based labour management practices that are not only consistent with a trend toward labour ‘flexibilisation’ within South African agribusiness practice, but also constitute rules and orders that reiterate Portuguese colonial practice. This analysis undermines current ahistorical narratives of the Açucareira de Xinavane – or Xinavane Sugar Mill – that depict the company as a beneficial exemplar of industrial production and technological advance. It suggests that the search of South African agribusiness for cheap labour north of its borders not only reinforces the low social and material valuing of Mozambican rural life and labour, but also reconstitutes labour relations from the country’s colonial past. This paper argues that these insights are critical to an understanding of the country’s post-conflict reconstruction, and its re-emerging linkages with South African capital. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Histories of southern Africa’s liberation struggles have been primarily written in the frame of the nation and have thus largely neglected the significant role played by transnational and inter-regional connections in shaping those struggles. In this article, I explore the complex and seemingly paradoxical dynamics of ‘national liberation’ through the case of black Namibians who were recruited into the South West African Territorial Force (SWATF), and the South African police counter-insurgency unit, Koevoet, during Namibia’s war for independence. I argue that the initially temporary ‘alliances’ between these transnational soldiers and South Africa’s security forces assumed a degree of permanence in the form of new and enduring military identities and loyalties. These often contradictory identities and loyalties have remained salient in influencing the history and politics of post-independence Namibia, as ex-SWATF and ex-Koevoet members have continued to invoke them in attempts to claim full citizen and war-veteran status in Namibia and South Africa. By analysing the post-war politics and historical narratives of two veterans’ organisations of former SWATF and Koevoet members, I bring into focus the transnational character of Namibia’s liberation struggle and the painful legacies of the conflict’s internalisation along familial, ethnic, racial and ideological lines. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

International rivalry in the Cold War has dominated scholarship on the post-independence war in Angola, but little research has been done on how foreign support for the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) and the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) had an impact on political mobilisation inside Angola. This article draws upon interviews with people who remembered the conflicts of the 1970s and 1980s in the Angolan Central Highlands, the area in which UNITA made its strongest identity-based claims against the MPLA state, and which was fiercely contested during the war. It compares these with memoirs and other secondary material that record elite perspectives on the war. I argue that ideologies espoused by the external players in Angola had little direct impact on the political affiliations of people in the contested area. Nevertheless, external support for rival movements in Angola indirectly shaped and polarised popular attitudes towards the movements, notably by providing the MPLA and UNITA with the capacity to present themselves as state-like. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various articles within the issue including the novels of South African author Nadine Gordimer, the apartheid prison in South Africa and the impact of media on the trial of serial prisoner Daisy de Melker.

This article explores the repertoire of commemorative activities that developed around the anniversary of the fatal 16 June 1976 Soweto schoolchildren’s march against the imposition of Afrikaans. It uses the coverage of 16 June commemorations from 1977 up to 1996 to think through the role of newspapers, journalists and editors in the framing of this day as a ‘national’ moment. Newspaper reports reveal ongoing conversations and debates over who were, and who should be, commemorating 16 June; how they should do so; the place of young people in this commemorative community; and the intersecting boundaries of race, nation and commemoration. I argue that examining this contested commemorative tradition and the ways in which English-language newspapers tell national narratives through their reporting offers one way of gaining a ‘clearer sense of the national’ in the history of the liberation struggle. My aim is not so much a comprehensive picture of the struggle as it played out within the borders of South Africa, but rather to ask how it was that the liberation struggle was thought, performed and narrated as national. The article reveals a range of actors beyond the liberation organisations involved in these processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines political debates that led to women’s suffrage in Mauritius in 1948, under British colonial rule. The Mauritian case study highlights the complexity of women’s political citizenship in a plural, divided society and the challenges of multiple identities for women’s political mobilisation for the right to vote. Female suffrage subject to educational and property qualifications was proposed by men from the ruling elite, made up of Franco-Mauritians and ‘gens de couleur’, as a means to widen the franchise. This proposal was opposed by Indo-Mauritian and Creole men who represented the working class and advocated male adult suffrage. The article examines why women were given the right to vote by an all-male political elite and why women did not mobilise for the franchise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Students engaged in the spring 2015 protests on the University of Cape Town campus demanded the removal of the statue of Cecil John Rhodes, prompting renewed debate over the appropriate treatment of colonial and apartheid-era statuary in contemporary South African public spaces. While the students’ protests were often dismissed in public discourse and media coverage as misguided or misinformed, this article situates them in the broader context of symbolic reparations central to the transition to multiracial democracy. We introduce the terms ‘monologic commemoration’ and ‘multiplicative commemoration’ to describe the two dominant phases of South African public memory initiatives during and after apartheid. Monologic commemoration promotes a singular historical narrative of national identity and heroic leadership, whereas multiplicative commemoration requires the representation of as many diverse experiences and viewpoints as possible. We examine the #RhodesMustFall campaign as an eruption of discontent with both the monologic and multiplicative approaches, potentially signalling a new ‘post-transitional’ phase of South African public culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The commemorating narrative of South African nationhood tells the story of the national liberation struggle against apartheid and the transition to freedom and democracy. It places the present ruling party, the African National Congress (ANC), at its heart as leader of the struggle and bringer of freedom. However, the cracks and contradictions in this national story are increasingly evident, as poverty, injustice and inequality deepen. This article draws on a case study of former anti-apartheid struggle comrades who continue to experience poverty and oppression. Their social exclusion is expressed though the contested ways in which they give meaning to past struggles in relation to the dominant national narrative. In the current context of widespread unemployment, they face a memory paradox. Conflicting desires underpin the way in which they give meaning to their experiences as they attempt to gain access to military pensions, which, however, assume a version of the past that endorses the national liberation narrative. They also contest some of the underlying assumptions of this narrative and the politics it implies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Early 20th-century South Africa saw the emergence of a range of liberal reading initiatives aimed at encouraging a black reading culture. What ensued was a lively public debate about reading and the uses of the book which included not only the liberal philanthropic groups that gave support to these projects but also those African readers and intellectuals who found themselves the targets of the reading initiative itself. In the first part of this article, I highlight the prominent role played by liberal advocates of the book in establishing the broad parameters of the book-reading encounter in South Africa, particularly as it related to emergent black reading communities. I give attention to the nature of this developing reading consensus and the assumptions about reading and the world of the book that it encoded. In the second part of the article, I explore the ways in which this consensus was negotiated by African readers and intellectuals. To this end, I look at some of the traces and fragments of an on-going debate about reading and its social and personal value recorded in the contemporary African press. The aim of the article is not only to ascertain how Africans responded to the liberal incitement to read but also to address some of the contestations over the meaning and use-value of reading during this period as part of a more general history of reading in early 20th-century South Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In April 2015, a Whatsapp text message instructed millions of African immigrants in South Africa to go home. The message drew on xenophobia and afrophobia to criminalise African immigrants in South Africa. Broadly, immigrants are seen as breaking the law by illegally crossing a sovereign border and becoming illegal foreigners. Having entered the country without authorisation (‘papers’), these foreigners become perceived as drug dealers, traffickers of children, squatters, facilitators/exploiters of an informal economy, and thieves stealing opportunities from South Africans. This article identifies three principle techniques of criminalising immigrants: 1) immigrants being compelled to purchase immigrant documents through illicit means to stay legally in South Africa; 2) the South African Police Service conducting raids such as Operation Fiela and arresting foreigners; 3) the South African Police Service, along with the Department of Home Affairs officials, illegally detaining immigrants. Together, these techniques contribute to the criminalisation of African foreign nationals. These techniques are increasingly characteristic of governance in the global south and explain how a Whatsapp message can reverberate throughout South Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An introduction to the journal is presented in which the editor discusses reports published within the issue, including the role of Black Consciousness in the liberation project, the position of non-racialism adopted by the Democratic Alliance in South Africa and citizenship in South Africa.

Non-racialism as a concept has a rich and contentious history in South African politics. For many it was a core feature of the struggle against apartheid, uniting a range of forces fighting for a society free from racial discrimination. Indeed it is a central tenet in South Africa’s Constitution, forming a core part of the ‘founding provisions’ of the country. However, there is widespread contestation over what the concept entails, both theoretically and in practical terms. This article examines the concept of non-racialism primarily through the lens of South Africa’s largest political opposition party, the Democratic Alliance (DA), but relates its approach to that of the African National Congress (ANC). How has the DA conceptualised and instrumentalised the vision of non-racialism, historically and in post-apartheid South Africa? This article argues that neither the DA nor the ANC has been able to do so coherently. The idea of non-racialism is a fracture that deeply divides both parties; this division is also one that originated historically for both parties. The article concludes that there is a clear shift in how the DA envisaged non-racialism during apartheid and how the party instrumentalises the concept today, and that this change echoes, to some extent, the experiences of the ANC. Both parties now equate non-racialism to multiracialism, on the one hand, and a (interim) racialisation of politics on the other. This raises the question of whether non-racialism, as conceived by some in the early days of the Congress alliance, is a dying ideal. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article is an attempt to reflect on nationalist politics and its accompanying political imaginations in South Africa, in the process questioning the assertion of a single ‘rainbow nation’, by locating the ways in which community is imagined in post-apartheid South Africa. It looks at the ‘other’ South Africa, which has yet to realise the gains of political modernity. For these citizens of South Africa, modernity is but a distant project. Its consequences in most parts of this ‘other’ South Africa have been not only extreme poverty, social marginality or political exclusion, but also the emergence and formation of new subjectivities and collective agency. This article seeks to theorise the modern political subject in the ‘other’ South Africa that has not actively participated in the project of modernity and globalisation. In the process, it seeks also to examine how citizen–subject positions are being constituted – particularly in the interaction between state and non-state actors, as a precursor to a future study of the broader interplay of citizenship, governmentality and political subjectivity in contemporary South Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article explores the electoral performance of the African National Congress (ANC) to argue that there is evidence of a two-fold movement. On the one hand the ANC is weakening as a national organization, and on the other the ANC is strengthening as a regional party based in KwaZulu-Natal. This article explores the significance of these developments for democracy in South Africa today and, more importantly, for the integrity of the South African nation. The article argues that the ANC has historically been the main mover of an inclusive (‘cosmopolitan’) vision of South Africa. As it weakens and metamorphoses, what will happen to its commitment to this brand of African nationalism? Furthermore, are the conditions of a South African nation sufficiently in place that the future of the country as a national community is secure, even as the ANC’s commitment to such a vision weakens? [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Black Consciousness, as seminally constructed by Steve Biko as a political philosophy of struggle against apartheid racism, has been subjected to a wide range of explications, which, in the main, have been from a perspective shaped by political activism. Here, in a deliberately philosophical project, we demonstrate how the rational structure of Black Consciousness is shaped by Biko’s employment of the Hegelian dialectical form as an analytical tool. We highlight the critical conceptual value of ‘black solidarity’, which Biko posits as the antithetical moment, in line with the Hegelian triad. This doctrine of the self-exclusion and grouping of black people against inter-racial alliances has hitherto been submerged under the emphasis on Biko’s evocative utterances on the liberation of the black mind from slave mentality. We point out how this analytical framework, which adopts black solidarity as the antithesis to white racism, eventuates in a logical contradiction of Biko’s vision that Black Consciousness would lead to a universal non-racial consciousness, ‘true humanity’. Our claim is that this logical defect, in corroboration of Hegelian rationality, translates into a defective and ineffective political praxis. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

If Bantustans were artifices of the apartheid state – ‘puppet’ regimes ruling through the despotism of ‘tradition’, rather than through modern bureaucratic techniques – what are we to make of their archives, the remains of their government? This paper – a chronicle of the reclamation of the KaNgwane archive – considers this question in relation to scholarly critiques of the archive as well as that of the Bantustans. As a pile of rotting, random (almost pulped and recycled) documents, the KaNgwane archive lacks most of the taxonomic classification, ordered selection, and epistemic authority of colonial state archives, against and along which critical scholarship urges us to read them. Yet the remains of what was in fact the KaNgwane archive is richly instructive. First, what remains as (and in) the Bantustan's archive suggests not only investments in the conventions of statehood, but the way in which the Bantustan state was materialised through bureaucratic paperwork. Second, the literal recycling of history lays bare the possible meanings of the histories of Bantustan rule to those once subject to its authority, and who now subject its history to theirs. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this article I show how a brief history of the use of an exceptionally wide variety of potions with assumed mystical effects by football teams in the Bushbuckridge area of South Africa provides a unique vantage point for understanding men's experiences of political and economic transformations associated with the homeland system. Historically, the advent of football coincided with the establishment of the Lebowa and Gazankulu homelands in the area. Teachers and ministers founded the first football teams during the 1960s, and treated the sport pedagogically, as preparation for labour migration. During this era, teams felt compelled to use substances prescribed by the Holy Spirit to protect themselves against the potions of their opponents, which they associated with the malevolent practice of witchcraft. However, in the mid 1970s, football was commercialised and businessmen became the prime patrons of football teams. Coaches now started using offensive potions to attain favourable results. Players themselves began to use potions more extensively during the insecure economic environment of the 1990s, when football became a means of reconfirming masculine status. My analysis points to the salience of labour and patronage in men's life worlds, and shows how magic became moralised in desperate times. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

During South Africa's constitutional negotiations in the 1990s, it was assumed that the self-governing ‘homelands’ would inevitably be re-incorporated into a new South Africa, whatever that may be. Despite being denigrated by the liberation movements throughout their existence, some homelands would become aligned to the African National Congress (ANC) at apartheid's close: the Transkei, led by General Bantu Holomisa, became a particular base of support. KwaZulu (through the Inkatha Freedom Party [IFP] and its leader, Prince Mangosuthu Buthelezi) and Bophuthatswana (led by Lucas Mangope), on the other hand, would become key players in oppositional alliances, first the Concerned South Africans Group (COSAG) and later the Freedom Alliance. KwaZulu/IFP argued for a distinctly federal dispensation, in addition to recognition of the Zulu king. Bophuthatswana, similarly, argued for a confederal state. In 1994, however, four provinces became nine, and the former homelands were no more. Bantu Holomisa became a popular figure within the ANC and, later, leader of the United Democratic Movement (UDM). Chief Buthelezi would become a minister in the Government of National Unity. The United Christian Democratic Party (UCDP), formed by Lucas Mangope, became a presence in the South African parliament and North West provincial legislature. This article analyses the role of these three homelands during the negotiations process, looking at the continued salience of their politics since 1994 and the problematic legacies for provincial governance in the post-apartheid era. It also shows the problematic narrative that has accompanied the homelands, and their continued relevance in the post-apartheid state almost 20 years after their official demise. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Since the end of the Angolan conflict in 2002, the ruling Movemento Popular de Libertação de Angola (MPLA) party has been promoting a ‘master narrative’ of ‘peace and reconstruction’, through which the Angolan conflict is re-signified as a merely technical issue, and the question of ‘national reconciliation’ is limited to the reconstruction of infrastructures. Conversely, post-war memory politics revisits the past only selectively. While the history of the independence struggle is revised and politicised, the post-independence Angolan conflict is notably absent from public discourse, as the MPLA's ambivalent role in contested events precludes the stabilisation of the civil war as ‘patriotic history’. Departing from scholarship on memory politics in post-liberation regimes, this article analyses the discursive strategies and performative acts employed in these processes, and looks at the symbolic and material effects of this ‘technical’ hegemonic discourse in the country's capital, Luanda. As national reconciliation is limited to the reconstruction of infrastructures, the master narrative of the ‘New Angola’ is also physically imposed on the urban cityscape; similarly, any substantive political dialogue about the war is precluded as a threat to the ‘gains of peace’, which are measured again in purely material terms of the built environment. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The period after the end of the Second World War was, literally, a defining moment in Namibian history. The future status of the territory was debated during some of the earliest meetings of the United Nations in 1945–1946. On the one hand, the South Africans argued that they had forged Namibia into a de facto fifth province of the South African nation, and that ‘consultations’ held with both black and white residents of the territory showed that the vast majority embraced absorption within the Union of South Africa. Critics argued that the ‘consultations’ had been an elaborate deception and that the claims of consensus were a forgery. Both these readings, however, reflect nationalist perspectives that oversimplify the conceptual contest. A closer look at four different contemporary interventions suggests a range of alternative perspectives, but also suggests that the notion of a liberation struggle was grounded in the failure to export South African identity and the persistence of perceptions of empire and foreign occupation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The purpose of this article is to argue that the Robben Island prison experience between 1962 and the early 1990s makes an important contribution to the South African debate on the nature of belonging. In this article I focus on Nelson Mandela's imagination of belonging. I show how, through the process of formal study and the informal flowering of seminars, and particularly the debates and engagements that take place, Mr Mandela and his fellow prisoners work through, often with great personal difficulty and even contradiction, the questions of their individual and collective pasts and their subjectivities, and begin to delineate and even rehearse alternative visions of what a new South Africa might look like. This ‘working through’ involved, for Mandela, difficult questions of belonging – race, nation and the political economy to sustain belonging. Who and what is the nation, and what is its content? [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]