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Outside southern Africa little attention has been given to the lively debates, particularly within South Africa, about migration, economic integration, racism/xenophobia and exclusion. After the collapse of apartheid the Southern African Development Community (sadc) developed initiatives on regional co-operation on population movement in a far-reaching 1995 Draft Protocol on Free Movement. However, the post-apartheid South African state was concerned solely with free trade and, with the support of other regional players, managed to halt the Protocol. The processes of neoliberal regional integration, socioeconomic transformations, poverty and inequality, as well as the political turmoil in countries of the sub-Saharan region, have resulted in growth of migration to South Africa. The post-apartheid regime has made full use of the ancien regime's authoritarian legal migration instruments, while migrant workers from neighbouring countries, many undocumented, are exploited by employers, repressed by the police and immigration authorities and treated with suspicion. This paper focuses on the processes of localised and globalised racialisation of migrant workers in South Africa, which have allowed it to treat the question of free movement, migration and integration more or less in the image of Europe. The 'rainbow nation' seems to be racialising and excluding the 'xenos' based on the apartheid legacy's treatment of migrant black labour. Moreover, the myth of the 'weak state' serves to cover up the power of capital, which is benefiting from the drive to informalisation and the irregular/undeclared work of undocumented workers. Trade unions have failed to organise migrant workers, initially reacting defensively, but now increasingly recognising that migrant workers must be incorporated in the movement and their rights defended for the benefit of all workers. If trade unions look at the European and US experience they will find similar dilemmas but also strategies for incorporation in the unions. Finally the paper looks at future challenges beyond racialisation and xenophobia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on an interdisciplinary conference organised by the Kent Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities in April 2004. The title of the conference, Connecting Cultures attracted an extraordinarily diverse range of papers covering subjects from Caribbean narratives to translating India, to representing terrorism, and included papers on British Asian cinema and television, narrative and memory in South Africa, post-apartheid prose writing and culture contact in Border Zones. The paper of Terence Ranger, a speaker at the conference, considers a mode of translation as he explores the dynamics of the postcolonial interactions that exist in the system of Zimbabwe asylum appeals. He assesses the usefulness of examining asylum narratives both with the grain and against the grain to debate issues surrounding postcolonial assumptions both in Zimbabwe and in Britain. The papers that follow expand on various themes of the conference, commencing with a group of papers that discuss narrative and memory in South Africa and Zimbabwe.

Three post-conflict approaches have emerged on the African continent during the past decade. 'Pardon', 'punishment' and 'amnesia' represent different routes followed by South Africa, Rwanda and Mozambique in the aftermath of conflict. What pragmatic considerations and cultural resources predisposed each to pursue the path it did? This paper looks at the reasons for the choice to hold a truth commission, to prosecute through trials or to forget the past. It assesses the models' effectiveness, and concludes with an observation that they are not as distinct from each other as they first appear. South Africa, Rwanda (after 2002) and Mozambique have all opted for approaches that emphasised the priority of reintegrating perpetrators back into the community. This goal may be served best by methods other than trials. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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