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From 1950 onwards, under the apartheid regime's Group Areas Act, hundreds of thousands of people were forced to leave their homes across South Africa's cities. While the removals from some areas, notably District Six in Cape Town, are well documented and memorialised, many others have largely been erased from public memory. In a context of burgeoning research into issues of spatial justice in Southern cities, this paper puts forward the argument that the concepts and practice of memory and memorialising in urban spaces deserve more attention. Specifically, we suggest that the relationships between space and memory, shaped by collective, public acts of remembering and forgetting, can expand our understanding of what constitutes spatial justice in our cities. Reflecting on a research project conducted in Lower Claremont, a racially mixed, middle‐class suburb in Cape Town that was declared White in 1969 and subsequently dubbed Harfield Village, we explore some of the ways in which remembering and forgetting take place on the urban scale, and their implications for imagining just cities. We ask, too, what possibilities exist for active remembering in this place and in similarly ordinary city spaces. Analysing oral histories from former residents and interviews with current occupants of the neighbourhood, we open up some of the complications in surfacing forgotten stories and creating landscapes of memory. In the final section of the paper we reflect on an art installation that formed part of the research project, and suggest some possibilities for active memory work in our urban spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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A hybrid version of macro-appraisal is used by South African public archivists when separating records of enduring value from ephemeral records. This appraisal function should occur immediately after the filing systems have been approved by the national and provincial archivists. However, in most cases, this function only occurs two years after the filing system has been approved. In the 1990s, the South African National Archives changed its traditional appraisal methodology from a Schellenberg approach to formulate a sound appraisal policy based on the macro-appraisal model. One of the key elements identified was the need to identify gaps in the written records that could be filled during the appraisal process. These gaps could be complemented by the collection of oral history. This study used qualitative data obtained through content analysis and literature to review the appraisal policy guidelines and approaches of the National Archives and the Gauteng Provincial Archives in relation to the process of appraisal, issuing of disposal authorities and capturing of oral history projects in relation to Gauteng local governments. This study used a case study design and specifically focused on the appraisal of Gauteng local government records. Interviews were held with officials of the National Archives and Gauteng Provincial Archives involved in the function of appraisal of public records. This study indicated that there were gaps in archival collections, which should be supplemented by the collection of oral history testimonies. The oral history testimonies collected from individuals and communities affected by socio-economic and socio-political events are not captured by the country's public archivists. These narratives of post-apartheid South Africa are being lost and may not be captured by the national and provincial archives services. The key recommendation of this study is that there should be clear policy guidelines relating to the process of appraisal and transparency on how these processes are undertaken in South African public archives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Post-apartheid South Africa's liberation historiography has been constructed and curated in a manner that influences public and collective memory to assume that only one specific liberation movement (the African National Congress) was involved in the South African liberation struggle. The Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) and its military wing, the Azanian People's Liberation Army (APLA), have largely been given perfunctory attention or ignored because of bias and the selective politics of memory. In instances where the history of PAC or APLA is given some attention pre and post-apartheid, the focus has been mainly on uPoqo as the paramilitary wing of the PAC, or on the leadership conflicts within it, at the expense of interrogating other important aspects within the movement. This article explores the development of the term Poqo, mapping its roots from the shorthand for "Umbutho wama-Afrika Poqo." It then shows that the prohibition of the PAC in 1960 after the Sharpeville massacre led the movement to operate under the auspices of Poqo, an underground name. Furthermore, this article demonstrates that Poqo was not a paramilitary wing of the PAC but is/was the PAC itself in another form. Ultimately, this historical and historiographical contribution seeks to achieve a re-alignment of Poqo in South Africa's post-apartheid history writing and public memory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Feministische Studien is the property of De Gruyter and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article considers the social and political action of South Africa's black middle classes during the Jacob Zuma administration (2009 and 2018) during which the governing party fragmented in a disorderly way, partly dissolving traditional class lines. Swathes of black middle classes left the governing party to join the militant Economic Freedom Fighters, new smaller parties and the main opposition party (the Democratic Alliance). The class-based fallout was consequential for the governing party, as it was for theories of middle classes. Using South Africa's experience, this article offers a critique of the dominant neoliberal tradition which imagines an orderly and politically homogeneous class. It further argues that social and political action among the black middle classes should not be viewed as generic, it is rather shaped by dynamics unique to South Africa, including social memory. This, it is argued, blurs class behaviour as articulated by prevailing class theories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of South African Journal of Cultural History is the property of South African Society for Cultural History and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article investigates local endeavours for Holocaust memory in post-apartheid South Africa in their relation to global memory imperatives that are, among others, produced by supranational organizations such as UNESCO and the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. Drawing on a larger case-study on globalized memory, I analyse to what extent a generalized mnemonic framework is reflected in South Africa's 2007 curriculum reform, namely its inclusion of the Holocaust and subsequent memory politics. In order to illuminate the coloniality of memorialization, I trace the epistemic location of the narrative that suggests that Holocaust memory nourishes democratic values and human rights—maybe even more so than local memories of violence and oppression such as colonization and apartheid. In this regard, I found that while many activists for Holocaust memory continuously and sometimes uncritically advocate for its global implementation, a decolonial perspective enables us to understand the power dynamics constitutive of universal moral norms around Holocaust memory that tacitly transmit global demands to local contexts. I therefore suggest that, within the global colonial matrix of power, a universally advised practice of memorializing the Holocaust to specific ends can be regarded as a technique of governmentality, because it risks limiting utopian thought beyond the Euro-modern paradigm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sports in South Africa have evolved into an arena for self-discovery, a place of self-revelation. Through sports, particularly athletics, heroes emerged who not only achieved for themselves and their communities, but also served as golden bulbs, flickering lights of hope, inspiration, and motivation to the community. Despite the heroic roles played by athletes, sporting memories of unique and gallant characters remain self-stored, exposed to all natural disasters such as loss, rapid deterioration, inaccessibility, thus turning into golden bulbs covered in a black cloth. This qualitative study adopted oral testimony triangulated with content analysis to explore the memories of undocumented athletics heroes in South Africa. Snowball sampling was adopted to help locate historically excluded athletics heroes and sheroes. The study revealed that athletes' houses have been transformed into museums encompassing all of their running memories, displayed all over their living rooms, with only a few athletes overseeing forgotten historical memories of most legendary runners and, in some cases, without specialised handling, compounded by the fact that these archival memories are only accessible to those fortunate enough to be close to these legendary runners. The study recommends that these memories be included in the national archival system so that they can be accessed by the public, as a large portion of athletes' historical memories are unaccounted for and thus inaccessible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Key moments of the American Civil War and the 1899–1902 South African War and their tragic immediate aftermaths remain powerful features of national memory in both countries. Over the past century, vengeful politicians and ideologues in both have transformed them into formidable stock-in-trade. Second-, third-, and fourth-hand accounts of the alleged churlish manner of the victorious armies, especially soldiers of African descent, were made into combustible timber for reactionary political campaigns. The perceived cruel turns of fate have made their way into literature, stage, and screen. The two wars afforded people of various races and social conditions opportunity to act upon their conceptions of a just society, albeit amid terrible carnage and loss. They also underscored the permanence of the industrial transformation of both countries. In the decades following these two wars most of the black and white agrarian populations discovered that state and agrarian elites had cynically manipulated and then extinguished their aspirations. Most often, for black agrarians, violence was the preferred instrument to pursue desired outcomes. Reconstruction in the American South was a paradox. The Civil War emancipated the slaves but left the entire South, especially upland cotton regions, economically backward. In Louisiana, especially, politicized violence to coerce black labor was pervasive. After the South African War, white violence against rural black people was widespread. Lord Milner's Reconstruction Administration was more concerned to bring South Africa's gold mines back into production than to stem the violence. The low-intensity violence of the postwar countryside became the backland route to apartheid. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]