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The role of the state in promoting development and economic transformation in South Africa has been the subject of diverse viewpoints and discussions. With the transition to democracy in 1994, progress on various socio-economic indicators has been achieved due to the macro-level programs instituted by the African National Congress (ANC) led government. The current economic situation in South Africa, influenced by globalization, involves various powerful entities such as global and national capital, the apartheid elite (mostly white), and the emerging black elite connected to the ANC. These dynamics have an intricate impact on the working class, reshaping power structures in the country. This article delves into the developmental impact of key socio-economic programs of the ANC, notably the Reconstruction and Development Program and the Growth, Employment, and Redistribution Plan. It explicitly examines access to basic services like housing, electricity, water, and sanitation, shedding light on their impact. The focus also extends to the persistent issues of unemployment and resulting income inequalities within South Africa. These programs' effects on these societal challenges are thoroughly analyzed. Ultimately, the article highlights the starkly unequal developmental outcomes, showcasing how significant portions of South African society remain excluded despite these initiatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: This paper examines the changing patterns of social inequality and stratification in relation to migration, ethnicity, gender, class, and education. Methodology: This study adopted a desk methodology. A desk study research design is commonly known as secondary data collection. This is basically collecting data from existing resources preferably because of its low cost advantage as compared to a field research. Our current study looked into already published studies and reports as the data was easily accessed through online journals and libraries. Findings: Changing patterns of social inequality and stratification are influenced by migration, ethnicity, gender, class, and education. Migration can lead to economic disparities for immigrants, either through improved opportunities or exploitation. Ethnicity remains a significant factor, with ethnic minorities facing discrimination and limited access to resources. Gender inequality persists with disparities in pay and leadership roles, while class-based inequality continues through inheritance and income distribution. Access to quality education plays a vital role in social mobility, but disparities in resources and rising tuition costs can limit opportunities. Unique Contribution to Theory, Practice and Policy: Intersectionality theory, Human capital theory & Transnationalism theory may be used to anchor future studies on changing patterns of social inequality and stratification in relation to migration, ethnicity, gender, class, and education. Organizations and institutions should implement diversity and inclusion programs that go beyond tokenism. Develop and implement comprehensive immigration reform policies that address the rights and social integration of migrants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mark Behr's artistic exploration of the horrific legacy of Afrikaner racist and masculinist ideology in The Smell of Apples has attracted substantial critical attention. This is perhaps what has elevated his novel to a post-apartheid South African literary canon. While it has been read as an exculpatory narrative--an exploration of how white South Africans disclosed their complicity in apartheid's atrocities and/or a disclosure of how the apartheid system violated their rights--there is critical blindness to other important themes that the novel grapples with. This is why I offer a limited reading of Behr's critique of Afrikaner gender oppression. My exploration, which focuses on Behr's exposition of gender discrimination of upper-middle class women in an Afrikaner society, is anchored on two questions: how does Behr deploy an innovative register--eavesdropping child witness-narrator and a written letter--to unveil the oppression of upper-middle class white South African women in the Afrikaner polity? Second, how does he script the feminist agency of the 'mother of the nation' figure who is muzzled by Afrikaner patriarchy? I foreground Maria Pia Lara's thinking about the liberational potential of literary texts in my discussion of Behr's exposition of the gendered oppression of certain categories of women by Afrikaner patriarchy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article centres a selected set of "race-class debates" from the 1970s that were characterized by a powerful reformulation of political critiques of the South African racial order, both from within Marxist thought and with the dramatic entry of Black Consciousness onto the political stage. Our discussion focuses on two exemplary interventions: Biko's testimony at the SASO/BPC trial and his presentation of the theoretical basis of BC's political strategy, and Stuart Hall's 1980 essay "Race, Articulation and Societies Structured in Dominance", and its reformulation of a Marxist perspective for thinking through race-class relations. With Hall we (re)discover theoretical terms for thinking through the problem of how relatively autonomous practices of domination come to be articulated. With Biko, we discover a strategic modality for approaching the political problem of collective subjectivity that holds lessons for how struggles against frameworks of domination might be politically articulated in their multiplicity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In his writings, Bernard Magubane theorizes racial capitalism but without necessarily invoking the term. Instead, he frequently refers to "the political economy of race and class" in the South African society. First, Magubane traces the roots of capitalism and racism in South Africa back to European expansionism. Second, he grapples with dispossession during the colonial period and calls it "the fact of conquest". This period was a significant prelude to apartheid capitalism and racism. Third, having analyzed these forms of domination, he argues that black people in South Africa would be liberated through the insurrection of the working people. Magubane's main contribution is his use of historical analysis to understand the next move by imperialism and its impact on the interaction of race and class and the struggle for liberation. Magubane seeks to develop a clear theoretical framework to understand the nature of the South African society. In this paper, I will attempt to illustrate Magubane's contribution to Marxist thought based on his study of South Africa's racially hierarchical political economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Education Policy Analysis Archives / Archivos Analíticos de Políticas Educativas / Arquivos Analíticos de Políticas Educativas is the property of Educational Policy Analysis Archives & Education Review 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.)

Wastewater treatment plants receive influent wastewater that is contaminated with bacterial pathogens which may be released into the environment if the plant effluent is inadequately treated. In this study, next-generation sequencing was used to perform a 16S rDNA-based survey of bacterial populations in the influent and effluent from a treatment facility in the North-West Province (SA). In total, 3638 and 3872 effective DNA reads were obtained for the influent and effluent, respectively. Sequence analysis revealed the detection of a diverse bacterial constituency in both the influent and effluent samples. The phyla: Proteobacteria (49.82% and 52.04%), Firmicutes (14.06% and 13.14%) and Actinobacteria (5.00% and 9.99%) were found to be taxonomically abundant in the influent and effluent, respectively. This translated to the detection of biological treatment-, fecal coliform-, and disease-associated bacterial groups that are classified under the following genera: Escherichia spp., Serratia spp., Aeromonas spp., Legionella spp., Pseudomonas spp., Mycobacterium spp., Clostridium spp., Staphylococcus spp. and Streptococcus spp., Comamonas spp., Nitrosomonas spp., Acinetobacter spp., Rhodobacter spp., Paracoccus spp., Hyphomicrobium spp., and Desulfovibrio spp. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Occupying urban spaces for queer women, often shaped by implicit and explicit forms of regressive heteropatriarchy, has been understood as a challenge for queer women. As a result, queer women struggle to inhabit, live and feel safe in urban spaces. However, further scholarship is needed to consider how queer women may also find strategies to overcome such challenges. Such work can then add productively to, and right an imbalance within, existing scholarship on sexuality and urban space by exploring, acknowledging and giving voice to the lived experiences of queer women especially in urban Africa. Drawing on a PhD study that deployed in-depth interviews with 23 queer women, this intervention looks specifically at how black queer women have found creative ways to create communities with each other in challenging contexts, in the city of Johannesburg. This intervention shows how black queer women resist various forms of oppression by creating safe spaces for themselves (and others) within the city. An appreciation of these strategies by black queer women can then help further discussions as to how we come to understand how queer women occupy and make urban spaces their own through socialisation and support in ways that may also have applicability across the wider continent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article opens with the 2015 Rhodes Must Fall protests at the University of Cape Town, when a student poured feces on a statue of Cecil Rhodes. This moment exemplifies the ambivalent relationship between symbolic politics and demands for institutional transformation in postapartheid South Africa. The essay considers two sites of tension: the appropriation of this antiapartheid, decolonial rhetoric outside of South Africa (as in the Rhodes Must Fall campaigns at the University of Oxford) and the borrowing of US discourses of racial identity in South African universities. In both cases, specific social and political contexts and their attendant challenges tend to disappear. In South African universities, this has the effect of occluding class, class inequality, and class struggle. To address the South African context, the essay suggests that the writing of Antonio Gramsci, whose work spans literature as cultural production and practical political mobilization, might provide a more useful politics of reading and writing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

School choice and commuting in Ladybrand's three high schools was explored. While all were numerically dominated by Black African children, only the fee-charging former whites-only public school, in the heart of Ladybrand, had a multiracial learner profile. Black African learners enrolled in this school hailed from mostly middle-class homes in the neighbouring Black African township of Lesotho. The homes are financially resourced. Parents are educated, married and employed in skilled or professional jobs. These learners passively commuted to school. The profile of the two no-fee schools, located in the former 'black only' designated peripheral townships, was different. Here learners are almost exclusively Black South Africans, living in poorly educated, single-parent homes. Household finances were weak with parents either unemployed or working in semi-skilled or unskilled jobs. These learners either used a subsidized government bus, mini-bus taxis or walked (in some cases long distances from neighbouring farms) to school. Parents said they selected no-fee schools on geographical proximity and low cost; whereas education quality drove choice for the former white school. The socio-economic and demographic profile of learners in no-fee versus fee-paying schools was statistically significant. Ladybrand's high schools are segregated by class, a situation reflecting much of urban South Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The explosion of identity-based movements, has brought issues of social oppression to the forefront of political and academic debates. These emerging voices have emphasized the intertwined fates of social oppression and capitalist development and in doing so, they have challenged traditional assumptions and mores regarding the role of race, gender, caste and ethnicity in reproducing capitalism. It is in this context that this article highlights the views of radical anti-apartheid activists on the relation between race and capitalism. To put things in perspective, the recent political effervescence has gone hand in hand with a resurgence of interest in anti-racist voices from the global south but missing in these discussions are the anti-apartheid voices from South Africa that played a crucial role in overthrowing the authoritarian regime and who, in the process made innovative theoretical interventions that highlighted the close relation between racism and capitalism. It is towards these writings that this article turns to and hopes to underline their enduring legacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article seeks to critically analyse how intersections of race and class shape representations of Black and white gay men in QueerLife, a South African online magazine. It focuses on QueerLife's '4men' section and how its content represents classed and raced gay identities. My argument is that QueerLife forwards racialised and classed representations of the gay lifestyle, which reinforce homonormalisation within what is known as the "Pink Economy". Using Critical Diversity Literacy (CDL) to read the underlying meanings in texts and images, the article concludes that QueerLife is complicit in the construction of gay identity categories that seek to appeal to urban, white, middle-class gayidentifying communities in South Africa. The article also demonstrates how, when Black bodies are represented in QueerLife, exceptionalism mediates their visibility in this online magazine. Overall, the findings demonstrate how Black and white gay bodies are mediated online and how their different racial visibilities are negotiated within the system of structural racism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers an intersectional analysis of how non-elites frame neighborhood as a synecdoche for nation through tourism. In Cape Town, South Africa, white Western tourists perceive the peripheral Black townships to be more dangerous than the city's white center but also more representative of the country and thus worth visiting. Drawing from ten months of ethnographic fieldwork, I illustrate how Black women who have established home-based township accommodations iron out the tension between tourists' fear and desire. I employ Goffman's theories of impression management to demonstrate how township hostesses make Black South African space fit for Western consumption through race, class, gender, and nation. On the frontstage, women assuage tourists' inhibitions by acting as maternal African figures. On the backstage, they cover the risks borne of poverty as communal Black mothers. Their gendered production of Black place palliates post-apartheid problems and projects South Africa's stability on the global stage, which invites further Western visitation and capital. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how dwellers of the fortified Cape Town market called The Neighbourgoods Market understand, navigate, and experience personal safety. The findings support Hentschel's (2015) claim that concepts such as "fortified enclaves" cannot fully explain how navigations of personal safety unfold in urban South Africa. Market dwellers' sense of safety did not solely result from fortification but was constantly assessed on the affective, corporeal, and emotional plane. The particulars of this undertaking illuminate that market access and belonging is granted those that can behave in a way that market dwellers understand as 'enjoyment'. Therefore, ideas about the 'right' way to enjoy the market form a kind of social and behavioral fortification, in addition to the exterior and architectural one. The findings indicate the importance of further study of how seemingly positive characteristics of space – such as enjoyment - operate social hierarchizing and subsequent spatial exclusion in contemporary cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is about the rebellious behavior of the servant class and the consequent threat it posed to the established social order in the 1820 settlement. There were deep anxieties amongst the higher echelons of the settlement about maintaining class distinctions. Upper and middle class settlers relied on informal and formal strategies in order to keep social hierarchies intact. The concept of social control is applied in this respect to study the troubled master-servant relationship, emphasize an obsessive preoccupation with social order, and uncover the limits of upper and middle class settlers' control. This focus on the troubled master servant relationship in the 1820 settlement and the failed attempts to control it is a helpful correction to the celebratory reverberations of early South African settler histories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines Twitter use by audiences of the popular South African television show, Our Perfect Wedding. We argue that the show's Twitter feed provides an extension of South Africa's 'Black Twitter' facilitating a space for recognition and group identity for Black South African television viewers. Such a space is significant since Black audiences have been neglected in the short history of South African television broadcasting. On Our Perfect Wedding, broadcast on a satellite television service DStv to paying subscribers, questions of class and race are salient for an audience group prized as an emerging market of Black middle-class viewers. Through qualitative analysis of a sample of tweets featuring the hashtag, #OPWMzansi (Our Perfect Wedding South Africa), we demonstrate how Twitter is used for the performance and negotiation of class and race for the audience. The comedy of the show's Twitter commentary is largely dependent upon judgements around class, taste and language. While the Twitter feed features creative user contributions, the #OPWMzansi network reveals that much of the communication is prompted and networked back to the official programme Twitter site, demonstrating the centrality of the traditional television broadcaster to Twitter interactions with the text. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Current conceptualisations of citizenship in South Africa are embedded in the egalitarian discourse of the Constitution, lauded for its recognition of historically marginalised groups, including sexually and gender diverse people. Within the paradox of progressive legal advancements and the legacy of colonialism and apartheid, we use a decolonial feminist lens to critically engage with the notion of citizenship for black lesbian women in contemporary South Africa. We adopt a social-psychological perspective of citizenship as an active practice, embedded within the dynamic intersections of historical, structural and discursive patterns of power-knowledge relations in everyday life. We draw from five focus group discussions that were part of a study that explored the intersections of identity, power and violence in the lives of black lesbian women in South Africa. Focusing on the enactments of citizenship in public spaces, we contend that black lesbian women's lived experiences of citizenship point to the enduring manifestations of the coloniality of power, in which the centrality of race underpins the intersections of class, gender and sexuality. We conclude by arguing that current conceptualisations of full citizenship in contemporary South Africa require a reframing that recognises the coloniality of power and the heterogeneity of marginalised and invisibilised subjectivities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The collapse of apartheid in the 1990s saw the rapid re-entry of South Africa into international sporting fields. This move, backed by the African National Congress (ANC) and given Nelson Mandela's endorsement, was seen as a strategy to attain two objectives; to cut-off the White right wing threat by placating the fears of the White population, and to bring in revenue that would be used to redress the legacy of apartheid sport. This article seeks, through a case study of cricket, to assess the effects of this strategy, especially in relation to the latter goal of redressing inherited socio-spatial inequalities. A key contention of this article is that spatial apartheid and inherited racial boundaries has remained in play, and this has influenced who could be selected to place professional cricket and who is excluded. Two and a half decades since cricketing unity, race is still with us, but so is class. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Systems of power influence client–sex worker interactions, in part, by shifting how actors perceive the interaction. In the present study, I argue that clients of sex workers determine appropriate behavior during the sex work transaction based on how they perceive the sex worker from whom they are purchasing services. Systems of power, such as race, socioeconomic status, and the local sex work status hierarchy, influence this perception. I present an analysis of national survey data on South African clients' self-reported condom use and interview data on South African clients' experiences while purchasing sex. Taking both data sets together, I find that clients characterize sex workers based on the sex workers' perceived race, class, and the venue in which they work. Clients discussed perceiving the sex worker as a commodified object, one which ought to be used differently depending on their positionality. This perception manifest behaviorally when discussing sexual health risk and the appropriateness of violence against sex workers. Through this analysis, I demonstrate the utility of conceptualizing power along multiple levels of analysis (interpersonally and structurally) when studying decision-making in the sex work industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Review of African Political Economy is the property of Review of Political Economy (ROAPE) 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.)

Orientation: Regardless of the implementation of the Employment Equity Act (EEA), No. 55 of 1998 and the abolishment of apartheid in 1994, African and mixed-race females are under-represented in managerial positions in the public sector of the Western Cape (WC) in South Africa and nationally in the private health sector. Research purpose: The purpose was to explore the views of nurses about promotion to managerial positions in view of the Employment Equity Act (EEA) and the possible influence of race, class and gender. Motivation for the study: South Africa has a history of racial hierarchies and gender inequities. It was therefore important to explore the influence of the EEA and race, class and gender on the promotion of nurses in the post-apartheid context. Research approach/design and method: A cross-sectional descriptive survey design was completed. Six hundred and eighty-eight (n = 688) nurses consented to participate and 573 (83%) questionnaires were returned. Main findings: Race as a social construct surfaced in the superior viewing of white and the inferior viewing of African nurses. Mixed-race and white nurses seemed disgruntled with the EEA because of the benefits it holds for African nurses. African nurses seemed angered by their under-representation in managerial positions in the private and public sectors in the WC. White nurses seemed convinced that African, mixed-race and Indian nurses experience upward mobility. Mixed-race nurses (public sector WC) showed concerns about the career successes of males in a female-dominated profession. Practical/managerial implications: Managerial structures should be required to invest in diversity training, create awareness of the noble intentions of the EEA and communicate the relevance of employment equity plans. Contribution/value-add: The findings provided evidence that reflected a need for diversity training and the creation of awareness about the longstanding influence of racial and gender hierarchies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the first postapartheid television show to exclusively address "coloreds," Color TV, a variety comedy show, participates in the postcolonial objective of dismantling historical racial hierarchies in South Africa. Yet contradictory responses by "colored" viewers to the focus on working-class experiences expose fault lines in this democratizing project. Identity theories of strategic essentialism and creolization explain how working-class viewers embraced the realism of Color TV that they felt legitimized the significance of their role in the nation, while middle-class viewers perceived the images as too restrictive yet simultaneously identified proudly as "colored." The uneven reception of Color TV highlights the significance of addressing intersectional identities (of race and class) in television programming to expand inclusion of minority groups in multicultural nations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article shows how age as a category of dependency upends popular consciousness about race and class within postcolonial health systems. White individuals working within South Africa's private health insurance (medical aid) market and allied fields face a conundrum with respect to elder care. Some policies accommodate older adults' needs, but being older is costly and long-term residential care is excluded. Critically, these workers' position as middle- and upper-class enables them to pity older, poorer whites and blacks who more often use a dysfunctional public health sector, yet the elder care gap and other limitations reveal that these workers' own class position is also tenuous. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent scholarship laments the growing fragmentation of the working class due to flexible labour regimes and unemployment. This paper examines an emerging effort in South Africa to counter this fragmentation: the United Front project, initiated and led by the National Union of Metalworkers South Africa (NUMSA). Drawing on 74 interviews conducted at two different NUMSA-led protests in Johannesburg, the analysis unpacks two sets of tensions. One set of tensions revolves around class politics, which pertain to the divide between unionized workers in relatively stable employment, and impoverished communities ravaged by unemployment. The other set of tensions revolves around party politics, including divisions with respect to the United Front's opposition to the ruling party, the African National Congress (ANC). Each dimension reveals both crucial sources of solidarity and potential obstacles, showing that forging a broad working-class unity in the current period is complex, but not impossible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The institutionalized racism that once subjugated the Black majority during South Africa's apartheid years gave way after 1994 to legislature that aims to bring the country into a new era of egalitarianism. A striking result of this has been the steady flow of young Black people achieving upward mobility and making the transition into the middle- and upper-classes. This article explores young Black South Africans' lived experiences of upward mobility, as well as their efforts to negotiate between separate and often contrasting identities by applying an interpretive sociological framework to their narrative accounts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The bifurcation of the musical arts education sector in South Africa into its public and private dimensions reproduces inequality along lines of class, race and geography. This article reviews policy and practice in the post-apartheid era to provide new insight into the crisis unfolding in public schools. An ethnographic case study of school musicking in the Ingwavuma district of KwaZulu-Natal describes some of the strengths and challenges associated with music education in rural areas. Indigenous musics are thriving, but teachers lack training in music literacy and have limited resources at their disposal. The 2012 National Curriculum Statement accords music a peripheral (and in some cases, optional) position in South Africa’s Basic Education syllabus (DBE 2012). Music is widely practised as an extracurricular activity that does not develop the skills in music literacy required for entry into tertiary education or the music industry. By contrast, students at private schools benefit from high-quality education in Western musics through independent examination boards. It is argued that an egalitarian approach to music education would return the study of music to the school curriculum in revised form. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Using South Africa as a case study, this article presents a new argument for an adaptation of the Comparative Media Systems Model by Hallin and Mancini. The article proposes that factors of race, class and gender and intersections hereof as well as nation-building be added to the model to better suit the analysis of media development in post-colonial societies. The article looks at media development in societies that have undergone social and political transitions since the late 1980s and early 1990s and highlights differences between transitional societies and young democracies in Eastern Europe and East Asia vis-a-vis transitions in post-colonial societies in the global South. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The questions that Neville Alexander raises in his three texts (1979, 2002 and 2013) are issues with which academics wrestle in the university in different forms. These questions have a direct bearing on the social practices that unfold in pursuit of the consolidation and expansion of a new democratic order. The perspective in this article is that of the university, in that it attempts to think through the sensitive matter of the relationship between academic autonomy, institutional imperatives and the national project. With this in mind the authors set out to present Alexander's thoughts on questions relating to the political (i.e., the 'national question'); economic (i.e., affirmative action and practices of embourgeoisement); and the socio-cultural (the racial habitus which includes reference to a new historical community). Each of the aforementioned informs the way in which the university is positioned as an institutional site in light of Alexander's approach to the 'national question' in South Africa. This means that the authors take up the university's role in society, raising the matter of its identity, the form it may take and how the university contributes to what they refer to as a 'nation-in-becoming'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the psychologization of development in South Africa, one of the most unequal countries in the world, through a critical analysis of a discussion on a national radio programme about the meaning of Mandela Day. We demonstrate how speakers draw on common sense notions of race, class, and party politics that (re)produce subject positions from within a rights-based interpretive repertoire that emphasizes structural reform and class resistance, and an agency interpretive repertoire that emphasizes individualism, responsibility, and volunteerism. We further demonstrate how the agency subject position serves to stifle and resist the rights subject position by drawing on common sense “psychological truths” about what it means to be a good citizen. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Class categorisation should not only be informed by academic pursuits but by the lived experiences of those being categorised. A human or community-centred definition of class will illustrate the complexities of class experience and will thus present a dynamic conceptualisation. Through two life-history interviews of two black women from South Africa, this article illustrates that middle-classness for blacks during apartheid was marred with constant shifts related to the socio-economic and political impermanence of class position. Continuous negotiation driven by the need to be included in one's own community and the effects of being racially othered in interaction with whites and white spaces influences these shifts. In conclusion, the article argues that being middle class and black is heterogeneously experienced and thus complex. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on an ethnographic case study conducted in the Dormaa District, this article describes a group which has emerged in southern Ghana in the last decades and is called Burgers. Burgers are transnational migrants who have materially achieved a middle-class status in their country of origin by doing blue-collar jobs in Western Europe or North America. Their emergence as a class highlights the links between transnational migration, global inequalities and national imaginaries of social status. Since their relative wealth lacks conventional legitimations, these migrants are a cause of irritation to existing imaginaries of social status in Ghana. In this context, redistribution of resources and collaborative silences are central to understanding how Burgers negotiate their status and convert money into symbolic capital. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the early 1970s in South Africa two developments coincided. Workers in the port city of Durban struck, triggering a union movement which was crucial in defeating apartheid and which remains the society’s largest organized force. And radical scholars began to analyse apartheid as a system of class domination. The two were related, for the scholarship helped convince middle-class radicals to join the union movement. It also made democracy and a critique of private economic power key themes for the movement. The relationship between the ideas and the movement show the limits and possibilities of academic influence on social movements. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper draws on fieldwork done in Greystone School in South Africa, a single sex girls' school. I explore how the legacy of coloniser and colonised is reconfigured through the history of the school and the particular racialised politics of South Africa, where race and class have always been imbricated in differently nuanced ways before, during and after apartheid. The young women have, for the most part, been produced and produced themselves as white youngladies– with the politesse and habitus that this implies. Thus, despite the current intake of a significant number of black girls from further north in Africa, some local Indian (in South African terms) pupils and a very few local black (African) young women, the school continues to support the production of whiteness and (middle) class amongst their students. Throughout, I show how global colonial and postcolonial narratives of whiteness have (and have had) their own particular form and relationship to narratives of whiteness in the changing South African context. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Informed by the writings of the Frankfurt school and critical pedagogy, this article is a reflective piece on the engagement with the race and class debate in South African education. The article opens with the recent stampede to gain access to a university as a backdrop for an interrogation of the notions of race and class in both higher and basic education. Thereafter, the article highlights how universities and schools reproduce social and economic power systems to the detriment of the advancement of poor and working-class youth (the overwhelming majority of whom are black). The objective here is to encourage a deeper engagement with theoretical constructs of marginalisation, and racial and class inequalities. Over the past year there has been student unrest at 11 universities, and when one reflects on the youth resistance of the 1980s, it is evident that an academic engagement with discourses of power beyond polemic is needed to ensure that the youth take on the power brokers on equal terms. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper traces three political mobilizations in the wealthy suburbs of Johannesburg: a boycott of redistributive tax policies, the creation of gated communities and residents' associations, and the demand for residential city improvement districts (CIDs). I argue that state rescaling and networked governance are constituted through struggles over governmental power. I also argue for more attention to race in the political economy of scale. Struggles over the scalar, networked, and territorial dimensions of governance are constitutive moments in the shifting articulation of race, class, and space. An analysis of articulation highlights the role of territory, identity and imagination in the production of space, demonstrates that neoliberal forms of networked governance are products of struggle, and reiterates the feminist argument that governmental interventions are about more than just capital accumulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The situation comedy Madam & Eve (2000-2005) debuted on e.tv, a free-to-air South African television channel, and emerged as one of the most popular local shows, even winning international recognition. Raising pertinent issues of race, class, and gender within the context of domestic service in postcolonial South Africa, Madam & Eve follows the interconnected lives of Gwen Anderson, a well-to-do, white “Madam,” and Eve, a younger, working-class, and black “Maid.” Although directly confronting inequalities of race and class by integrating the perspectives of the maid and the employer, and undermining hierarchies of power through the unruliness of mimicry, the comedy confines racial resolution to the individual. By scapegoating individuals for their discriminatory attitudes, and effectively quelling the motivation for collective resistance, the show embodies the larger industrial trend of promoting profitability at the expense of progressive politics. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

South Africa as a sociopolitical space of transition provides the opportunity for the renegotiation and contestation of taken-for-granted social identities. Social identities are practiced and performed through broad social processes and solidified through social institutions. I explore the usefulness of the concept of intersectionality for the framing of South African masculinities. Race, class, ethnicity/culture, sexuality, and gender are lived through everyday micro-practices in a range of social spaces such as work and home, yet macro-practices of race, class, ethnicity/culture, and sexuality have had a profound (but maybe less visible) shaping of social, gendered identities. South Africa's political and social transition is captured through the introduction of multiple pieces of legislation such as the Growth, Employment and Redistribution Strategy and the Civil Union Act (2006) that directly impacts the performance and practice of social identities. This paper is informed by qualitative research conducted with incarcerated, sex offenders in three South African prisons. This paper contributes to a growing body of knowledge on the significance of an intersectional framing of masculinities as central in the reproduction/production of social power and social identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the colonial vision of Southern Africa, rural people were seen as both underemployed and self-sustaining even while processes of commodification dependent on the exploitation of their labour were producing spatially and racially marked inequalities of wealth and consumption and related patterns of health and affliction. Affliction sometimes reflected denial of access to formal health provisioning, but it was also produced by the conditions of labour, including capital's largely successful struggle to externalize responsibility for the reproduction of its workers. This paper discusses various moments in the making of affliction in the region: the development of endemic tuberculosis, the resurgence of malaria, famine-related paralysis and HIV/ AIDS. These cases illustrate how affliction has been shaped by the weight of long-term structural relations of class in the organization of labour and by the contingent outcomes of immediate political struggles. They suggest that efforts to improve health in Southern Africa today must address persistent structural patterns that underlie the causes of the incidence of disease; these are also relevant to questions of land reform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Against a backdrop of declining manufacturing employment, this article uses a study of the call center industry to argue that English language proficiency is central to new service jobs in post-apartheid South Africa. Drawing on research in Durban, we in this study show that access to call center work—especially the highest paid niches—is heavily mediated by English language skills generally attainable only at the most elite high schools. In doing so, we argue that access to English-medium education can challenge racial disadvantage, but simultaneously that English can help to consolidate white privilege through the continued association of a ‘prestigious’ accent with whiteness. The study accordingly reveals the importance of language in the changing intersectionality of race and class and, in doing so, underlines the value of social and cultural perspectives in labor geography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The slogan ‘no education without representation’ symbolised a belief in the anti-apartheid movement that without a democratic government, South Africa's people could not receive an inclusive education. Since the end of official apartheid in 1994, the education system has faced new transformative aims focused on ending racial separation and inequality. This article seeks, in three main ways, to contribute to debates over the progress made. First, post-apartheid policy is explored. Desegregation of schools and universities is seen as a key goal but is shown not to have led simplistically to inclusion. Second, three concepts of ‘place’ are considered as analytical tools in the study of inclusion. These are shown to hold different but relevant interpretations of how ‘place’ can influence processes of in- and exclusion. Third, the voices of students at the Universities of Cape Town and the Western Cape set out how students experience, negotiate and participate in campus in- and exclusion. Racial inequalities and divisions are seen to be reproduced as primary fault-lines of exclusion, but new class cleavages and recognition of other social differences are partly disrupting this traditional picture. The article considers the implications for both inclusive education in South Africa and wider geographical engagements. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Non-racialism is examined in relation to the concepts of race, generic humanism and universalism in order to establish conditions under which non-racialism can be implemented as an emancipatory concept. Denial of the salience or even the existence of the concept 'race' and also tendencies to organise on the basis of race essentialism are examined. It is accepted that race does not exist at an ontological level, in that it is not required for the constitution of the human subject. But race does exist historically and socially. To ignore its existence in addressing the question of non-racialism would be to deny the validity of the experience of racial inequality. At the same time, organisation on the basis of race, while sometimes motivated by strategic considerations, carries the danger of slippage and a permanent racialised identity. The post-1994 period is seen as opening the road to universalism and thus removing the basis for strategic essentialism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: On the basis of a 2008 survey conducted in the Msunduzi municipality in the KwaZulu-Natal province, the paper begins an exploration of the character of popular politics and citizenship in South Africa. Embracing a ‘citizen-centred’ methodology informed by participation literatures, and sensibilities to the ‘work in progress’ character of African cities from urban studies debates, the paper interrogates the mainstream liberal-participatory model of citizenship in South Africa, and the critiques of current South African politics informed by these notions, specifically the ‘racial census’ and ‘dominant party syndrome’ analyses. Taken together these views can be read as characterising South African politics as a game for individual citizens governed by liberal rules, but played by racial and/or partisan groups in exclusionary ways, thus distorting liberal democratic mechanisms of representation and accountability. The paper also examines evidence for an alternative class-based analysis of one aspect of citizenship, namely, protest against poor local governance. The paper looks to unpack this ‘liberal model versus racialised communitarian practice’ imaginary by, on the one hand, demonstrating the ways in which citizenship is not racialised, or is asymmetrically racialised. Indeed, other than party allegiances and trust in key offices, very little by way of what citizens do, believe or think of themselves follows discrete racial lines. Similar points hold for partisanship too. On the other hand, the paper does not redeem the liberal-democratic model as there is also evidence of trust in government when it is not deserved based on performance, but more importantly, evidence that citizens embrace ‘informal’ means to secure their rights. A good example of this is protestors who are also more likely to vote than non-protestors. Taken together, these findings affirm both the way in which the racial and partisan legacy of the past is being undone by new institutions and practices, and suggest the complex intersection of these with networks of personal relations which characterise the local politics of most African cities. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This article considers the ways in which children's leisure time was conceptualised and directed in the Cape Colony between 1850 and the end of the century. Using diaries, letters, and evidence presented to Parliamentary commissions of enquiry, the article argues that the notion of ‘productivity’ was central to ideas around leisure time during this period. Beginning with an overview of the leisure activities of white, middle class, and of poor, coloured, white, and African, children in Cape Town and the Boland during this period, the paper then moves on to a discussion of the child-related work of the Dutch Reformed Church (DRC). Although other churches organised Sunday Schools and other children's societies, the DRC began this work considerably earlier and achieved a much wider reach. This analysis of children's leisure time demonstrates the extent to which children preoccupied colonial commentators and organisations during the second half of the nineteenth century. The history of childhood remains unexplored within South African historiography. This article addresses this lacuna. It sheds light not only on the changing nature of childhood in the nineteenth-century Cape Colony, but also provides new ways of understanding the colony's industrialisation and economic expansion as a result of the mineral revolution. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Threats to the autonomy of South Africa's press have prompted protest – understandably so. But, while media control or censorship are inimical to the free flow of information, which is essential to democracy, the mainstream press's response to real and perceived threats has done more to reveal the depth of its middle-class bias than to rally citizens behind the defence of freedom. The article seeks to demonstrate that the mainstream media's understanding of freedom is restricted to the liberties of the suburban middle classes. It supports this argument by analysing both the journalistic preoccupations it seeks to defend and the phrasing of its attempts to oppose state control. And it argues that the framing of press freedom as a purely middle-class concern will make it increasingly unlikely that free expression can be effectively defended. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Domestic history in South Africa is largely an unploughed field. Yet, for much of South Africa's past, households were the places where concerns about class, gender and race intersected at a very close, personal level. Moreover, it was in the residences of the power elite that the contradictions between the ideas of a migrant aristocracy, notions of empire, and the practical needs for the maintenance of an ostentatious lifestyle, were revealed. In this article I use one elite household in Johannesburg (1909-1923) as a lens through which to explore a variety of these domestic experiences and to expose the nexus between race, class and empire in South African domestic history at the turn of the 20th century, so as to further develop ideas first advanced in my article in the Journal of Family History (2007). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]