Search

During 1970-1985, South Africa vacillated between reform and reaffirmation of the repressive regime known as apartheid. Did these reforms slow the pace of protest, or did they facilitate protest, by intensifying discontent? Using event-history data on anti-apartheid protest we suggest that passage of reforms will increase the pace of protest while state repression will dampen it. We further hypothesize that the nature and scope of each reform would differentially affect protest by each of three official racial populations: Black Africans, Coloreds, and Asian Indians. As expected, reforms that integrated housing and jobs and reforms that legitimated the rights of black labor unions propelled protest by Black Africans against apartheid, but so did reforms that excluded Black Africans from citizenship. In contrast, relatively few reforms affected the rate of protest by Asian Indians and Colored population groups. Finally, we found that repression decreased rates of protest significantly for all three groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article evaluates the state of sociological research and teaching in South Africa. The author's criticisms or enumerations of shortcomings of social science in the country should not be understood as unique in South Africa and nonexistent in the U.S. Only that in South Africa, some of the problems seem to be a direct result of the fact that racial separation has been institutionalized through the policies of apartheid. The author's overall impression of the state of social science in South Africa is that it is undergoing enormous shifts in focus and methods.

Our analysis of thousands of racial confrontations and protests in South Africa and the United States provides support for the hypothesis that some forms of state-sponsored repression fuel racial unrest In the United States our results indicate that the number of arrests by police at prior collective events deterred protest but it raised the rate of racial conflict between whites and blacks. In South Africa the situation is more complicated: arrests in the form of detentions raised the rate of anti-Apartheid protest, but banning of political activists decreased protest activity and interracial conflict. Consistent with competition and resource-mobilization theories, our results show that declining levels of racial inequality in education for blacks significantly raised rates of black protest in both countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]