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Hargreaves (2002) suggested that vigorous social movements have the potential to improve the quality of (and increase the equity in) public education. This paper explores the role of Equal Education, an education social movement in South Africa led by university students and secondary school learners, in the process of educational change. Drawing on interviews with the organisation's founding members, organisers and secondary school learners, the paper examines how the organisation/social movement embodies what Oakes and Rogers (2007) describe as "learning power" and in the process contribute to improvement in public education.

The paper examines the history and politics of sanitation and urban belonging and citizenship in Cape Town. It traces the cultural histories of waste and odour in order to reveal the embedding of liberal citizenship, as well as technology, in the body. We do this to make sense of why and how toilets and waste have become recent objects and instruments of struggle in Cape Town, and elsewhere. The paper shows that these political struggles did not arise from nowhere; their emergence is the outcome of historically and materially sustained contradictions that are fundamental to liberal governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hargreaves (2002) suggested that vigorous social movements have the potential to improve the quality of (and increase the equity in) public education. This paper explores the role of Equal Education, an education social movement in South Africa led by university students and secondary school learners, in the process of educational change. Drawing on interviews with the organisation's founding members, organisers and secondary school learners, the paper examines how the organisation/social movement embodies what Oakes and Rogers (2007) describe as 'learning power' and in the process contribute to improvement in public education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT This article analyses the media images and public discourses that surrounded the 2011 'open toilet scandal' or what came to be known as the '2011 Toilet Elections' and the 'Toilet Wars'. Widely circulated media images of unenclosed modern, porcelain toilets struck a raw nerve as the nation was preparing to vote in local government elections, and produced responses of shock from politicians and ordinary citizens, partly because these images seemed to condense and congeal long historical processes of racism and apartheid. Whereas the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was understood to be the key transitional justice mechanism in the mid-1990s, by the late 1990s the TRC was no longer at the centre of political life, and its mythology of national reconciliation and 'new beginnings' was being widely contested. What replaced it was a 'messy' popular politics that was preoccupied with issues relating to land, housing, sanitation, service delivery, labour conditions and employment equity. The TRC's narrowly conceived conception of transitional justice seemed unable to address these struggles to improve conditions of everyday life. The article concludes that these forms of popular politics reveal the limits and possibilities of engaging with the unfinished business of the 1994 democratic transition by developing a localized politics of transitional social justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Academics and journalists in South Africa routinely reproduce stark oppositions between ‘radical’ social movements that embrace the spectacular revolutionary politics of the barricades, and those that work within the ‘reformist’ logic of the law, liberalism, constitutional democracy and the bureaucratic state. These strikingly different activist strategies also seem to manifest themselves as contrasts between the politics of the instant media spectacle and the patient, long-term organisational work of ‘slow activism’. At one level, the slow and patient styles of activism of South African civil society organisations such as the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), Social Justice Coalition (SJC) and Equal Education (EE) can indeed be contrasted with the spectacle of the burning barricades typically associated with ‘service delivery protests’ and the illegal wildcat strikes that spread throughout the mining and transport sectors in 2012. However, this contrast can also be misleading. By focusing on the case study of the Social Justice Coalition in Khayelitsha in Cape Town, this paper shows that, notwithstanding these apparent differences of political style and repertoire, ‘reformist’ social movements are not averse to using media-friendly spectacles of civil disobedience campaigns to highlight service delivery problems, structural inequalities and social injustices. The SJC case study is specifically concerned with how this particular organisation has drawn on a variety of activist traditions that use media campaigns and the politics of the spectacle as part of a rich repertoire of modes of mass mobilisation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An Afrikaans popular song about a general of the Anglo-Boer War, ‘De la Rey’ was received with great enthusiasm among white Afrikaans-speakers in 2007, but also generated much controversy about the possible implications of re-ethnicisation among Afrikaners. What did this manifestation of popular culture say about the resilience of Afrikaner identity and the impact of the New South Africa? This article examines the ways in which this song entered into the post-apartheid public sphere, and investigates how De la Rey revivalism can be related to Afrikaners' experience of post-apartheid transformation. The ‘De la Rey song’ was created for a market that was ripe for a nostalgic celebration of a revamped but less party-political Afrikaans ethnic identity. The song soon became a rallying point for Afrikaners who perceived themselves to be under threat from the ANC government. The heroic figure of De la Rey was invoked as a saviour who would be able to lead the threatened Afrikaners symbolically to a safe place. The song tapped into the profoundly unsettled identity politics of many white Afrikaans-speakers whose continued commitment to a racially exclusivist identity was no longer politically acceptable. The song succeeded because it was a muted affirmation of white Afrikaner identity and helped to reassert the imagined boundaries of white Afrikanerdom while speaking the legitimate language of history and cultural heritage. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper investigates how the South African state has understood the relationship between HIV and poverty and how individuals and community-based organisations have responded to these state interventions. It considers the ways in which liberal forms of government frame people living with AIDS as a particular category of 'deserving' and 'entrepreneurial' citizens, and then re-frames them through a package of health and welfare interventions. Based on ethnographic research with the members of Khululeka, a support group for HIV-positive men, the study pays particular attention to how masculinity has shaped the ways these men have experienced and transformed these state interventions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I investigate responses to the humanitarian crisis that emerged following the May 2008 xenophobic violence against South African nonnationals that resulted in 62 deaths and the displacement of well over 30,000 people. I focus specifically on how a South African AIDS activist movement, the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) and its partners, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF—Doctors Without Borders) and the AIDS Law Project (ALP), translated a particular style and strategy of AIDS activism into legal, medical, humanitarian, and political responses to the massive population displacement. The TAC provided relief to displaced people in the form of basic needs, such as food, clothes, and blankets, as well as legal aid, and it engaged in activism that promoted the rights of the refugees. I investigate how the ideas and practices of global agencies such as the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) were deployed and reinterpreted by TAC activists. I also examine how TAC activists involved in assisting the refugees drew on a global humanitarian assemblage of categories, legal definitions, norms and standards, and procedures and technologies that went beyond the simple management of “bare life.” TAC's shift from fighting for antiretroviral drugs (ARVs) to fighting for refugees' rights reveals a “politics of life” that spans multiple issues, networks, and constituencies. It is also a politics that, at times, strategically deploys standardized bureaucratic logics and biopolitical techniques of humanitarian aid. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the ways in which global health messages and forms of health citizenship are mediated by AIDS activists in rural South Africa. It focuses on how these activists and treatment literacy practitioners are not only concerned with changing the lives of people living with AIDS to better manage biological conditions associated with their seropositive status, but also with how they are also committed to recruiting new members into their biopolitical projects and epistemic communities. These mobilization processes involve translating and mediating biomedical ideas and practices into vernacular forms that can be easily understood and acted on by the “targets” of these recruitment strategies. However, these processes of “vernacularization” of biomedical knowledge often occur in settings where even the most basic scientific understandings and framings of medicine cannot be taken for granted. This ethnographic case study shows that global health programs and their local mediators often encounter “friction” from the most powerful national actors as well as the most marginalized local ones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on post-apartheid developments in relation to the sexual politics that surrounded the 2006 rape trial of South Africa's former Deputy President, Jacob Zuma. The trial and its aftermath highlight contested interpretations of rights, morality, religion, culture and political leadership in post-apartheid South Africa. It also serves as a mirror reflecting the tension between sexual rights and patriarchal cultures. Whereas race and class concerns dominated oppositional politics during the apartheid era, sexual and gender rights now compete for space in the post-apartheid public sphere. There is a glaring gap between the progressive character of 'official' state, constitutional and NGO endorsements of gender and sexual equality on the one hand, and the deeply embedded ideas and practices that reproduce gender and sexual inequality on the other. Idealised conceptions of 'civil society' fail to adequately acknowledge its 'unruly' and 'uncivil' character. The responses of Zuma supporters, including NGOs, activists, academics and journalists attending the trial reveal a chasm between the sexual and gender equality ideals enshrined in the Constitution and promoted by progressive civil society organisations, and the sexual conservatism within the wider South African public. The article also examines how ideas about 'traditional' Zulu masculinity were represented and performed in the Zuma trial, thereby highlighting a tension between constitutional conceptions of universalistic sexual rights on the one hand, and claims to particularistic sexual cultures on the other. This tension, I argue, is reproduced by the rhetorical productivity of a series of binaries: modern and traditional, rights and culture, liberal democracy and African communitarianism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates how the Makuleke community in Limpopo Province achieved iconic status in relation to land reform and community-based conservation discourses in South Africa and beyond. It argues that the situation may be more complex than it first appears, and the ways in which the Makuleke story has been deployed by NGOs, activists, academics, conservationists, the state and business may be too simplistic. The authors discuss historical representations of the Makuleke ‘tribe’ against the backdrop of their experiences of living in the borderland Pafuri region of the Kruger National Park prior to their forced removal. After investigating the ways in which the chieftaincy, and its relation to communal land, has been strengthened by local mobilizations against threats from the neighbouring Mhinga Tribal Authority, the authors suggest that a central tension in the Makuleke area is the conflict between democratic principles governing the legal entity in control of the land (i.e., the Communal Property Association), and traditionalist patriarchal principles of the Tribal Authority. The article shows how these restitution-linked processes became implicated in the establishment in 2002 of the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park. The authors also argue that the image of the Makuleke as a ‘model tribe’ is both a product of changing historical circumstances and a contributor to contemporary discourses on land restitution and conservation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission as an ongoing process of collective memory and public culture. Rather than concentrating on the actual TRC hearings themselves, it focuses on artistic and cultural mediations of this process. It explores the ways in which the South African artist Sue Williamson has engaged with the contradictions, ambiguities and silences of the TRC process. Williamson's work on the TRC, which was exhibited in the South African National Gallery in 2004 as part of the Decade of Democracy Exhibition, reflects upon the 'grey zones' and limits of the TRC's nation building efforts. The paper is divided into three sections. The first section locates the TRC, as a state ritual of nation building, within the broader anthropological literature on ritual. The second section situates Sue Williamson's work within academic debates on the TRC. The final section focuses on Williamson's work in the context of the role of museums and art galleries as spaces of nation building. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I investigate how the moral politics of HIV/AIDS activism in South Africa is contributing toward new forms of citizenship that are concerned with both rights-based struggles and with creating collectively shared meanings of the extreme experiences of illness and stigmatization of individual HIV/AIDS sufferers. I argue that it is precisely the extremity of the ‘near death’ experiences of full-blown AIDS, and the profound stigma and ‘social death’ associated with the later stages of the disease, that produce the conditions for HIV/AIDS survivors' commitment to ‘new life’ and social activism. It is the activist mediation and retelling of these traumatic experiences that facilitates HIV/AIDS activist commitment and grassroots mobilization. It is also the profound negativity of stigma and social death that animates the activist's construction of a new positive HIV-positive identity and understanding of what it means to be a citizen-activist and member of a social movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the complex cultural politics of HIV/AIDS in South Africa. It focuses on how AIDS ‘dissident’ science impacted on policy discourses and how AIDS activists, together with scientists, the media and health professionals, responded. It also shows how the HIV/AIDS debate and struggles over access to treatment were framed by historically embedded cultural and political interpretations of AIDS that were a product of South Africa's apartheid and post-apartheid history. However, rather than adopting a cultural nationalist response to this historical legacy, activists from the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) deployed a class-based politics that concentrated on access to anti-retroviral drugs rather than debates on the complexities of AIDS causation. This approach contrasts with attempts by AIDS activists in the United States to influence the production of scientific knowledge on AIDS directly, for example, research funding and protocols for trials. The article discusses how TAC and its partner organisation, Medicins Sans Frontières (MSF - Doctors without Borders), strategically positioned themselves in the struggle for access to AIDS drugs, and how new forms of health citizenship, gendered identities and political subjectivities emerged in the course of these struggles. For example, ideas of bodily autonomy associated with liberal individualist conceptions of citizenship collided with patriarchal cultural ideas and practices that prevent many women from accessing biomedical interventions (for example, contraception, HIV testing and treatment). The biomedical paradigm that underpinned TAC/MSF campaigns also had to contend with local understandings of misfortune and illness. While TAC's strategies included networking with global civil society organisations such as MSF, Health Gap, and Oxfam, they also involved grassroots mobilisation and an engagement with local socio-cultural realities. This brand of health activism produced solidarities that straddled local, national and global spaces, resembling what Arjun Appadurai and others describe as ‘globalisation from below’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the organisational practices and strategies of the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), an AIDS activist social movement in South Africa. TAC, like other new social movements, draws on grassroots, bottom-up, network-based modes of organisation that operate simultaneously in diverse local, national and global spaces. The article argues that TAC provides examples of organisational practices that cut across institutional and non-institutional spaces, and that are capable of generating multiple relations to the state. In doing so, it has provided its members with opportunities to engage simultaneously in a variety of participatory spaces that allow for the articulation of new forms of citizenship from below. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract This article questions some of the key assumptions of post-development and anti-development critics such as Arturo Escobar and Wolfgang Sachs, who tend to prescribe a puritanical and principled rejection of ‘exogenous development’ that does not necessarily reflect the needs and desires of the beneficiaries of development. Drawing on fieldwork research on land claims in Northern Cape and Northern Provinces (South Africa), the author argues that these beneficiaries tend to deploy hybrid and highly selective and situational responses to development interventions. These hybrid responses can be regarded as indigenous modernities. Development packages are resisted, embraced, reshaped or accommodated depending on the specific content and context. The author also questions James Ferguson's conclusion that depoliticizing development discourses inevitably buttresses bureaucratic state power. Rather, the fieldwork findings suggest that state-led development is often an extremely risky business that can undermine the legitimacy and authority of governments. In addition, in many parts of the developing world, it is the retreat of the neo-liberal state, rather than ‘the tyranny of development’, that poses the most serious threat to household livelihood strategies and economic survival. The case studies discussed here suggest that responses to development are usually neither wholesale endorsements nor radical rejections of modernity. Even when resisting and subverting development ideas and practices, people do not generally do so on the basis of either radical populist politics or in defence of pristine and authentic local cultural traditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article relates the author's experiences of having worked as consultant with indigenous peoples in South Africa. He visited the two major San communities to assess the state-indigenous peoples relations. The author's critical ethnographic account based on the fieldwork done as part of the consultancy is presented.

This article focuses on the ambiguities and contradictions of donor and NGO development discourses in relation to local constructions of 'community', cultural authenticity and San identity. It deals specifically with the cultural politics of the successful 1999 ≠ khomani San land claim in the Northern Cape Province of South Africa. The study investigates local responses to state, NGO and donor discourses on indigenous identity and 'cultural survival'. It shows how strategic narratives of community solidarity, social cohesion and cultural continuity, were produced by claimants and their lawyers during this process. In the post-settlement period, however, social fragmentation and intra-community conflict between 'traditionalists' and 'western bushmen' became increasingly evident. These conflicts drew attention to the difficulties of creating community solidarity and viable livelihood strategies in a province characterised by massive unemployment and rural poverty. The paper suggests that these divisions were also a product of the contradictory objectives of NGOs and donors to provide support for traditional leadership, San language and 'cultural survival', and to inculcate modern/western ideas and democratic practices. Furthermore, despite the thoroughly hybridised character of contemporary San identity, knowledge and practices, San traditionalists appeared to stabilise 'bushman' identity by recourse to notions of a 'detribalised Other' – the 'western bushmen' living in their midst. It is evident, however, that the 'traditionalist' versus 'western bushman' dichotomy is itself at the heart of donor and NGO development agendas. Consequently, the donor double vision of the San – as both 'First Peoples' and modern citizens-in-the-making – contributed to these intra-community divisions and conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article criticizes the article of Nancy Scheper-Hughes "On the Call for a Militant Anthropology: The Complexity of ‘Doing the Right Thing.'" It addresses on anthropologists to supersede the cultural and moral relativism of the 1990s with a militant anthropology that is politically and morally committed and engaged. According to the author, the major problem with the article is that it feigns that there was an unambiguous agenda for the activist South African anthropologist. Scheper-Hughes does not seem cognizant that many South African anthropologists did take sides but in ways that dare the simplistic dualities of resistance. She also entirely brushes aside the history of activist anthropology in South Africa. Other significant contentions of the author are presented.

Discusses South African anthropology and the problems of alterity and location. Comments on South African keywords such as race, ethnicity, tribe, gender and culture; Ethnicity as seen to be either false consciousness or an identity manipulated by the apartheid state to further its divide and rule agendas.

In this editorial the author looks at poo protests in South Africa as political in various ways, comparing it to the Great Stink of London in the 19th century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]