[PDF] The Contested Idea Of South Africa eBook

Author : Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 300 pages
File Size : 36,39 MB
Release : 2021-11-29
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 1000476936

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This book reflects on the complex and contested idea of South Africa, drawing on a wide range of disciplinary perspectives. Ever since the delineation of South Africa as a country, the many diverse groups of people contained within its borders have struggled to translate a mere geographical description into the identity of a people. Today the new struggles ‘for South Africa’ and ‘to become South African’ are inextricably intertwined with complex challenges of transformation, xenophobia, claims of reverse racism, social justice, economic justice, service delivery, and the resurgent decolonization struggles reverberating inside the universities. This book covers the genealogy of the idea of South Africa, exploring how the country has been conceived of by a broad group of actors, including the British, Afrikaners, diverse African nationalist traditions, and new formations such as the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), Black First Land First (BLF), and student formations (Rhodes Must Fall & Fees Must Fall). Over the course of the book, a broad range of themes are covered, including identity formation, modernity, race, ethnicity, indigeneity, autochthony, land, gender, intellectual traditions, poetics of South Africanness, language, popular culture, truth and reconciliation, and national development planning. Concluding with important reflections on how a colonial imaginary can be changed into a free and inclusive postcolonial nation-state, this book will be an important read for Africanist researchers from across the humanities and social sciences.

Author : Franco Barchiesi
Publisher : State University of New York Press
Page : 362 pages
File Size : 38,95 MB
Release : 2011-06-01
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 1438436122

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Winner of the 2012 CLR James Award presented by the Working Class Studies Association Millions of black South African workers struggled against apartheid to redeem employment and production from a history of abuse, insecurity, and racial despotism. Almost two decades later, however, the prospects of a dignified life of wage-earning work remain unattainable for most South Africans. Through extensive archival and ethnographic research, Franco Barchiesi documents and interrogates this important dilemma in the country's democratic transition: economic participation has gained centrality in the government's definition of virtuous citizenship, and yet for most workers, employment remains an elusive and insecure experience. In a context of market liberalization and persistent social and racial inequalities, as jobs in South Africa become increasingly flexible, fragmented, and unprotected, they depart from the promise of work with dignity and citizenship rights that once inspired opposition to apartheid. Barchiesi traces how the employment crisis and the responses of workers to it challenge the state's normative imagination of work, and raise decisive questions for the social foundations and prospects of South Africa's democratic experiment.

Author : Lungisile Ntsebeza
Publisher : BRILL
Page : 336 pages
File Size : 25,72 MB
Release : 2005-06-01
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9047407903

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This book argues that the promulgation of the Traditional Leadership and Governance Framework and Communal Land Rights Acts runs the risk of compromising South Africa's democracy. The acts establish traditional councils with land administration powers. These structures are dominated by unelected members.

Author : Antina von Schnitzler
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 252 pages
File Size : 41,74 MB
Release : 2016-11-08
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 0691170789

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In the past decade, South Africa's "miracle transition" has been interrupted by waves of protests in relation to basic services such as water and electricity. Less visibly, the post-apartheid period has witnessed widespread illicit acts involving infrastructure, including the nonpayment of service charges, the bypassing of metering devices, and illegal connections to services. Democracy’s Infrastructure shows how such administrative links to the state became a central political terrain during the antiapartheid struggle and how this terrain persists in the post-apartheid present. Focusing on conflicts surrounding prepaid water meters, Antina von Schnitzler examines the techno-political forms through which democracy takes shape. Von Schnitzler explores a controversial project to install prepaid water meters in Soweto—one of many efforts to curb the nonpayment of service charges that began during the antiapartheid struggle—and she traces how infrastructure, payment, and technical procedures become sites where citizenship is mediated and contested. She follows engineers, utility officials, and local bureaucrats as they consider ways to prompt Sowetans to pay for water, and she shows how local residents and activists wrestle with the constraints imposed by meters. This investigation of democracy from the perspective of infrastructure reframes the conventional story of South Africa’s transition, foregrounding the less visible remainders of apartheid and challenging readers to think in more material terms about citizenship and activism in the postcolonial world. Democracy’s Infrastructure examines how seemingly mundane technological domains become charged territory for struggles over South Africa’s political transformation.

Author : Evan Lieberman
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 344 pages
File Size : 10,10 MB
Release : 2022-06-28
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 0691203016

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A compelling account of South Africa’s post-Apartheid democracy At a time when many democracies are under strain around the world, Until We Have Won Our Liberty shines new light on the signal achievements of one of the contemporary era’s most closely watched transitions away from minority rule. South Africa’s democratic development has been messy, fiercely contested, and sometimes violent. But as Evan Lieberman argues, it has also offered a voice to the voiceless, unprecedented levels of government accountability, and tangible improvements in quality of life. Lieberman opens with a first-hand account of the hard-fought 2019 national election, and how it played out in Mogale City, a post-Apartheid municipality created from Black African townships and White Afrikaner suburbs. From this launching point, he examines the complexities of South Africa’s multiracial society and the unprecedented democratic experiment that began with the election of Nelson Mandela in 1994. While acknowledging the enormous challenges many South Africans continue to face—including unemployment, inequality, and discrimination—Lieberman draws on the country’s history and the experience of comparable countries to demonstrate that elected Black-led governments have, without resorting to political extremism, improved the lives of millions. In the context of open and competitive politics, citizens have gained access to housing, basic services, and dignified treatment to a greater extent than during any prior period. Countering much of the conventional wisdom about contemporary South Africa, Until We Have Won Our Liberty offers hope for the enduring impact of democratic ideals.

Author : Ian Shapiro
Publisher : University of Virginia Press
Page : 385 pages
File Size : 40,39 MB
Release : 2011-06-21
Category : History
ISBN : 0813931010

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Democracy came to South Africa in April 1994, when the African National Congress won a landslide victory in the first free national election in the country’s history. That definitive and peaceful transition from apartheid is often cited as a model for others to follow. The new order has since survived several transitions of ANC leadership, and it averted a potentially destabilizing constitutional crisis in 2008. Yet enormous challenges remain. Poverty and inequality are among the highest in the world. Staggering unemployment has fueled xenophobia, resulting in deadly aggression directed at refugees and migrant workers from Zimbabwe and Mozambique. Violent crime rates, particularly murder and rape, remain grotesquely high. The HIV/AIDS pandemic was shockingly mishandled at the highest levels of government, and infection rates continue to be overwhelming. Despite the country’s uplifting success of hosting Africa’s first World Cup in 2010, inefficiency and corruption remain rife, infrastructure and basic services are often semifunctional, and political opposition and a free media are under pressure. In this volume, major scholars chronicle South Africa’s achievements and challenges since the transition. The contributions, all previously unpublished, represent the state of the art in the study of South African politics, economics, law, and social policy.

Author : Maano Ramutsindela
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 141 pages
File Size : 33,98 MB
Release : 2017-11-22
Category : Science
ISBN : 1351776460

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This title was first published in 2001. Examining state-driven programmes of land reform, this book provides an important examination of the transformation process in post-apartheid South Africa at both national and local levels. It captures the dynamics of socio-political change at national and local levels and provides an important analysis of integration in one of the world’s most divided societies.

Author : Gillian Patricia Hart
Publisher : University of Georgia Press
Page : 295 pages
File Size : 31,22 MB
Release : 2014
Category : History
ISBN : 0820347175

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Revisiting long-standing debates to shed new light on the transition from apartheid, Hart provides an innovative analysis of the ongoing, unstable, and unresolved crisis in South Africa today and suggests how Antonio Gramsci's concept of passive revolution can do useful analytical and political work in South Africa and beyond.

Author : John Parker
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
Page : 185 pages
File Size : 11,96 MB
Release : 2007-03-22
Category : History
ISBN : 0192802488

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Intended for those interested in the African continent and the diversity of human history, this work looks at Africa's past and reflects on the changing ways it has been imagined and represented. It illustrates key themes in modern thinking about Africa's history with a range of historical examples.

Author : Clifton Crais
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 35,57 MB
Release : 2009-03-19
Category : History
ISBN : 9780521104821

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South Africa historian Clifton Crais combines a cultural history of state formation with an analysis of African conceptions of power and the moral problem of evil. He explores the role of ideas held by Africans and Europeans in shaping political society throughout South Africa's history. He demonstrates how Africans contested one of the great evils of the twentieth century: apartheid. Crais discusses colonialism, resistance, nationalism, violence, and the challenges to creating democracy.