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4968 results in Wits University Press

Page 174 of 249

  • Introduction: South Africa at large

  • from PART 4 - South Africa at Large
    • By Roger Southall, Professor Emeritus, Department of Sociology, University of the Witwatersrand and, during 2013, the Van Zyl Slabbert Visiting Professor in Politics and Sociology at the University of Cape Town.
  • Edited by John Daniel, Prishani Naidoo, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, Devan Pillay, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, Roger Southall, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg
  • Book:
    New South African Review 3
    Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    31 May 2019
    Print publication:
    01 March 2013, pp 294-296

  • Summary

    Under the presidency of Nelson Mandela, South African foreign policy sought, for the most part, to assume a high moral ground, refashioning itself after the isolation and ignominy of the late-apartheid years by adopting adherence to human rights and international law as its basis. Following clashes with African states over human rights issues (and the criticisms of their domestic policies that this implied or activated), his successor, Thabo Mbeki, opted for a more pragmatic approach combined with a reformist pan-Africanist agenda embodied in the launch of the New Partnership for African Development (Nepad). Subsequently, under Jacob Zuma, South African foreign policy has sought to extend its outreach globally and continentally while consolidating its linkages regionally.

    The two chapters that conclude this volume highlight both dimensions of foreign policy under the Zuma presidency: first in Sanusha Naidu's exploration of South Africa's admission into the grouping of ‘emergent’ economies known as the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China); and, second, by an analysis of relations between the governments of Swaziland and South Africa by John Daniel and Marisha Ramdeen.

    Naidu describes the invitation to South Africa to join the BRIC club in December 2010 as a diplomatic coup on the part of the Zuma presidency, a signifier of South Africa's high profile in various international forums as a representative of the global South. However, South Africa's admission as the fifth member country of BRIC was greeted with ambivalence, some arguing that it confirmed the country's status as an influential player globally, others that South Africa had been admitted more for political than economic reasons, noting especially that economically it was dwarfed by the other member countries. Naidu asks what implications joining the BRIC has for South Africa's foreign policy, and whether it marks a culmination of Mbeki's developmental and internationally reformist agenda.

    Naidu depicts Zuma's foreign policy as combining elements of Mandela's human rights agenda with an attempt to smooth relations that had been ruffled by Mbeki regionally, notably with Angola, but she sees continuity with Mbeki's goal of strengthening South Africa's position continentally and globally, inclusive of pursuit of greater inclusion of the global South within multilateral forums and notably within international financial institutions.

  • Introduction: Ecology, economy and labour

  • from PART 2 - Ecology, Economy and Labour
    • By Devan Pillay, Associate Professor and Head, Department of Sociology, University of the Witwatersrand.
  • Edited by John Daniel, Prishani Naidoo, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, Devan Pillay, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, Roger Southall, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg
  • Book:
    New South African Review 3
    Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    31 May 2019
    Print publication:
    01 March 2013, pp 92-94

  • Summary

    Under Jacob Zuma's leadership, the African National Congress-led government continued along its schizophrenic development trajectory, trying to appease contradictory interests amid modest economic growth and rising social instability. The most powerful of all these interests remain the large corporations, which continue to shape public discourse around issues of ecology, economy and labour.

    The chapters in this section speak to these issues. Dick Forslund presents a detailed exposition of the need for a wage-led growth path that tackles, head on, the neoliberal argument that low wages and inequality are necessary for economic growth, with the benefits trickling down to the working class in the long-term (by which time, as Keynes once said, we are all dead). Forslund argues instead that low wages and extreme inequality deprive the country of local markets and jobs. We should support unions in their demand for higher wages, tackle inequality by reducing the profit share of gross domestic product (GDP), abandon export-led growth that is based on wage compression, and move out of excessive reliance on extractive industries in favour of climate jobs that combine sustainable development with employment and decent work.

    Martin Nicol continues the discussion on economic policy with a focus on the mining industry and the debate over nationalisation. He argues for nationalisation of a special type, and is sceptical about the feasibility of outright nationalisation (whereby the state takes ownership of mines) as well as bureaucratic state intervention as envisaged by the African National Congress (ANC) task team report. Nicol puts forward a more socially embedded alternative in which workers, citizens and the environment are central actors, ensuring that mineworkers obtain just rewards for their labour through a wage solidarity policy; improved living conditions for workers; a programme of adult education; and a mine veterans policy. He argues that mining with care and efficiency would alleviate unfavourable environmental consequences and provide full economic value, but this, he asserts, can only be achieved through independent union and community organisation, to build a countervailing power against private management and state cronyism, mismanagement and corruption.

  • Introduction: Public policy and social practice

  • from PART THREE - Public Policy and Social Practice
    • By Prishani Naidoo, a lecturer in the Department of Sociology at the University of the Witwatersrand.
  • Edited by John Daniel, Prishani Naidoo, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, Devan Pillay, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, Roger Southall, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg
  • Book:
    New South African Review 3
    Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    31 May 2019
    Print publication:
    01 March 2013, pp 196-200

  • Summary

    Although it is not uncommon to hear the view expressed that the South African government has good policies on paper but has failed many times in their implementation, it is less often that we examine the possibilities that such policies might be flawed in their very approaches (that is, before their implementation even begins). The chapters in this section allow us to consider such a possibility in relation to a set of diverse topics, offering detailed accounts and assessments of the evolution of policy (and its relation to concrete practice and lived experience). As we read the accounts of skills development, the state of education and health sector transformation, the politicisation of senior appointments in the public service, and male circumcision, we are able to develop a deeper understanding of the crises being faced in each of these areas of experience and engagement, allowing us to move beyond merely repeating the observation that the state lacks the capacity to implement policy (which it admittedly often does). These chapters draw our attention to some of the major blind spots, points of mismatch with lived reality, and areas of neglect that characterise policies that guide contemporary efforts to address persistent problems and needs.

    Stephanie Allais kicks off this section with a close analysis of skills policy, identifying key problem areas, and relating developments in the sphere to international debates with the aim of ‘building a conceptual language as well as an empirical base’ from which to evaluate South African skills policy. She offers a brief history of skills development in the country, emphasising clear failures of the key strategies adopted in the post-apartheid period, including the National Qualifications Framework (NQF) and the system inaugurated by the national skills levy (levy-grant system), followed by a survey of international approaches (in the ‘developed’ world) to the question of expanding and improving the vocational skills of national populations. She suggests that at least four major factors contribute to the persistence of low levels of skills in South Africa: economic inequality and job insecurity; a poor school system; ‘the tendency of the NQF towards low-level fragmented skill’ with ‘cumbersome’ related requirements; and ‘a contractualised provision model which does not provide a framework for building public provision’, worsened by difficulties of implementation.

  • Chapter 11 - An African Newspaper in Central Johannesburg: The Journalistic and Associational Context of Abantu-Batho

  • from THEMES AND CONNECTIONS
    • By Peter Limb, an adjunct associate professor and Africana bibliographer at Michigan State University.
  • Grant Christison, Paul Landau, Peter Limb, Christopher Lowe, Sarah Mkhonza, Sifiso Mxolisi Ndlovu, Jeff Opland, Chris Saunders, Robert Trent Vinson
  • Book:
    The People’s Paper
    Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    21 April 2018
    Print publication:
    31 December 2012, pp 298-317

  • Summary

    In the preceding chapters we examined the content of Abantu-Batho. This chapter situates the paper in its journalistic and associational context: what was it like to be an African newspaper literally on the sidewalks of central Johannesburg; how did it gather and interpret news; how did it survive socially and financially; and what socio-intellectual matrix did it inhabit or even help create?

    THE MAKING OF A NEW RADICAL JOURNALISM

    The steady growth of the black-owned and edited press from the 1880s (see the Introduction in this volume) laid an important foundation for Abantu-Batho and supplied useful journalistic connections for advice or providing copy, and even models of layout and design to emulate. But the new paper also found its own niche as both a national and Johannesburg forum. It challenged the hegemony of the Establishment press that controlled public knowledge. There had been earlier flashes of radicalism, as in Izwi Labantu, but these faded as fast as the paper. Abantu-Batho sought to be a journal of national politics and quality, as opposed to a tabloid, but with a hybrid character and inclusive of human-interest stories and advertisements (see below). Above all, it was a political newspaper.

    In other chapters we investigate themes of political campaigns and policies, resistance, and the initial construction of nationhood in its pages. Here I suggest that Abantu-Batho both reflected and helped create African politics. It was a new media for Africans with a wider national and linguistic reach than before and a strident new assertiveness – the Facebook of the 1910s. Over time, under fire from the Right and with declining resources and a worn-out press, it failed to keep up with technological change. Yet those writers who stayed with Abantu-Batho refused to kowtow to the white-sponsored ‘yellow’ press epitomised by Umteteli wa Bantu, and retained their assertiveness and autonomy – to the extent that a largely pro-Congress editorial team could ever be fully ‘independent’ of politics. In this regard, it was the start of a new radical journalism later consummated in The Guardian and Inkundla ya Bantu.

Shakespeare and the Coconuts
  • On post-apartheid South African culture
  • Natasha Distiller
  • Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    21 April 2018
    Print publication:
    31 December 2012
  • In this book Natasha Distiller explores historic and contemporary uses of Shakespeare in South African society which illustrate the complexities of colonial and post-colonial realities as they relate to iconic Englishness. Beginning with Solomon Plaatje, the author looks at the development of an elite group educated in English and able to use Shakespeare to formulate South African works and South African identities. Refusing simple or easy answers, Distiller then explores the South African Shakespearian tradition postapartheid. Touching on the work of, amongst others, Can Themba, Bloke Modisane, Antony Sher, Stephen Francis, Rico Schacherl and Kopano Matlwa, and including the popular media as well as school textbooks, Shakespeare and the Coconuts engages with aspects of South Africa’s complicated, painful, fascinating political and cultural worlds, and their intersections. Written in an accessible style to explain current cultural theory, Shakespeare and the Coconuts will be of interest to students, academics and the general interested reader.

  • Prologue - The Johannesburg Moment

  • Michael Burawoy, Karl Holdt
  • Book:
    Conversations with Bourdieu
    Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    20 April 2018
    Print publication:
    31 December 2012, pp 1-6

  • Summary

    Forty years ago, in the early 1970s, Durban experienced a ferment of new ideas that were to profoundly shape resistance to apartheid. The central figures in this ferment were two charismatic intellectuals, Steve Biko and Rick Turner. Biko and his comrades founded the Black Consciousness movement and its organisational forms, the South African Students’ Organisation and the Black People's Convention, from which emerged a new generation of political activists who went on to organise trade unions, community organisations and the United Democratic Front. Rick Turner's ideas about participatory democracy and the projects he initiated to support a nascent black trade union movement, partly in response to the challenge of Black Consciousness, influenced many of those who contributed to the building of the trade union movement.

    The Durban ferment was not only about the ideas of intellectuals; it was also about a shift in popular consciousness. In 1973 some 100,000 workers participated in a wave of strikes in Durban, breaking with the quiescence of the 1960s. By the end of the decade both Biko and Turner had been killed by the Security Police. Their ideas, however, continued to shape the resistance movement in different ways throughout the 1980s.

    This was what Tony Morphet – drawing on Raymond Williams's idea of a structure of feeling – called the ‘Durban moment’, constituted by profound shifts in ideas and consciousness among intellectuals and workers, and setting off far-reaching reverberations across South Africa, way beyond the immediate locale of Durban (Morphet, 1990: 92–93; Webster, 1993).

    That was the Durban moment. This book is subtitled ‘the Johannesburg moment’. What do we mean by this?

    At the simplest level, the title is a reference to the fact that the book grew out of a series of lectures on Pierre Bourdieu, the great French sociologist, given at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg in 2010. The significance of the reference to place is not simply that the lectures took place here, but that they presented an occasion for interrogating the relevance of Bourdieu's work to South Africa – and, more importantly, confronting the meaning of South Africa for Bourdieu's theory. It is through exploring the significance of this interrogation and confrontation that we can arrive at some sense of the possible meaning of a ‘Johannesburg moment’.

  • Chapter 1 - Rock art management: Juggling with paradoxes and compromises, 3 and how to live with them

  • from PART 1 - ON DOCUMENTING ROCK ART
    • By Anne-Sophie Hygen, Riksantikvaren – the Directorate for Cultural Heritage, Oslo, Norway, Alexey E. Rogozhinskiy, Kazakh Scientific Research Institute on Problems of the Cultural Heritage of Nomads, Almaty, Kazakhstan
  • Edited by Benjamin Smith, Knut Helskog, David Morris
  • Book:
    Working with Rock Art
    Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    21 April 2018
    Print publication:
    31 December 2012, pp 3-14

  • Summary

    THE PROBLEM

    Rock art management requires concrete answers to a multitude of interrelated questions. What are our motives and issues; what are the relevant past and present data and situations, and how do we make it all come together in management planning and practice without compromising the sites themselves, the people who made what we are managing today, our own scientific and ethical ideals, or the society we serve?

    The inherent problem of rock art management is that different goals and motivations do not always act in one way, but in many. We have research interests; we have the obligations of conservation, protection, preservation and long-term maintenance, and then again we have the demand for public presentation, with on-site infrastructural measures and facilities, walkways, signposts, adaptations for visitors, and so on. All these different motivations are valid and relevant, but the trouble is that they may be in opposition to each other. Therefore, we also have to ask and answer these questions: What are the vested interests in rock art, whose interests are we dealing with, and can different interests be combined without destructive compromises?

    WHAT DO WE MANAGE WHEN MANAGING ROCK ART?

    The precondition for knowing what we are dealing with in rock art management, as in archaeology in general, is of course documentation and recording, of the rock art in its multiple synchronic and diachronic micro and macro contexts. But in rock art management we need to go a step further and ask: What, ultimately, are we managing? I will not go into the fact that we also manage visitors; local, regional and national interests; economic and political interests and development issues but rather ask: Do we manage physical manifestations, landscapes and features, or do we manage meanings? Of course we should do both according to Hodder's two types of contextual meaning, ”… object as object, and object as meaningfully constituted” (1986: 171), but in any case we need to “know” what “the objects” are (ibid: 15). In order to “know” what they are, they must be identified and for practical purposes named, and we all know that terminology in archaeology is infused with interpretation, however cool and neutral we set out to be.

  • Beauvoir Meets Bourdieu

  • from CONVERSATION 6 - THE ANTINOMIES OF FEMINISM
  • Michael Burawoy, Karl Holdt
  • Book:
    Conversations with Bourdieu
    Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    20 April 2018
    Print publication:
    31 December 2012, pp 123-144

  • Summary

    If the scholarly principle of her literary ‘vocation’, of her emotional ‘choices’ and even of her relation to her own status as a woman offered to us by Toril Moi have but little chance of appearing as Simone de Beauvoir, this is because she is separated from this by the philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre to whom she delegated, in a way, her capacity to do philosophy .… There is not a better example of the symbolic violence that constitutes the traditional (patriarchal) relationship between the sexes than the fact that she will fail to apply her own analysis on relations between the sexes to her relationship with Jean-Paul Sartre.

    She loves this destiny [aggrégation in philosophy] like she loves he who embodies the realisation of what she would long to be: Normalien, instituted by the rite of the concours in a superman socially authorised to despise the inferior castes … a philosopher who is sure of being one – sure to the point of destroying, for the sole pleasure of shining or of seducing, which are the same thing, this is the project of Simone de Beauvoir.

    Bourdieu (1995: viii)

    Bourdieu very rarely refers to Beauvoir, but when he does it is with undisguised contempt, reminding us of his treatment of Fanon. Of course, both had a close relation to Jean-Paul Sartre, Bourdieu's imagined combatant and intellectual nemesis. The passages above are drawn from Bourdieu's preface to the translation of Toril Moi's biography of Simone de Beauvoir. In this preface written under the mocking title, ‘Apology for a dutiful woman’,1 Bourdieu claims that Beauvoir had no ideas of her own independent of Sartre, and then reduces her to a project of his own (Bourdieu's) projection – to be a philosopher dismissive of those beneath her.

    This strategy of reductionism justifies the silencing of Beauvoir. If her ideas are an emanation of Sartre's, then there's no need to take them seriously. Bourdieu thereby exercises the very symbolic violence he condemns, namely the masculinist practice of silencing women. The final move in this denigration is to appropriate Beauvoir's ideas from The Second Sex (1989 [1949]) – a foundational classic in the analysis of masculine domination as an expression of symbolic violence. Bourdieu's Masculine Domination (2001 [1998]) is but a superficial and diminutive gloss on The Second Sex.

  • Appendix - Abantu-Batho Editors and Editorial Staff

  • from PART II - Anthology
  • Grant Christison, Paul Landau, Peter Limb, Christopher Lowe, Sarah Mkhonza, Sifiso Mxolisi Ndlovu, Jeff Opland, Chris Saunders, Robert Trent Vinson
  • Book:
    The People’s Paper
    Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    21 April 2018
    Print publication:
    31 December 2012, pp 511-512

  • Summary

    OWNERS/MANAGING EDITORS

    Pixley ka Isaka Seme (1882–1951), board of directors chair, managing editor, 1912–16?; acting editor, 1916 and 1917/18?

    Levi Thomas Mvabaza (1870s–1947?), managing director, 1916–31?

    J. T. Gumede (1867–1947), owner, 1929–31

    EDITORS, SUB-EDITORS AND WRITERS

    Cleopas Kunene (1866–1917), editor, English/isiZulu, 1912–late 1915; mid-1916–April? 1917

    Daniel Simon Letanka (1874–1932), Sesotho/SeTswana editor, 1912–31; a director

    Saul Msane (1856–1919), editor, February 1914–July 1916

    Robert Grendon (1867?–1949), editor, 1915–July 1916

    Levi Thomas Mvabaza (1870s?–1947?), isiXhosa editor, 1916–31

    Jeremiah Dunjwa (d. 1935), joined staff, 1913, isiXhosa editor, 1916?

    Henry Selby Msimang (1886–1982), sub-editor or ‘Special Commissioner’, 1913–?; isiZulu English editor, May/June 1917?–February 1918?

    Herbert Nuttall Vuma Msane, editor or sub-editor, 1917–?

    Horatio L. Bud-M'belle, sub-editor, 1917?–19?

    Richard Victor Selope Thema (1886–1955), sub-editor? a.1914?–1920; acting isiZulu/English editor, February 1918–?

    Nontsizi Elizabeth Mgqwetho, poet and possibly staff, 1919.

    Epafras Mogagabise Ramaila (1897–1962), possible contributor, 1917?–29?

    Trevor Dan Mweli Skota (1893–1976), organiser/sub-editor, 1912; editor,1927?–31?

    A. W. G. Champion (1893–1975), editor or sub-editor, 1930–1

    STAFF

    C. S. Mabaso (d. 1935), secretary of Abantu-Batho Ltd., General Agent, 1912–29?

    Serasengoe Philip Merafe, “foreman machineminder”, 1912–14

    Moffat Caluza (outsourced printer)

    ENDNOTES

  • Data from Grant Christison, from death notice in NASA, Pretoria, TAB, MHG 31992.

  • Over the years, argues Chris Lowe (e-mail to editor 29 July 2011), some writers have conflated the names of Horatio L. Bud-M'belle and Isaiah Bud-M'belle to: ‘Horatio Isaiah Budlwana (Bud) Mbelle’ (E. J. Verwey (ed.), New Dictionary of South African Biography, vol. 1 (Pretoria: HSRC, 1999): 170) and ‘Horatio Isaiah Bud-Mbelle’ (T. Karis and G. M. Carter (eds), From Protest to Challenge: A Documentary History of African Politics in South Africa, 1882–1964, vol. 4 (Stanford: Hoover University Press, 1977): 12), with later errors perhaps originating in the latter source. Horatio was a nephew of Isaiah. Sometimes it is also spelt M'belle or Mbelle.

  • Data from Chris Lowe; T. D. M. Skota (ed.), The African Yearly Register, Being an Illustrated National Biographical Dictionary (Who's Who) of Black Folks in Africa (Johannesburg: Esson, 1931): 53 lists Selope Thema only as a ‘correspondent’.

  • Donald Herdeck, African Authors (Washington, DC: Black Orpheus Press, 1973): 359.

  • Fanon Meets Bourdieu

  • from CONVERSATION 4 - COLONIALISM AND REVOLUTION
  • Michael Burawoy, Karl Holdt
  • Book:
    Conversations with Bourdieu
    Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    20 April 2018
    Print publication:
    31 December 2012, pp 74-90

  • Summary

    But above all I wanted to get away from speculation – at that time [1960s], the works of Frantz Fanon, especially The Wretched of the Earth, were the latest fashion, and they struck me as being false and dangerous.

    Bourdieu (1990 [1986]: 7)

    What Fanon says corresponds to nothing. It is even dangerous to make the Algerians believe the things he says. This would bring them to a utopia. And I think these men [Sartre and Fanon] contributed to what Algeria became because they told stories to Algerians who often did not know their own country any more than the French who spoke about it, and, therefore, the Algerians retained a completely unrealistic utopian illusion of Algeria … the texts of Fanon and Sartre are frightening for their irresponsibility. You would have to be a megalomaniac to think you could say just any such nonsense.

    Pierre Bourdieu, interview in Le Sueur (2001: 282)

    Bourdieu's stance toward Marxism becomes more hostile as we move from Marx to Gramsci and now to Fanon. Bourdieu is prepared to acknowledge the insights of Karl Marx and, indeed, so many of his ideas find an echo in the writings of Marx. As I suggested in Conversation 2, his theory of cultural domination can be seen as an extension of Marx's political economy from material to symbolic goods. While Bourdieu wants to distance himself from his opposite number in the Marxist tradition, he nonetheless shows a grudging respect by turning Gramsci against Gramsci.

    When it comes to Frantz Fanon, the gloves are off, as we see in the rare quotes above, taken from two interviews. I have found no other explicit commentary on Fanon in Bourdieu's works. As with other Marxists, once we allow Fanon to respond, we see both astonishing parallels and glaring divergences. Bourdieu's enmity towards Fanon – there is no evidence that Fanon even knew Bourdieu – is perhaps all the deeper because their lives in Algeria overlapped. But they were worlds apart: the one a scientific observer from the metropolis sympathetic to the plight of the colonised, attempting to give them dignity by recognising their distinctive traditions; the other a psychiatrist from Martinique trained in France and dealing directly with victims of violence on both sides of the colonial divide.

  • 7.1 The Politics of Obscenity: Lady Chatterley's Lover and the Apartheid State

  • from 7 - Ideological Exigencies and the Fates of Books
  • Edited by Andrew van der Vlien
  • Book:
    Print, Text and Book Cultures in South Africa
    Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    21 April 2018
    Print publication:
    31 December 2012, pp 348-368

  • Summary

    “Why shouldn't we go to South Africa?”

    “We might!”, he said slowly.

    D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928; 1993, 215–16).

    In late 1928 various factors—piracy, a hostile press, and confiscations by US customs and Scotland Yard—forced D. H. Lawrence to become the first major defender of Lady Chatterley's Lover. In a series of prose pieces published in or around 1929—“Pornography and obscenity”, the introduction to These Paintings, the introduction to Pansies, and the A Propos—he rejected the charge that he was a pornographer and that his novel was, as John Bull had put it, an “evil outpouring” (Lawrence 1993, xxxii). Decrying pornography as the “attempt to insult sex, to do dirt on it”, he presented himself variously (and at times contradictorily) as a physician out to heal the “diseased” modern psyche; as a truth teller seeking to expose the “sentimental lie of purity and the dirty little secret”; as a champion of an enlightened modernity that had left behind the “dim-minded, obscure, violent natures of the Middle ages”; as a defiant individualist up against the “mob, mob, mob” and its “obscene howl”; and as a purifier of the dialect of the tribe who wished to cleanse the word “arse” of its deforming “mental associations” (Lawrence 1998, 286, 294–314; 1993, 307). For good measure, he also added paeans to the Old Church (it “knew best the enduring needs of man”) and to Christian marriage (which has “given man the best of his freedom, given him his little kingdom of his own within the big kingdom of the State”) (Lawrence 1993, 321–22). Although unorthodox, his social attitudes, religious feelings, intentions and hoped-for effects were, Lawrence urged, serious, sincere and high-minded. Lady Chatterley's Lover was “an honest, healthy book, necessary for us today” (Lawrence 1993, 307).

    For 30 years public authorities around the world (the “grey ones” as Lawrence dubbed them) did not believe him (Lawrence 1998, 303).

  • PART II - Anthology

  • Grant Christison, Paul Landau, Peter Limb, Christopher Lowe, Sarah Mkhonza, Sifiso Mxolisi Ndlovu, Jeff Opland, Chris Saunders, Robert Trent Vinson
  • Book:
    The People’s Paper
    Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    21 April 2018
    Print publication:
    31 December 2012, pp 331-490

  • Summary

    INTRODUCTION

    Part II comprises texts from Abantu-Batho in the form of articles, editorials and letters drawn from extant issues, fragments, translations in archives, or reprints in other newspapers or books. The narrow Abantu-Batho archive restricted scope, but for those years where more issues are available, our selection criteria seek a thematic balance across political, intellectual, economic, social and cultural history, biography, gender, class, and region. Despite the very limited and scattered archive we have been able to include at least one piece from each year of publication.

    The sources are chiefly library or archival holdings, notably the extensive run between 1930 and 1931 in the National Library of South Africa (also microfilmed), the 1920 special issue in Durban and SOAS, 1928–29 issues in Atlanta and the Carter-Karis Collection, a range of issues and translations in the National Archives, Pretoria (especially Department of Justice and Director of Native Labour files), and the Swaziland National Archives, plus Rhodes House Library at the University of Oxford. We have given priority to unpublished items, but in the Bibliography readers can locate short extracts in contemporary newspapers and books, and selected reprints in compilations such as the Karis-Carter volumes, Outlook on a Century, and the Garvey Papers.

    We keep notes to a minimum, as many persons and events are explained in Part I, but where necessary more obscure persons or events are annotated. Generally, we follow the language usage and spelling of the time. We have silently corrected some spelling or grammar, but kept this to a minimum to let readers appreciate the flavour of contemporary writing.

    CONTENTS

    1912

  • 1. ‘The Municipalities and Natives’, Abantu-Batho, 23? October 1912

  • 2. ‘Oppression of the Native & Coloured Races’, Abantu-Batho, December? 1912

  • 3. ‘The Affairs of Swaziland’, Abantu-Batho, 25 December–12 February 1913

    • 1913

  • 4. ‘Native Women's Brave Stand’, Abantu-Batho, July? 1913

  • 5. ‘The New Solicitor: Mr. R. W. Msimang’, Abantu-Batho, 5 July 1913

  • 6. ‘An Ancient Couple: Suffering under the Lands Act’, Abantu-Batho, September 1913

  • Chapter Fourteen - The ANC: Party Vanguard of the Black Middle Class?

    • By Roger Southall, professor of Sociology at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg
  • Edited by Arianna Lissoni, Jon Soske, Natasha Erlank, Noor Nieftagodien, Omar Badsha
  • Book:
    One Hundred Years of the ANC
    Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    21 April 2018
    Print publication:
    31 December 2012, pp 325-346

  • Summary

    The African National Congress (ANC) lays claim to being the oldest living nationalist movement in Africa. Purportedly, nationalist organisations represent the interests of a putative or extant ‘nation’ against those of an oppressive external power or coloniser. When their struggles triumph, they lay claim to ownership of the previously externally dominated state, national oppression is overthrown, and the nationalist movement moves into power as the representative of the people. However, as has been wryly observed time after time, the triumph of nationalism exacerbates rather than eliminates differences the nationalist struggle had contained. Once they have assumed power, nationalist movements may claim to represent and promote the interests of the entire nation, yet regularly they have become the vehicles of particular ethnic, class, religious and/or regional interests. The category of ‘nation’ effectively dissolves, except in so far as the now-ruling party defines who and who does not belong to it.

    Likewise, the sectional interests of those who control the ruling party become unambiguously identified with the ‘national interest.’ Across wide swathes of Africa the post-colonial state has come to be identified as effectively owned and controlled by a post-colonial elite which, while it may have all sort of ethnic and other properties, is, above all, defined by its use of the state machinery for purposes of material accumulation. Having taken control of the instruments of power, the nationalist movement establishes the ‘party-state’ and becomes a ‘political machine’ central to the allocation of political and economic goods and consolidation of power and well-being of the new elite.

    According to its theology of the National Democratic Revolution (NDR), the ANC is uncomfortably aware of the dangers of South Africa following this trajectory. The principal dynamic of the NDR is said to be the liberation of Africans in particular and blacks in general from political and socio-economic bondage. The ‘motive forces’ of the revolution are recognised as workers and the rural poor, who constitute the large majority of the popular movement, alongside middle strata (including small business operators and real and aspirant capitalists), which, historically, were blocked from growth and development by the racial exclusions of segregation and apartheid.

    As part of the motive forces, the black middle strata constitute a critical resource, providing not only professional skills but fostering value systems appropriate to the building of democracy and development.

  • SECOND KEYNOTE ADDRESS: A Continuing Search for Identity: Carrying the Burden of History

    • By Joel Netshitenzhe, executive director and board vice-chairperson of the Mapungubwe Institute for Strategic Reflection
  • Edited by Arianna Lissoni, Jon Soske, Natasha Erlank, Noor Nieftagodien, Omar Badsha
  • Book:
    One Hundred Years of the ANC
    Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    21 April 2018
    Print publication:
    31 December 2012, pp 13-28

  • Summary

    Populations that are multiply wounded as a product of permanent stress lose their capacity to make decisions and plan for the future due to the excess suffering they have lived through and not processed … Reconstructing the sense of our national and personal histories … allows us to go forward in life. But going forward is only possible if people can find new energy.

    The centenary of the African National Congress (ANC) presents a unique opportunity to interrogate the ideals that spawned and sustained a movement that has assumed the status of a towering giant in the consciousness of South African society and humanists further afield. Whilst our reflections are about history, the subliminal question exercising our minds is whether there should be, and indeed whether there will be, another hundred years. Are South Africans able, in the words of Nicaraguan psychologist Martha Cabrera, to transcend the ‘excess suffering’ and ‘find new energy’?

    Historians are better able to organise and articulate the detailed facts about the evolution of the movement and their significance. Out of such disciplined scholarship we will be able to understand the ANC's historical narrative and how it is intertwined with the evolution of South African society. However, in the discourse on the centenary, we should be inspired by more than just inquisitiveness about the mysteries of the past. Though that in itself is a noble undertaking, this exercise should help us draw lessons that will help South African democrats find new energy.

    This address tries to examine some of the current challenges facing the ANC against the backdrop of relevant developments in its evolution. The fact that the ANC is able to reach the one hundred-year milestone with its organisational integrity intact – a feat that few political organisations have attained – is deserving of serious intellectual reflection. The central argument in this brief treatise is that survival and success are the product of a continuing search for identity and thus a healthy uncertainty. A few themes in current debates which intersect with the ANC historical narrative have been selected here. The choice of these themes is subjective and has been inspired by the following question: how, in its theory and praxis, should the ANC define its identity and project itself into the future?

  • 5.3 From The Origin of Language to a Language of Origin: A Prologue to the Grey Collection

  • from 5 - Questions of the Archive and the Uses of Books
    • By Hedley Twidle, Namaqualand and outside Johannesburg, studied at Oxford, Edinburgh and York
  • Edited by Andrew van der Vlien
  • Book:
    Print, Text and Book Cultures in South Africa
    Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    21 April 2018
    Print publication:
    31 December 2012, pp 252-284

  • Summary

    In his 1878 account of a five-month visit to South Africa, Anthony Trollope described his experience of the Grey Collection reading room in Cape Town. With the kind of sly provocation that made his account such a talking point at the Cape, he remarked:

    It would be invidious to say that there are volumes so rare that one begrudges them to a distant Colony which might be served as well by ordinary editions as by scarce and perhaps unreadable specimens. But such is the feeling which comes up first in the mind of a lover of books when he takes out and handles some of the treasures of Sir George Grey's gift (Trollope 1878, 74).

    In 1861 George Grey, the singularly ambitious colonial autocrat who before the age of 50 had been governor of South Australia (1840–45), New Zealand (1845–53) and the Cape Colony (1854–61), donated some 5,200 items to the South African Library. With a silver trowel he had laid the foundation stone of the present building at the foot of the Company Gardens in September of 1858; in 1860 it was completed and—apart from a period between 1942 and 1944 when valuable holdings were moved to Stellenbosch for fear of enemy action—his bequest has been housed here ever since, kept, as stipulated, “wholly separate and distinct from the general Collection of Books in the Library”.

    In the kind of cultural transaction often repeated in the nineteenth century, a private collection formed the nucleus of Victorian civic culture and, in this case, a British colonial identity in the process of formation. For a rising Anglophone mercantile class at the Cape, “The Grey” transformed Cape Town's library at a stroke into “a local institution worthy of a much larger European city” (Dubow 2006, 48). Ever since, it has been dutifully celebrated by its custodians as “a mirror of Western culture” and a “treasure for all times”.2 Yet equally, from Trollope's account onwards, a note of unease seems to have been present when considering how exactly such texts might fare or signify when (re)located at the tip of Africa.

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