Months were spent researching and preparing this four-part series on the dramatic events surrounding NELSON MANDELA, the life-term prisoner who has cast a larger than life shadow on South African politics. Staff writer DENNIS CRUYWAGEN travelled extensively to interview at first hand — or by other means, where necessary — those stalwart ANC veterans who were convicted in the Rivonia Treason Trial and jailed with Mandela. He talked, too, to members of the Mandela family, politicians, lawyers and many others who were close to or knowledgeable about the ANC leader. Official records and other sources on the life and times of Nelson Mandela were also consulted. Compiling the vast amount of information sometimes led to unusual situations. For instance, Mrs Winnie Mandela, always pressed for time, was interviewed — not in her home in Diepkloof, Soweto, as arranged but in a hired car in a Johannesburg traffic jam while following a vehicle driven by her driver. She was late for another appointment. Drawn from various sources this series sets out to reconstruct an overview of 25 years and more of political and personal drama, passion and poignancy. / Supplement to The Argus, Tuesday February 6 1990 / Exclusive Part 1

Thesis (MA (History))--University of Stellenbosch, 2004. / In this research the early development of the Black Sash is briefly explored, together with how it altered over time. Changes in the internal structures and its effect on the membership are benchmarked, together with the reasons and reasoning that compelled the organization to undertake a complete restructuring. An in-depth study is made of the disorientation brought about by the collapse of apartheid. Particular attention is paid to the resistance to, and ultimate acceptance of, the inevitability of offering a professionalized service. Attention is focused on the relationship between the Black Sash as a white women’s protest movement and the wider white community, content in the main to support apartheid. The degree to which the Black Sash was accepted by the black community as an equal partner in the struggle for a democratic South Africa is discussed and the criteria by which the organization has been evaluated. In addition, liberalism, per se, is evaluated from a “grassroots” perspective. From 1973, socio-economic developments in the wider society saw many Black Sash members returning to the workplace. This left them with little or no time to offer the organization during formal working hours. In order for the work to continue, paid staff had to be employed to augment the volunteer component. During the 1986 States of Emergency, members of banned organizations joined the Black Sash, and it became an amalgam of different views, generations and political opinion. This represented a significant ontological shift and altered its character in the eyes of the public, but also created internal fissures. The focus of this research is on the response of the Black Sash and its membership to the changing environment in which it was forced to function. By the 1980s, members were finding it difficult to relate to the new protest movements that were rapidly gaining black support and the black on black violence. Ultimately, except for its service arm, namely the advice offices, it emerged as an organization in limbo, appealing neither to the white minority nor the black majority. Women from other race groups, whose membership would have corrected the demographic imbalance, were reluctant to join a predominantly white organization with a tangible camaraderie, built up over the years as a result of members’ shared backgrounds and experiences. This threatened its effectiveness as an advocacy group, and access to the funding that was a vital element in its survival. Structural changes offered the only solution. One of the intentions of this research is to draw attention to the reinvented Black Sash Trust. As a multi-racial, multi-gender, professionalized NGO, managed and staffed by salaried personnel of all age groups, with minimal white volunteer input, it has replaced the two-tiered membership based structure, with a semiprofessional service arm. Having redefined its role and as the end product of slow, almost imperceptible but unavoidable innovations over time, it is developing its own identity, which encompasses much of the original Black Sash ethos.

This thesis compares how Lilian Ngoyi of South Africa and Fannie Lou Hamer of the United States crafted political identities and assumed powerful leadership, respectively, in struggles against racial oppression via the African National Congress and the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. The study asserts that Ngoyi and Hamer used alternative sources of personal power which arose from their location in the intersecting social categories of culture, gender and class. These categories challenge traditional disciplinary boundaries and complicate any analysis of political economy, state power relations and black liberation studies which minimize the contributions of women. Also, by analyzing resistance leadership squarely within both African and North American contexts, this thesis answers the call of scholar Patrick Manning for a “homeland and diaspora” model which positions Africa itself within the historiography of transnational academic debates.

Ruth First was an activist, journalist and sociologist trained by experience and credentialed by her numerous publications. Having lived most of her adult life as an intellectual and activist, First died in August 1982 at the hands of a regime and its supporters who intensely detested all these pursuits. This research project sketches the intellectual contributions made by the South African sociologist during her time at the Centre of African Studies at Eduardo Mondlane University, Mozambique. Her life like the newspaper she edited in the early 1970s was a Fighting Talk and this research project is about celebrating that life and valorising some of the life’s work that she left behind. Making use of qualitative research methods such as archiving, semi-structured interviews and contents analysis, this thesis sought to document Ruth First’s intellectual interventions while at the Centre of African Studies. Engaging with her work while she was in Mozambique and inserting her intellectual contributions, which like those of many African scholars have given way to debates from the global North, into our curriculum would perhaps be the real refutation of the assassin's bomb. This engagement is also crucial as it extends much further than the striking accolades which take the form of buildings and lectures established in her honour.

This booklet is intended to serve as a report-back to those organisations which were party to the Conference for a Democratic Future (CDF) and to those who were unable to be present. It is also intended to act as a guide to action for 1990 and beyond. The CDF was a historic gathering of the forces for change represented by 4600 delegates from over 2100 organisations. These range form Bantustan parties on the one end of the political spectrum to ultra leftist groups on the other end. But perhaps the most significant presence was from organisations like Five Freedoms Forum, NAFCOC, the Hindu Seva Samaj, that of traditional leaders and the hundreds of other community organisations which are rapidly becoming an active component of the mass struggle for change. Also significant was the strong worker representation from a range of trade unions, including eight affiliates of NACTU whose leadership had turned down the invitation to be part of the Conference. The Conference for a Democratic Future was a major step in the overall process of building unity in action and maximising the isolation of the regime. It was, in this sense, not an isolated event. The year 1989 had taken unity in action to new heights with the Defiance Campaign and the mass marches. The process leading up to the CDF was intended td be more important then the Conference itself. Likewise, in the post-Conference period, the follow-up process should be given the importance it deserves. At the end of the day, it is this follow-up process which would determine the actual success or failure of the CDF exercise. The Declaration adopted at the Conference represents the strategic orientation of the broad forces for change. It calls for the intensification of the struggle and for the placing of the question of political power on the agenda of our united mass action. The Conference resolutions collectively contain the elements of a programme of action. Without exception, each resolution is a call to action. The task of all participants of the Conference is to translate these resolutions into Mass United Action. The adoption of the Harare Declaration should act as the starting point of a process which takes its content to the masses of our people in all comers of the country. The demand for the Constituent Assembly should become a popular demand of the people. By adopting the resolution on international pressure, the Conference sends an unambiguous signal to the world community on how the people of South Africa view their role in the struggle to end apartheid. The follow-up to the Conference should also be a continuing search for whatever common ground exists between the broad forces for change. This search must take place not only at a national level, but mere importantly at a regional and local level. Let us bear in mind the words of the Declaration: “The moral appeal of the Democratic Movement has never been greater”. by an MDM delegate on the CDF Convening Committee. / Includes the Harare Declaration: declaration of the OAU Ad-hoc Committee on Southern Africa on the Question of South Africa (Harare, Zimbabwe, August 21, 1989)

This paper is intended to analyze the contributions of Contextual Theology and Contextual theologians to dismantling the South African apartheid system. It is intended to demonstrate that the South African churches failed to effectively politicize and radicalize to confront the government until the advent of Contextual Theology in South Africa. Contextual Theology provided the Christian clergy the theological justification to unite with anti-apartheid organizations. Its very concept of working with the poor and oppressed helped the churches gain favor with the black masses that were mostly Christian. Its borrowing from Marxist philosophy appealed to anti-apartheid organizations. Additionally, Contextual theologians, who were primarily black, began filling prominent leadership roles in their churches and within the ecumenical organizations. They were mainly responsible for radicalizing the churches and the ecumenical organizations. They also filled an important anti-apartheid political leadership vacuum when most political leaders were banned, jailed, or killed.

This thesis focuses on strategies of representation in South African anti-apartheid documentary film and video from the late 1970s to 1995. It identifies and analyses two broad trends within this movement: the first developed by the organisation called Video News Services; the second developed in the Mail and Guardian Television series called Ordinary People. Two history series are analysed against the backdrop of transformations in the television broadcasting sector in the early 1990s. South African documentary film and video is located within a theoretical framework that interweaves documentary film theory, theories of Third cinema and of identity, rid working class cinema of the 1920s and 1930s. The concepts of ‘voice’ and the ‘speaking subject’ are the two key concepts that focus the discussion of strategies of representation in detailed textual analyses of selected documentaries. The analysis of three documentaries that typify the output of Video News Services reveals how these documentary texts establish a symbiosis between representations of the working class as black, male, and allied to COSATU, and the liberation struggle. The analysis of selected documentaries from the Ordinary People series highlights those strategies of representation that facilitate perceptions of the multiplicities of identities in South Africa. This focus on representations of identity is extended in analysing and comparing two television series. The strategies of representation evident in the Video News Services documentaries and the meanings they produce about identify are repeated in the series called Ulibambe Lingashoni: Hold Up the Sun. In Soweto: A History, strategies of representation that follow the trend towards representing identity as multiple are used to present history as if from the perspective of ‘ordinary’ people. The thesis creates an argument for South African documentary film and video to move towards strategies of representation that break down the fixed categories of identity developed under apartheid. With policy moves for creating more ‘local content’ films and television productions there is opportunity to re-shape the documentary film and video movement in South Africa using representational strategies that blur the boundaries between documentary and fiction, and between individualised, discrete categories of identity.

Over the last four centuries, South Africa has been shaped by the twinned, dialectical histories of violence and resistance to violence. However, because both violence and resistance encompass myriad formations and are underlain with a plethora of ideologies and hermeneutics, studying each - particularly from within critical community psychology - is oftentimes necessarily didactic and reductive. Yet, if this kind of research is to retain emancipatory potential, I contend, it should be both community-oriented and politically committed. In an attempt to understand how violence moves through Thembelihle, a low income community in South Africa, an expansive lens for conceptualising violence and resistance is advanced across this research’s four studies. In Study I, I use discursive psychology to examine how Thembelihle has been constructed in dominant discourse by analysing newspaper reporting on the community. Following this, in Study II and Study III, I draw on multimodal discourse analysis to study representations of quotidian life and political resistance in a participatory documentary film entitled Thembelihle: Place of Hope, which was collaboratively produced by residents of Thembelihle, professional filmmakers and myself. Lastly, in Study IV, I harness the narrative-discursive approach to explore how residents of Thembelihle build community in response to Thembelihle: Place of Hope. It was found that within dominant constructions, Thembelihle was personified as a monolithic and an essentially Other geo-cultural space, made newsworthy principally through its engagement with a broad, often vaguely-conceived, notion of violence. In response to dominant discursive constructions of this kind, community members who featured in and produced the documentary advanced a humanistic conception of Thembelihle which did not accept the different violences to which the community is subject. Following this, audiences of the documentary engaged the affective and political dimensions of community-building in order to advance a democratically conceived notion of collective will. These findings present critical community psychologists and violence scholars with a number of considerations around representation; the multitudinous nature of violence and resistance; psycho-politics; and radical hope. Ultimately, I argue, if such research is to be meaningful, it must be guided by and subordinated to the emancipatory requirements articulated by community members. / Psychology / D. Litt et Phil (Psychology)

The apartheid state was vulnerable to the opposition of the End Conscription Campaign (ECC) on two fronts. From 1967 universal white male conscription was introduced, and progressively increased until 1984. This indicated the growing threat to the apartheid state from regional decolonisation which offered bases for the armed liberation movement. From 1977 a policy of "reformed apartheid" attempted to contain internal black opposition through socio-economic upliftment, but the failure of this containment intensified the need for military coercion. Minority conscription created an ongoing manpower challenge, which the ECC exacerbated by making the costs of conscription explicit, thus encouraging non-compliance and emigration. Secondly, the National Party used a security discourse to promote unity among whites, offsetting both its conscription demands and its decreased capacity to win white political support through socio-economic patronage. After the formation of the Conservative Party in 1982, the state faced conflicting demands for stability from the right, and for reform from the left. The ECC's opposition intensified these political differences, and challenged conscription on moral grounds, particularly the internal deployment of the SADF after 1984. Through its single-issue focus the ECC was able to sidestep divisions which plagued existing anti-apartheid opposition, uniting a variety of groups in national campaigns between 1984 and 1988. Since it could not afford to accommodate the ECC's demands, and in view of growing white acceptance of aspects of the ECC's opposition, the state repressed the ECC to limit its public impact. By 1988 - in a climate of growing white discontent around the material and personal costs of conscription, economic decline, political instability and conscript deaths in Angola - the ECC's call for alternatives to military conscription encouraged a broader range of anti-conscription sentiment, prompting the state to ban it. / History / M.A. (History)

This study focuses on Steve Biko’s Africana existential phenomenology, with particular emphasis on the themes of blackness, black solidarity and liberation. The theoretical foundation of this thesis is Africana existential phenomenology, which is used as a lens to understand Biko’s political thought. The study argues that thematic areas of blackness, black solidarity, and liberation are inherent in Africana existential phenomenology. These thematic areas give a better understanding of existential questions of being black in the antiblack world. What is highlighted is the importance and the relevance of the revival of Biko’s thinking towards creating other modes of being that are necessary for the actualisation of blacks as full human subjects. / Political Sciences / M.A. (Politics)