Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, Dept of Anthropology, December 1999. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet.

This thesis explores the ability of poetry to articulate political critique in Post-Apartheid South Africa. The aim of the project is to evaluate the extent to which poetry provides criticism of a contemporary political climate marked by government corruption, rising social inequality and widespread immiseration. I argue that both ‘poetry’ and ‘post-Apartheid’ are developing and contested concepts that acquire meaning in concrete circumstances and continue to take on fresh resonance in South Africa today. I contend that poetry does not passively reflect historical circumstances nor docilely take its place in a post-Apartheid political climate. Instead, it actively engages with the milieu within which it finds itself and contributes in a meaningful way to our understanding of what the post-Apartheid era actually means. My study focuses on six poets who represent the innovative and politically charged character of post-Apartheid poetry. The writers I choose to examine are Ari Sitas, Seitlhamo Motsapi, Lesego Rampolokeng, Mxolisi Nyezwa, Vonani Bila, and Angifi Dladla. All of these poets lived through Apartheid and were young, or of middle age, at the dawn of liberation. Eager and able citizens willing to build a new democracy, these artists have been bitterly disappointed by the African National Congress’s abandonment of South Africa’s black majority. The poets in question have set about bearing witness to unrelenting social ills through drawing upon the dynamism of poetry in order to rejuvenate public language, dialogue and debate. Confronted with the over-simplification of information in an epoch of late-capitalism, the poets in this thesis seek to revitalise language, through innovative use of form, in order to fashion new perceptions of the world in which they live. All of the writers in this thesis have been involved in politics or activism and make a point of incorporating these real world experiences into their work. Thus, Sitas invokes worker chants from his time spent in Durban’s labour movement and Dladla remains fascinated by the Gauteng prisons where he has taught creative writing. The poetry I examine is moulded by the active public life of its writers and in turn seeks to participate in a wider world. In this line of thought, many of these poets have started their own literary journals and publishing initiatives, often with strong ties to social justice movements and grass-roots communities. Here, one can mention Nyezwa’s development of the English/isiXhosa multicultural arts journal Kotaz in the Eastern Cape and Bila’s Timbila publishing in the Limpopo province. Through autonomous methods of poetic production and distribution, poets are able to create spaces in which non-commercial and potentially revolutionary art can be heard. My doctorate spotlights the artistic and political victories of a pioneering group of poets, who are little known both locally and abroad. My research underscores the politically critical qualities of poetic form and thus has resonance beyond a narrowly South African context. Indeed, I believe my PhD can contribute in a valuable way to debates pertaining to the social relevance of poetry in the world today.

This thesis should essentially be considered as an exposition of the foreign policy of a "new", apartheid-free South Africa in a post-Cold War international arena, arguing for a pro-active and prudent foreign policy. An important goal of the study is to make as dispassionate and rational as possible a contribution to the debate on South Africa's future foreign policy, national roles and external relations. A further aim of the study shall be to deduce relevant results of perpetual and viable foreign policy orientations and national role models within the framework of policy alternatives to South Africa's decision-makers in the future.

South Africa is a developing country. It has been an active participant in the multilateral trading system since the creation of the new democratic government in May 1994. However, the country's role in the history of the multilateral trading system before this was very different. South Africa was a founding member of the GATT in 1947. The apartheid regime positioned itself within the organisation as a developed country and behaved as such. This study examines over 800 GATT documents on the country's participation in the GATT from 1947 to 1994. These documents have not been examined or studied before in any comprehensive manner. Although there is a vast literature on the history of the GATT, much of this is written from an orthodox standpoint, especially on the role of developing countries (Bhagwati, 2002; Srinivasan, 1998; Hoekman and Kostecki, 1995; Martin and Messerlin, 2007). More recently, there has been some revisionist academic literature on the GATT (Wilkinson, 2006, 2014; Wilkinson and Scott, 2008). This empirical study contributes to the work of the revisionists. An examination of the GATT documentation raises three main questions that this study sets out to examine. First, why did Apartheid South Africa project itself as a developed country in the GATT from its formation in 1947? Second, how was South Africa able to implement its domestic protectionist and discriminatory policies and still adhere to the ideas and principles of the GATT? And third, why did the major players in the GATT reflect a tendency to deviate from the main ideas and principles of the GATT in their trade practices vis-a-vis South Africa?John Ruggie's work on ideas and multilateralism and his concept of 'embedded liberalism' to describe the post-war multilateral economic institutions, including the GATT, is utilised to analyse the above questions. This study argues that while Ruggie's work is helpful in setting out the main ideas that drove the creation of the GATT and that became the core principles of the organisation, this analytical work on the multilateral trading system is incomplete and will need to be extended by other theoretical work. The GATT documentation reveals that there was a gap between the ideals of the multilateral trading system and the practice of both South Africa and the developed countries within the organisation. While they both professed their commitment to the GATT ideas of liberalisation, non-discrimination and reciprocity, their practices often tended towards protectionism, discrimination and the exclusion of developing countries. To explain this contradictory behaviour this study has drawn on the revisionist history of the GATT. This extended analytical framework is utilised to analyse the GATT documentation on South Africa.

Recent writing in the anthropology of affect and cognate fields has positioned hope as a useful category with which to examine socio-political life and formulate a political and theoretical response adequate to its form. This dissertation extends this endeavour by exploring the ‘hopeful projects' mothers and families undertake in order to secure their children's futures in contemporary Cape Town. Based on ethnographic research conducted with Black mothers between March and October 2018, I argue that the supposedly private maternal hopes my interlocutors hold are in fact indexical of the ways in which social inequality functions and becomes manifest in everyday life and care. Situated at the interface of embodied experience and political histories, their hopes are indicative of how liberal logics of selfextension, self-mastery, and self-maximisation are inhabited to produce alternative futures. At the same time, however, such hopes are continually undone by contexts of intractable structural violence and deprivation, reinvested into normative notions of kinship, domesticity, sexuality, and the body, or marshalled to perform reparative work that should properly fall under the purview of the state. In detailing the ways in which my interlocutors attempt to craft more capacious, more just, and more materially abundant futures for their children, I illustrate the affective entailments of life-building in post-Apartheid South Africa

A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Humanities, University of the Witwatersrand, in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Social and Psychological Research. July 2019 / The psychosocial condition and socioeconomic position of black employees in the South African workplace remain unchanged in spite of the advent of democracy in 1994. The black employee’s racial experience in the workplace is indicative of the normative experience of blackness in contemporary South African society that is in agreement with the everyday familiarity of socioeconomic disadvantage and psychosocial subjugation that affects the overall existential experience of blackness. As such, hostile racial interactions in the workplace reflect that the socioeconomic and psychosocial changes expected post-apartheid are materialising at seemingly substandard rates. The current investigation utilised a phenomenological approach to the broader critical psychology of race the interpretive research paradigm and semi-structured interviews to direct thematic data analysis techniques that informed the study conclusions. The participant group consisted of eight tertiary educated black employees, one male and seven females, with an age range of 21 to 27 years, with workplace experience ranging from two weeks to four years. The results of this investigation significantly shows the inefficiency of the democratic redress policy in the facilitation of workplace diversification, and its ineptitude in expediting psychosocial and socioeconomic inclusion, integration and participation such that the existential black employee’s experience of racial identity in the post-apartheid South African workplace is not adversarial. The findings of this investigation suggest that the instances of on-going racism in the workplace are the result of an institutional socioeconomic investment in racial inequality that facilitates hostile racial interactions in the workplace. / NG (2020)

Thesis (MMus (Music))--University of Stellenbosch, 2009. / ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This thesis attempts to understand questions of our past in the present. It is broadly premised on the assumption of complicity as an interpretive frame in which the relationship between Apartheid intellectualisation and Afrikaans music historiography can be elucidated. Its protagonists are Gerrie Eloff, Geoffrey Cronjé, H.F. Verwoerd, Piet Meyer, Jan Bouws, Rosa Nepgen and Jacques Philip Malan. In each of the four chapters, I attempt to construct metaphors, points of intersection or articulation between Apartheid intellectualisation and Afrikaans music historiography. Music is never entirely absent: for Apartheid ideologues such as Geoffrey Cronjé and Gerrie Eloff musical metaphors become ways of enunciating racial theories, for the Dutch musicologist Jan Bouws music provides entry into South Africa and its discourses, for J.P. Malan music becomes a conduit that could facilitate national goals and for Rosa Nepgen music constitutes the perfect domain for and the gestating impulse of her own often ornate national devotions. Some of the themes addressed in this thesis include the language and metaphors of Apartheid intellectualisation, discourses of paranoia, struggle, purity, contamination, the ‘Afrikanermoeder’ (‘Afrikaner mother’), the cultural language of Afrikaner nationalism and the reciprocity between cultural fecundity and dominance of the land. The final denouement comprises a positing of the Afrikaans art song ‘O Boereplaas’ and the singing soprano Afrikanermoeder who emerges as the keeper of Afrikaner blood purity, guardian of her race and prophet of its fate and future. / AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Hierdie tesis probeer om vrae uit ons verlede in die hede te verstaan. Die aanname van komplisiteit verskaf ’n premis en interpreterende raamwerk waarbinne die verhouding tussen Apartheid-intellektualisering en Afrikaanse musiekhistoriografie belig kan word. Die protagoniste van hierdie tesis is Gerrie Eloff, Geoffrey Cronjé, H.F. Verwoerd, Piet Meyer, Jan Bouws, Rosa Nepgen en Jacques Philip Malan. In elk van die vier hoofstukke poog ek om metafore, punte van kruising of artikulasie tussen Apartheid-intellektualisering en Afrikaanse musiekhistoriografie te konstrueer. Musiek word nooit buite rekening gelaat nie: vir Apartheid-ideoloë soos Geoffrey Cronjé en Gerrie Eloff word musikale metafore maniere hoe teorieë oor ras geformuleer kan word, vir die Nederlandse musikoloog Jan Bouws verleen musiek toegang tot Suid-Afrikaanse kulturele diskoerse, vir J.P. Malan word musiek ’n kanaal waardeur nasionale doelstellings vloei en vir Rosa Nepgen verteenwoordig musiek die ideale omgewing en teelaarde vir haar eie en gereeld oordadige nasionale lofuitinge. Sommige van die temas wat in hierdie tesis aangespreek word sluit in die taal en metafore van Apartheid intellektualisering, diskoerse van paranoia, stryd, suiwerheid, kontaminasie, die Afrikanermoeder, die kulturele taal van Afrikanernasionalisme en die wederkerigheid tussen kulturele oplewing en oorheersing van Suid-Afrika. Die tesis word tot slot gevoer deur ’n besinning oor die Afrikaanse kunslied ‘O Boereplaas’ en die singende sopraan, die Afrikanermoeder, wat na vore tree as die bewaarder van Afrikaner-bloedsuiwerheid, oppasser van haar ras en die profetes van die volk se lot en toekoms.

Student Number : 0419886N - MA research report - School of Politics - Faculty of Arts / “The longing for a better world will need to arise at the imagined meeting place of many movements of resistance, as many as there are sites of enclosure and exclusion. The resistance will be as transnational as capital. Because enclosure takes myriad forms, so shall resistance to it.” - Iain A Boal, First World, Ha Ha Ha!, City Lights, 1995 Boal’s description captures the exuberance, hope and confidence of today’s social movements. That there is something irresistible about autonomous, grassroots and subaltern movements in their anti-systemic alternatives to capitalism has become a notion which has gained considerable currency in recent years.1 Formations of these groups (the Zapatistas being the oft cited example) are seen to mirror theories of the most utopian and radical forms of democracy. In Part 1 we seek to examine a range of critical historiography in exploring the features of what is ‘new’ in today’s social movements, using Zapatista style organization and discourse as the prototype. This definition will be moulded with the elements of critical theory which have at their core a radical transformative function of social movements. For example Castells’ work on urban movements pictures: “collective conscious action aimed at the transformation of the institutionalized urban meaning against the logic, interest and values of the dominant class.”2 We will draw from Murray’s assumption that such movements “actively contest the prevailing forms of political representation and the legitimacy of political rule.”3 New social movements (NSM) will be seen within the context of anti-normative approaches to democracy. An alternative pole of reference will emerge in contrast to what we will term low intensity, liberal, parliamentary or bourgeois forms of democracy. All this will be lodged in an understanding of old social movements. We hold these to be single issue movements that fail to forge links to other sites of oppression and exploitation, or movements which take on a narrow class composition and understanding of change. Implicit in moving on from narrow, and or,Marxist-Leninist positions over class, is the multiplicity of relations humans have within the social body. This refutes crude economism conceptions regarding the make-up of the working class.4 However, capitalism and our relations to production, still remain central in understanding the relationship of the subject to the social body. We suggest recent crisis points and weaknesses in capitalism (detected as neo-liberal trends) provide plenty of scope for weaving an historical dialectic back in. Evidence for this comes from critical theory which claims, perhaps falsely, to be founded on anti-essentialism.5 We argue that it is commodification which breeds this resistance against the totalizing effect of capitalism at every level of the structure. Thus neo-liberalism embodies for much of this critical thought the subject of a “Fourth World War” fought by the multitude. 6 The mobile nature of contemporary capital and the immaterial essence of its production to define the multitude – essentially disenfranchised and disaffected subjects – has led to an expanded definition of the old working class.7 The multitude is the reinvention of some social subject invested in an historical project. This multitude has taken on a particular guise, moving away from traditional conceptions of a revolutionary class. As Negri and Hardt note: “The closer we look at the lives and activity of the poor, the more we see how enormously creative and powerful they are”.8 The poor embody the ontological condition not only of resistance but also of productive life itself.9 However, we will also attempt to locate moments within the subject that go beyond the indeterminacies and moments of rupture within the structure. Careful attention will be paid to Zizek’s subject of lack, in assessing the carnivalesque and irrational moments of today’s movements and the role of what we will view as a renewed sense of voluntarism. We remain conscious that we are forging a vision of new social movements which forges an at times uneasy alliance across a variety of groups who challenge dominant structures at different times, spaces and ways. It is sometimes tempting to lump various “anti-globalisation” groups together, without grasping the intricacies and nuances that bind as well as divide them. Ultimately, we accept some of the essentialist critique that can be levelled at NSM theory, recognizing a trope of romanticism around struggle is deliberately and necessarily invented. This will be fully discussed in the controversial claim that some movements and elements of civil society have more validity than others. It will be considered in claiming that moments of oppression, subordination and exploitation require articulation and don’t erupt into historical trajectories of struggle. This requires the development and expression of relative rather than fixed universals (e.g. around democracy, right to water, right to land). It is commodification and neo-liberalism that provides the stimulus for such relative universals. We shall see that they revolve around issues that are real to subjects in the narratives of their struggles and lives.11 Finding some fixity of meaning and experience ensures our analysis is not post-structuralist. Post-structuralism has fostered awkward relationships with truths which have, as Mamdani has noted, not always led to a basis of a “healthy humanism”.12 It leads to a universalized aestheticization whereby truth, reduced to merely a style effect of discursive articulation, forges an endless spectrum of interpretation/re-interpretation. 13 Moreover, it can be utilized to create legitimacy for fascist, colonialist and imperialist discourses. Part 1 attempts to provide the basis for the rest of the work by developing an understanding of the historicity of new social movements and what makes them different to other forms of political and social organisation. This is critical for later discussion which will draw upon the experiences of South Africa. In Part 2 we seek to build from the radical civil society theory and tease out features and characteristics of it within anti-apartheid social movements. This will involve an exploration around township civics which were and are often bundled under the umbrella of the United Democratic Front (UDF). Many of these were built around notions of People’s Power, economic transformation and social justice. We will consider the ideology present in these movements and how it played out in realities, acknowledging the highly repressive scenario of the apartheid state. Within these movements we will flesh out radical spaces and visions which appeared to have dissipated in the ANC hegemony over the decolonisation process and subsequent “transformation” project. We will not shy away from advocating that there were features within such radical spaces, such as Charterist, and or, unity projects, which emerged at various times to create implicitly anti-democratic politics. 14 Such problems as we will see went to the core of the UDF and also into the geo-polities of South Africa which became “ungovernable” in the 1980s. Depoliticization was not just a performative effect of ANC strength or “Stalinism” as often narrated by the left, but a weakness in the structure and formation of civil society. 15 We explore whether it was not just the ANC that “demobilized” the grassroots, but that the form and functioning of civil society that contributed to the conditions in which movements’ own radical notions of People’s Power and direct democracy dissipated. Part 3 will look at this demobilization within the context of the transition to democracy during the negotiated settlement.16 We scrutinize the nature of the period from apartheid to liberal democracy, noting trajectories of struggle which mark both eras. We argue that elements and goals in the struggle that sought a very different democracy to that gained at the CODESA talks have re-emerged in the deepening disillusionment of the ANC project after ten years of governance. This has within some discourse included the ability of the nation-state generally, within neo-liberalism, to bring about social justice. Yet, the suggestion that this is the period of “economic” rather than “racial” apartheid will need to be carefully explored in the context of Fanon’s characterization of national liberation elites.17 While noting the benefit an economic approach has in distinguishing the role of dominant classes, we suggest it can overshadow explicit structures of racism that penetrate to the core of South African society. They are brought out for example by grassroots movements such as the Landless People’s Movement (LPM), in their campaign that equated landlessness with racism. Finally Part 4 examines the extent characteristics we ascribe to the new social movements of South Africa correspond with the features of anti-apartheid struggles of the 1980s. Moreover, it requires us to assess the critical theory developed in Part 1 in terms of realities in post-Apartheid South Africa. We note the apprehension in considering parallels between anti-apartheid struggles and current rights based struggles. While there have been a few attempts to make links within a continuation of struggle from apartheid to neo-liberalism18, all too often, the anti-apartheid struggles that invoked notions of People’s Power have been dismissed as undemocratic, authoritarian and reactionary.19 While an attempt to wipe the slate clean might be useful in carving out a fresh and dynamic image for contemporary social movements, it perhaps ignores that there are similar issues, rhetoric and ideologies being played out today. We will explore whether the historiography simply seeks to justify and re-create contemporary social movements to create ammunition for particular strands of political theory judged to be liberationist and correct within the current historical juncture. Are we carving out a fictional historicity within the identity of struggle that doesn’t exist? Are narratives created more for attachments to a belief in certain “historical” processes than less sharply defined realities? Is the multitude, merely Marx’s 19th century industrial working class, vested with an imaginary historical project? Noting the background of many individuals involved within the APF (trade union, SACP), we need to discuss how they have been placed on a new trajectory of thought given the features which define today’s subjects in NSM compared to orthodox Marxist-Leninist thought around the revolutionary subject. We hope a sketch of the past and an analysis of the present may contribute in the current debates within the social movements during a critical time for anti-capitalist struggles in South Africa. This work is not concerned with producing exhaustive lists of repressive acts conducted by the state, the brutality of private security firms, or broken election promises, but in uncovering the structure of the post-apartheid state and how social movements respond and re-create themselves. Despite their youth, they represent the first serious contestation of ANC hegemony in terms of an alternative discourse around democracy, social justice and transformation. This work has been made possible through regular contact with social movements in Gauteng. Informal participatory discussions with various activists and communities within these struggles have been invaluable and enlightening. Such first hand experience has provided an insight into the operative nature and democratic functioning of a variety of movements including the role of vanguards and leadership. My attendance at various forums and discussions, such as the Social Movements Indaba (SMI), has also been vital. Fundamentally, the work hinges upon a critical exploration from three areas. Firstly, in the discussion necessary to establish a historicity of new social movements which will point to their methodological and epistemic construction. Secondly, upon an understanding of the South African experience that can cover an immense ground from apartheid into liberal-democracy which is aware and responsive to a wide range of historiography. Thirdly, a series of interviews and personal reflections from discussions with various activists across South Africa. Some are well known leaders. Others form part of the collective multitudes beginning to emerge and speak through the fissures of South African society. Relationships that I have made, as well as recent political events, culminated in the choices of the Khayelitsha township of Cape Town, Alexandra in Johannesburg and Harrismith in the Free State as the sites for this part of the research.21 The methodology hinges upon an accurate reflection and assessment of contemporary social movements from the people who participate and function within them, together with an historiographical account of social movements in the South African experience. Limitations here are perhaps obvious. Interviewees may have the tendency to be modest or emphasize their own personal role in struggles. Attendance of community meetings and forums is hoped to counter-balance this together with the use of contemporary subject work. However, there can be no objective yardstick by which to judge the contributions found in this paper. Furthermore, the lack of rigour within the methodology would alarm the majority of modernist and positivist historians and commentators. Yet, it is with this aim that the work attempts to accept the criticisms of romanticism, myth, euphoria and narratives in seeking to forge the very conditions outlined by Boal in which we might find the same “imagined meeting place” and discussion of freedom.

A viewpoint of the intersectional and complex nature of identity is seen to be integral to the understanding of the identities of black female students. ‘Identity constructions of black South African female students’ is an exploratory study with a view to understand the identities of black South African women in institutions of higher learning and education. The study investigated the experiences of 16 female South African black students; with a focus on their race category, gender as well as class subject positions. The study is placed within the context of the Historically White University (HWU) and was specifically conducted in a HWU situated in Johannesburg. The students’ articulations of their university experiences were explored qualitatively, within three focus group discussions through an open-ended interview guideline. Results show that their education is accounted for as a significant influence in their subjectivity given the social mobility it grants as the women’s experience of self shifts as does their position in society. Furthermore it was found that with the cultural capital attained through education, notions of class, racial and gender identities are affected and a multiplicity of identities exists as a result.

No description available.