Browsing by Author "du Toit, André"
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- ItemRestricted'Afrikaander circa 1600': Reflections and Suggestions Regarding the Origins and Fate of Afrikaner Nationalism(Taylor & Francis, 2008) du Toit, AndréThis article compares two quite different portrayals of, and reflections on, the nature and fate of Afrikaner nationalism in its historical entanglement with the apartheid order. On the one hand, it considers the many and sustained publications of the historian Hermann Giliomee, culminating in The Afrikaners (2003). On the other hand, it provides an analysis and interpretation of a work of art, ‘Afrikaander circa 1600’ (2007), an installation by the visual artist and sculptor Andries Botha. While Giliomee’s ‘biography’ of the Afrikaners remains trapped in their struggle for ‘survival’, it fails to historicise fully the demise of Afrikaner nationalism as a political project. As against this, Botha’s installation, on the analogy of the “Bushman Diorama” in the South African Museum, presents a kind of Afrikaner Diorama in a post-apartheid perspective reducing Afrikaner nationalism and power to historical relics.
- ItemRestrictedAskari: a story of collaboration and betrayal in the anti-apartheid struggle by Jacob Dlamini (review)(2016) du Toit, AndréWith the publication of Jacob Dlamini’s Askari the historiography of the South African post-apartheid transition has – in its own good time – come of age. Building on Dlamini’s first book, Native Nostalgia (2009), it also announces the arrival of perhaps our first major post-apartheid historian.
- ItemRestrictedAutonomy as a Social Compact(2007-02) du Toit, AndréThis paper by André du Toit of the University of Cape Town (UCT) is one in a series of research papers on the topic of academic freedom, institutional autonomy and public accountability in contemporary South African higher education. These perspectives have been commissioned as part of the enquiry of an independent Task Team, convened by the Council on Higher Education (CHE), to investigate the past decade of regulation of South African higher education by government and other agencies, and to promote debate on conceptions of autonomy, freedom and accountability, in general, and in the specific context of higher education transformation. Amid concerns and claims by some that the nature of government involvement in South African higher education in the second decade of democracy is in danger of moving from ‘state steering’ to ‘state interference’, the CHE believed it important to undertake a sober and rigorous investigation of the issues, so giving effect to the CHE’s responsibilities independently to advise the Minister of Education, to monitor and evaluate higher education, and to contribute to higher education development. Specifically, the Higher Education, Institutional Autonomy and Academic Freedom (HEIAAF) Task Team investigation – ongoing between 2005 and 2007 – has aimed to: • stimulate research and writing; • build shared understandings of institutional autonomy, academic freedom and public accountability, through the creation of various public fora, public discussion and debate on these important principles; and • develop consensus, as far as is possible, on the nature and modes of government involvement in higher education transformation, and on the relationships between government and other regulatory bodies, and higher education institutions.
- ItemOpen AccessClearing the ground: Spurious attacks and genuine issues in the debate about philosophy in a post‐colonial society(Taylor & Francis (Routledge), 1995) du Toit, AndréFor anyone somewhat in touch with the philosophical community in South Africa it must come as a surprise to learn that analytical philosophy has been under attack, and needs to be defended against its "critics". The very idea of attacking or defending "analytical philosophy" now seems strange and dated; a generation or two ago there was no lack of critics, nor of defences and counterattacks, but much has changed in the philosophical world since then.
- ItemOpen AccessExperiments with Truth and Justice in South Africa: Stockenström, Gandhi and the TRC(Taylor & Francis (Routledge), 2005-06) du Toit, AndréThis article sets out to trace the intellectual and political antecedents of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in the longer perspective of South African history. It does so by taking a closer look at some of the longstanding if intermittent series of South African projects invoking notions of truth and justice, most recently exemplified by the TRC in the context of the new democratic and post-apartheid South Africa of the 1990s. It traces the history from Stockenstro ̈m’s stand for truth and justice on the frontier in the 1830s, through Gandhi’s mobilisation of ‘truth-force’ as a resource for popular protest at the beginning of the twentieth century, to truth and justice in the theory and practice of the TRC. It argues that the TRC process was characterised by a major shift from a central concern with truth as acknowledgement and justice as recognition during the initial victims’ hearings to the quasi- judicial aims and procedures of the amnesty hearings and the perpetrator findings of the TRC Report. It concludes that no direct line can be traced from Stockenstro ̈m and Gandhi’s truth experiments to the TRC process as a founding action of the ‘new South Africa’. None of these experiments is deemed anything like an unqualified ‘success’, or even to have produced clear and unambiguous outcomes. In trying to speak of ‘truth’ and ‘justice’ in South African conditions, Stockenström, Gandhi, and the TRC successively became ensnared in a range of confusions, ambivalences and contradictions.
- ItemRestrictedFrom autonomy to accountability: Academic freedom under threat in South Africa?(Taylor & Francis (Routledge), 2000) du Toit, AndréInvocations and defenses of academic freedom in South Africa should not necessarily be taken at face value. The threats may be all too real, and the stakes very high indeed, as the experience of universities under apartheid has shown, but on this ideological battleground the enemies of academic freedom typically do not announce themselves as such while the defenders of academic freedom may turn out to have their own ulterior motives and hidden agendas. Thus if the Extension of University Education Act 45 of 1959, which sought to proscribe the admission of black students to traditionally white universities, announced the National Party (NP) government as the prime threat to academic freedom in the eyes of the liberal or 'open universities', this did not mean that the NP government for its own part also openly admitted to the objective of doing away with academic freedom. On the contrary, their official view, as adumbrated in the Main Report of the Commission of Inquiry into Universities of 1974, popularly known as the Van Wyk de Vries Report, was that 'everyone is agreed that universities should have academic freedom', and the Report went to considerable lengths to demonstrate that separate development policies were in accordance with the 'proper' understanding of the ideal of academic freedom (Van Wyk de Vries 1974: 27). In this respect, as John Higgins (2000: 107-8) points out in a recent article, it does not differ all that much from the position taken by the post-apartheid National Commission on Higher Education (NCHE) in its 1996 report, A Framework for Transformation.
- ItemRestrictedHealing the Healers? The TRC's Hearings on the Health Sector(University of KwaZulu-Natal, 1998) du Toit, AndréThe health sectoral hearings were not what many participants anticipated. Those who expected to name the professionals guilty of misconduct were disappointed. Were the hearings about telling the truth and promoting reconciliation, or about restoring the lost honour of the medical profession?
- ItemOpen AccessInstitutionalizing Free Inquiry in Universities during Regime Transitions: The South African Case(Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009) du Toit, AndréFor South African higher education and institutionalized research, the transition to a democratic "new South Africa" in the 1990s opened the way to different kinds of fundamental change. The transition also brought new risks and more insidious threats to free inquiry. Taken together these make for a complex and confusing overall picture that can be read in opposite ways. Some changes, especially those that signal the achievement of long social and political struggles, take center stage as dramatic manifestations of a new order of free inquiry. Other changes, especially those brought about by the unanticipated impact of global trends on the restructuring of South African higher education, were only remarked in retrospect. Perhaps the most difficult to assess are those the transition made conceivable, but in the event did not take place. Thus South Africa's democratic transition suggested that beyond the deracialization of the elite sector, inclusive access to higher education would enable free inquiry to draw on the intellectual resources of society as a whole. Regime change from apartheid to democracy promised the institutionaliza- tion of a more robust and flourishing culture of free inquiry fit for a democratic society. (And if this was not realized, how should that lack be identified and assessed?)
- ItemRestrictedLaying the Past to Rest(University of KwaZulu-Natal, 1994) du Toit, AndréThe new Government's proposed Commission on Truth and Reconciliation is bound to be controversial. But drawing on international experience, the Commission will wisely place concern for 'truth' above Justice', ensuring public acknowledgement of serious human rights violations under an agreement for political amnesty, and it could help settle accounts from the past and contribute towards national reconciliation.
- ItemOpen AccessThe Legacy of Daantjie Oosthuizen: Revisiting the Liberal Defence of Academic Freedom(CODESRIA, 2005) du Toit, AndréThe classic formulations of the liberal notion of academic freedom in the South African context date from the period of the late 1950s and early 1960s when the ‘Open Universities’ had to define their stance in the face of the onslaught of Verwoerdian apartheid ideology and rampant Afrikaner nationalism. Adumbrated in the hallowed T. B. Davie formula (‘our freedom from external interference in (a) who shall teach, (b) what we teach, (c) how we teach, and (d) whom we teach’) and articulated more extensively in two short books, The Open Universities in South Africa (1957) and The Open Universities in South Africa and Academic Freedom, 1957-1974 (1974), jointly published by the universities of Cape Town and Witwatersrand, these classic formulations were, above all, concerned with a defence of academic freedom essentially conceived as the institutional autonomy of the university vis-à-vis possible interference or regulation by the state. Forty years on, it is time to revisit these classic defences of academic freedom from the very different vantage point of the newly democratic South Africa. Both the external and the internal contexts of academic freedom have radically changed. Not only has the statutory framework of the apartheid state been dismantled and the ideological force of Afrikaner nationalism spent but the former ‘open universities’ have themselves been transformed in various ways (though not in others). The relatively small-scale collegial institutions almost wholly dependent on state subsidies are now part of a massively expanded tertiary sector subject to the macro-politics of educational restructuring as much as the domestic impact of the managerial revolution within the university itself. In this new context academic freedom no longer has to be defended primarily against the external threat of state intervention; rather it has to be defined in relation to basic democratic norms of accountability and in the often non-collegial context of the contemporary academic workplace.
- ItemOpen AccessNo Rest Without the Wicked: Assessing the Truth Commission(University of KwaZulu-Natal, 1997) du Toit, AndréHalf way through its term, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission has achieved much given its complex task. The TRC's uniquely public and democratic nature accounts for some strengths but also many weaknesses. Dealings with victims have been successful. But if substantial numbers of perpetrators, particularly prominent security and ANC figures, do not apply for amnesty, the TRC will have failed in one of its main objectives.
- ItemRestrictedThe Owl of Minerva and the Ironic Fate of the Progressive Praxis of Radical Historiography in Post-apartheid South Africa(2010) du Toit, AndréThis review essay reflects on issues raised by a recent edited volume. Despite its title and stated objectives, ‘History Making and Present Day Politics’ does not provide a broad and inclusive survey of post-apartheid South African histo- riographical developments. Its main topic is the unexpected demise in the post- apartheid context of the radical or revisionist approach that had invigorated and transformed the humanities and social studies during the 1970s and 1980s. In the context of the anti-apartheid struggle the radical historians had developed a plausible model of praxis for progressive scholarship, yet in the new post-apartheid democratic South Africa radical historical scholarship itself encountered a crisis of survival. This should not be confused with a general ‘crisis’ of historical scholarship in South Africa, as some of the uneven contributions to this volume contend, as that remains an active and diversely productive field due also to substantial contributions by historians not based in South Africa. If the dramatic and ironic fate of radical historical scholarship in the context of the transition to a post-apartheid democracy is the volume’s primary topic, then it unfortunately fails to provide serious and sustained critical reflection on the origins and pos- sible explanations of that crisis. It is argued that a marked feature of the accounts of ‘history making’ provided in this volume is the (former) radical historians’ lack of self-reflexivity and the scant interest shown in the underlying history of their own intellectual trajectories.
- ItemOpen AccessUnderstanding South African Political Violence: A New Problematic?(1993-04) du Toit, AndréPolitical violence has deep historical roots in South Africa. But if violence has figured prominently, it usually has not proved too difficult to make sense of it: the violence of conquest, the violence of frontier wars, the violence of apartheid and of the struggle against apartheid, the criminal violence of gangs and the ritualized violence of faction fights. Understanding such types of violence has consisted in relating the pathologies and instrumentalities of violence in appropriate ways to these primary social processes and political phenomena. The extent and intensity of current political violence is, however, more difficult to comprehend. This essay, by André du Toit, is in part an attempt to provide an interpretation of the “new political violence”. At one level, the current process of transition has resulted in a shift from the politics of violence to the politics of negotiation. At another level, however, the process has been marked by increasing political violence in the black townships. The incidence of interracial violence has been more limited. The current patterns of violence need to be understood in part in the context of local struggles that are independent of the “master narrative” of violence. They are also not unrelated to the processes of modernization generated by apartheid and to the rapidly diminishing expectations from the negotiations currently underway. The paper places political violence in the context of attempts and steps toward modernization that date back to the seventeenth century. The earlier forms of violence involved warfare between isolated communities, the expansion of the frontier, the formation of the modern state and the suppression of resistance to colonial rule by the Boers and the Zulus. The key feature of African resistance to oppression in the twentieth century was, however, its non-violent character. The resistance was based on demands for full incorporation in the modern state with civil and political rights of citizenship. Even the enforced recourse to violence after the imposition of apartheid did not represent a rejection of the values and ideals of the modern political state and society.