Browsing by Subject "apartheid"

Now showing 1 - 5 of 5
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Open Access
    Becoming with the dog in South Africa Reflections on family, memory, and human-animal relations in post-apartheid South Africa
    (2022) Ndaba, Mpho Antoon; Twidle, Hedley
    Can the relationship White people have with the figure of the dog, in what currently exists as South Africa, be free of antiblackness? Following instances where I saw black women who worked as domestic workers walk dogs belonging to their White employers, I write these letters addressed to you, my sister, Palesa – meditating on the dog-Human relationships as sites of racial violence. The core analytic framework and theory I employ to explore these extreme, mundane, and in-between forms of violence, is Afro-Pessimism.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Open Access
    The Land Question in South Africa: the challenge of transformation and distribution
    (2010) Ntsebeza, Lungisile; Hall, Ruth
    Since the advent of democracy in 1994, issues at the heart of the land question in South Africa are how to reverse this phenomenon and how a large-scale redistribution of land can contribute to the transformation of the economy and the reduction of poverty, both rural and urban. The extent to which indigenous people were dispossessed of their land by whites in South Africa under colonial rule and apartheid has no parallels on the African continent. This book debates these issues against the backdrop of a land reform programme that made limited headway in the first decade of South Africa's democracy. The book offers a robust assessment of that programme and raises critical questions for its future.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Restricted
    Memory, Conscience andthe Museum in South Africa: The Old Langa Pass Office and Court
    (2008) Ralphs, Gerard
    The old pass office and court in Langa was a site of apartheid brutality. In its day-to-day workings, the court found thousands of South Africans guilty of ‘crimes’ that were only crimes in the radically unjust society that the apartheid government cultivated. This paper explores how residents from Langa have remembered the site of the old pass office and court through the lens of oral history. In doing so, it asks how the site, now the Langa Museum, may become a space of memory, identity, and political conscience and consciousness in a post-apartheid context. What insight and wisdom lie embedded in Langa residents’ oral histories about the old pass office? And how can oral historians, Langa residents, museum and heritage practitioners, and visitors to Langa access and utilise the transformative narrative power of these site-stories in the shifting contexts of the site as an emergent social history museum? At what point does the old Langa pass office cease to be a dark space of apartheid, and begin to become a space of post-apartheid humanity and creativity? Indeed, can the Langa Museum become a ‘living’ social history museum? What would a transformation of this nature entail for oral history, Cape Town's memory communities, community-based heritage practice, citizenship, and identity in the South African postcolony?
  • No Thumbnail Available
    Item
    Open Access
    South African political thought
    (2014-04-24) Duthie, Shawn
    This collection of materials is taken from a semester long course within the UCT Political Studies programme, concerning political thought in South Africa. Students on the course would attend around 4 hour-long lectures and 1 tutorial per week. The materials presented here are selected lecture notes and tutorial plans. Not all lectures in the series have notes; some consisted of discussion sessions. This outline details the readings students would be expected to study prior to attending these lectures. Whilst the actual lectures (and debates) have not been provided, this collection should provide an introduction to the themes of the course and provide the kinds of questions that aid the understanding of political thought in South Africa. Go to South African Political Thought This course provides a survey of the main developments in South African political thought since the beginning of the twentieth century. A twelve-week course cannot cover every significant development in South African political thought in this period; but this course is intended to give students an understanding of the main political traditions in modern South Africa, and how they have interacted and developed. At the same time, the material is organized around themes that are not specific to any one political or ideological tradition, but play a role in defining the politics of specific periods. The three main organizing themes are described briefly in the following section of this outline. Finally, the course is intended to provide a sense of the overall trajectory of political ideas in modern South Africa, its distinctive character and its significance for understanding and assessing contemporary developments. The essays for the course require students to discuss specific questions in such a way as to clarify that larger historical trajectory.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Open Access
    The theatre of violence: narratives of protagonists in the South African conflict
    (HSRC Press, 2005) Foster, Don; Haupt, Paul; De Beer, Marésa
    This profound and deeply compassionate study aims to reach into the complexities of political violence in South Africa between 1960 and 1994, and to expand our understanding of the patterns of conflict that almost drew South Africans into a vortex of total disintegration during the apartheid era. This book is used in the teaching of critical and social psychology at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels. While many accounts have focused on the victims of state repression, this unique volume documents the often contradictory and confusing stories of those who acknowledge having committed some dreadful deeds. Individuals on various sides of the apartheid divide, from state security structures to the ANC, PAC and grassroots, activists, tell their own stories. The central focus is to give an account of the actions of the perpetrators, here depicted as competing protagonists in an arena of violence. It examines the violence forensically, through its public and popular representations, academically and, finally, through the narrative approach, drawing on a rich analysis of stories from different sides. The authors also offer the first critical examination of the TRC's amnesty process, show how media representations of perpetrators inform public perceptions, and scrutinise international scholarly writings on the issue of political violence. Suggestive and intriguing, The Theatre of Violence opens a fresh examination of the erstwhile taken-for-granted understandings and attempts to address a range of questions that are often not considered, and perhaps cannot be considered, in a dispassionate way. It is in many ways an optimistic study, holding out the possibility of a society that can understand and take steps to minimise the perpetration of gross violations of human rights.