Browsing by Subject "post-apartheid"

Now showing 1 - 8 of 8
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    Access to learning resources in Post-apartheid South Africa
    (Massachusetts Institute of Technology & International Development Research Centre, 2018-05-01) Gray, Eve; Czerniewicz, Laura; Joe Karaganis
    Any inquiry into how university students get the learning resources they need for their education in post-apartheid South Africa must deal with three interrelated subjects: the legacy of apartheid, which continues to structure educational opportunities in important ways more than twenty years after the first democratic election; the organization and increasingly radical transformation of the commercial publishing market, which has been the primary source of textbooks and other materials in the system; and— common to all of the chapters in this book—the mix of new-technology-enabled strategies through which students do their best to get the textbooks and other materials they need. We track three decades of tensions around these issues, as post-apartheid leaders struggle to reform an educational system originally designed primarily to control and oppress rather than educate the majority population. Because the old system had grown up around numerous (and often colonially grounded) accommodations of the global publishing business, international copyright law, and—most important—a structural disregard for whether the system worked in more than a minimal sense, the pressure for reform has produced tensions on all of these fronts.
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    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.
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    Film adaptation of the post-apartheid South African novel: re-examining the aesthetics of creation of disgrace
    (2022) Sawadogo, Denis; Moji, Polo; Ouma, Christopher
    While many scholarships of the film adaptation of Disgrace have championed the fidelity rhetoric of the film with respect to J.M. Coetzee's novel, and in so doing, have advocated the axiomatic hierarchy of literature over cinema, this dissertation challenges the fidelity discourse about the film and proposes new tropes for adaptation criticism beyond the classical paradigm. Central to the thesis is the argument that a re-examination of Steve Jacobs's feature film Disgrace unveils the inconsistency and inadequacy of the fidelity rhetoric as a language for adaptation criticism, positions the film as an independent genre with its specificity and poeticity, and allows for an intertextual dialogue with other post-apartheid South African and postcolonial African cinematic productions as a means of promoting adaptation criticism beyond the fidelity model. While cementing the film's independent status vis-à-vis the novel, the intertextual critique also allows for a rewriting of Jacobs's Disgrace that addresses its shortcomings and controversies. Hence, drawing upon structural narratologists such as Gerard Genette, postcolonial scholars such as Gayatri Spivak and Frantz Fanon, and adaptation critics including Linda Hutcheon, Robert Stam, Alexie Tcheuyap, and Lindiwe Dovey, the dissertation explores at a time formal and thematic aesthetics of the film adaptation to diversify its critical avenues not only but also to bridge epistemological gaps left by previous studies which are limited to thematic hermeneutics.
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    Growing up in the new South Africa: childhood and adolescence in post-apartheid Cape Town
    (2011) Bray, Rachel; Gooskens, Imke; Moses, Sue; Kahn, Lauren; Seekings, Jeremy
    How has the end of apartheid affected the experiences of South African children and adolescents? This pioneering study provides a compelling account of the realities of everyday life for the first generation of children and adolescents growing up in a democratic South Africa. The authors examine the lives of young people across historically divided communities at home, in the neighbourhoods where they live, and at school. This resource can be used be anyone interested in developing their knowledge on the experiences of children in post-apartheid South Africa.
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    The men who shaped the South African media: the untold story
    (2014-09-29) Matisonn, John
    The media was one of the first sectors to change in South Africa after apartheid. This three-lecture course will argue that its future is now at risk not only because of government measures such as the Secrecy Bill but also because of changes of ownership amid the technological revolution. The course will draw on new research as well as the lecturer’s firsthand knowledge of key events, including the original exposés of the Broederbond and Muldergate, apartheid era attempts to stop reporting on corruption, the downfall of the Rand Daily Mail, the establishment of the Nigerian-backed and short-lived THISDAY newspaper, the Truth Commission hearings on the media, and the opening of the airwaves after 1994. It will describe the influence of two men who set the philosophy of the SABC: Lord John Reith, founder of the BBC, and Dr Piet Meyer, a Nationalist leader. The role of Charles Bloomberg, a journalist who pioneered the exposure of Meyer and the Afrikaner Broederbond, will be explored, as will Muldergate, the scandal driven by Prime Minister John Vorster’s determination to stop the anti-apartheid Rand Daily Mail newspaper. The course will show how the apartheid government spent millions of rands to influence, buy, bribe or close newspapers and media, civil society organisations and churches around the world. The final lecture will explain how the media changed at the end of apartheid, how the Truth Commission hearings on the media influenced that change, the new era of the Secrecy Bill and new ownership of key media institutions.
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    Savings, insurance and debt over the post-apartheid period: a review of recent research
    (2004) Cally, Ardington; David, Lam; Murray, Leibbrandt; James, Levinsohn
    Sustainable poverty reduction requires that poor households effectively manage risk. The absence of basic financial services is a major obstacle to poverty reduction in South Africa. This paper reviews available South African literature on utilisation of formal and informal risk management instruments. The centrality of income in accessing the complementary bundle of formal financial services excludes households in the lower deciles from formal financial services. Rural households and households without formally employed household members are also denied access. Strong complementarities with informal channels of finance mean that these same households have limited access to even informal financial services. Promoting the use of savings accounts in pension and social grant payouts and the growth of village banks have been suggested as means to increase formal access for the poor.
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    The South African Variety of Capitalism
    (Taylor and Francis, 2013) Nattrass, Nicoli
    This paper explores the South African political economy through the lens of a variety of capitalism (VoC) approach. It argues that attempts were made in the early post-apartheid period to forge a more social-democratic and co-ordinated variety of capitalism, but that this floundered as the government adopted neoliberal macroeconomic policies against the wishes of organised labour, and as black economic empowerment policies further undermined an already racially-fraught business sector. Organised labour was able to push for, and maintain, protective labour market policies – but this came at the cost of growing policy inconsistency notably with regard to trade liberalisation which, in the presence of growing labour-market protection, has exacerbated South Africa's unemployment crisis. Unemployment remains intractable (and with it inequality) and corruption/patrimonialism appears to be a growing problem.
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    (Un)Homely in Cape Town: contested space and the post-apartheid urban narrative
    (2021) Mahatey, Ayesha; Moji, Polo
    Negotiation of urban space is particularly pertinent to South African history as a site of social and spatial conflict resulting from the legislative practices and social engineering of the apartheid government in the form of the Group Areas Act (1950). As a postcolonial and post-apartheid city, Cape Town has the distinction of evolving from pre-apartheid's least segregated city to apartheid's most segregated city, with many of the injustices of the past perpetuated in the post-apartheid era by its current neoliberal order. Yet, in The Rediscovery of the Ordinary (1991), South African writer Njabulo Ndebele asserts that Johannesburg has always been, the centre of South African resistance and “spectacle” – and the object of studies such as Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis (2008). Located at the intersection of urban and postcolonial studies, this study is grounded by the framework of ‘critical urban theory' (Michel De Certeau, Henri Lefevre, Neil Brenner), which frames urban space as a “site, medium and outcome” of histories of social power. It therefore reads the post-apartheid narratives of The Woman Next Door (2016) by Yewande Omotoso, Thirteen Cents (2001) by Sello Duiker and Living Coloured: Because Black and White Were Taken (2019) by Yusuf Daniels, as representations of the city as “politically and ideologically mediated, socially contested and therefore malleable” space, by drawing on Sarah Nuttall's assumption of place – specifically the city – as a constitutive subject of certain narratives as well as Homi Bhabha's notion of the “unhomely”. The concepts of home, unhoming and homelessness are therefore used to establish how history and space collide to create a palimpsestic reading of Cape Town. Thus, the study maps spatial contestation in central and peripheral locations of the city and raises questions of racialised and class-based (un)belonging as representative of the post-apartheid South African city.