Apartheid

Local' Writing, 'Global' Reading, and the Demands of the 'Canon': the Case of Alan Paton's Cry, the Beloved Country

by Andrew van der Vlies

South African Historical Journal 55 (2006): 20-32

Reading Banned Books

by Andrew van der Vlies

Wasafiri 22.3 (November 2007): 55-61. [DOI: 10.1080/02690050701565810]

An Interview with Jeremy Cronin

by Andrew van der Vlies

Contemporary Literature 49.4 (Winter 2008): 514–39. [DOI: 10.1353/cli.0.0039]

‘Citizen of the World: Nadine Gordimer’s essays and stories.’ Review of Nadine Gordimer, Life Times: Stories, 1952-2007 and Telling Times: Writing and Living, 1954-2008.

by Andrew van der Vlies

Times Literary Supplement, 3 December 2010: 23-24.

Dockside Prostitution in South African Ports

by Henry Trotter

History Compass 6/3 (2008): 673-690

Prostitution has been a staple of dockside social life for centuries. In South Africa, it dates from the Dutch East... more Prostitution has been a staple of dockside social life for centuries. In South Africa, it dates from the Dutch East India Company's establishment of a refreshment station at the Cape of Good Hope. But unlike other prostitution sectors—streets, brothels, agencies—the women of the dockside sex trade in Cape Town and Durban participate in a global traffic of ideas, diseases, DNA, contraband, and currency through their ceaseless interactions with foreign sailors. They exploit their knowledge of the seamen's languages and cultures so as to more effectively solicit their marks in a competitive and cosmopolitan environment.

Social historians provide passing glimpses of dockside prostitution in their consideration of larger historical themes—Company rule, slavery, British colonial governance, the Mineral Revolution, the Anglo-Boer War, and apartheid—but they have yet to treat it as a distinct analytical category through which to view the past. Yet popular intellectual trends suggest that research into the dockside sex trade would add new dimensions to the histories of cosmopolitanism, gender, globalization, maritime recreation, and the Atlantic and Indian Oceans.

This article provides a quick and accessible introduction to the historiography of dockside prostitution in South Africa.

Trauma and Memory: The Impact of Apartheid-Era Forced Removals on Coloured Identity in Cape Town

by Henry Trotter

in Mohamed Adhikari (Ed.), Burdened by Race: Coloured Identities in Southern Africa (Cape Town: UCT Press, 2009), pp. 49-78

Communities often cohere around memories of historical suffering: yet coloured South Africans, a people whose diverse... more Communities often cohere around memories of historical suffering: yet coloured South Africans, a people whose diverse ancestry experienced enslavement, dispossession, genocidal extermination, and apartheid degradation, for the most part, they do not invest in remote historical traumas. Most coloured Capetonians instead focus upon a painful experience within living memory: the forced eviction of 150,000 coloured people from their homes and communities in the Cape Peninsula between 1957 and 1985 under the Group Areas Act. It is this experience that gives coloured identity vital resonance, especially amongst working class people, many of whom have yet to overcome the losses of that trauma.

Based on over one hundred life history interviews with coloured and African forced removees, this article examines the impact of Group Areas evictions on contemporary coloured identity. It suggests that, in the wake of mass social trauma, coloured removees coped with their pain by reminiscing with each other about the "good old days" in the destroyed communities. Their removal to racially defined townships ensured that they mainly shared their memories with other coloured people, and much less with African or Indian removees.

Apartheid social engineering to a large extent thus determined the spatial limits within which coloured memories circulated, creating a reflexive, mutually reinforcing pattern of narrative traffic. Over the past four decades, the constant circulation of these nostalgic stories has developed a "narrative community" amongst coloured people in the townships. This experience of popular sharing and support in the context of loss today gives coloured identity in Cape Town a dimension that would be lacking if it were only mobilized for political or economic purposes.

Sailing Beyond Apartheid: The Social and Political Impact of Seafaring on Coloured South African Sailors

by Henry Trotter

in Carina Ray & Jeremy Rich (Eds.), Navigating African Maritime History (St John's, Newfoundland: Int'l Maritime Economic History Association, 2010), pp. 189-213

Historians of maritime culture show that, during the Revolutionary Era, the ship was an important site for the... more Historians of maritime culture show that, during the Revolutionary Era, the ship was an important site for the development and dissemination of anti-authoritarian ideals, that seamen were important carriers of revolutionary political consciousness to distant ports, and that the Atlantic basin was radicalized by this maritime traffic. They further suggest that seafarers embraced rebellious strategies because, on land, their rights were often restricted, their property expropriated and their labour exploited while, at sea, many were press-ganged or shanghaied into service, others were bonded into debt-service agreements and all were subject to the capricious rule of an elitist officer class. But these “motley crews” found new opportunities to connect as fellow subalterns, both on ships and on docks, producing a radical maritime tradition.

The question this article poses is: to what extent was this bound to the revolutionary era? Did the cauldron of maritime labour continue to imbue seafarers with a radical political sensibility beyond the age of sail?

To answer this question, I focus on the fortunes of “mixed race” coloured South African seamen who sailed on South African ships during apartheid (1948-1994). I chose this group of Cape Town men because they share structural similarities with their Atlantic ancestors: they were politically oppressed, their land was expropriated by the government and they were physically exploited. By assessing their experiences at home, at sea and abroad, we can better understand how modern seafaring has affected their political consciousness.

July’s People in Context: Apartheid’s dystopias abroad

by Andrew van der Vlies

In Brendon Nicholls, Nadine Gordimer’s July’s People. London: Routledge, 2010 [dated 2011]. 115-30. [ISBN: 978-0-415-42072-3]

Chapter 5: Social Capital

by Thomas Colquhoun-Alberts

with Phillip Dexter and Gigi Edross, in Adam Habib (ed.), 2005, Overcoming the Legacy of Discrimination in South Africa: Report to the President of the Republic of South Africa. Pretoria: Human Sciences Research Council.

The Irish Anti-Apartheid Movement

by Thomas Colquhoun-Alberts

with Kader and Louise Asmal, in Gregory Houston (ed.), The Road to Democracy: International Solidarity and Support, vol. 3 (South African Democracy Education Trust: Pretoria, 2008),

A History of the Disability Rights Movement in South Africa

by Thomas Colquhoun-Alberts

co-authored with Colleen Howell and Schuaib Chalklen, in Brian Watermeyer et al. (eds.) Disability and Social Change: A South African Agenda (Cape Town: Human Sciences Research Council Press, 2006),

A Balance of Forces: The Church In the South African Context

by James R. Cochrane

Extrapolating Revolution in Who Fears Death and District 9

by Frederic Derose-Jacques

Environmental Mediation and Hot Interpretation: a Case Study of District Six, Cape Town

by David Uzzell

South African Mail: Messages from Inside: Women Artists in Resistance

by Janet Goldner

Messham-Muir, Kit. . ‘VIBGYOR: Victor Gordon’s art from 1977 to 2003.’ Vanitas. Broken Hill: Broken Hill City Gallery, 2003

by Kit Messham-Muir

Catalogue essay for Victor Gordon retrospective touring exhibition, 2003-2005

“Truth and Reconciliation as Performance: Spectres of Eucharistic Redemption,” in Looking Back, Reaching Forward: Reflections on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa ed. Charles Villa-Vicencio & Wilhelm Verwoerd (Cape Town: Juta, 2000), 113-122.

by Ebrahim Moosa

Reflections on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa Reflections on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa

Blackout: Freedom without Power and Meritocratic Apartheid

by Christopher Allsobrook

This paper attributes a liberal-republican conception of “freedom-without-power” which dominates contemporary western... more This paper attributes a liberal-republican conception of “freedom-without-power” which dominates contemporary western political philosophy to a reification of social agency that mystifies the historical social, political and economic contexts of human capacities and achievements. Such abstraction, I argue,  is not harmless but functions ideologically amongst prevailing structures of domination and exploitation.
Following Plato’s analogy between the structure of the soul and the polis, I suggest that freedom may be thought a consequence rather than a condition of political relations. I draw on the work of Raymond Geuss to explain why the political contexts of origin and application of “freedom”  are normatively significant. I argue against the use of pre-political ethical frameworks in political philosophy in favor of an historically and contextually sensitive, self-critical approach to the “necessary illusions” of ethics. Such ethical-political integration addresses problems of ideological complicity with an abstract distinction between freedom and power. I show this by drawing a critical account of African identity, from Steven Biko, which addresses ideological blind-spots in Thaddeus Metz’s influential liberal-communitarian interpretation of Ubuntu. The critical account illuminates symptoms of “meritocratic apartheid” in South Africa today, which the pre-political conception obscures. Through satisfaction with a legal, formal projection of freedom, abstracted from power, we have all learned to justify inequality.

Constructions of Childhood In Apartheid's Last Decades.

by Monica Eileen Patterson

Dissertation for Ph.D. in Anthropology and History, University of Michigan, 2009.

My dissertation examines constructions of childhood at a time and place in which black children‘s lives were defined... more My dissertation examines constructions of childhood at a time and place in which black children‘s lives were defined by tremendous instability. On the one hand, these children are often remembered as the most vulnerable and defenseless of apartheid‘s victims. Yet, the history of the struggle for freedom in South Africa reveals that young people were also potent political actors, dangerous and willing to take on a whole government, armed with placards, songs, stones, military training, guns, and other weaponry. They were critical targets of state violence, but also powerful political players and themselves agents of violence.

Semantically, socially, intellectually, "childhood" is in its essence constructed in its meanings and usages. The political, cultural, and social work of childhood lies in these conventions. Suffering and violence vex and complicate the constructions of childhood in South Africa, where violence and childhood were structurally and practically linked through the apartheid system.  Following the Soweto Uprising of 1976, images of children as victims of state-sponsored violence saturated South Africa and the world. 

Within the context of the late apartheid period, the complex relationship between childhood and violence fuels new opportunities for additional reflection and debate by reopening questions about agency, responsibility, culpability, and consciousness for reconsideration and revision. It is impossible to settle on one definition of childhood in South Africa, where the child-youth continuum is one that has been especially open to manipulation by various kinds of actors, including children and youth themselves.

In exploring these issues I examine the Soweto Uprising of 1976, the Bantu Education System, the languages of Afrikaans and the pidgin known as Fanagalo, the United Nations International Year of the Child in 1979 and its counter version, South Africa‘s National "Year of Health," the historical shifts in the iconography and representative range of images of children in South African political posters from the 1980s, and South Africa‘s Truth and Reconciliation Commission Special Hearings on Children and Youth and The Winnie Madikizela-Mandela and the Mandela United Football Club.

La derrota en la victoria: reseña de "Invictus"

by Juan Pablo Serra

Published in SESIÓN NO NUMERADA: REVISTA DE LETRAS Y FICCIÓN AUDIOVISUAL, 1 (2011), 103-109 [review essay]