South Africa

A federal judge has upheld Harvard College’s admissions program against a challenge from Edward Blum. Her opinion reinforces what I interpret to be the true purpose of affirmative action in the U.S., which is the pursuit of racial transition.

Violence, oppression, otherisation and marginalisation have long been used as political and militaristic tools by organised groups of powerful elite on subjugated persons. The use of these tools over a prolonged period of time and especially when used to target a segment of a community has been a repeated tactic of establishments keen to hold power over individuals and groups. In most instances, these individuals and groups which make up the oppressed, marginalised, otherised community have also been stripped of their agency to engage and protest at their treatment at a political level – to a degree they have been stripped of their voice to counteract the violence and exclusion. To such a notion, the Rohingya too have systematically been stripped of their agency and their will to protest at their treatment at the hands of the Burmese Junta and now the so called Burmese Government.

Many solutions for the Rohingya have been bandied about by academics, diplomats and activists and yet almost 37 years after the 1982 Citizenship Law which effectively took away the rights of the Rohingya in Burma, none of those solutions have led to anywhere near the solution of citizenship and protection that the Rohingya have sought. The Genocidal wave of 2017 is not new; the Rohingya have been here before in 1978 and 1990’s when other waves of genocidal actions by the Burmese Military and Government have led to mass exodus. The solution of repatriation has failed. It failed in 1978 and it failed in 1992 and it will fail again once enacted by Burma and Bangladesh whether that’s in 2019, 2020 or any future date. Repatriation fails because it does not take into account the demands of the Rohingya people. And so diplomatic tools of lifting of sanctions without tangible changes in the lives of the common man have been not only premature but have also shifted the momentum away from changing civil society for the better. The reasoning and logic for the lifting of sanctions, whether that is from the USA or the EU or for that matter any other nation or group of nations ultimately was driven by economic growth chances rather than changes politically.

During the Bengal uprising against British colonial rule at the turn of the twentieth century prominent thinker and activist Sri Aurobindo opined that boycott was not just a passive form of resistance to colonial rule but an active one.  In fact he went on to compare the boycotts of the Americans against British rule and even China’s boycotting of American goods too. To bring the call for boycott in relation to the Rohingya and Burma, more recent examples of boycotts against South Africa in view of their apartheid and the boycott, divest and sanctions movement (BDS) against Israeli occupation of Palestine are valuable comparatives.

With diplomacy, repatriation and sanctions currently not working as political solutions to the Rohingya genocide perpetrated by Burma, boycott has to be a very real solution that should be considered deeply. Any serious boycott of Burma cannot be singled down to things like travel bans or certain businesses. It cannot be on only issues such as sanctioning the trade of arms or jewels. It cannot be centered around the boycotting of Burmese academics and thought leaders. The boycott must be anchored by the suffering that the Burmese military and government has caused.

The boycott should be wide ranging and widely supported. If it cannot be supported by the international community through academia, media and political spheres, then we can all hold our hands up for watching an ethnic group being totally and irreversibly destroyed.

The relationship between a middle income white precinct in Melville and the post-apartheid predominantly black city of Johannesburg are still seen as separate entities. This poses a threat to the democratic production of space in a post-apartheid city like Johannesburg. Through a city-funded, "bottom-up" approach, the Johannesburg Development Agency (JDA) funded a Community Participatory Design (CPD) project known as the Melville Precinct Plan, in which the Melville Residents Association (MRA) have voiced a different opinion about the way that the urban is envisioned in relation to the Strategic Area Framework (SAF) set out by the City of Johannesburg. The city of Johannesburg's planning policies and its urban development projects aggressively address the concerns of the post-apartheid city which segregated people by race and today the long lasting dire effects of spatial inequality are still experienced by the marginalised. The "Corridors of Freedom" scheme is a special project which was initiated by the Mayor Parks Tau a few years ago and aims to re-stitch city back together again. Amongst many other policies which echo the same anti-apartheid values, the SAF exhibits progressive socioeconomic place-making strategies and is mainly focused along three main transport corridors around Johannesburg. The Empire-Perth corridor connects Johannesburg Central Business District (CBD) and the township of Soweto and along this corridor, on the border of the CBD, Melville is a white middle income neighbourhood which was commissioned by the JDA to undergo a CPD for a new vision of the precinct to support the Corridors of Freedom Project. However, the project received resistance from the MRA due to the imposing effects of urban densification on the precinct. Some of the questions we ask in this paper are: why does the MRA disagree with the Metropolitan Development Framework? To what extent does race and fear play a part in the argument? How do we make a sustainable and equitable post-apartheid city? What are the values of government, how do they relate to policies and how does they filter down to municipal level and make a difference on the ground to communities on an urban level? (Marinova and Hossain, 2013, p. 347).The aim of this paper is to discuss the relationship between this pro-liberal urban development planning project and the responses of a resistant minority group in Johannesburg in 2017. The paper contextualises the post-apartheid city and the pertinent arguments both for and against development. It questions what kind of development is important on the borders of the city, what fears are synonymous with that, but also what is unfair and exclusionary practice? The research will consider the Melville Precinct Plan as a case study, and look at its framing policies and the general outcomes in order to unpack how the borders, peripheries and edges are used politically to undermine generous public participation processes in planning for a new vision for a community.

Published by George Washington University Columbian College of Arts and Sciences, October 2019

https://columbian.gwu.edu/gw-arts-sciences-magazine

If race is a central part of human identity, can one own or disown one’s race? To which community would a multiracial person, immigrant, or diasporic subject belong? What future is there for race as a viable concept? Professor of English Alexa Alice Joubin breaks new ground in critical race studies by placing “race” at the intersections of gender, class, whiteness, blackness, and “invisible races” in South Africa, Israel, India, Western Europe, US, East Asia, and Asian America. From Black Lives Matter to #MeToo movements, the book close reads a wide array of cases of racialized language from the Middle Ages to Renaissance to the twentieth century and demonstrates that race is profoundly constituted by language and narratives.

This piece, first presented at the Africa-Asia international conference in Dar es Salaam in 2018, was inspired by the possibility of encountering transcontinental conversations about law and history at the conference. In consulting this work as a doctoral student, a key question emerged for me: what are the possibilities and limits of reconstructing political thought through court cases? While earlier generations of legal historians have debated this issue, new intellectual histories from Africa and economic histories from South Asia suggest the time is right for a reappraisal.

The year 1948 was critical in the history of two multiethnic nations, Israel and South Africa. In 1948, the nation of Israel was created by a United Nations partition of the British protectorate of Palestine. The Israeli Declaration of Independence enshrined the principle of equal ...

This article explores the relationship between breath and emotion and between breath and image in an attempt to make theatre and performance that is inspired by a biography of the body. It investigates the body as a site for generating images for the purpose of performance-making. The article is a methodological study that draws from various traditions, methods, and somatic practices. It explores the relationship between body, breath, and feeling and how these impacts on the imagination in processes of producing images for performance-making. It further investigates whether breath can be experienced as an embodied element that is sensed somatically by performers. The author argues that it can, and in so doing may, act as a catalyst for activating memories, stories, and experiences held in the body of the performer.

Shore platforms found along rock coasts worldwide are often interpreted as wave abrasion acting on uniform bedrock surfaces. Whilst this viewpoint may apply at the macroscale, there are complex feedbacks between bedrock properties (rock type, mineralogy, rock structures), weathering and erosion processes and rates, and microtopography at the meso- to microscale. In turn, these influence wave runup, backwash processes, and extent of wave-splash and physical, chemical and biological weathering processes that result. This study investigates the relationships between bedrock hardness properties, microtopography and shore platform denudation processes from a site on the Indian Ocean-facing coast of South Africa. Three shore-normal transects (45–57 m in length) were surveyed across the sandstone platform using a differential GPS. These data were integrated with rock surface hardness measurements along the transects taken using a Proceq Equotip instrument. Results show that platform morphology and hardness values vary considerably, corresponding to the most dominant denudation processes found at different positions in the tidal frame. The lowest hardness values (most extensive rock weathering) are found on the landward third of the platform but away from the land margin. The highest and greatest variability of hardness values are found on bedrock highs immediately above highest astronomical tide level, in the lower third of the profile. This position suggests a dominant role of wave-splash and wetting/drying. Variations in hardness values and microtopography through the transects were used to develop an evolutionary model linking rock hardness values to specific weathering and erosion processes of the rocky shore platform.

The study reported in this article explored the nexus between military theory and history. Military theory attempts to quantify, qualify and illuminate the often unpredictable phenomenon of war. The article consists of two parts: the theory of manoeuvre warfare and the history of the 1914-1915 South African campaign in German South West Africa (GSWA). The GSWA campaign has been described in many ways as a secondary theatre within the greater geostrategic chess game of the First World War. The objective of this analysis was to question whether the South African victory resulted from vast numerical superiority or from the operational concepts, which the South Africans applied in the execution of the campaign.

The First World War moulded the global landscape and had a lasting effect on much of the world. Where the majority of international research focusses on the European theatre, Antonio Garcia explores one of the peripheral campaigns of the Great War. South Africa’s First World War campaign in German South West Africa was a daring military undertaking epitomised by manoeuvre and rapidity.

Antonio takes a novel approach in comparing the campaign to manoeuvre warfare theory. Manoeuvre theory is based on the principles of mobility, rapidity and surprise which attempts to achieve victory with the least loss of resources and in the shortest time possible. In order to achieve a rapid victory against the German forces, the South African soldiers were pushed to the limits of exhaustion to achieve the Union of South Africa’s strategic objectives.

The campaign in the deserts of German South Africa became the setting for adventure and war, where Briton, Boer and People of Colour served together as a Dominion of the British Empire. Blacks, Coloureds and Indians fought for the hopes of better political franchise, an ambition which was not to be achieved until 80 years later. The book addresses the complex political dynamics in South Africa at the time of the Great War, the deep division between Afrikaners and British South Africans and the Afrikaner Rebellion. 

With the backdrop of political difficulties and a lack of overwhelming support for the entry into the Great War, the Botha government needed a quick result so as to maintain the delicate balance of power. Antonio provides an analysis on the campaign through the lens of military theory so as to determine how the swift victory was achieved. The book answers the question of whether the campaign was won through numerical superiority or through the use of a superior operational strategy. The victory was the first campaign victory led by a British Dominion.

Jesus die Doper Waarom noem ons Johannes "die Doper"? Omdat hy mense in water gedoop het vir 'bekering'. Waarom noem ek Jesus "die Doper"? Omdat hy die sonde oorkom en ons uit die land van die dood gered het, het hy ons kom doop vir die 'bekering van sondes'. Net nadat hy uit die dood opgestaan het, doop hy sy dissipels met 'n gees en nie met water nie (Johannes 20:22).

The paper examines how the disappointment of ex-resistance fighters can illuminate the grey zone of founding-the ambiguity of beginning anew against the background of systemic violence that eludes the predominant linear visions of transition. For a theoretical framework, I draw on Hannah Arendt's insights into the ambiguity of beginning anew as a practice of attunement that takes oppressive practices as points of departure for democratizing political action. I explore how the ex-resisters' stories of disappointment can invigorate this practice, focusing on their ability to reorient political action towards reframing unjust relationships in a way that guards against systematic exclusions in the future. The paper demonstrates the political relevance of disappointment on the example of a South African ex-resister's memoir, Pregs Govender's Love and Courage. Govender's narrative discloses how experiences of disappointment can orient the ex-resisters' efforts to confront the complexities of founding obscured from the official story.