This is an opportune moment to raise a more general question. The peculiar character of democratic sovereignty is that it derives from the ‘people’ – this is one of the basic problematiques of the democratic imaginary (Wagner: 2013).
Non-state transnational actors have always played a central role in Sahelian economic structures and geopolitical arrangements not least because of their capacity to constitute sources of authority and sustenance outside and across state structures.
I argue that the trial of Jacob Zuma for rape was a story-telling contest, one in which a narrative of traumatising father-daughter rape was pitted against another of “delicious” consensual sex, with the final judgement acting as the authoritative or master narrative.
Testing Benedict Anderson’s thesis that nations are communities imagined principally
in the medium of the printed word, this chapter surveys a variety of writings on South
Africa from the decade between the South African War (1899-1902) and the moment
In the history of conscription in Rhodesia what began as a straightforward appeal to citizenship and national defense became obsessed not with the obligations of citizens but the fate of young men called upon to do the work of soldiering, work that had already been done for over a generation by A
This paper traces the history of four words central to the political vocabulary of the antiapartheid struggle: 'multi-racial,' "non-racial,' 'multi-racialism,' and 'non-racialism.' The opposition between 'non-racialism' and 'multi-racialism' was ab
Writing on the city of Luanda, the capital of Angola, is not an easy task. Part of the difficulty stems from my aim to provide more than a descriptive account of the city. My primary intention in this book is to reflect on the spatial transformation of the city of Luanda over time.
This chapter documents the emergence of the local manufacturing of skin lighteners in South Africa, and the linked and shifting markets for these cosmetics in the United States and South Africa.
Although it is not surprising to find that the colonial archive is replete with pictures of Africans who were employed as policemen, soldiers and mercenaries, it is more surprising to find these types of photographs in private family albums or on sale as postcards.
The paper explores various aspects in the development of the Palestinian national movement, with a focus on the ways in which it has conceptualized its core political goals. In particular, it looks at the extent to which it can be regarded as an anti-colonial or anti-apartheid movement.
Over a century ago Alfred Marshall, in his synthesis of the marginalist revolution, Principles of Economics (1890), defined economics as “both a study of wealth and a branch of the study of man”.
Social grants have become increasingly important income for many in South Africa. Grants are not welcomed by all however: in the village where I completed fieldwork as many as seventy per cent of its inhabitants rely on grants, people regard such transfers with suspicion.
In every British colony that received indentured workers from India, officials recorded personal and social details for identifying the arriving migrants. In the colony of Natal, just over 152,000 migrants were inscribed into such lists between 1860 and 1911.
In June 2012 the SAHJ carried two 'revisionist' articles on the 1942-44 South African National Health Services Commission (the NHSC or Gluckman Commission, after its Chairman, Dr Henry Gluckman), the first by the eminent African economic historian, Bill Freund, the second, by the mu
