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 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
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
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
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.
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.
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).
In the different fields that explore the history of statistics and the history of surveillance, Galton is typically treated as a figure of European intellectual history.
The privatisations of state corporations in South Africa were the local instantiation of the global rolling back of public spending and state intervention which came to be regarded as one of the defining features of ‘neoliberal’ policies.
This paper examines how the Durban Bantu Child Welfare Society (DBCWS) came to be established as part of a wider context of burgeoning public activities by African women in Durban, particularly from the 1930s.
This paper consists of two parts: first, a historical summary of a broader project being pursued; second, a specific thread of involving the development of&nbs
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
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.
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.
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”.
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.
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.
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.
In researching and writing change in three cities on three continents, I have confronted the question: what to make of ‘southern theory’ (Connell 2007) in relation to cities in the south as well as the north of th
In 2002 a year before receiving the Nobel Prize, John Maxwell Coetzee relocated from Cape Town to Adelaide, an undistinguished provincial capital in southern Australia with a population of a million and a quarter.
This introductory essay considers how we might forge a critical language to discuss an emerging constellation of cultural production in South Africa: that which focuses on the work of ‘intimate exposure’ in order to shape a public private sphere, which in turn forges forms of citizens
In the course of writing a book on Okhela (for there’s no such book, so far as I know), I came across many variations on this story, and what I have found particularly powerful is the way the assorted tellings and many truths have shaped the lives of both the storytellers and the subjects o
A study of the Independent Commission of Experts, popularly known as Bergier after its president, set up in Switzerland in the mid 1990s to establish, once and for all, the degree of complicity of the Swiss banks and authorities with the Nazi regime, has inspired me to return to South Africa’s Tr
“Freedom and Resentment” is a paper I return to again and again. I think it’s a really fascinating, deep, subtle, incredibly important and sometimes really quite annoying paper.
The last 30 years of capitalist development have, especially in what used to be called the advanced capitalist countries, generated paradoxical, if not contradictory trends. The “great crisis” (Galbraith, xi) of 2008 was rooted in an ideological failure.
This biographical paper explores how a fraternity of hereditary beggars, from the mountains of Kurdistan and known as the 'Jīlū Men', 'Great Deceivers' or 'Thieves of the Cross', spent nearly a century 'collecting' their way through some sixty-one countries on each of the inhabited continents.
In this paper rather than adjudicate whether Wiehahn represented the first step down the road of reform or the last effort to shore up apartheid, I want to examine closely a specific fissure in South Africa’s industrial relations system considered in great detail by the Commission—that between th
South Africa found itself on the front pages of the world’s press in 2012 when police shot and killed 34 miners during a strike by rock-drillers at the Marikana platinum mine.
