Author: Lawrence Hamilton
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 147252179X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 169
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Book Description
This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. Despite South Africa's successful transition to democracy and lauded constitution, political freedom for the majority of South Africans remains elusive. The poor and unemployed majority are poorly represented and lack power and thus freedom. Under these conditions, the freedom of the privileged minority is also seriously impaired due to the costs of maintaining their relative security and well-being. Lawrence Hamilton is an internationally-known political theorist, who has spent ten years teaching in South African universities. In this unique book he brings ideas - political and philosophical - to the fore to understand a contemporary political conundrum. He outlines the persistent, unresolved problems characterizing contemporary South Africa: poverty and quality of life statistics that are appalling for a middle-income country, levels of inequality that make South Africa one of the most unequal places in the world, skewed economic and political representation that reproduces elites rather than generating opportunities for all and an electoral system that implements the idea of proportional representation so literally that it undermines meaningful representation. Are South Africans Free? aims not only to explain the current state of South Africa but to provide positive new directions and suggestions for institutional change. Hamilton argues that freedom as power in South Africa does not depend on good will, charity or duty, and it goes beyond the complete realization of the political and civil liberties currently safeguarded in its constitution. Such change will depend on courageous leadership, active citizenship, new forms of representation and a macroeconomic policy that offers radical redistribution of actual and potential wealth.
Author: John C. Eby
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469633175
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 355
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Book Description
This game situates students in the Multiparty Negotiating Process taking place at the World Trade Center in Kempton Park in 1993. South Africa is facing tremendous social anxiety and violence. The object of the talks, and of the game, is to reach consensus for a constitution that will guide a post-apartheid South Africa. The country has immense racial diversity--white, black, Colored, Indian. For the negotiations, however, race turns out to be less critical than cultural, economic, and political diversity. Students are challenged to understand a complex landscape and to navigate a surprising web of alliances. The game focuses on the problem of transitioning a society conditioned to profound inequalities and harsh political repression into a more democratic, egalitarian system. Students will ponder carefully the meaning of democracy as a concept and may find that justice and equality are not always comfortable partners with liberty. While for the majority of South Africans, universal suffrage was a symbol of new democratic beginnings, it seemed to threaten the lives, families, and livelihoods of minorities and parties outside the African National Congress coalition. These deep tensions in the nature of democracy pose important questions about the character of justice and the best mechanisms for reaching national decisions. Free supplementary materials for this textbook are available at the Reacting to the Past website. Visit https://reacting.barnard.edu/instructor-resources, click on the RTTP Game Library link, and create a free account to download what is available.
Author: Nicholas Grant
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469635291
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 325
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Book Description
In this transnational account of black protest, Nicholas Grant examines how African Americans engaged with, supported, and were inspired by the South African anti-apartheid movement. Bringing black activism into conversation with the foreign policy of both the U.S. and South African governments, this study questions the dominant perception that U.S.-centered anticommunism decimated black international activism. Instead, by tracing the considerable amount of time, money, and effort the state invested into responding to black international criticism, Grant outlines the extent to which the U.S. and South African governments were forced to reshape and occasionally reconsider their racial policies in the Cold War world. This study shows how African Americans and black South Africans navigated transnationally organized state repression in ways that challenged white supremacy on both sides of the Atlantic. The political and cultural ties that they forged during the 1940s and 1950s are testament to the insistence of black activists in both countries that the struggle against apartheid and Jim Crow were intimately interconnected.
Author: Richard Elphick
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
ISBN: 0819573760
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 646
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Book Description
History is a powerful aid to the understanding of the present, and those who are concerned with the escalating crisis in South Africa will find this an invaluable source book. This is the story of the evolution of a society in which race became the dominant characteristic, the primary determinant of status, wealth, and power. Cultural chauvinism of the first European colonists – primarily the Dutch – merged with economic and demographic developments to create a society in which whites relegated all blacks – free blacks, Africans, imported slaves – to a systematic pattern of subordination and oppression that foreshadowed the apartheid of the twentieth century. From the beginning of the nineteenth century the new empire-builders, the British, reinforced the racial order. In the next century and a half the industrialized South Africa would become firmly integrated into the world economy. Published originally in South Africa in 1979 and updated and expanded now, a decade later, this book by twelve South African, British, Canadian, Dutch, and American scholars is the most comprehensive history of the early years of that troubled nation. The authors put South Africa in the comparative context of other colonial systems. Their social, political, and economic history is rich with empirical data and rests on a solid base of archival research. The story they tell is a complex drama of a racial structure that has resisted hostile impulses from without and rebellion from within.
Author: Malaika Wa Azania
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
ISBN: 1609806832
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 180
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Book Description
Apartheid isn't over—so Malaika Wa Azania boldly argues in Memoirs of a Born Free, her account of growing up black in modern-day South Africa. Malaika was born in late 1991, as the white minority government was on its way out, making her a "Born Free"—the name given to the generation born after the end of apartheid. But Malaika's experience with institutionalized racism offers a view of South Africa that contradicts the implied racial liberation of the so-called Rainbow Nation. Recounting her upbringing in a black township racked by poverty and disease, the death of a beloved uncle at the hands of white police, and her alienation at multiracial schools, she evokes a country still held in thrall by de facto apartheid. She takes us through her anger and disillusionment with the myth of black liberation to the birth and development of her dedication to the black consciousness movement, which continues to be a guiding force in her life. A trenchant, audacious, and ultimately hopeful narrative, Memoirs of a Born Free introduces an important new voice in South African—and, indeed, global—activism.
Author: Ivor Chipkin
Publisher: Wits University Press
ISBN: 1868144453
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 272
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Book Description
Do South Africans Exist? Addresses a gap in contemporary studies of nationalism and the nation, providing a critical study of South African nationalism against a broader context of African nationalism in general. Narratives of resistance, telling of African peoples oppressed and exploited, presume that ‘the people’ preceded the period of nationalist struggle. This book explores how an African ‘people’ came into being in the first place, particularly in the South African context, as a collectivity organised in pursuit of a political – and not simply cultural – end. The author argues that the nation is a political community whose form is given in relation to the pursuit of democracy and freedom, and that if democratic authority is lodged in 'the people', what matters is the way that this 'people' is defined, delimited and produced. He argues that the nation precedes the state, not because it has always existed, but because it emerges in and through the nationalist struggle for state power. Ultimately, he encourages the reader to re-evaluate knee-jerk judgements about the failure of modernity in Africa.
Author: Wilmot Godfrey James
Publisher: Lynne Rienner Pub
ISBN: 9781555876937
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 147
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Book Description
Against the backdrop of the heightened racial tensions between coloured and black South Africans, this text explores how the individual interests of distinct racial or ethnic communities can be served without endangering the creation of national unity.
Author: John Campbell
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1442265906
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 245
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Book Description
This incisive, deeply informed book introduces post-apartheid South Africa to an international audience. South Africa has a history of racism and white supremacy. This crushing historical burden continues to resonate today. Under President Jacob Zuma, South Africa is treading water. Nevertheless, despite calls to undermine the 1994 political settlement characterized by human rights guarantees and the rule of law, distinguished diplomat John Campbell argues that the country’s future is bright and that its democratic institutions will weather its current lackluster governance. The book opens with an overview to orient readers to South Africa’s historical inheritance. A look back at the presidential inaugurations of Nelson Mandela and Jacob Zuma and Mandela’s funeral illustrates some of the ways South Africa has indeed changed since 1994. Reviewing current demographic trends, Campbell highlights the persistent consequences of apartheid. He goes on to consider education, health, and current political developments, including land reform, with an eye on how South Africa’s democracy is responding to associated thorny challenges. The book ends with an assessment of why prospects are currently poor for closer South African ties with the West. Campbell concludes, though, that South Africa’s democracy has been surprisingly adaptable, and that despite intractable problems, the black majority are no longer strangers in their own country.
Author: Albie Sachs
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 220
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Book Description
9. Rights to the land.
Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 60
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Book Description
