After Apartheid


Book Description

Democracy came to South Africa in April 1994, when the African National Congress won a landslide victory in the first free national election in the country’s history. That definitive and peaceful transition from apartheid is often cited as a model for others to follow. The new order has since survived several transitions of ANC leadership, and it averted a potentially destabilizing constitutional crisis in 2008. Yet enormous challenges remain. Poverty and inequality are among the highest in the world. Staggering unemployment has fueled xenophobia, resulting in deadly aggression directed at refugees and migrant workers from Zimbabwe and Mozambique. Violent crime rates, particularly murder and rape, remain grotesquely high. The HIV/AIDS pandemic was shockingly mishandled at the highest levels of government, and infection rates continue to be overwhelming. Despite the country’s uplifting success of hosting Africa’s first World Cup in 2010, inefficiency and corruption remain rife, infrastructure and basic services are often semifunctional, and political opposition and a free media are under pressure. In this volume, major scholars chronicle South Africa’s achievements and challenges since the transition. The contributions, all previously unpublished, represent the state of the art in the study of South African politics, economics, law, and social policy.




The Collapse of Apartheid and the Dawn of Democracy in South Africa, 1993


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.




Are South Africans Free?


Book Description

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.




The Shaping of South African Society, 1652–1840.


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.




CDC Yellow Book 2018: Health Information for International Travel


Book Description

THE ESSENTIAL WORK IN TRAVEL MEDICINE -- NOW COMPLETELY UPDATED FOR 2018 As unprecedented numbers of travelers cross international borders each day, the need for up-to-date, practical information about the health challenges posed by travel has never been greater. For both international travelers and the health professionals who care for them, the CDC Yellow Book 2018: Health Information for International Travel is the definitive guide to staying safe and healthy anywhere in the world. The fully revised and updated 2018 edition codifies the U.S. government's most current health guidelines and information for international travelers, including pretravel vaccine recommendations, destination-specific health advice, and easy-to-reference maps, tables, and charts. The 2018 Yellow Book also addresses the needs of specific types of travelers, with dedicated sections on: · Precautions for pregnant travelers, immunocompromised travelers, and travelers with disabilities · Special considerations for newly arrived adoptees, immigrants, and refugees · Practical tips for last-minute or resource-limited travelers · Advice for air crews, humanitarian workers, missionaries, and others who provide care and support overseas Authored by a team of the world's most esteemed travel medicine experts, the Yellow Book is an essential resource for travelers -- and the clinicians overseeing their care -- at home and abroad.




Do South Africans Exist?


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.




Memoirs of a Born Free


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.




Now that We are Free


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.




Winning Our Freedoms Together


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.




Who Rules South Africa?


Book Description

In this timely work, WHO RULES SOUTH AFRICA?, highly regarded authors Paul Holden and Martin Plaut analyse the political elites that battle daily for power in South Africa. They argue that power does not reside in traditional institutions such as Parliament or even the Cabinet. Rather, power lies within the ANC-led Alliance which, with no founding document and no written constitution, is an unstructured and mutable political hydra with business and criminal elements in close attendance. It is the interaction between these forces which is the real story behind post-apartheid South Africa. In a country where poverty is rampant and institutions are weak, the battle for power is set to intensify. The authors unravel the mystery of how the rainbow nation has reached such a pass. What are the origins of the Alliance, and will it survive the current power struggles? Who are the shadowy forces that operate within or alongside the Alliance? Most importantly, they seek to answer the burning question of whether South Africa is destined to become another African tragedy, or whether there is still the promise of growth and a stable democracy.