The Demography of South Africa


Book Description

In nine essays originating from the running Miami International Relations Group seminar, the editors and contributors introduce constructivism as an alternative to studying IR from a historical and systems' analytical framework. They advance constructivism in the context of the perennial agent-structure debate; discuss international relations under social construction (as in national identity, feminist struggle, and global Internet governance), and reconstructing the discipline. Paper edition (unseen), $22.95. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR




Photography and History in Colonial Southern Africa


Book Description

This book studies the relationship between photography and history in colonial Southern Africa, using a series of encounters with Southern African photographic archives to reflect on photography as a distinct historical form. Through use of private and public archives, images produced by African itinerant photographers, white settlers, and colonial state institutions, this book explores the relationship between photography and history in colonial Southern Africa. Late nineteenth century Cape Colonial prison albums, police photographs from German Southwest Africa, African studio portraits, identity documents, travel permits and passports from the 1920s and 1930s, visual studies of whiteness and blackness authored by settler photographers, South African dompas photographs from the 1950s and 1960s, and aerial photography from the Eastern Cape in the mid-twentieth century are examined to highlight the ways in which photographic images cut across conventional institutional boundaries and complicate rigid distinctions between the private and the public, the political and the aesthetic, the colonial and the vernacular, or the subject and the object. Photography and History in Colonial Southern Africa argues that rather than understanding photographs as a means of preserving and recreating the past in the present, we can value them for how they evoke at once the need for and the limits of historical reconstruction. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of colonial history, photographic history, visual media, and African studies.




New Histories of South Africa's Apartheid-Era Bantustans


Book Description

The bantustans – or ‘homelands’ – were created by South Africa’s apartheid regime as ethnically-defined territories for Africans. Granted self-governing and ‘independent’ status by Pretoria, they aimed to deflect the demands for full political representation by black South Africans and were shunned by the anti-apartheid movement. In 1972, Steve Biko wrote that ‘politically, the bantustans are the greatest single fraud ever invented by white politicians’. With the end of apartheid and the first democratic elections of 1994, the bantustans formally ceased to exist, but their legacies remain inscribed in South Africa’s contemporary social, cultural, political, and economic landscape. While the older literature on the bantustans has tended to focus on their repressive role and political illegitimacy, this edited volume offers new approaches to the histories and afterlives of the former bantustans in South Africa by a new generation of scholars. This book was originally published as various special issues of the South African Historical Journal.




Everyday Communists in South Africa’s Liberation Struggle


Book Description

This book explores the role of social movements in the Southern African liberation struggle, through the lens of two ‘everyday communists’. Focusing on the Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA), the author explores the lives of Ivan and Lesley Schermbrucker, whose contribution to the party was more clandestine than that of leaders such as Bram Fischer and Joe Slovo. They represent how ‘ordinary’ people could play significant roles based on stances more rooted in common decency and morality than in Marxist theory. The book also sheds light on the interplay between transnational and national tendencies during the liberation movement, particularly between the 1940s and the 1960s. The Schermbruckers changed their views in response to the shifting national and international political landscape, the rise of Stalinism, and the flight of South African activists into exile from the 1960s. Both fluent in African languages, they were able to create relationships of trust with African members of the CPSA. Examining tensions and conflicts during the liberation struggle, this book provides fresh insights into ‘underground’ activism.




The Demography of South Africa


Book Description

This groundbreaking study of South Africa provides a unique look at the interplay of demographic, social and economic processes in a society undergoing rapid change as a result of the collapse of apartheid. It uses data from the first post-apartheid census as the basis for analysis of fertility, mortality within the context of HIV/AIDS, migration, education, employment, and household structure. These census data are complemented by large-scale household surveys and data from a partial registration system to study the relationships among various demographic, economic, and social phenomena. For the first time the demographic consequences of both the longer-term impact of apartheid policies and the policies of the new South Africa are examined and compared. This comprehensive reference links the demographic behavior of South Africa's various population groups to social, economic, and political inequalities created by policies of separate and unequal development. Prepared under the auspices of the Population Studies Center at the University of Pennsylvania, it is an essential resource for all scholars and practitioners in the field.




In the Shadow of Policy


Book Description

Notions of land and agrarian reform are now well entrenched in post-apartheid South Africa. But what this reform actually means for everyday life is not clearly understood, nor the way it will impact on the political economy. In the Shadow of Policy explores the interface between the policy of land and agrarian reform and its implementation; and between the decisions of policy ‘experts’ and actual livelihood experiences in the fields and homesteads of land reform projects. Starting with an overview of the socio-historical context in which land and agrarian reform policy has evolved in South Africa, the volume presents empirical case studies of land reform projects in the Northern, Western and Eastern Cape provinces. These draw on multiple voices from various sectors and provide a rich source of material and critical reflections to inform future policy and research agendas. In the Shadow of Policy will be a key reference tool for those working in the area of development studies and land policy, and for civil society groups and NGOs involved in land restitution.




Natures of Colonial Change


Book Description

In this groundbreaking study, Jacob A. Tropp explores the interconnections between negotiations over the environment and an emerging colonial relationship in a particular South African context—the Transkei—subsequently the largest of the notorious “homelands” under apartheid. In the late nineteenth century, South Africa’s Cape Colony completed its incorporation of the area beyond the Kei River, known as the Transkei, and began transforming the region into a labor reserve. It simultaneously restructured popular access to local forests, reserving those resources for the benefit of the white settler economy. This placed new constraints on local Africans in accessing resources for agriculture, livestock management, hunting, building materials, fuel, medicine, and ritual practices. Drawing from a diverse array of oral and written sources, Tropp reveals how bargaining over resources—between and among colonial officials, chiefs and headmen, and local African men and women—was interwoven with major changes in local political authority, gendered economic relations, and cultural practices as well as with intense struggles over the very meaning and scope of colonial rule itself. Natures of Colonial Change sheds new light on the colonial era in the Transkei by looking at significant yet neglected dimensions of this history: how both “colonizing” and “colonized” groups negotiated environmental access and how such negotiations helped shape the broader making and meaning of life in the new colonial order.




Apartheid


Book Description

Originally published in 1968, this volume traces the history and growth of Apartheid in South Africa. The acts which enforced Apartheid – the Group Areas Act, Population and Registration Act are given in full. The book also includes documents which reflected reaction to these measures: Parliamentary debates, newspaper reports and policy statements by the leading political parties and religious denominations. The documents are headed by a full historical and analytical introduction.




Survival in the 'Dumping Grounds'


Book Description

Survival in the 'Dumping Grounds' examines a defining aspect of South Africa's recent past: the history of apartheid-era relocation. While scholars and activists have long recognised the suffering caused by apartheid removals to the so-called 'homelands', the experiences of those who lived through this process have been more often obscured. Drawing on extensive archival and oral history research, this book examines the makings and the multiple meanings of relocation into two of the most notorious apartheid 'dumping grounds' established in the Ciskei bantustan during the mid-1960s: Sada and Ilinge. Evans examines the local and global dynamics of the project of bantustan relocation and develops a multi-layered analysis of the complex histories - and ramifications- of displacement and resettlement in the Ciskei.