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This paper explores the reparations debate in post-apartheid South Africa and outlines the recommendations for reparations made by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). Although reparations were discussed at the multi-party negotiations at the end of apartheid, the new democratic constitution that came out of those negotiations did not provide for reparations. The legislation that created the TRC, however, established a special committee (the Committee on Reparations and Rehabilitation or CRR) to formally examine the reparations issue and make policy recommendations to the President. The CRR made its recommendations — widely considered to be one of the world’s most ambitious and comprehensive reparations policies — in the TRC’s 1998 Report. However, the South African government did not respond to these recommendations, arguing that since the work of other committees within the TRC was not yet finished, it could not consider the CRR’s proposed policy. Victim groups and civil society disagreed, and an acrimonious conflict ensued over the perceived slow pace of government action on reparations. Victims also pursued lawsuits for reparations against multinational corporations that conducted business with the apartheid government. In 2003, the government finally enacted a reduced version of the CRR’s original reparations policy.

Most states saw accession to the Convention as a matter of foreign policy. Many perceived it as a way of demonstrating their anti‐apartheid credentials, with but few implications for their internal affairs. In its first eight years, CERD had to concentrate upon establishing the novel reporting regime, upon tutoring state delegations as to the nature of their new obligations, and on agreeing some boundaries to the Committee's mandate.

More detailed consideration is given to CERD's jurisprudence on particular articles, such as the recommendation that Article 3 constitutes a general prohibition of racial segregation and not just of apartheid. The discussion of particular articles is related to the Committee's observations on particular reports. It concludes that the dialogue with European states has been productive because there is also pressure for action arising within these states.

This introductory chapter looks at how every South African had to learn to live according to a complex cultural economy that was structured by several forms of (imputed) gaze. This is because life during apartheid became so rigidly divided along race lines, and yet remained intimate and close in workplaces and homes. Racialized identities and anxieties were played out at every level of social and intimate life. The result was a set of complex, performative anxieties that are by no means unique to South Africa but became more developed there than in most other societies. The chapter suggests that the legacy of colonial and apartheid regulation and cultural policy has made the embodied imagination of a range of imputed gazes extraordinarily compelling and complex in everyday life.

Despite employing a variety of strategies to maintain white supremacy, the South African government could not prevent the rise of a black resistance movement or of predominantly white nongovernmental organizations that opposed apartheid. Such challenges to apartheid, economic difficulties, international pressure, and behind‐the‐scenes negotiations led to regime change and democratic elections in 1994. In Northern Ireland, Catholic–Protestant antagonism has roots in many centuries of English colonialism, aggravated by mutual distrust and segregation, limited citizen control over government, intermittent economic stagnation, and sectarian prejudices, but only in the late 1960s did violence become a part of everyday life. Although bloodshed continued, progress toward a solution began in the 1980s and continued into the 1990s. When Israel was founded in 1948, Arab–Jewish hostility already existed, and grew in the following decades, which saw five wars between Israel and Arab states, as well as political organizations, sometimes leading to violence, by Palestinian Arabs living. Domestic pressure for reform in the late 1970s and intense Palestinian resistance in the late 1980s forced Israel to make concessions to the Palestinians, although prospects for peace remained bleak. All three conflicts shared features: disputes over land; forced settlements; ethnonational divisions; and the intersection of class and race.

Participation in civil society was one of the few options for the pursuit of peaceful progressive change in apartheid South Africa, and a range of peace and conflict‐resolution organizations (P/CROs) explored this option. These P/CROs were staffed mainly by middle class, white, university educated, English‐speaking males, exhibited significant levels of formalization and centralization, depended heavily on international funding, and were often harassed by the apartheid state. P/CROs were active in antimilitarization activities, mediation, promoting contact between white and black communities, encouraging dialog between elites, and research. Extensive links developed amongst P/CROs, between P/CROs and other kinds of antiapartheid nongovernmental organizations, and between some P/CROs and the mass‐based resistance movements; collectively, these organizations formed a “multiorganizational field.” P/CROs, in concert with the rest of the multiorganizational field, helped project an “emergent reality” – a nonracial and democratic South Africa; established channels of communication between the apartheid state and the resistance movement; and ripened the climate for political change.

As the Jews were deported, a page in Hitler's dictatorship was turned as new ‘racially foreign’ people, literally millions of foreign workers, were brought into Germany to labour for the Reich. The racist regime regarded Poles and other peoples from the east as racially inferior. They had to be used to win the war, but at all costs they had to be prevented from mixing with German blood. The authorities decided on nothing short of an ‘apartheid’ system, to keep these ‘race enemies’ in their place. This chapter discusses how this massive exploitative effort unleashed new social dynamics.

This chapter draws on examples from South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) to explore the special moments that were created by the TRC, which opened up the possibility of transformation of relationships between victims and perpetrators, and the impact of these encounters in the broader South African story of racial division and intergroup hatred between blacks as the oppressed group, and whites as beneficiaries of apartheid. It argues that when perpetrators express remorse they validate the victims' pains and give them back their uniqueness and that forgiveness, and not forgetting, is a healthy response that allows the parties to move on.

This conclusion begins with a vignette of Nelson Mandela’s release from prison in 1990. It then explores some aspects of the anti-apartheid movement that crested during the late 1980s, lingering on campaigns in Great Britain, Sweden, and the United States. The road between the postapartheid and postcolonial moments, however, was neither straight nor straightforward. The conclusion explicates some of the differences between the apartheid question in the 1980s and 1960s, and then reviews Gordian Knot’s central findings and restates its main arguments.

This is the fourth of five country case studies on income inequality, and looks at the case of South Africa. After an introduction, the second section of the chapter reviews the evolution of inequality in South Africa, and the third draws together the findings of other authors to highlight the primary sources of changes in the nature of income inequality (wage differentials and unequal access to employment). The fourth section assesses the evolution of economic policy and performance, drawing a distinction between the apartheid years and the post‐1994 period, and also considers the posttransition policy framework in more detail. The fifth section briefly discusses policies targeted at the structural causes of poverty and inequality since 1994 (policies on education and social expenditure, and on land). The sixth section focuses on the likely impact of the macroeconomic policy framework since 1994 on income distribution, arguing that changes in labour markets resulting from the breakdown of apartheid in the workplace dominated the observed shifts in the distribution of income during the 1970s and 1980s, although there is evidence that the shift towards neoliberal orthodoxy is increasingly affecting the income distribution; topics addressed include the effects of stabilization (inflation and interest rates), fiscal policy, trade and financial liberalization, and labour institutions.

This chapter narrates the story of how the Asiatic question was configured in South Africa from the 1860s to the present as a question of necessary containment of culturally alien people. It describes how the township of Chatsworth was set up, imagined, and framed as a purely Indian space over decades of tense and often antagonistic tussle between policy makers and social activists. The chapter also looks at how specific methods of policing contributed to the current mythology of the Indian township during apartheid as fundamentally safe, as a place where “we never locked our doors.” It draws on official documents, newspapers, and governmental publications, as well as a range of narratives by older residents of Chatsworth.

This chapter studies the theme of racism and fear of Africans among people of Indian origin. The relationship between indentured Indians and Zulu speakers in the province of Natal was tense and contentious throughout the twentieth century. The large riots in 1949 in Durban when Indian homes were attacked by African workers, as well as subsequent conflicts in 1985 and after apartheid, left a legacy of apprehension between the two communities that periodically erupt in racist allegations from both sides. The chapter also explores the tension between the so-called “racism's two bodies”—notions of surface and substance—in racial practices among Indians. It argues that the influx of large numbers of Africans in Chatsworth has transformed the idea of the area as a knowable site of cultural intimacy.

This chapter examines the development of political institutions of autonomy that were designed for Indians during the apartheid years. It unravels the pervasive sense of unreality and absurdity that accompanied the heavily circumscribed functions of these bodies and how this consolidated an already pervasive disengagement from the world of politics in the township. From the 1980s, representative politics became subsumed under a larger imperative of enjoyment and self-deprecating humor. Political figures and their speech are still not read literally but are transposed into a form of entertainment and performance that is enjoyed at a distance. This apprehension regarding the world of politics is clearly more pronounced among non-African communities in South Africa but still defines an important and ill-understood dimension of the postapartheid unhappy consciousness.

This chapter analyzes the quest for religious purification that arose from the Indian middle class in South Africa. It talks about the power and attractiveness of neo-Hindu movements in South Africa and how new and more standardized Brahmanical forms of Hinduism today clash with the popular customs and traditions that still inform ideas of belief and rituals in the Indian townships. A strikingly similar logic of purification is at work among the Muslims of Indian origin, only even more so. Apartheid forced forms of social and ritual sharing upon communities that despite their common religious orientation have little desire or inclination to share social spaces or mosques. The postapartheid society has made it possible for the traditional Muslim elite to embrace global piety movements and to reimagine their own genealogies as somehow Arab and thus not South Asian.

In multiracial or otherwise multicultural societies, people may discriminate in the allocation of scarce resources against members of particular racial or cultural groups. This chapter examines how people in postapartheid South Africa assess the desert of others in terms of access to social assistance from the state and employment opportunities. It uses attitudinal survey data from Cape Town — a city characterized by both inequality and cultural diversity — to examine who is viewed as deserving and undeserving of public assistance. In particular, it explores whether perceptions of desert reflect racial discrimination. It is shown that there are clear perceptions of what kinds of poor people are considered deserving of public assistance and who is considered undeserving, that these perceptions are shared widely across the population, and that explicit racial consideration makes little or no differences to these perceptions. These patterns contrast with those in some other areas of public life — including, notably, employment decisions — where racial differences are evident. One lesson from the chapter is that there are some areas of public policy that are likely to be relatively amenable to building cross-racial support for interracial redistribution.