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The Politics of Crime and Space in South Africa

Christine Hentschel

in Security In the Bubble: Navigating Crime in Urban South Africa

“The Politics of Crime and Space in South Africa” builds a historical framework for understanding the politics of crime and space in urban South Africa and contextualizes themes crucial to the ... More

“The Politics of Crime and Space in South Africa” builds a historical framework for understanding the politics of crime and space in urban South Africa and contextualizes themes crucial to the empirical analysis discussed later in the book, namely security deficits, segregation, plural policing, as well as information and communication politics. Handsome space reconstructs city makers’ and security experts’ taste for aesthetic and affective communication as a means of making their places safe.Less

Ivan Vladislavic: Traversing the Uneven City

WReC (Warwick Research Collective)

in Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literature

This chapter offers a reading of the work of Ivan Vladislavic by way of demonstrating that its specific formal features capture the aura of a particular historical speace (Johannesburg) and time (the ... More

This chapter offers a reading of the work of Ivan Vladislavic by way of demonstrating that its specific formal features capture the aura of a particular historical speace (Johannesburg) and time (the era of late or millennial capitalism) that nevertheless allows one to witness and reflect upon a general and global structure of feeling formed over the long duration of modernity’s unfolding. Read alongside incidents of occultism, witchcraft and trade in human organs in contemporary South Africa, Vladislavic's ‘anti-’ or ‘magic-’ realism points to the historical compulsion under which cultural modes operate in conditions of uneven development – the compulsion to fuse disparate idioms, languages, genres, and forms in order to meditate upon ordinary lives caught up in the dark magic of history. Vladislavic's thematic and formal concerns are interpreted as expressions of historical-material contraditions and paradoxes.Less

Textual Memories: Autobiographical Writing in a Time of Uncertainty

Martin J. Murray

in Commemorating and Forgetting: Challenges for the New South Africa

The birth of the ‘new South Africa’ has brought with it a proliferation of commentaries and essays, autobiographies, memoirs, and personal reminiscences, and realist documentaries that explore the ... More

The birth of the ‘new South Africa’ has brought with it a proliferation of commentaries and essays, autobiographies, memoirs, and personal reminiscences, and realist documentaries that explore the quandaries of social institutions and individuals as they attempt to deal honestly and forthrightly with the multiple legacies of tyranny, repression, and rebellion. Individual memories only become meaningful when they become social, that is, when they are shared and cross over into the realm of collective-cultural remembrance. As a kind of first-person narrative convention, these forms of written expression have entered into public discourses as factually-based stories, or mementos, that reflect their particular times and places in history. Autobiographical writing in the aftermath of historical trauma is a cultural manifestation of the personal need to rid oneself of the burden of history, or a kind of therapeutic undertaking designed to reconcile oneself with the past.Less

Racial and Class Discrimination in Assessments of Desert in Postapartheid Cape Town

Jeremy Seekings

in Discrimination in an Unequal World

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 ... More

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.Less

Haunted Heritage: Visual Display at District Six and Robben Island

Martin J. Murray

in Commemorating and Forgetting: Challenges for the New South Africa

“Haunting” is a useful metaphorical device for calling attention to how it is that certain places instill a sense of possession, absence, and loss in the urban landscape. The sense of the spectral ... More

“Haunting” is a useful metaphorical device for calling attention to how it is that certain places instill a sense of possession, absence, and loss in the urban landscape. The sense of the spectral presence of those who are not physically there is a ubiquitous feature of the phenomenology of place. This chapter uses the examples of the District Six Museum (Cape Town) and Robben Island Museum to explore how the spectral presence of the past haunts the present.Less

Facing Backward, Looking Forward: The Politics of Remembering and Forgetting

Martin J. Murray

in Commemorating and Forgetting: Challenges for the New South Africa

With the collapse of white minority rule and the dismantling of apartheid, citizens of the ‘new South Africa’ are called upon to look two ways in time: back to the racially-divided past to confront ... More

With the collapse of white minority rule and the dismantling of apartheid, citizens of the ‘new South Africa’ are called upon to look two ways in time: back to the racially-divided past to confront painful memories born of discrimination and oppression, and forward to the future – with its attendant risks, uncertainties, and contingent possibilities. Looking backward, they hold onto the past by remembering and commemorating. Looking forward, they envision a radiant future unencumbered and unburdened by the sordid apartheid past. The central conundrum that arises from this Janus-faced, schizophrenic vision has to do with resolving the tension between the politics of remembering and the politics of forgetting. On the one hand, the collapse of apartheid has triggered an enthusiasm for the recovery of those aspects of the national past which white minority rule had tried to erase, suppress, and elide from collective memory. On the other hand, finding a common ground of shared values upon which to forge a unifying national identity requires moving beyond – escaping – the past that had divided the country along racial and ethnic, ‘tribal’ and linguistic lines.Less

White Lies: Mythmaking and Social Memory in the Service of White Minority Rule

Martin J. Murray

in Commemorating and Forgetting: Challenges for the New South Africa

This chapter addresses a range of questions that investigate the origins of memory-making under white minority rule and how these discredited mnemonic devices linger in the present. What becomes of ... More

This chapter addresses a range of questions that investigate the origins of memory-making under white minority rule and how these discredited mnemonic devices linger in the present. What becomes of social memories of settler colonialism and white minority rule when the myth-laden, socio-cultural world of their making lies in ruins? The end of apartheid and the transition to parliamentary democracy triggered what amounted to a crisis of collective memory that left citizens of the ‘new South Africa’ without the stable reference points necessary for building a shared sense of national identity. What should be remembered and how? Where do old-fashioned monuments and memorials that extolled the virtues of white minority rule fit into the new national narrative of political stability, economic progress, and racial reconciliation? These are the kinds of questions that immediately provoked widespread debate and controversy.Less

Spatial Governance from Death to Life

Christine Hentschel

in Security In the Bubble: Navigating Crime in Urban South Africa

The introductory chapter charts the rediscovery of space as a prime strategy of security governance and city making in post-apartheid urban South Africa and other cities around the world. It suggests ... More

The introductory chapter charts the rediscovery of space as a prime strategy of security governance and city making in post-apartheid urban South Africa and other cities around the world. It suggests how to write Durban, a South African city with a dramatic history of spatial ordering, into urban and political theory – hence challenging the divisions still dominant in urban studies between cities of the North and cities of the South.Less

The Salience of Chiefs in Postapartheid South Africa: Reflections on the Nhlapo Commission

Mbongiseni Buthelezi and Dineo Skosana

John L. Comaroff and Jean Comaroff (eds)

in The Politics of Custom: Chiefship, Capital, and the State in Contemporary Africa

In chapter four, Buthelezi and Skosana suggest that neoliberalization has masked critical continuities in the manner in which African states have dealt with chiefship and customary law, giving ... More

In chapter four, Buthelezi and Skosana suggest that neoliberalization has masked critical continuities in the manner in which African states have dealt with chiefship and customary law, giving indigenous rulers authority over land to a degree that, if anything, exceeds the colonial past. Focusing on South Africa, and in particular the recent Nhlapo Commission of inquiry into traditional leadership, the authors explore the ways in which the government of the post-apartheid state has struggled to accommodate the politics of tradition in a liberal democratic social order, efforts that have lacked a clear vision, and had the unwitting effect of replicating aspects the apartheid past – and of violating some of the key provisions of the constitution for those (predominantly rural) citizens of the country ruled by the Kingdom of Custom.Less

Collective Memory in Place: The Voortrekker Monument and the Hector Pieterson Memorial

Martin J. Murray

in Commemorating and Forgetting: Challenges for the New South Africa

Focusing particular attention on two sites of memory – the Voortrekker Monument and the Hector Pieterson Memorial – enables us to critically examine both the parallels and divergent trajectories in ... More

Focusing particular attention on two sites of memory – the Voortrekker Monument and the Hector Pieterson Memorial – enables us to critically examine both the parallels and divergent trajectories in these different modes of commemoration. The Voortrekker Monument marked the power of Afrikanerdom at the height of the political confidence in the National Party as the vehicle of (white) national identity. Once a messenger of power, it has become a symbol of the failed promise of white minority rule. Once a powerful marker of triumph, it has become symbol of hubris. In contrast, the Hector Pieterson Memorial is an exemplary expression of what Maria Tumarkin has called a traumascape, or a distinctive category of place that stands witness to terrible acts of tragedy, and as a result inadvertently becomes synonymous with the past events themselves. Much more than merely the physical setting for tragedy, traumascapes are cathartic locations, transformed psychically by suffering, grief, and loss. They have become essential parts of people’s experience of mourning, remembering, and making sense of the traumatic events that took place there.Less

New Beginnings?

Gerald M. Oppenheimer and Ronald Bayer

in Shattered Dreams?: An Oral History of the South African AIDS Epidemic

In the fall of 2003, capitulating to both domestic and international pressure, a new plan was agreed upon that would ultimately provide treatment to AIDS patients, this was followed by inertia in ... More

In the fall of 2003, capitulating to both domestic and international pressure, a new plan was agreed upon that would ultimately provide treatment to AIDS patients, this was followed by inertia in implementing it. This chapter captures the response of those whose hospitals and clinics were chosen for the first phase of the roll-out, and who were finally given opportunity to provide life-saving medication to their patients. The chapter recounts the reaction of nurses and doctors who worked in settings that were not selected, whose patients would therefore continue to suffer and die. Finally, the doctors and nurses interviewed speak to the impact of AIDS on their own lives. They discuss their understanding of what it means to be a health care provider in a country whose very social fabric is threatened by an epidemic, and how their experiences with AIDS have shaped their own hopes for a post apartheid South Africa.Less

Epilogue: History and Heritage

Martin J. Murray

in Commemorating and Forgetting: Challenges for the New South Africa

This concluding chapter investigates the tension between history and heritage – what one scholar referred to as “twins separated at birth”: while their origins are identical, the trajectories of ... More

This concluding chapter investigates the tension between history and heritage – what one scholar referred to as “twins separated at birth”: while their origins are identical, the trajectories of their distinct life-courses are quite dissimilar. As communicative devices, history and heritage rely on antithetical modes of persuasion. Whereas history proclaims its commitment to unvarnished truth and objectivity, heritage is highly selective, arbitrary, and subjective. Heritage does not pretend to present a genuinely authentic, and reasonably plausible, account of some past, but is a declaration of faith in that what came before. With the end of apartheid and the transition to parliamentary democracy, the new custodians of memory sought to undo and unmake the falsified monumental history of the racially-coded past and to elevate popular resistance to white domination as the new national narrative. Yet in the ‘new South Africa’, sites of memory have to compete with the rejuvenated tourist industry. Tourism is not just a commercial business, but also a social practice engaged with the framing of history and identity.Less

Integrated Eighties Situation Comedies and the Struggle against Apartheid

Timothy Havens

in Black Television Travels: African American Media around the Globe

This chapter discusses the acquisition and programming of integrated sitcoms in apartheid South Africa. It analyzes how the South African channel Bop-TV used integrated sitcoms to construct an ... More

This chapter discusses the acquisition and programming of integrated sitcoms in apartheid South Africa. It analyzes how the South African channel Bop-TV used integrated sitcoms to construct an antiapartheid program schedule and channel identity. In addition to demolishing the prevalent industry lore that programming must have “universal themes” in order to appeal to international viewers, the story of integrated situation comedies in South Africa demonstrates the various institutional labors that broadcasters could generate from imported African American programming. It also displays the centrality of African American themes, even in highly integrated series, in explaining the value that foreign broadcasters often find in such imports.Less

Customary Human Rights Law

Steven Wheatley

in The Idea of International Human Rights Law

Chapter 5 looks at customary human rights law, explaining how we can think about custom as a self-organizing system, the emergent property of the performative acts of states, who literally ‘speak’ ... More

Chapter 5 looks at customary human rights law, explaining how we can think about custom as a self-organizing system, the emergent property of the performative acts of states, who literally ‘speak’ customary human rights into existence; customary law then binds the same countries that brought it into existence, exhibiting the characteristics of a complex system. Complexity serves to remind us of the importance of path dependence, the power of events, and possibilities of change as states respond to new information. The work shows how the measures targeting apartheid South Africa after the Sharpeville Massacre resulted in the first customary human right on the prohibition of racial discrimination, as well as an evolution in the methodology for custom-formation, allowing reference to General Assembly resolutions and law-making treaties. The chapter further demonstrates how the status of persistent objector was denied to apartheid South Africa, confirming the non-negotiable character of fundamental human rights.Less

Introduction: Memory and Amnesia after Apartheid

Martin J. Murray

in Commemorating and Forgetting: Challenges for the New South Africa

The Introduction contextualizes apartheid, while discussing the making and meaning of collective memory.

United Nations Human Rights Law

Steven Wheatley

in The Idea of International Human Rights Law

Chapter 3 tells the story of human rights in the United Nations. The work shows how we can understand the UN as a complex system of regulatory authority, which evolves with changes in the behaviours ... More

Chapter 3 tells the story of human rights in the United Nations. The work shows how we can understand the UN as a complex system of regulatory authority, which evolves with changes in the behaviours of the Member States and United Nations bodies as they respond to new information. The analysis demonstrates that, up until the 1960s, human rights provided a set of moral guidelines only, informing states how they should treat those subject to their jurisdiction and control. That was until the newly independent African countries joined the Organization and turned their attention to the problem of systematic racial discrimination in southern Africa, especially after the 1960 Sharpeville Massacre, when UN action against South Africa and South West Africa (Namibia) transformed the non-binding moral code contained in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights into a body of international human rights law, with the development explained by the importance of subsequent agreements and practices in the evolution of the regulatory authority of the United Nations.Less