Tradition and Transition in Southern Africa

Tradition and Transition in Southern Africa
Author: Andrew D. Spiegel
Publisher: Transaction Publishers
Total Pages: 288
Release:
Genre: History
ISBN: 9781412840231

This volume brings together many of the most interesting anthropologists writing on the current situation in South Africa. Initially conceived as a tribute to the work of Philip Mayer, the author of Townsmen and Tribesmen, the volume continues a tradition of digging into the interstices of South African society at the folk, tribal, and national levels. Each chapter examines the myriad ways in which tradition is a critical factor for those who must cope with the trauma of social and economic transition. This theme, central to the work of Philip and Iona Mayer, allows the reader to probe the core issues of South Africa and provide a theoretical structure for the study of other societies in similar states of transition to modernity.

The Politics of Transition

The Politics of Transition
Author: Richard Spitz
Publisher: Witwatersrand University Press Publications
Total Pages: 560
Release: 2000
Genre: History
ISBN:

During the early 1990s, South Africans kept a close eye on the media coverage of South Africa's negotiated transition to democracy. Likened to a soap opera by some, the negotiations featured violent interlopers, dramatic walkouts, alliances and, somehow, a fortunate conclusion in the form of the Interim Constitution and Bill of Rights. The importance of the negotiating process and the Interim Constitution itself should not be underestimated, however, in relation to their longer-term influence over the form of democracy currently enjoyed in South Africa. In this brave publication, Spitz and Chaskalson examine the politics behind the Kempton Park negotiations and the Interim Constitution, and the influence that these have had on the subsequent consolidation of a South African democracy.

Indigenous, Traditional, and Non-State Transitional Justice in Southern Africa

Indigenous, Traditional, and Non-State Transitional Justice in Southern Africa
Author: Everisto Benyera
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2019-09-13
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 149859283X

The book investigates the use of bottom-up, community based healing and peacebuilding approaches, focusing on their strengths and suggesting how they can be enhanced. The main contribution of the book is an ethnographic investigation of how post-conflict communities in parts of Southern Africa use their local resources to forge a future after mass violence. The way in which Namibia’s Herero and Zimbabwe’s Ndebele dealt with their respective genocides is a major contribution of the book. The focus of the book is on two Southern African countries that never experienced institutionalized transitional justice as dispensed in post-apartheid South Africa via the famed Truth and Reconciliation Commission. We answer the question: how have communities healed and reconciled after the end of protracted violence and gross human rights abuses in Zimbabwe and Namibia? We depart from statetist, top-down, one-size fits all approaches to transitional justice and investigate bottom-up approaches.

Traditional Leadership and Democratisation in Southern Africa

Traditional Leadership and Democratisation in Southern Africa
Author: Sandra Düsing
Publisher: LIT Verlag Münster
Total Pages: 412
Release: 2002
Genre: History
ISBN: 9783825850654

What are the impacts of ethnically based, traditional political institutions on democratic state and nation building in Southern Africa and how do heterogeneous sources of legitimacy affect the prospects of long-term democratic regime consolidation? What are the impacts of "traditionalism" employed for purposes of party-political mobilization? An indicator for the political influence of traditional leadership in Southern Africa is the fact that a considerable number of democratically elected politicians in high office originate from aristocratic families, representing hereditary traditional leadership structures for centuries. This is evident for the charismatic founding president of the new South Africa; Nelson Mandela, as well as for his adversary, the prime minister-in-office, Mangosuthu Buthelezi. The careful reconsideration of this "state behind the state" has been identified as crucial, in this study, to make any realistic assessments of the prospects for sustainable democratization in Southern African countries in the near future.

Performing South Africa's Truth Commission

Performing South Africa's Truth Commission
Author: Catherine M. Cole
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 265
Release: 2010
Genre: Apartheid
ISBN: 0253353904

South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commissions helped to end apartheid by providing a forum that exposed the nation's gross human rights abuses, provided amnesty and reparations to selected individuals, and eventually promoted national unity and healing. The success or failure of these commissions has been widely debated, but this is the first book to view the truth commission as public ritual and national theater. Catherine M. Cole brings an ethnographer's ear, a stage director's eye, and a historian's judgment to understand the vocabulary and practices of theater that mattered to the South Africans who participated in the reconciliation process. Cole looks closely at the record of the commissions, and sees their tortured expressiveness as a medium for performing evidence and truth to legitimize a new South Africa.

African Traditional Religion in South Africa

African Traditional Religion in South Africa
Author: David Chidester
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 476
Release: 1997-08-07
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0313032254

In a changing South Africa, recovering the meaning and power of African tradition is a matter of crucial importance. This work participates in that recovery by providing a comprehensive guide to research on the indigenous religious heritage of this dynamic country. Detailed reviews of over 600 books, articles, and theses are offered along with introductory essays and detailed annotations that define the field of study. This work plus two forthcoming volumes, Christianity in South Africa: An Annotated Bibliography and Islam, Hinduism, and Judaism in South Africa: An Annotated Bibliography will become the standard reference work on South African religions. Scholars and students in Religious Studies, Social Anthropology, History, and African Studies will find this set particularly useful. This work organizes and annotates all the relevant literature on Khoisan, Xhosa, Zulu, Sotho-Tswana, Swazi, Tsonga, and Venda traditions. The annotations are concise yet detailed essays written in an engaging and accessible style and supported by an exhaustive index, which comprise a full and complex profile of African traditional religion in South Africa.

From Apartheid to Democracy

From Apartheid to Democracy
Author: Katherine Elizabeth Mack
Publisher: Penn State Press
Total Pages: 250
Release: 2015-06-18
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0271066385

South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) hearings can be considered one of the most significant rhetorical events of the late twentieth century. The TRC called language into action, tasking it with promoting understanding among a divided people and facilitating the construction of South Africa’s new democracy. Other books on the TRC and deliberative rhetoric in contemporary South Africa emphasize the achievement of reconciliation during and in the immediate aftermath of the transition from apartheid. From Apartheid to Democracy, in contrast, considers the varied, complex, and enduring effects of the Commission’s rhetorical wager. It is the first book-length study to analyze the TRC through such a lens. Katherine Elizabeth Mack focuses on the dissension and negotiations over difference provoked by the Commission’s process, especially its public airing of victims’ and perpetrators’ truths. She tracks agonistic deliberation (evidenced in the TRC’s public hearings) into works of fiction and photography that extend and challenge the Commission’s assumptions about truth, healing, and reconciliation. Ultimately, Mack demonstrates that while the TRC may not have achieved all of its political goals, its very existence generated valuable deliberation within and beyond its official process.

Nostalgia after Apartheid

Nostalgia after Apartheid
Author: Amber R. Reed
Publisher: University of Notre Dame Pess
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2020-11-30
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 026810879X

In this engaging book, Amber Reed provides a new perspective on South Africa’s democracy by exploring Black residents’ nostalgia for life during apartheid in the rural Eastern Cape. Reed looks at a surprising phenomenon encountered in the post-apartheid nation: despite the Department of Education mandating curricula meant to teach values of civic responsibility and liberal democracy, those who are actually responsible for teaching this material (and the students taking it) often resist what they see as the imposition of “white” values. These teachers and students do not see South African democracy as a type of freedom, but rather as destructive of their own “African culture”—whereas apartheid, at least ostensibly, allowed for cultural expression in the former rural homelands. In the Eastern Cape, Reed observes, resistance to democracy occurs alongside nostalgia for apartheid among the very citizens who were most disenfranchised by the late racist, authoritarian regime. Examining a rural town in the former Transkei homeland and the urban offices of the Sonke Gender Justice Network in Cape Town, Reed argues that nostalgic memories of a time when African culture was not under attack, combined with the socioeconomic failures of the post-apartheid state, set the stage for the current political ambivalence in South Africa. Beyond simply being a case study, however, Nostalgia after Apartheid shows how, in a global context in which nationalism and authoritarianism continue to rise, the threat posed to democracy in South Africa has far wider implications for thinking about enactments of democracy. Nostalgia after Apartheid offers a unique approach to understanding how the attempted post-apartheid reforms have failed rural Black South Africans, and how this failure has led to a nostalgia for the very conditions that once oppressed them. It will interest scholars of African studies, postcolonial studies, anthropology, and education, as well as general readers interested in South African history and politics.

Fragmented Families, Poverty, and Women's Reproductive Narratives in South Africa

Fragmented Families, Poverty, and Women's Reproductive Narratives in South Africa
Author: Kammila Naidoo
Publisher: Adonis & Abbey Publishers Ltd
Total Pages: 318
Release: 2009-08-30
Genre: Reference
ISBN: 1912234572

Fragmented Families addresses a central question in the demographic debates on poverty and fertility transition in southern Africa:. In what ways do women's recurrent encounters with poverty serve to shape their sexual unions, social relationships and reproductive practices? The book focuses on the lives of a group of mothers and daughters from fifteen families in a demarcated part of the Winterveld area in South Africa, and draws attention to historical, socio-cultural, political and economic concerns in order to place in context or make sense of reproductive dynamics and family life at the micro-level. Vignettes, drawn from fieldwork, highlight the particularities of the area: the persistence of historical tensions, diverse livelihoods and complex gender relationships. The intergenerational stories of the women suggest that they live with immense and increasing adversity and that strategies to contend with them sometimes include attempts to assert control over sexual encounters and reproductive outcomes. The book contributes to a continuing debate on how changing socio-economic conditions could influence prospects for and the nature of fertility transition in African countries. The study concurs with alternative arguments that shifts toward lower levels of fertility might be due, in certain contexts, to experiences of severe hardship rather than favourable economic circumstances. Instead of seeking security and risk-aversion through bearing many children the response of indigent women in this area has been largely to resist reproduction, at particular stages of their lives, whilst using sexual relationships and child-bearing as strategies to manipulate and secure resources. In reflecting on methodological approaches, the book draws attention to the limitations of survey research in efforts to elicit 'accurate' representations of reproductive behaviour and fertility preferences, and emphasises the usefulness of more engaged, qualitative and long-term fieldwork endeavours in building substantive insights on women's familial and reproductive lives.

Traditional Leaders in a Democracy

Traditional Leaders in a Democracy
Author: MISTRA MISTRA
Publisher: African Books Collective
Total Pages: 402
Release: 2019-03-29
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0639995624

Post-1994, South Africa's traditional leaders have fought for recognition, and positioned themselves as major players in the South African political landscape. Yet their role in a democracy is contested, with leaders often accused of abusing power, disregarding human rights, expropriating resources and promoting tribalism. Some argue that democracy and traditional leadership are irredeemably opposed and cannot co-exist. Meanwhile, shifts in the political economy of the former bantustans - the introduction of platinum mining in particular - have attracted new interests and conflicts to these areas, with chiefs often designated as custodians of community interests. This edited volume explores how chieftancy is practised, experienced and contested in contemporary South Africa. It includes case studies of how those living under the authority of chiefs, in a modern democracy, negotiate or resist this authority in their respective areas. Chapters in this book are organised around three major sites of contest: leadership, land and law.