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5398 results in Wits University Press

Page 119 of 270

New South African Review
  • A fragile democracy – Twenty years on
  • Volume 4
  • Edited by Gilbert M. Khadiagala, Prishani Naidoo, Devan Pillay, Roger Southall
  • Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    21 April 2018
    Print publication:
    31 March 2014
  • The death of Nelson Mandela on 5 December 2013 was in a sense a wake-up call for South Africans, and a time to reflect on what has been achieved since ‘those magnificent days in late April 1994’ (as the editors of this volume put it) ‘when South Africans of all colours voted for the first time in a democratic election’. In a time of recall and reflection it is important to take account, not only of the dramatic events that grip the headlines, but also of other signposts that indicate the shape and characteristics of a society. The New South African Review looks, every year, at some of these signposts, and the essays in this fourth volume of the series again examine and analyse a broad spectrum of issues affecting the country. They tackle topics as diverse as the state of organised labour; food retailing; electricity generation; access to information; civil courage; the school system; and – looking outside the country to its place in the world – South Africa’s relationships with north-east Asia, with Israel and with its neighbours in the southern African region. Taken together, these essays give a multidimensional perspective on South Africa’s democracy as it turns twenty, and will be of interest to general readers while being particularly useful to students and researchers.

Mbeki and After
  • Reflections on the Legacy of Thabo Mbeki
  • Richard Calland, Jane Duncan, Steven Friedman, Mark Gevisser, Daryl Glaser, Mark Heywood, Peter Hudson, Chris Landsberg, Eusebius McKaiser, Chris Oxtoby, Peter Vale
  • Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    21 April 2018
    Print publication:
    31 December 2009
  • For nearly ten years – indeed more if we include his period of influence under Mandela’s presidency – Thabo Mbeki bestrode South Africa’s political stage. Despite attempts by some in the new ANC leadership to airbrush out his role, there can be little doubt that Mbeki was a seminal figure in South Africa’s new democracy, one who left a huge mark in many fields, perhaps most controversially in state and party management, economic policy, public health intervention, foreign affairs and race relations. If we wish to understand the character and fate of post-1994 South Africa, we must therefore ask: What kind of political system, economy and society has the former President bequeathed to the government of Jacob Zuma and to the citizens of South Africa generally? This question is addressed head-on here by a diverse range of analysts, commentators and participants in the political process. Amongst the specific questions they seek to answer: What is Mbeki’s legacy for patterns of inclusion and exclusion based on race, class and gender? How, if at all, did his presidency reshape relations within the state, between the state and the ruling party and between the state and society? How did he reposition South Africa on the continent and in the world? This book will be of interest to anyone wishing to understand the current political landscape in South Africa, and Mbeki’s role in shaping it.

The Musical Instruments of the Indigenous People of South Africa
  • Percival Kirby
  • Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    21 April 2018
    Print publication:
    31 December 2013
  • Percival Kirby was a musician and ethnomusicologist and for many years head of the music department at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. Between 1923 and 1933 he undertook more than nine expeditions as well as many shorter excursions around South Africa. He was hosted by local chiefs and taught to play the instruments he encountered. He managed to purchase many of them, and this collection, now known as the Kirby Collection, is housed at the South African College of Music, University of Cape Town. First published as Musical Instruments of the Native Races of South Africa in 1934, the book was the culmination of research trips undertaken by Percival Kirby. It became the standard reference on indigenous South African musical instruments. The bulk of the material is concerned with detailed information on the making and playing of each instrument, and is accompanied by a large number of musical examples. This third edition contains an introduction by Mike Nixon, Head of the Ethnomusicology and African Music at the South African College of Music, and new reproductions of the valuable historic photographs, but leaves Kirby’s original text unchanged.

New South African Review 5
  • Beyond Marikana
  • Volume 5
  • Edited by Gilbert M. Khadiagala, Prishani Naidoo, Devan Pillay, Roger Southall
  • Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    21 April 2018
    Print publication:
    31 December 2015
  • This fifth volume in the New South African Review series takes as its starting point the shock wave emanating from the events at Marikana on 16 August 2012 and how it has reverberated throughout politics and society. Some of the chapters in the volume refer directly to Marikana. In others, the infl uence of that fateful day is pervasive if not direct. Marikana has, for instance, made us look differently at the police and at how order is imposed on society. Monique Marks and David Bruce write that the massacre ‘has come to hold a central place in the analysis of policing, and broader political events since 2012’.The chapters highlight a range of current concerns – political, economic and social. David Dickinson’s chapter looks at the life of the poor in a township from within. In contrast, the chapter on foreign policy by Garth le Pere analyses South Africa’s approach to international relations in the Mandela, Mbeki and Zuma eras. Anthony Turton’s account, ‘When gold mining ends’ is a chilling forecast of an impending environmental catastrophe. Both Devan Pillay and Noor Nieftagodien focus attention on the left and, in different ways, ascribe its rise to a new politics in the wake of Marikana.The essays in NSAR 5: Beyond Marikana present a range of topics and perspectives of interest to general readers, but the book will also be a useful work of reference for students and researchers.

New South African Review
  • 2010: Development or decline?
  • Volume 1
  • Edited by John Daniel, Prishani Naidoo, Devan Pillay, Roger Southall
  • Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    21 April 2018
    Print publication:
    31 December 2010
  • The New South African Review revives the tradition of critical, analytical scholarship developed by the South African Review in the 1970s and 1980s. Accessible to a wide readership and drawing upon authors from well beyond academia, its objective is to be informative, discursive and, at times, downright provocative. It seeks to provide contemporary comment and engage with current controversies. The first volume in the series, 2010: Development or Decline? ranges widely across the implications of the international crisis for the economy, the threats to our fragile ecology of present economic strategies, through to the state of the ANC and the public service, issues around service delivery, migration, HIV-Aids, land reform, crime, the sexual behaviour of our youth, and much more. Posing the provocative question of whether South Africa is embarking upon a long-term decline, the volume simultaneously argues the potential for a society premised upon social equality, social coherence and sustainability. This collection will appeal to both national and international audiences interested in engaging with the multiple dilemmas and challenges facing contemporary South Africa

South Africa and India
  • Shaping the Global South
  • Claire Bénit-Gbaffou, Phil Bonner, Pradip Kumar Datta, Pamila Gupta, Patrick Heller, Isabel Hofmeyr, Jonathan Hyslop, Crain Soudien, Stéphanie Tawa Lama-Rewal, Goolam Vahed, Michelle Williams, Eric Worby
  • Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    21 April 2018
    Print publication:
    31 December 2011
  • South Africa’s future is increasingly tied up with that of India. While trade and investment between the two countries is intensifying, they share long-standing historical ties and have much in common: apart from cricket, colonialism and Gandhi, both countries are important players in the global South. As India emerges as a major economic power, the need to understand these links becomes ever more pressing. Can the two countries enter balanced forms of exchange? What forms of transnational political community between these two regions have yet to be researched and understood? The first section of South Africa and India traces the range of historical connection between the two countries. The second section explores unconventional comparisons that offer rich ground on which to build original areas of study. This innovative book looks to a post-American world in which the global South will become ever more important. Within this context, the Indian Ocean arena itself and South Africa and India in particular move to the fore. The book’s main contribution lies in the approaches and methods offered by its wide range of contributors for thinking about this set of circumstances.

Print, Text and Book Cultures in South Africa
  • Edited by Andrew van der Vlien
  • Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    21 April 2018
    Print publication:
    31 December 2012
  • This book explores the power of print and the politics of the book in South Africa from a range of disciplinary perspectives—historical, bibliographic, literary-critical, sociological, and cultural studies. The essays collected here, by leading international scholars, address a range of topics as varied as: the role of print cultures in contests over the nature of the colonial public sphere in the nineteenth century; orthography; iimbongi, orature and the canon; book- collecting and libraries; print and transnationalism; Indian Ocean cosmopolitanisms; books in war; how the fates of South African texts, locally and globally, have been affected by their material instantiations; photocomics and other ephemera; censorship, during and after apartheid; books about art and books as art; local academic publishing; and the challenge of ‘book history’ for literary and cultural criticism in contemporary South Africa.

Richard Rive
  • A partial biography
  • Shaun Viljoen
  • Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    21 April 2018
    Print publication:
    31 December 2013
  • Richard Moore Rive (1930–1989) was a writer, scholar, literary critic and college teacher in Cape Town, South Africa. He is best known for his short stories written in the late 1950s and for his second novel, ‘Buckingham Palace’, District Six, in which he depicted the well-known cosmopolitan area of District Six, where he grew up. In this biography Shaun Viljoen, a former colleague of Rive’s, creates the composite qualities of a man who was committed to the struggle against racial oppression and to the ideals of non-racialism but was also variously described as irascible, pompous and arrogant, with a ‘cultivated urbanity’. Beneath these public personae lurked a constant and troubled awareness of his dark skin colour and guardedness about his homosexuality. Using his own and others’ memories, and drawing on Rive’s fiction, Viljoen brings the author to life with sensitivity and empathy. The biography follows Rive from his early years in the 1950s, writing for Drum magazine and spending time in the company of great anti-establishment writers such as Jack Cope, Ingrid Jonker, Jan Rabie, Marjorie Wallace, Es’kia Mphahlele and Nadine Gordimer, to his acceptance at Magdalene College, Oxford, where he completed his doctorate on Olive Schreiner, before returning to South Africa to resume his position as senior lecturer at Hewat College of Education. This biography will resurface Richard Rive the man and the writer, and invite us to think anew about how we read writers who lived and worked during the years of apartheid.

The Unresolved National Question in South Africa
  • Left thought under apartheid and beyond
  • Edited by Edward Webster
  • John Mawbey, Jeremy Cronin, Alex Mohubetswane Mashilo, Robert van Niekerk Niekerk, Luli Callinicos Callinicos, B. G. Brown, M. P. Giyose, H. J. Peterson, C. A. Thomas, A. R. Zinn, Siphamandla Zondi, T. Dunbar Moodie, Enver Motala, Salim Vally, Gerhard Maré, Xolela Mangcu, Shireen Hassim, Alec Erwin, Sian Byrne, Nicole Ulrich, Lucien Walt, Martin Legassick, Daryl Glaser
  • Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    21 April 2018
    Print publication:
    31 December 2017
  • The re-emergence of debates on the decolonisation of knowledge has revived interest in the National Question, which began over a century ago and remains unresolved. Tensions that were suppressed and hidden in the past are now being openly debated. Despite this, the goal of one united nation living prosperously under a constitutional democracy remains elusive. This edited volume examines the way in which various strands of left thought have addressed the National Question, especially during the apartheid years, and goes on to discuss its relevance for South Africa today and in the future. Instead of imposing a particular understanding of the National Question, the editors identified a number of political traditions and allowed contributors the freedom to define the question as they believed appropriate – in other words, to explain what they thought was the Unresolved National Question. This has resulted in a rich tapestry of interweaving perceptions. The volume is structured in two parts. The first examines four foundational traditions: Marxism-Leninism (the Colonialism of a Special Type thesis); the Congress tradition; the Trotskyist tradition; and Africanism. The second part explores the various shifts in the debate from the 1960s onwards, and includes chapters on Afrikaner nationalism, ethnic issues, black consciousness, feminism, workerism and constitutionalism. The editors hope that by revisiting the debates not popularly known among the scholarly mainstream, this volume will become a catalyst for an enriched debate on our identity and our future.

The People’s Paper
  • A centenary history and anthology of Abantu-Batho
  • Grant Christison, Paul Landau, Peter Limb, Christopher Lowe, Sarah Mkhonza, Sifiso Mxolisi Ndlovu, Jeff Opland, Chris Saunders, Robert Trent Vinson
  • Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    21 April 2018
    Print publication:
    31 December 2012
  • This much-awaited volume uncovers the long-lost pages of the major African multilingual newspaper, Abantu-Batho. Founded in 1912 by African National Congress (ANC) convenor Pixley Seme, with assistance from the Swazi Queen, it was published up until 1931, attracting the cream of African politicians, journalists and poets Mqhayi, Nontsisi Mgqweth, and Grendon. In its pages burning issues of the day were articulated alongside cultural by-ways. The People’s Paper – comprising both essays and an anthology – explores the complex movements and individuals that emerged in the almost twenty years of its publication. The essays contribute rich, new material to provide clearer insights into South African politics and intellectual life. The anthology unveils a judicious selection of never-before published columns from the paper spanning every year of its life and drawn from repositories on three continents. Abantu-Batho had a regional and international focus, and by examining all these dynamics across boundaries and disciplines, The People’s Paper transcends established historiographical frontiers to fill a lacuna that scholars have long lamented.

Thinking Freedom in Africa
  • Toward a theory of emancipatory politics
  • Michael Neocosmos
  • Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    21 April 2018
    Print publication:
    31 December 2016
  • Previous ways of conceiving the universal emancipation of humanity have in practice ended in failure. Marxism, anti-colonial nationalism and neo-liberalism all understand the achievement of universal emancipation through a form of state politics. Marxism, which had encapsulated the idea of freedom for most of the twentieth century, was found wanting when it came to thinking emancipation because social interests and identities were understood as simply reflected in political subjectivity which could only lead to statist authoritarianism. Neo-liberalism and anti-colonial nationalism have also both assumed that freedom is realisable through the state, and have been equally authoritarian in their relations to those they have excluded on the African continent and elsewhere. Thinking Freedom in Africa then conceives emancipatory politics beginning from the axiom that people think’. In other words, the idea that anyone is capable of engaging in a collective thought-practice which exceeds social place, interests and identities and which thus begins to think a politics of universal humanity. Using the work of thinkers such as Alain Badiou, Jacques Rancière, Sylvain Lazarus, Frantz Fanon and many others, along with the inventive thought of people themselves in their experiences of struggle, the author proceeds to analyse how Africans themselves – with agency of their own – have thought emancipation during various historical political sequences and to show how emancipation may be thought today in a manner appropriate to twenty-first century conditions and concerns.

These Oppressions Won't Cease
  • The Political Thought of the Cape Khoesan, 1777 - 1879: An Anthology
  • Robert Ross
  • Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    21 April 2018
    Print publication:
    31 December 2017
  • The Khoesan were the first people in Africa to undergo the full rigours of European colonisation. By the early nineteenth century, they had largely been brought under colonial rule, dispossessed of their land and stock, and forced to work as labourers for farmers of European descent. Nevertheless, a portion of them were able to regain a degree of freedom and maintain their independence by taking refuge in the mission stations of the Western and Eastern Cape, most notably in the Kat River valley. For much of the nineteenth century, these Khoesan people kept up a steady commentary on, and intervention in, the course of politics in the Cape Colony. Through petitions, speeches at meetings, letters to the newspapers and correspondence between themselves, the Cape Khoesan articulated a continuous critique of the oppressions of colonialism, always stressing the need for equality before the law, as well as their opposition to attempts to limit their freedom of movement through vagrancy legislation and related measures. This was accompanied by a well-grounded distrust, in particular, of the British settlers of the Eastern Cape and a concomitant hope, rarely realised, in the benevolence of the British government in London. Comprising 98 of these texts, These Oppressions Won’t Cease – an utterance expressed by Willem Uithaalder, commander of Khoe rebel forces in the war of 1850-3 – contains the essential documents of Khoesan political thought in the nineteenth century. These texts of the Khoesan provide a history of resistance to colonial oppression which has largely faded from view. Robert Ross, the eminent historian of precolonial South Africa, brings back their voices from the annals of the archive, voices which were formative in the establishment of black nationalism in South Africa, but which have long been silenced.

Regarding Muslims
  • From slavery to post-apartheid
  • Gabeba Baderoon
  • Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    21 April 2018
    Print publication:
    31 December 2014
  • How do Muslims fit into South Africa’s well-known narrative of colonialism, apartheid and post-apartheid? South Africa is infamous for apartheid, but the country’s foundation was laid by 176 years of slavery from 1658 to 1834, which formed a crucible of war, genocide and systemic sexual violence that continues to haunt the country today. Enslaved people from East Africa, India and South East Asia, many of whom were Muslim, would eventually constitute the majority of the population of the Cape Colony, the first of the colonial territories that would eventually form South Africa. Drawing on an extensive popular and official archive, Regarding Muslims analyses the role of Muslims from South Africa’s founding moments to the contemporary period and points to the resonance of these discussions beyond South Africa. It argues that the 350-year archive of images documenting the presence of Muslims in South Africa is central to understanding the formation of concepts of race, sexuality and belonging. In contrast to the themes of extremism and alienation that dominate Western portrayals of Muslims, Regarding Muslims explores an extensive repertoire of picturesque Muslim figures in South African popular culture, which oscillates with more disquieting images that occasionally burst into prominence during moments of crisis. This pattern is illustrated through analyses of etymology, popular culture, visual art, jokes, bodily practices, oral narratives and literature. The book ends with the complex vision of Islam conveyed in the post-apartheid period.

Popular Politics and Resistance Movements in South Africa
  • William Beinart, Julian Brown, Tracy Carson, Marcelle C. Dawson, Tim Gibbs, Rebecca Hodes, Simonne Horwitz, Genevieve Klein, Mandisa Mbali, Kelly Rosenthal, Chizuko Sato, Mfaniseni Fana Sihlongonyane, Thula Simpson
  • Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    21 April 2018
    Print publication:
    31 December 2010
  • This volume explores some of the key features of popular politics and resistance before and after 1994. It looks at continuities and changes in the forms of struggle and ideologies involved, as well as the significance of post-apartheid grassroots politics. Is this a new form of politics or does it stand as a direct descendent of the insurrectionary impulses of the late apartheid era? Posing questions about continuity and change before and after 1994 raises key issues concerning the nature of power and poverty in the country. Contributors suggest that expressions of popular politics are deeply set within South African political culture and still have the capacity to influence political outcomes. The introduction by William Beinart links the papers together, places them in context of recent literature on popular politics and ‘history from below’ and summarises their main findings, supporting the argument that popular politics outside of the party system remain significant in South Africa and help influence national politics. The roots of this collection lie in post-graduate student research conducted at the University of Oxford in the early twenty-first century.

Sol Plaatje's Native Life in South Africa
  • Past and present
  • Edited by Janet Remmington, Brian Willan, Bhekizizwe Peterson
  • Sabata-mpho Mokae, Nhlanhla Maake, Peter Limb, Albert Grundlingh, Khwezi Mkhize, André Odendaal, Christopher Saunders, Heather Hughes, Keith Breckenridge, Jacob Dlamini, Sean O’Toole
  • Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    21 April 2018
    Print publication:
    31 October 2016
  • First published in 1916, Sol Plaatje’s Native Life in South Africa was written by one of the South Africa’s most talented early twentieth-century black leaders and journalists. Plaatje’s pioneering book arose out of an early African National Congress campaign to protest against the discriminatory1913 Natives Land Act. Native Life vividly narrates Plaatje’s investigative journeying into South Africa’s rural heartlands to report on the effects of the Act and his involvement in the deputation to the British imperial government. At the same time it tells the bigger story of the assault on black rights and opportunities in the newly consolidated Union of South Africa – and the resistance to it. Originally published in war-time London, but about South Africa and its place in the world, Native Life travelled far and wide, being distributed in the United States under the auspices of prominent African-American W E B Du Bois. South African editions were to follow only in the late apartheid period and beyond. The aim of this multi-authored volume is to shed new light on how and why Native Life came into being at a critical historical juncture, and to reflect on how it can be read in relation to South Africa’s heightened challenges today. Crucial areas that come under the spotlight in this collection include land, race, history, mobility, belonging, war, the press, law, literature, language, gender, politics, and the state.

Ties that Bind
  • Race and the politics of friendship in South Africa
  • Edited by Shannon Walsh, Jon Soske
  • Sisonke Msimang, Stacy Hardy, Lesego Rampolokeng, T. J. Tallie, Franco Barchiesi, Bridget Kenny, Daniel Magaziner, Neelika Jayawardane, Tsitsi Jaji, Mosa Phadi, Nomancotsho Pakade, Molemo Moiloa, Nare Mokgotho, Frank B. Wilderson
  • Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    21 April 2018
    Print publication:
    30 September 2016
  • What does friendship have to do with racial difference, settler colonialism and post-apartheid South Africa? While histories of apartheid and colonialism in South Africa have often focused on the ideologies of segregation and white supremacy, Ties that Bind explores how the intimacies of friendship create vital spaces for practices of power and resistance. Combining interviews, history, poetry, visual arts, memoir and academic essay, the collection keeps alive the promise of friendship and its possibilities while investigating how affective relations are essential to the social reproduction of power. From the intimacy of personal relationships to the organising ideology of liberal colonial governance, the contributors explore the intersection of race and friendship from a kaleidoscope of viewpoints and scales. Insisting on a timeline that originates in settler colonialism, Ties that Bind uncovers the implication of anti-blackness within nonracialism, and powerfully challenges a simple reading of the Mandela moment and the rainbow nation. In the wake of countrywide student protests calling for decolonisation of the university, and reignited debates around racial inequality, this timely volume insists that the history of South African politics has always already been about friendship. Written in an accessible and engaging style, Ties that Bind will interest a wide audience of scholars, students and activists, as well as general readers curious about contemporary South African debates around race and intimacy.

Seeing and Knowing
  • Rock art with and without ethnography
  • Edited by Geoffrey Blundell, Christopher Chippindale, Benjamin Smith
  • Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    21 April 2018
    Print publication:
    31 December 2010
  • It is largely through the work of David Lewis-Williams that San rock art has come to be understood so well, as a complex symbolic and metaphoric representation of San religious beliefs and practices. The purpose of this volume is to demonstrate the depth and wide geographical impact of Lewis-Williams’ contribution, with particular emphasis on the use of theory and methodology drawn from ethno­graphy that he has used with inspirational effect in understanding the meaning and context of rock art in various parts of the world. Seeing and Knowing explores how to understand and learn from rock art with and without ethnography. Because many of the chapters are based on solid fieldwork and ethnographic research, they offer a new body of work that provides the evidence for differentiation between knowing and simply seeing. This volume is unique in that it focuses exclusively on rock art and ethnography, and covers such a wide geographic range of examples on this topic, from southern Africa, to Scandinavia, to the United States. Many of the chapters explore studies in rock art regions of the world where variation and constancy can be observed and explored across distances both in space and in time. The editors have entitled the book Seeing and Knowing to echo Lewis-Williams’ Believing and Seeing published almost thirty years ago; they say ‘seeing’ again because looking at rock art is and will always be central, and then what is seen when human eyes and minds look; they say ‘knowing’ in recognition that, by his work and by his example, archaeologists now know a little more than they knew before. Even so, as Lewis-Williams will be the first to say, we still know only a fraction.

Psychological Assessment in South Africa
  • Research and applications
  • Edited by Sumaya Laher, Kate Cockcroft
  • Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    21 April 2018
    Print publication:
    31 December 2013
  • This book provides an overview of the research related to psychological assessment across South Africa. The thirty-six chapters provide a combination of psychometric theory and practical assessment applications in order to combine the currently disparate research that has been conducted locally in this field. Existing South African texts on psychological assessment are predominantly academic textbooks that explain psychometric theory and provide brief descriptions of a few testing instruments. Psychological Assessment in South Africa provides in-depth coverage of a range of areas within the broad field of psychological assessment, including research conducted with various psychological instruments. The chapters critically interrogate the current Eurocentric and Western cultural hegemonic practices that dominate the field of psychological assessment. The book therefore has the potential to function both as an academic text for graduate students, as well as a specialist resource for professionals, including psychologists, psychometrists, remedial teachers and human resource practitioners.

Remains of the Social
  • Desiring the post-apartheid
  • Edited by Maurits Bever Donker, Ross Truscott, Premesh Premesh Lalu, Gary Minkley
  • Derek Hook, Mari Ruti, Jaco Barnard-Naude, Annemarie Lawless, Aidan Erasmus, Helena Pohlandt-McCormick
  • Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    21 April 2018
    Print publication:
    31 December 2017
  • Remains of the Social is an interdisciplinary volume of essays that engages with what ‘the social’ might mean after apartheid; a condition referred to as ‘the post-apartheid social’. The volume grapples with apartheid as a global phenomenon that extends beyond the borders of South Africa between 1948 and 1994 and foregrounds the tension between the weight of lived experience that was and is apartheid, the structures that condition that experience and a desire for a ‘post-apartheid social’ (think unity through difference). Collectively, the contributors argue for a recognition of the ‘the post-apartheid’ as a condition that names the labour of coming to terms with the ordering principles that apartheid both set in place and foreclosed. The volume seeks to provide a sense of the terrain on which ‘the post-apartheid’ – as a desire for a difference that is not apartheid’s difference – unfolds, falters and is worked through.

Termites of the Gods
  • San cosmology in southern African rock art
  • Siyakha Mguni
  • Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    21 April 2018
    Print publication:
    31 December 2015
  • In Termites of the Gods, Siyakha Mguni narrates his personal journey, over many years, to discover the significance of a hitherto enigmatic theme in San rock paintings known as ‘formlings’. Formlings are a painting category found across the southern African region, including South Africa, Namibia and Zimbabwe, with its densest concentration in the Matopo Hills, Zimbabwe.Generations of archaeologists and anthropologists have wrestled with the meaning of this painting theme in San cosmology without reaching consensus or a plausible explanation. Drawing on San ethnography published over the past 150 years, Mguni argues that formlings are, in fact, representations of flying termites and their underground nests, and are associated with botantical subjects and a range of larger animals considered by the San to have great power and spiritual significance.This book fills a gap in rock art studies around the interpretation and meaning of formlings. It offers an innovative methodological approach for understanding subject matter in San rock art that is not easily recognisable, and will be an invaluable reference book to students and scholars in rock art studies and archaeology.

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