Wits University Press

Summary

One can but only speculate on the personality of the artist who created this painting. Here was an extraordinary person, whose mind could leave the naturalistic tradition of his art to reach out into an ethereal world of abstraction, centuries before the time and thousands of miles from the place of Klee, Mondrian, Braque, and other abstract painters of the 20th century.

Core elements of San belief and cosmology include the notions of Great God and supernatural potency, which find strong expression in the healing dance and the daily life of the people. How these spiritual elements are expressed in the rock art is neither simple nor straightforward. Over time, researchers developed means to make the connections between these facets of San expressive culture. Yet to deal with these intricate connections, and in preparation for deciphering formlings and botanical images, we need to understand the basics of San picture making; for example, common ways in which the painters made and structured their imagery. San rock art, as with many prehistoric artistic forms, is largely representational and draws its subject matter principally from physical or natural phenomena. However, the way in which painters achieved the object-pictorial transformation is complex. I examine the manner in which aspects of San rock art are structured in order to understand how symbolism is embedded in graphic terms.

Early researchers, schooled mostly in Western art traditions, viewed San rock art with the expectation that the subject matter of images they considered ‘good’ representations would be readily recognisable and understandable. I argue that judgements of what forms a good or bad depiction are culturally constructed and based on fundamentals built in a particular cultural context and history. There are therefore no universals in the manner in which we perceive or read graphic representations. Consider what would happen if someone accustomed only to Western textual forms were asked to read hieroglyphics, Mongolian or Mandarin language characters. They would not be able to decipher these foreign scripts, let alone the conveyed meaning. Although images are somewhat different, the caution is the same. Our literary culture has encouraged a literal ‘reading’ of images without taking into account cultural rubrics and conventions that may be in sharp contrast to our own systems of representation. So much of our seeing comes from habit and the expectation of the familiar in that which we perceive.

Summary

Jacob Zuma's years in command of the ANC have irrevocably changed the party as organisation – and the South African state. The ANC is captured as a tide gradually receding towards a point that marks the end of its hegemony, its fate linked to, but not solely determined by, President Zuma. The power of Zuma is formidable, but also contested. While factions are battling out the succession, the damages that the Zuma era has inflicted on the ANC pose two questions. Would the ANC recover from the wounds inflicted by Zuma? Could the ANC reposition itself to rise above the party that installed, retained and protected Zuma?

Some of the changes to the ANC organisationally in the course of Zuma's two presidential terms have resulted specifically from his presidency, his style of leadership and the way in which he rules over the ANC and the government. Other organisational changes might have materialised no matter which ANC leader was in power – many were due to the organisation's own continuous metamorphosis from liberation movement to a powerful majoritarian and dominant party that fused with the state. It was a particular type of organisation that allowed Zuma to become and to remain its president for two terms. But Zuma and those close to him in the organisation also have agency – they shape events rather than experience them passively. They fostered the ANC's integration with the state and they allowed an ANC in which the president rules. As a result, there is more emphasis on a party that sees state institutions as personal (and, occasionally, organisational) fiefdoms. Under this tutelage the ANC has become even more of an organisation that readily submits to the top leadership, plays extensively in succession politics and excels at factional mobilisation. In such an orgy of power there is little time to contemplate accountability to the public who had put the party in power – except in the narrow sense of reporting to ANC structures and events and roughly abiding by state-institutional processes.

The intra-ANC wrangle is about the extent to which the Zuma band of leaders – forcefully but ambiguously because of uncertain succession outcomes – will create openings for a post-Zuma order that will dare to diverge from the dictates of the Zuma era.

Summary

Rightly, Siyakha Mguni, the author of this beautiful and stimulating book, feels that he has ‘uncovered certain hidden mysteries of the San spiritual universe’. Modestly, but again rightly, he adds that he has ‘likely only partially uncovered the possible layers of symbolism’ of his chosen foci – the so-called ‘formlings’ and trees, two hitherto little understood components of a fascinating southern African art.

Insights of this importance do not come suddenly and out of nowhere. Rather, they are milestones along a road with many ups and downs. Discovery, it is said, favours the prepared mind. ‘Mind preparation’ itself is a long and sometimes arduous task. Siyakha gives us glimpses of his journey, which began in 1978 in the Matopo Hills of Zimbabwe, a beautiful region of southern Africa that has been marked by terror and violent clashes as well as delicate images from a bygone age. He found that the ‘place and its tranquil ambience evoke deep time’.

In such situations it is easy to surrender oneself to the contemplation of beauty and also to the puzzles that the more enigmatic images imply. For some, it is almost sacrilege to probe for and expose ‘hidden mysteries’. Are we trespassing on sacred ground, intruding into the innermost thoughts of long gone people? Should we not simply allow the mystery to endure?

Siyakha's personal journey has enabled him to bridge what some people see as a dichotomy. He can, and we feel it on page after page, marvel at the subtlety of thought and beauty of line that we see in the paintings he has chosen for reproduction and, at the same time, lead us to an understanding of what the images meant for those who made them so long ago. Knowledge of how a flower ‘works’ botanically need not erase our sense of wonder. On the contrary, our wonder grows as we learn more and more.

In this book, Siyakha's ‘flowers’ are rock art images that are prominent in Zimbabwe but enigmatic. Some are oval patches of paint, sometimes joined in long lines; several have added details. These are the so-called formlings. Believing that the art was a direct representation of what the San saw around them, some earlier writers thought the oval forms depicted the Victoria Falls, grain bins, shields or other objects that people saw daily.

Summary

Opposition political parties in South Africa are on a long march to dent ANC majorities. Although the parties take part in the uphill slog to close the gap, the succession of new parties falling in battle against the ANC hangs over their heads. And even ‘great opposition performances’ are only modestly reducing the ANC's lead.

The Democratic Alliance (DA) has grown more steadfastly than any other opposition party in democratic South Africa. It grew by six percentage points from 2009 to 2014, while the ANC shrank by four percentage points. In the decade from 2004 to 2014 it grew incrementally and systematically from one national election to the next without setbacks, and this was despite new opposition parties detracting from its potential performance. Despite such achievements, however, the DA's growth has been modest and it has no guarantee that a new party may not still rise and eclipse it. The EFF made a notable 6 per cent entrance onto the electoral landscape in 2014, yet its performance was only marginally better than the six percentage-point growth that the DA registered.

Three futures need to be considered for the DA: on its own, incrementally growing as a predominantly liberal party (with or without added momentum that could allow catch-up with the ANC); becoming more like the ANC in policy and ideology (offering a cleaner, less corruption-prone party while extending rapidly into the black-African voter bloc); and largely suspending prior ideology to become a vote-catching party machine that would also align with other parties in governing coalitions.

The thread of these alternative futures runs through this argument. The DA as predominant opposition party anchors the chapter, counterbalanced with the rest of the opposition right of the ANC. The analysis places DA growth, identity changes and leadership dilemmas and change in the context of a weakened but always dominant ANC. The chapter dissects the DA's gradual accumulation of support, its strategies for reinventing itself, and its barriers to becoming the next government – and compares the DA's fortunes with the hopes of new opposition parties, which rise and fall at an approximate rate of one per major electoral event.

Positioning opposition amid ANC dominance

The DA – along with other centrist opposition parties – has encroached on ANC territory. In the process the DA cracked, but did not crush, the ceilings that racial and liberation identity impose on South African voter allegiances.

Summary

Until recently, the Great Depression of the 1930s was considered the worst crisis of capitalism. Today, historians, economists and the business media have confirmed that we are now experiencing the worst crisis of contemporary capitalism. The early-twentieth-century Great Depression seems to pale in comparison to the ‘great financial crisis’ that occurred at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Despite the massive bailouts given to banks and finance houses, deepening austerity in the heartlands of capitalism and a tenuous continuity in growth rates in countries like China and India, the end of the crisis is not in sight. This, of course, does not mean capitalism is about to collapse – but it is certainly in a state of deepening crisis and will probably reach a historical terminus, like all social systems before it.

However, this volume does not attempt to make catastrophic predictions, but instead sets out to explain and provide an understanding of the unfolding crisis by bringing into view its underlying dynamics.

With such a deep systemic and conjunctural crisis facing neoliberal capitalism, both in South Africa and beyond, one would intuitively expect the Left to be on the rise and gaining ground. Yet there seems to be an unevenness regarding effective left-wing responses to the crisis. In most instances, trade unions, social movements and left-wing parties seem to be advancing responses that are incapable of bridging the gulf between the current realities and popular expectations of progressive transformation, such as employment creation and less inequality. The weaknesses and advances of the Left in response to the current context are critically assessed in this volume.

By applying a rigorous Marxist (and neo-Marxist) political-economic analysis of the contemporary capitalist crisis and the Left's response to it, this volume confronts some of the inherited weaknesses of Marxist theoretical approaches to capitalist crises. The first weakness, according to Lilley (2012: 44), can be referred to as the ‘vanguardist’ dyad of structural determinism, on the one side, and voluntarism on the other.1 Structural-determinist approaches give primacy to the ‘laws of history’ and the limits of the capitalist system (or the internal weight of its own contradictions).

Summary

Europe is haunted by austerity. Public sectors across the European Union (EU) are being cut back and working-class gains from the post-war period systematically undermined. It is often argued in the media that citizens of richer countries will now have to pay for the ‘profligacy’ of citizens from indebted countries. Cultural arguments of apparently ‘lazy Greek’ workers as the cause of the crisis are put forward despite the fact that Greek workers are amongst those who work the most hours in Europe. In any case, it is not the Greek, Portuguese, Irish or Cypriot citizens and their health and education systems that are being rescued. It is banks, that organised the lending of super-profits to peripheral countries, and that were exposed to private and national debt in these countries. For example, German and French banks were heavily exposed to Greek debt, and British banks to Irish debt, with much of this exposure having now been socialised through bond purchases by the European Central Bank (ECB). In this chapter, we will assess the causes of the crisis, its implications for workers and discuss the politics of labour in response to the Eurozone crisis.

Conceptually, assessments of developments in the European political economy have been dominated by institutionalist analyses from within the Varieties of Capitalism literature. As we will argue in the next section, this literature, which is beset by problems of methodological nationalism, is unable to take into account the underlying social relations of production that link the various political economies closely together, with developments in one affecting the others. Second, development within the EU, especially of countries in the periphery which are now in trouble, such as Greece, Portugal, Spain and Ireland, was generally assessed along the lines of David Ricardo's theory of comparative advantage, with the idea that everybody would benefit from free trade and ultimately reach the same kind of development level. Instead, we will argue that, as borne out in empirical reality, capitalist development and expansion is characterised by processes of uneven and combined development. Importantly, unevenness exists not only between countries in the core and the periphery, but also within countries, be they in the core or periphery.

Summary

A warming trend is already apparent in South Africa, and it is much higher than the global average rate. Thus, relative to the present, temperatures in the interior of the country could rise by about 3°C by the end of the century if the countries of the world greatly and urgently reduce their greenhouse gas emissions, but by up to 6°C if they do not.

The global average air temperature measured near the surface in 2010 has risen by 0.8°C since 1870 when accurate records began and, measured over multi-decade periods, the rate of warming has been accelerating. The rise in air temperature has been unsteady: there is a general upward trend interspersed by some long periods of no change, or even cooling. For instance, in the decade after 2000 there was little overall rise, just as there was little rise in the period 1945–1968, but in between were periods of rapid rise. Such pauses are to be expected when a complex system such as Earth's climate is nudged up, even if the nudging is relatively continuous, as the increase in greenhouse gases has been. Some of the cooling periods are associated with variable global weather patterns and specific events. Altered ocean circulation such as recurrent La Niña phenomena in the equatorial Pacific Ocean cools Earth, as do large volcanic eruptions that fill the atmosphere with reflective dust and sulphate aerosols. These eruptions can cool Earth's atmosphere by up to 0.5°C for two to three years. Tellingly, the heat content of the ocean, which is much larger than the heat content of the atmosphere, has kept going up. Despite the temporary cooling periods, there is a consistent overall upward trend in average global temperatures. The annual average air temperature in South Africa has risen by around 1.2°C over the period of accurate records.

In the medium term, global warming in the northern hemisphere will generally exceed that in the southern hemisphere because oceans, which dominate the southern hemisphere, warm more slowly than the land. Despite this, the rate of warming in South Africa is nearly twice the average rate recorded worldwide so far. This is partly because inland regions of South Africa are distant from cooling oceanic influences. It is also because much of South Africa falls within a dry belt broadly corresponding to the Tropic of Capricorn.

Summary

In December 2005, Khanya College dedicated a special issue of its journal Khanya to a debate about the relationship between the so-called ‘social movements’ and the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu). The debate had been sparked by the launch of a ‘new UDF’ in Cape Town on 22 August of that year, which sought to call upon the legacy of the anti-apartheid United Democratic Front that was prominent in the 1980s. The new formation was essentially an attempt by Cosatu in the Western Cape to build broader support for its new ‘jobs and poverty’ campaign, and saw the labour federation working with partners such as the Cape Town-based nongovernmental organisation (NGO), the Alternative Information Development Centre (AIDC). Notably, however, the launch received a critical response from community-based organisations affiliated with the most prominent Cape Town social movement, the Anti-Eviction Campaign.

The debate centred around the political orientation of social movements – a group of organisations with deep roots in township communities – and in particular the question of whether they should join initiatives such as the new UDF. But beneath this question lay a whole host of other questions regarding the state of the working class and working-class struggle in South Africa:

Summary

The recent natural disasters experienced globally, which may have been the result of climate change, serve to emphasize the need for all states and citizens to stand in solidarity in addressing and mitigating the unpredictable effects of climate change and global warming. The effects will be felt not only by individuals but also by industry, and this will have a particularly severe impact on the global south. This is a stark reminder of the need for a more balanced and equitable global society that is free from hunger and poverty.

A rational response to this threat will require partnerships between nations as well as increased support for research and innovation. These will be needed to save future generations’ livelihoods and prosperity, and also to preserve the welfare and well-being of the global population.

This book summarizes the important knowledge gathered around global change and its impact in the Southern African region. It points out that the Southern African region has over the past century warmed at a rate of about twice the global average. What is more perturbing is that it will continue to do so if proactive actions are not taken to address global warming. The fact that large parts of Southern Africa are already hot and dry makes the countries in this region all the more vulnerable to further warming and greater rainfall uncertainties.

The South African Department of Science and Technology has for many years supported research into climate change, its impact and strategies for adaptation and prevention. The Department will continue to provide strategic direction and support in understanding climate change and in related research and innovation. South African researchers, including the authors of this book, continue to make significant contributions to the global knowledge base on this crucial twenty-first century issue.

It is clear that global warming and climate change affect everyone. I believe that, as citizens, we must play a role in developing solutions which meet our aspirations for a better life and ensuring that we do not condemn future generations to an intolerable environment.

It is therefore with great satisfaction that I introduce this sometimes complex science of Earth's climate to the people for whom it is most relevant – the ordinary, interested parties outside of the scientific community.

Summary

Djo Tunda Wa Munga and Rumbi Katedza both live in transitional (post-)conflict societies – the former in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and the latter in Zimbabwe – which impacts on how they make films and on the kinds of films they make. In recognition of their work and its considerable impact, both filmmakers were invited to deliver keynote addresses at the ‘Uber(w)unden (Art in Troubled Times)’ conference, which was convened at the Goethe-Institut in September 2011.

Prior to this meeting in 2011, we had occasion to meet Wa Munga for discussions at the Durban International Film Festival 2010, where he premiered his film Viva Riva! (2010) while Katedza was a participant in the ‘ARTSWork: Meeting of African Women Filmmakers’ in 2010 at the Goethe-Institut in Johannesburg.

Katedza is an accomplished filmmaker whose position in Zimbabwe has been twofold. Firstly, she has sought to use the medium as a way of interrogating representations of the political climate in her country. Secondly, she has used the medium to empower a new generation of Zimbabweans generally and women in particular. Her articles and short stories have been published widely. Her award-winning documentary The Axe and the Tree (2010) explores the processes of collective healing and community accountability for the perpetration of violence. The success of the film is its ability to represent the sometimes fine line between the survivors of violence and the perpetrators of violence.

After an anti-colonial civil war, Zimbabwe gained its independence from the British in 1980. The country suffered international sanctions in relation to its politics of land redistribution and, since the 1990s, has experienced growing internal opposition demanding freedom of speech next to other citizens’ rights, as well as the upholding of human rights. Internal conflict and violence have intensified further in the context of contested elections.

Wa Munga is also a highly skilled and award-winning filmmaker, whose film practice draws from a series of close observations of his social and political circumstances in the DRC. Wa Munga's debut feature film Viva Riva! has played at a number of international film festivals.

Summary

Although the future seems fraught with climate risk, it does not have to be as risky as current trends would project. As a species, humans are wonderfully adaptive and have the advantages of foresight and learning, if we care to use them. There are ways for ten billion humans to coexist on Earth at an acceptable and equitable level of comfort, while leaving a large enough share of the planet and its life-support processes to sustain the rich diversity of life forms on which we directly and indirectly depend.

Currently, human development is not on a sustainable path, climatically and in many other respects. A deeply unpleasant future for our children and grandchildren can only be averted by fundamental and sustained changes in the way we live. This will be very difficult to achieve because it falls into a class of problem where collective welfare is in tension with the incentives that drive individual or subgroup behaviour. For example, all the inhabitants of Earth share an atmosphere. Action by any individual to reduce his or her negative effect on the atmosphere comes at some personal cost, but unless the action is simultaneously undertaken by millions of other individuals, there is negligible direct personal benefit. The benefit of individual restraint accrues to everyone, including the freeloaders who continue to pollute.

The only non-disastrous outcome of this kind of challenge is enlightened collective action. This is the objective of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, where progress is slower than the melting of glaciers. Fortunately, there are many other avenues to supplement international political processes. For example, individual nations and cities are increasingly taking action without waiting for global consensus because their citizens are demanding it, and because they see benefit in becoming pioneers in a new global ‘green’ economy. Private-sector investors are also looking at their portfolios as a whole rather than just at fossil fuel-based assets, and realizing that climate change places many sectors at risk. They are changing their investment strategies accordingly.

Collective action is easier to achieve at a local than a global scale, especially with regard to climate adaptation. This is because, for adaptation actions, the benefits accrue to the people taking the action rather than to the whole world. For example, many cities are showing climate leadership where countries are not.

Summary

In all epochs of the world's history, we shall find the Great Man to have been the indispensable saviour of his epoch; – the lightning, without which the fuel never would have burnt. The History of the World, I said already, was the Biography of Great Men.

Great men make history, but only such history as it is possible for them to make. Their freedom of achievement is limited by the necessities of their environment. To portray the limits of those necessities and the realization, complete or partial, of all possibilities, that is the true business of the historian.

The chief characteristic of the hero is sincerity. More sublime than grace, more authentic than reason, sincerity is a moral force that connects the actor to his action or belief or idea.

It is a truism of South African history that black people have been ‘invisible’ for centuries – erased out of history, erased out of place, erased out of cities, erased out of mind. It is also a truism that this erasure is no accident – it didn't just happen; it was part of the grander history of the colonisation of the southernmost tip of the African continent. It is in this state of being post-colonials that we as a ‘new generation’ of South Africans – Mandela's progeny, Generation X/Y, ‘Model Cs’, Born Frees, whatever epithet you care to throw at us – confront the ‘blank spaces’ of our country's history.

This chapter will be the meditation of a Generation Xer on how we can restore sight so that future generations can see themselves in ‘history’. It is based on the thought that the only way we can restore this lost sight is by assuming the role carved out for us by an earlier generation of Africans who themselves had to deal with the shock of watching themselves being erased. Their struggle to paint in, fill in, plaster over, colour in the experience of being a historical subject and a seeing being is our struggle. I shall call these earlier Africans the ‘black interpreters’.

However, inasmuch as their struggle is ours, this chapter will also argue that being a post-colony is not a period measured in time but an age: ‘As an age, the postcolony encloses multiple durées made up of discontinuities, reversals, inertias, and swings that overlay one another, interpenetrate one another, and envelope one another: an entanglement.’

Summary

Zanele Muholi is currently one of South Africa's internationally acclaimed artists. The main focus of her work is the representation of black lesbians and transgender people at the intersection of race and class.

Although she is perhaps best known as a photographer, she does not work exclusively in this medium, but in dialogue with films, clips, installations, beadwork and other media. Her intention is not to produce single masterpieces – l'art pour l'art – but rather an inter-textual multitude of visual representations of the Other. Her work may be situated in the context of feminist artists such as Phybia Dlamini and Gabrielle le Roux, who produce art at the intersection of community engagement, youth development and the documentation of the margins of hetero-normative societies through the bricolage of film, installations, writing, drawing and photography.

Muholi's aim is to challenge not only the normativity of heterosexuality, but also to subvert the dominant impression of homosexuality as a mainly white, Western and middle-class phenomenon. Her artistic exploration of body politics produces a voice that articulates a community's condition into the collective silence.

The multiple forms of her artistic expression follow Muholi's political interests: the promotion of human rights and equality for persons with non-conforming gender-performances. She herself locates her artwork within what she calls ‘visual activism’.

Feminist and post-colonial analyses of representational politics generate particular aesthetic and ethical questions and dilemmas which can be well illustrated through a consideration of Muholi's art (Schuhmann 2014b). This chapter looks at her work in its own right, while at the same time using Muholi's art to engage a resonant spectrum of questions around the wider political economy of representing violence and trauma. This includes the challenge of subverting contemporary practices of Othering and their multiple legacies of oppression, as well as the risk of inadvertent complicity with hegemonic gaze regimes. To understand fully the representative strategies mobilised by Muholi, and in order to engage these questions, it is necessary to embrace her full body of work and to try to interpret it within wider theoretical considerations, from postcolonial film theory, trauma studies, socio-linguistics and psychoanalytic cultural theory.

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Frontmatter

Chapter 4 - Ways of seeing San rock art

Summary

Frontmatter

3 - Could rising carbon dioxide concentrations boost plant growth?

Chapter 1 - The ANC's fused party-state

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Foreword

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Chapter 6 - The DA's encroaching march

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Introduction

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Chapter 4 - Austerity and resistance: The politics of labour in the Eurozone crisis

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8 - How hot might it get in South Africa this century?

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References

Acknowledgements

Acknowledgements

Chapter 2 - Labour and community struggles 1994-2014

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Foreword

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5 - Aftermath – A focus on collective trauma

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Introduction

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Chapter Ten - The Black Interpreters and the Arch of History

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6 - Shooting Violence and Trauma: Traversing visual and social topographies in Zanele Muholi's work

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9 - Will climate change cause malaria to spread in South Africa?

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