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5398 results in Wits University Press

Page 198 of 270

  • Chapter 8 - ‘Ask for a camel when you expect to get a goat’: Contentious politics and the climate justice movement

  • from PART 2 - Ecology, Economy and Labour
    • By Jacklyn Cock, Professor Emeritus, Department of Sociology, University of the Witwatersrand
  • Edited by John Daniel, Prishani Naidoo, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, Devan Pillay, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, Roger Southall, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg
  • Book:
    New South African Review 3
    Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    31 May 2019
    Print publication:
    01 March 2013, pp 154-172

  • Summary

    INTRODUCTION

    The climate crisis is deepening. Despite seventeen years of multinational negotiations there is no binding global agreement on the reduction of carbon emissions. In fact, carbon emissions are rising, which means that climate change will intensify and have devastating effects – particularly on the working class – in the form of rising food prices, water shortages, crop failures and so on. Shifting to a new energy regime will be particularly challenging for South Africa, given the carbon-intensive nature of our economy and the continued dominance of the ‘minerals-energy complex’.

    The failure of the multinational has generated an emphasis on the mobilisation of civil society. As environmental justice analyst David Hallowes states, ‘the “theatre of engagement” needs to shift away from the international negotiations’. Civil society, however, contains deep differences and serious power imbalances, as the 2011 Global Day of Action march demonstrated.

    Theatrical elements were in evidence in this march of 15 000 people from all over the world to the site of the COP17 negotiations in Durban. It was a very colourful event, with different movements marching in their battalions, singing and chanting ‘A people united will never be defeated’. There were the 400 members of the Rural Women's Assembly in their green T-shirts proclaiming ‘WOMEN – THE GUARDIANS OF SEED, LIFE AND EARTH’; 500 Democratic Left Front and Climate Jobs campaigners in red with the slogan ‘LISTEN TO THE PEOPLE. END CAPITALISM NOT NATURE’; SA Transport and Allied Workers’ Union (Satawu) members in orange; giant banners bearing differing messages; puppets; a balloon proclaiming ‘RIGHTS FOR MOTHER EARTH NOW’; an inflated octopus wearing an ‘Uncle Sam’ hat; some of Via Campesina's 200 million worldwide members; a funeral procession following a coffin to mark the end of ‘King Coal’; loud chants such as ‘Away with the capitalist agenda, away!’ (as well as ‘Phantsi COP17 that does not represent the people, phantsi!’); and three topless women carrying an anti-nuclear banner. At first glance it seemed a powerful illustration of the World Social Forum slogan of ‘Unity in Diversity’ with many different traditions and forms of struggle all heading in the same direction and converging at the International Convention Centre.

  • Chapter 4 - Predicaments of post-apartheid social movement politics: The Anti-Privatisation Forum in Johannesburg

  • from PART 1 - Party, Power and Class
    • By Ahmed Veriava, Associate Professor, Department of Political Studies, University of the Witwatersrand., Prishani Naidoo, a lecturer in the Department of Sociology at the University of the Witwatersrand.
  • Edited by John Daniel, Prishani Naidoo, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, Devan Pillay, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, Roger Southall, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg
  • Book:
    New South African Review 3
    Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    31 May 2019
    Print publication:
    01 March 2013, pp 76-90

  • Summary

    INTRODUCTION

    In May 2012, the authors received an invitation to attend a meeting ‘to discuss where do we take the APF?’ (McKinley, e-mail communication, 3 May 2012). Subsequently, we met as a small group on the stairs of Museum Africa in Newtown one Sunday morning. Present were about fifteen men and women, including founding members and activists from later struggles. There was, however, no easy path forward, and the discussion turned on whether or not the APF should ‘be revived’. For some of us, revival made no sense. The APF belonged to a different time, and what was needed was a new form to bring together communities in struggle. The elected office bearers had also not met in over a year, and were tainted by accusations of corruption. Rather than trying to resurrect a name that we had long outgrown, or trying to clean up the mess left by the office bearers, our task should be to think about ways of bringing back together the existing struggles of the communities in which the APF operated, or those that have been emerging since its departure from the political realm. For others, however, the APF's death could not be accepted (or admitted) as local struggles had depended heavily on its knowledge, skills and other resources. ‘The APF had a name’ and that meant something: it was too much simply to walk away.

    Twelve years earlier, in a precinct close by, the APF held what would later come to be seen as one of its first protests. At that time, there was the idea, and anticipation, that an emerging campaign against privatisation would be transformed into a movement. Activists from Wits University and the city had come together to protest against a conference called Urban Futures that was showcasing the city's and the University's respective restructuring plans. Denouncing the ‘neoliberal policies’ (APF 2000a; 2000b) of the University and the city, on the last day of the conference (after a week of smaller actions), a group of about a hundred protesters from a range of organisations across the city pushed their way into the Wits Great Hall, taking over the closing session. And so the APF was born.

  • Introduction: The second phase – tragedy or farce?

    • By Devan Pillay, Associate Professor and Head, Department of Sociology, University of the Witwatersrand.
  • Edited by John Daniel, Prishani Naidoo, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, Devan Pillay, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, Roger Southall, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg
  • Book:
    New South African Review 3
    Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    31 May 2019
    Print publication:
    01 March 2013, pp 1-10

  • Summary

    Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce …

    (Karl Marx 1852)

    The Marikana massacre of 16 August 2012 epitomised, in many ways, the tragedy of South Africa's transition to democracy since the heady days of 1994. If, on the one hand, the country is hailed as a ‘miracle’ of reconciliation, constitutional democracy and socioeconomic progress in many areas, on the other hand it is a story of a dream deferred: rising unemployment and work insecurity; widespread poverty amid expanding inequality; increasing crime and corruption; sexual violence; rural decline and displacement; urban homelessness and slummification; state dysfunctionality and public disservice; corporate greed and ecological degradation of various kinds.

    Much of this corresponds with the global picture of uneven (or enclave) development, and is captured by chapters in this volume and previous volumes of the New South African Review, as well as by the state's own National Planning Commission, which presents the social deficit as a problem of policy formulation and implementation. Marikana, however, exposes the scenario as a problem of global capitalism that still shows up in South Africa in a racialised form, embedded in a minerals-energy-financial complex based on cheap labour power – the hallmark of apartheid. Despite the coming to power of a democratically elected government supposedly representing the interests of the majority, Marikana has shown how, in the final instance, the state apparatus acts on behalf of a ‘power elite’, with the aid of subordinate classes beholden to its network of patronage, and with the aid of the mainstream media.

    The manner in which the African National Congress (ANC) and its Alliance partners responded – closing ranks around the tainted president Jacob Zuma – under the guise of a ‘second phase’ of the ‘national democratic revolution’ to supposedly address persisting historical imbalances, raises the question: has the tragedy of Zuma's first term, which patently failed to address the essential features of the so-called ‘1996 class project’ (namely, neoliberal, enclave development), now become a farce?

  • Chapter 14 - Traditional male initiation: Culture and the Constitution

  • from PART THREE - Public Policy and Social Practice
  • Edited by John Daniel, Prishani Naidoo, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, Devan Pillay, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, Roger Southall, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg
  • Book:
    New South African Review 3
    Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    31 May 2019
    Print publication:
    01 March 2013, pp 278-292

  • Summary

    INTRODUCTION

    Traditional male initiation has in recent years been the focus of government and media attention as a result of unacceptably large numbers of initiates being severely injured or dying. Between 1995 and 2006, more than 6 500 boys undergoing initiation were admitted to Eastern Cape hospitals, more than 300 died and over a hundred had their genitalia amputated following ritual circumcision (see Apps 2005: 28). The Eastern Cape Department of Health reported that eight initiates had died in the province between early January 2007 and November 2006 although two of these deaths were not directly related to circumcision (one had been murdered and another had died in a fire at a school). This represented a decrease in the number of deaths compared with the same period in the preceding year when fifteen deaths had been recorded. However, multiple problems continue to beleager traditional initiation practices in the Eastern Cape. In 2009 alone, ninety-one newly circumcised men in the Eastern Cape died, fifty-six of those deaths occurring in the mid-year school holidays (Associated Press 2010).

    Would-be initiates are mindful of the risks and their sense of uncertainty is compounded by an awareness of the extent to which the reproduction of the custom has become fragile and uncertain. The role prescribed by tradition for families is not always followed where there are many female-headed households, and the certainty of communal bonds and hierarchies implied by the practice have been fractured and become muddled. The social imperative to be initiated is as strong as it ever was, accompanied by an uncompromising set of social and physical punishments for those who fail to abide by it, but the social networks and foundations upon which that imperative once securely rested, and which served to support it, are no longer in place in many communities. This has led to a crisis with multiple dimensions including bogus fly-by-night surgeons and circumcision lodge operators; widespread reports of alcoholism and drug abuse by initiates and by those practising as traditional surgeons and nurses; and under-age boys being abducted into circumcision lodges or taking it upon themselves to be circumcised without the knowledge of their families.

  • Chapter 12 - Health sector reforms and policy implementation in South Africa: A paradox?

  • from PART THREE - Public Policy and Social Practice
    • By Laetitia Rispel, Professor and Head of the School of Public Health, University of the Witwatersrand., Julia Moorman, Senior Community Health Specialist, School of Public Health, University of the Witwatersrand.
  • Edited by John Daniel, Prishani Naidoo, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, Devan Pillay, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, Roger Southall, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg
  • Book:
    New South African Review 3
    Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    31 May 2019
    Print publication:
    01 March 2013, pp 239-260

  • Summary

    INTRODUCTION

    The health of South Africans is poor, relative to the country's economic development and health care expenditure (Blecher et al. 2011; Coovadia et al. 2009). The country is faced with the coexistence of ‘explosive HIV and TB epidemics, a high burden of chronic illness, mental health disorders, injury and violence-related deaths as well as a silent epidemic of maternal, neonatal, and child mortality’ (Lawn and Kinney 2009: 2). Life expectancy has declined over the past decade (largely because of the HIV epidemic), there is insufficient progress towards the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), and health system performance is sub-optimal (Chopra et al. 2009; Rispel and Kibua 2011). Gender, race and geographical location remain the key markers of social and economic vulnerability and of poor health outcomes (Coovadia et al. 2009). Despite many supportive health policies and significant progress in social service development, stark health inequalities remain between the rich and the poor and between urban and rural dwellers (Harris et al. 2011; Padarath and English 2011).

    In response to these problems, the minister of health signed the Negotiated Service Delivery Agreement (NSDA) for the health sector in October 2010. In terms of the NSDA, the four strategic outputs for the health sector are: increasing life expectancy; decreasing maternal and child mortality; combating HIV & AIDS and decreasing the burden of disease from tuberculosis; and strengthening health system effectiveness. Figure 1 shows the linkages between intended health care reforms and improvement in health outcomes.

    In the past two years, a number of policy initiatives to strengthen the South African health system have been launched by the national Department of Health. These include the re-engineering of primary health care; improving human resources for health, notably the revitalisation of the nursing profession; the introduction of compulsory accreditation of all health facilities and the proposed national health insurance (NHI) system, the last-named having received the most media attention. As can be seen from Figure 1, these initiatives have their origins in the NSDA.

  • Introduction: South Africa at large

  • from PART 4 - South Africa at Large
    • By Roger Southall, Professor Emeritus, Department of Sociology, University of the Witwatersrand and, during 2013, the Van Zyl Slabbert Visiting Professor in Politics and Sociology at the University of Cape Town.
  • Edited by John Daniel, Prishani Naidoo, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, Devan Pillay, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, Roger Southall, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg
  • Book:
    New South African Review 3
    Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    31 May 2019
    Print publication:
    01 March 2013, pp 294-296

  • Summary

    Under the presidency of Nelson Mandela, South African foreign policy sought, for the most part, to assume a high moral ground, refashioning itself after the isolation and ignominy of the late-apartheid years by adopting adherence to human rights and international law as its basis. Following clashes with African states over human rights issues (and the criticisms of their domestic policies that this implied or activated), his successor, Thabo Mbeki, opted for a more pragmatic approach combined with a reformist pan-Africanist agenda embodied in the launch of the New Partnership for African Development (Nepad). Subsequently, under Jacob Zuma, South African foreign policy has sought to extend its outreach globally and continentally while consolidating its linkages regionally.

    The two chapters that conclude this volume highlight both dimensions of foreign policy under the Zuma presidency: first in Sanusha Naidu's exploration of South Africa's admission into the grouping of ‘emergent’ economies known as the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China); and, second, by an analysis of relations between the governments of Swaziland and South Africa by John Daniel and Marisha Ramdeen.

    Naidu describes the invitation to South Africa to join the BRIC club in December 2010 as a diplomatic coup on the part of the Zuma presidency, a signifier of South Africa's high profile in various international forums as a representative of the global South. However, South Africa's admission as the fifth member country of BRIC was greeted with ambivalence, some arguing that it confirmed the country's status as an influential player globally, others that South Africa had been admitted more for political than economic reasons, noting especially that economically it was dwarfed by the other member countries. Naidu asks what implications joining the BRIC has for South Africa's foreign policy, and whether it marks a culmination of Mbeki's developmental and internationally reformist agenda.

    Naidu depicts Zuma's foreign policy as combining elements of Mandela's human rights agenda with an attempt to smooth relations that had been ruffled by Mbeki regionally, notably with Angola, but she sees continuity with Mbeki's goal of strengthening South Africa's position continentally and globally, inclusive of pursuit of greater inclusion of the global South within multilateral forums and notably within international financial institutions.

  • Introduction: Ecology, economy and labour

  • from PART 2 - Ecology, Economy and Labour
    • By Devan Pillay, Associate Professor and Head, Department of Sociology, University of the Witwatersrand.
  • Edited by John Daniel, Prishani Naidoo, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, Devan Pillay, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, Roger Southall, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg
  • Book:
    New South African Review 3
    Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    31 May 2019
    Print publication:
    01 March 2013, pp 92-94

  • Summary

    Under Jacob Zuma's leadership, the African National Congress-led government continued along its schizophrenic development trajectory, trying to appease contradictory interests amid modest economic growth and rising social instability. The most powerful of all these interests remain the large corporations, which continue to shape public discourse around issues of ecology, economy and labour.

    The chapters in this section speak to these issues. Dick Forslund presents a detailed exposition of the need for a wage-led growth path that tackles, head on, the neoliberal argument that low wages and inequality are necessary for economic growth, with the benefits trickling down to the working class in the long-term (by which time, as Keynes once said, we are all dead). Forslund argues instead that low wages and extreme inequality deprive the country of local markets and jobs. We should support unions in their demand for higher wages, tackle inequality by reducing the profit share of gross domestic product (GDP), abandon export-led growth that is based on wage compression, and move out of excessive reliance on extractive industries in favour of climate jobs that combine sustainable development with employment and decent work.

    Martin Nicol continues the discussion on economic policy with a focus on the mining industry and the debate over nationalisation. He argues for nationalisation of a special type, and is sceptical about the feasibility of outright nationalisation (whereby the state takes ownership of mines) as well as bureaucratic state intervention as envisaged by the African National Congress (ANC) task team report. Nicol puts forward a more socially embedded alternative in which workers, citizens and the environment are central actors, ensuring that mineworkers obtain just rewards for their labour through a wage solidarity policy; improved living conditions for workers; a programme of adult education; and a mine veterans policy. He argues that mining with care and efficiency would alleviate unfavourable environmental consequences and provide full economic value, but this, he asserts, can only be achieved through independent union and community organisation, to build a countervailing power against private management and state cronyism, mismanagement and corruption.

  • Introduction: Public policy and social practice

  • from PART THREE - Public Policy and Social Practice
    • By Prishani Naidoo, a lecturer in the Department of Sociology at the University of the Witwatersrand.
  • Edited by John Daniel, Prishani Naidoo, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, Devan Pillay, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, Roger Southall, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg
  • Book:
    New South African Review 3
    Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    31 May 2019
    Print publication:
    01 March 2013, pp 196-200

  • Summary

    Although it is not uncommon to hear the view expressed that the South African government has good policies on paper but has failed many times in their implementation, it is less often that we examine the possibilities that such policies might be flawed in their very approaches (that is, before their implementation even begins). The chapters in this section allow us to consider such a possibility in relation to a set of diverse topics, offering detailed accounts and assessments of the evolution of policy (and its relation to concrete practice and lived experience). As we read the accounts of skills development, the state of education and health sector transformation, the politicisation of senior appointments in the public service, and male circumcision, we are able to develop a deeper understanding of the crises being faced in each of these areas of experience and engagement, allowing us to move beyond merely repeating the observation that the state lacks the capacity to implement policy (which it admittedly often does). These chapters draw our attention to some of the major blind spots, points of mismatch with lived reality, and areas of neglect that characterise policies that guide contemporary efforts to address persistent problems and needs.

    Stephanie Allais kicks off this section with a close analysis of skills policy, identifying key problem areas, and relating developments in the sphere to international debates with the aim of ‘building a conceptual language as well as an empirical base’ from which to evaluate South African skills policy. She offers a brief history of skills development in the country, emphasising clear failures of the key strategies adopted in the post-apartheid period, including the National Qualifications Framework (NQF) and the system inaugurated by the national skills levy (levy-grant system), followed by a survey of international approaches (in the ‘developed’ world) to the question of expanding and improving the vocational skills of national populations. She suggests that at least four major factors contribute to the persistence of low levels of skills in South Africa: economic inequality and job insecurity; a poor school system; ‘the tendency of the NQF towards low-level fragmented skill’ with ‘cumbersome’ related requirements; and ‘a contractualised provision model which does not provide a framework for building public provision’, worsened by difficulties of implementation.

  • Chapter 11 - An African Newspaper in Central Johannesburg: The Journalistic and Associational Context of Abantu-Batho

  • from THEMES AND CONNECTIONS
    • By Peter Limb, an adjunct associate professor and Africana bibliographer at Michigan State University.
  • Grant Christison, Paul Landau, Peter Limb, Christopher Lowe, Sarah Mkhonza, Sifiso Mxolisi Ndlovu, Jeff Opland, Chris Saunders, Robert Trent Vinson
  • Book:
    The People’s Paper
    Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    21 April 2018
    Print publication:
    31 December 2012, pp 298-317

  • Summary

    In the preceding chapters we examined the content of Abantu-Batho. This chapter situates the paper in its journalistic and associational context: what was it like to be an African newspaper literally on the sidewalks of central Johannesburg; how did it gather and interpret news; how did it survive socially and financially; and what socio-intellectual matrix did it inhabit or even help create?

    THE MAKING OF A NEW RADICAL JOURNALISM

    The steady growth of the black-owned and edited press from the 1880s (see the Introduction in this volume) laid an important foundation for Abantu-Batho and supplied useful journalistic connections for advice or providing copy, and even models of layout and design to emulate. But the new paper also found its own niche as both a national and Johannesburg forum. It challenged the hegemony of the Establishment press that controlled public knowledge. There had been earlier flashes of radicalism, as in Izwi Labantu, but these faded as fast as the paper. Abantu-Batho sought to be a journal of national politics and quality, as opposed to a tabloid, but with a hybrid character and inclusive of human-interest stories and advertisements (see below). Above all, it was a political newspaper.

    In other chapters we investigate themes of political campaigns and policies, resistance, and the initial construction of nationhood in its pages. Here I suggest that Abantu-Batho both reflected and helped create African politics. It was a new media for Africans with a wider national and linguistic reach than before and a strident new assertiveness – the Facebook of the 1910s. Over time, under fire from the Right and with declining resources and a worn-out press, it failed to keep up with technological change. Yet those writers who stayed with Abantu-Batho refused to kowtow to the white-sponsored ‘yellow’ press epitomised by Umteteli wa Bantu, and retained their assertiveness and autonomy – to the extent that a largely pro-Congress editorial team could ever be fully ‘independent’ of politics. In this regard, it was the start of a new radical journalism later consummated in The Guardian and Inkundla ya Bantu.

  • Prologue - The Johannesburg Moment

  • Michael Burawoy, Karl Holdt
  • Book:
    Conversations with Bourdieu
    Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    20 April 2018
    Print publication:
    31 December 2012, pp 1-6

  • Summary

    Forty years ago, in the early 1970s, Durban experienced a ferment of new ideas that were to profoundly shape resistance to apartheid. The central figures in this ferment were two charismatic intellectuals, Steve Biko and Rick Turner. Biko and his comrades founded the Black Consciousness movement and its organisational forms, the South African Students’ Organisation and the Black People's Convention, from which emerged a new generation of political activists who went on to organise trade unions, community organisations and the United Democratic Front. Rick Turner's ideas about participatory democracy and the projects he initiated to support a nascent black trade union movement, partly in response to the challenge of Black Consciousness, influenced many of those who contributed to the building of the trade union movement.

    The Durban ferment was not only about the ideas of intellectuals; it was also about a shift in popular consciousness. In 1973 some 100,000 workers participated in a wave of strikes in Durban, breaking with the quiescence of the 1960s. By the end of the decade both Biko and Turner had been killed by the Security Police. Their ideas, however, continued to shape the resistance movement in different ways throughout the 1980s.

    This was what Tony Morphet – drawing on Raymond Williams's idea of a structure of feeling – called the ‘Durban moment’, constituted by profound shifts in ideas and consciousness among intellectuals and workers, and setting off far-reaching reverberations across South Africa, way beyond the immediate locale of Durban (Morphet, 1990: 92–93; Webster, 1993).

    That was the Durban moment. This book is subtitled ‘the Johannesburg moment’. What do we mean by this?

    At the simplest level, the title is a reference to the fact that the book grew out of a series of lectures on Pierre Bourdieu, the great French sociologist, given at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg in 2010. The significance of the reference to place is not simply that the lectures took place here, but that they presented an occasion for interrogating the relevance of Bourdieu's work to South Africa – and, more importantly, confronting the meaning of South Africa for Bourdieu's theory. It is through exploring the significance of this interrogation and confrontation that we can arrive at some sense of the possible meaning of a ‘Johannesburg moment’.

  • Chapter 1 - Rock art management: Juggling with paradoxes and compromises, 3 and how to live with them

  • from PART 1 - ON DOCUMENTING ROCK ART
    • By Anne-Sophie Hygen, Riksantikvaren – the Directorate for Cultural Heritage, Oslo, Norway, Alexey E. Rogozhinskiy, Kazakh Scientific Research Institute on Problems of the Cultural Heritage of Nomads, Almaty, Kazakhstan
  • Edited by Benjamin Smith, Knut Helskog, David Morris
  • Book:
    Working with Rock Art
    Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    21 April 2018
    Print publication:
    31 December 2012, pp 3-14

  • Summary

    THE PROBLEM

    Rock art management requires concrete answers to a multitude of interrelated questions. What are our motives and issues; what are the relevant past and present data and situations, and how do we make it all come together in management planning and practice without compromising the sites themselves, the people who made what we are managing today, our own scientific and ethical ideals, or the society we serve?

    The inherent problem of rock art management is that different goals and motivations do not always act in one way, but in many. We have research interests; we have the obligations of conservation, protection, preservation and long-term maintenance, and then again we have the demand for public presentation, with on-site infrastructural measures and facilities, walkways, signposts, adaptations for visitors, and so on. All these different motivations are valid and relevant, but the trouble is that they may be in opposition to each other. Therefore, we also have to ask and answer these questions: What are the vested interests in rock art, whose interests are we dealing with, and can different interests be combined without destructive compromises?

    WHAT DO WE MANAGE WHEN MANAGING ROCK ART?

    The precondition for knowing what we are dealing with in rock art management, as in archaeology in general, is of course documentation and recording, of the rock art in its multiple synchronic and diachronic micro and macro contexts. But in rock art management we need to go a step further and ask: What, ultimately, are we managing? I will not go into the fact that we also manage visitors; local, regional and national interests; economic and political interests and development issues but rather ask: Do we manage physical manifestations, landscapes and features, or do we manage meanings? Of course we should do both according to Hodder's two types of contextual meaning, ”… object as object, and object as meaningfully constituted” (1986: 171), but in any case we need to “know” what “the objects” are (ibid: 15). In order to “know” what they are, they must be identified and for practical purposes named, and we all know that terminology in archaeology is infused with interpretation, however cool and neutral we set out to be.

  • Beauvoir Meets Bourdieu

  • from CONVERSATION 6 - THE ANTINOMIES OF FEMINISM
  • Michael Burawoy, Karl Holdt
  • Book:
    Conversations with Bourdieu
    Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    20 April 2018
    Print publication:
    31 December 2012, pp 123-144

  • Summary

    If the scholarly principle of her literary ‘vocation’, of her emotional ‘choices’ and even of her relation to her own status as a woman offered to us by Toril Moi have but little chance of appearing as Simone de Beauvoir, this is because she is separated from this by the philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre to whom she delegated, in a way, her capacity to do philosophy .… There is not a better example of the symbolic violence that constitutes the traditional (patriarchal) relationship between the sexes than the fact that she will fail to apply her own analysis on relations between the sexes to her relationship with Jean-Paul Sartre.

    She loves this destiny [aggrégation in philosophy] like she loves he who embodies the realisation of what she would long to be: Normalien, instituted by the rite of the concours in a superman socially authorised to despise the inferior castes … a philosopher who is sure of being one – sure to the point of destroying, for the sole pleasure of shining or of seducing, which are the same thing, this is the project of Simone de Beauvoir.

    Bourdieu (1995: viii)

    Bourdieu very rarely refers to Beauvoir, but when he does it is with undisguised contempt, reminding us of his treatment of Fanon. Of course, both had a close relation to Jean-Paul Sartre, Bourdieu's imagined combatant and intellectual nemesis. The passages above are drawn from Bourdieu's preface to the translation of Toril Moi's biography of Simone de Beauvoir. In this preface written under the mocking title, ‘Apology for a dutiful woman’,1 Bourdieu claims that Beauvoir had no ideas of her own independent of Sartre, and then reduces her to a project of his own (Bourdieu's) projection – to be a philosopher dismissive of those beneath her.

    This strategy of reductionism justifies the silencing of Beauvoir. If her ideas are an emanation of Sartre's, then there's no need to take them seriously. Bourdieu thereby exercises the very symbolic violence he condemns, namely the masculinist practice of silencing women. The final move in this denigration is to appropriate Beauvoir's ideas from The Second Sex (1989 [1949]) – a foundational classic in the analysis of masculine domination as an expression of symbolic violence. Bourdieu's Masculine Domination (2001 [1998]) is but a superficial and diminutive gloss on The Second Sex.

  • Appendix - Abantu-Batho Editors and Editorial Staff

  • from PART II - Anthology
  • Grant Christison, Paul Landau, Peter Limb, Christopher Lowe, Sarah Mkhonza, Sifiso Mxolisi Ndlovu, Jeff Opland, Chris Saunders, Robert Trent Vinson
  • Book:
    The People’s Paper
    Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    21 April 2018
    Print publication:
    31 December 2012, pp 511-512

  • Summary

    OWNERS/MANAGING EDITORS

    Pixley ka Isaka Seme (1882–1951), board of directors chair, managing editor, 1912–16?; acting editor, 1916 and 1917/18?

    Levi Thomas Mvabaza (1870s–1947?), managing director, 1916–31?

    J. T. Gumede (1867–1947), owner, 1929–31

    EDITORS, SUB-EDITORS AND WRITERS

    Cleopas Kunene (1866–1917), editor, English/isiZulu, 1912–late 1915; mid-1916–April? 1917

    Daniel Simon Letanka (1874–1932), Sesotho/SeTswana editor, 1912–31; a director

    Saul Msane (1856–1919), editor, February 1914–July 1916

    Robert Grendon (1867?–1949), editor, 1915–July 1916

    Levi Thomas Mvabaza (1870s?–1947?), isiXhosa editor, 1916–31

    Jeremiah Dunjwa (d. 1935), joined staff, 1913, isiXhosa editor, 1916?

    Henry Selby Msimang (1886–1982), sub-editor or ‘Special Commissioner’, 1913–?; isiZulu English editor, May/June 1917?–February 1918?

    Herbert Nuttall Vuma Msane, editor or sub-editor, 1917–?

    Horatio L. Bud-M'belle, sub-editor, 1917?–19?

    Richard Victor Selope Thema (1886–1955), sub-editor? a.1914?–1920; acting isiZulu/English editor, February 1918–?

    Nontsizi Elizabeth Mgqwetho, poet and possibly staff, 1919.

    Epafras Mogagabise Ramaila (1897–1962), possible contributor, 1917?–29?

    Trevor Dan Mweli Skota (1893–1976), organiser/sub-editor, 1912; editor,1927?–31?

    A. W. G. Champion (1893–1975), editor or sub-editor, 1930–1

    STAFF

    C. S. Mabaso (d. 1935), secretary of Abantu-Batho Ltd., General Agent, 1912–29?

    Serasengoe Philip Merafe, “foreman machineminder”, 1912–14

    Moffat Caluza (outsourced printer)

    ENDNOTES

  • Data from Grant Christison, from death notice in NASA, Pretoria, TAB, MHG 31992.

  • Over the years, argues Chris Lowe (e-mail to editor 29 July 2011), some writers have conflated the names of Horatio L. Bud-M'belle and Isaiah Bud-M'belle to: ‘Horatio Isaiah Budlwana (Bud) Mbelle’ (E. J. Verwey (ed.), New Dictionary of South African Biography, vol. 1 (Pretoria: HSRC, 1999): 170) and ‘Horatio Isaiah Bud-Mbelle’ (T. Karis and G. M. Carter (eds), From Protest to Challenge: A Documentary History of African Politics in South Africa, 1882–1964, vol. 4 (Stanford: Hoover University Press, 1977): 12), with later errors perhaps originating in the latter source. Horatio was a nephew of Isaiah. Sometimes it is also spelt M'belle or Mbelle.

  • Data from Chris Lowe; T. D. M. Skota (ed.), The African Yearly Register, Being an Illustrated National Biographical Dictionary (Who's Who) of Black Folks in Africa (Johannesburg: Esson, 1931): 53 lists Selope Thema only as a ‘correspondent’.

  • Donald Herdeck, African Authors (Washington, DC: Black Orpheus Press, 1973): 359.

  • Fanon Meets Bourdieu

  • from CONVERSATION 4 - COLONIALISM AND REVOLUTION
  • Michael Burawoy, Karl Holdt
  • Book:
    Conversations with Bourdieu
    Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    20 April 2018
    Print publication:
    31 December 2012, pp 74-90

  • Summary

    But above all I wanted to get away from speculation – at that time [1960s], the works of Frantz Fanon, especially The Wretched of the Earth, were the latest fashion, and they struck me as being false and dangerous.

    Bourdieu (1990 [1986]: 7)

    What Fanon says corresponds to nothing. It is even dangerous to make the Algerians believe the things he says. This would bring them to a utopia. And I think these men [Sartre and Fanon] contributed to what Algeria became because they told stories to Algerians who often did not know their own country any more than the French who spoke about it, and, therefore, the Algerians retained a completely unrealistic utopian illusion of Algeria … the texts of Fanon and Sartre are frightening for their irresponsibility. You would have to be a megalomaniac to think you could say just any such nonsense.

    Pierre Bourdieu, interview in Le Sueur (2001: 282)

    Bourdieu's stance toward Marxism becomes more hostile as we move from Marx to Gramsci and now to Fanon. Bourdieu is prepared to acknowledge the insights of Karl Marx and, indeed, so many of his ideas find an echo in the writings of Marx. As I suggested in Conversation 2, his theory of cultural domination can be seen as an extension of Marx's political economy from material to symbolic goods. While Bourdieu wants to distance himself from his opposite number in the Marxist tradition, he nonetheless shows a grudging respect by turning Gramsci against Gramsci.

    When it comes to Frantz Fanon, the gloves are off, as we see in the rare quotes above, taken from two interviews. I have found no other explicit commentary on Fanon in Bourdieu's works. As with other Marxists, once we allow Fanon to respond, we see both astonishing parallels and glaring divergences. Bourdieu's enmity towards Fanon – there is no evidence that Fanon even knew Bourdieu – is perhaps all the deeper because their lives in Algeria overlapped. But they were worlds apart: the one a scientific observer from the metropolis sympathetic to the plight of the colonised, attempting to give them dignity by recognising their distinctive traditions; the other a psychiatrist from Martinique trained in France and dealing directly with victims of violence on both sides of the colonial divide.

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