As with the Left, the Conservative Party also began to look to charity for the delivery of social services. Following the enormous appeal of Band Aid and Live Aid, the Government turned to the voluntary sector to make up for the cuts to the social services budgets. However, it also hoped to embrace a compliant sector. Conservative MPs regularly complained to the Charity Commissioners about the political advocacy of the humanitarians and other poverty lobbyists. From the mid-1980s, this became a concerted campaign through neoconservative organisations such as Western Goals. The most successful was the International Freedom Foundation, an anti-communist libertarian group which triggered an investigation into Oxfam’s advocacy on apartheid. The Charity Commissioners concluded that Oxfam had overstepped its remit and publicly rebuked it in 1991, even though the end of apartheid was in sight. It later emerged that the IFF was a front organisation for the South African military. The racist politics of the region, which shaped so much humanitarian intervention, had returned to the UK to impact the regulation of all charities’ campaigning work.

Employment testing is routinely performed in South Africa today, but this was not always the case. Turning its back on its apartheid history of racial segregation and discrimination, South Africa has developed a progressive legal system to thwart bias and promote fairness in employment testing. This chapter explores employment-related testing in the public and private sectors, beginning with an overview of South Africa’s apartheid history, followed by a discussion of how the current legal system addresses fairness. A distinctive aspect of South African law is that preferential treatment, including lower cutoffs and within-group norming for protected groups, is not only mandated but also widely practised as the norm rather than the exception. Our review concludes that South Africa has enacted an extensive legal framework to promote equality and prevent unfair discrimination.

This chapter explores the thought of the intellectual and revolutionary activist, Zweledinga Pallo Jordan, in South Africa. It argues that a global intellectual history approach can be usefully incorporated in understanding his key writings, both archival and curated. Jordan’s writings, largely overlooked, personify a vibrant and engaged intellectual project of anticolonialism, drawing from a transnational circulation of ideas. Their style, content, and form vary considerably, incorporating discussion papers, editorials, newspaper columns, published chapters, articles, speeches, and lectures. The chapter therefore recovers the meaning of the central ideas contained in these writings, by examining Jordan’s own biography and the global context of political exile. It focuses on significant themes such as nation, race, class, and democratic constitutionalism as Jordan attempts to articulate the scope of the South African national liberation project in line with his ideological commitment to the African National Congress (ANC).

Chapter 2 situates the activism of La Fulana and Free Gender in historical contexts. The chapter draws on the theoretical framework of the previous chapter to argue that an intersectional approach illuminates the roles that race, class, and gender have played alongside sexuality in the historical process of constructing citizenship. The chapter advances this argument first with examination of the construction of the colonial state in each context, which instantiated strong norms of race, class, gender, and sexuality. The chapter then shows how these interlocking systems of power mediate organizations’ contemporary interactions with the political system, with other social movement organizations, and with opposition and oppositional discourse. The chapter discusses each of these factors for both organizations, first showing how the democratic transitions and adoption of human rights discourse affected La Fulana and Free Gender’s identity strategizing by providing new political and discursive opportunities. Next, the chapter explains how La Fulana’s and Free Gender’s interactions with the broader LGBT movement influenced their identity strategizing. Finally, the chapter explores the impact of anti-LGBT opposition and oppositional discourses on each organization’s identity strategies.

A core purpose of South Africa’s Constitution was to modify private orderings growing out of Apartheid’s legacy of racism. Hence, the South African framers, and specifically those representing the African National Congress (ANC), had strong reason to adopt some version of horizontal application. While republican elements occur in some of the ANC’s early thought on private actors’ duties, such discourses featured less when the party had to find consensus with representatives of the Nationalist Party while negotiating the Interim Constitution. A strong formalist streak in the legal culture, concerns about preserving property rights, and the incentives of institutions such as the Supreme Court of Appeal all cut against the practice of horizontal application. Ultimately, the constitutional framers provided for both direct and indirect horizontal application in the Final Constitution. The ANC’s vision was thus fixed in this feature, and subsequent cases further cemented a break from prior orderings. Republican discourses ensued in cases involving horizontal application and perhaps most clearly in issues striking at the heart of the old Apartheid regime, such as housing and education.

Across sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and the Caribbean, the English-language essay engages with colonialism and postcolonial reality to embody forms of life writing that grapple with the provocative confluences of English education, local context, and migrant desire. While conflicts between colonial legacy, postcolonial liberation, and creative imagination assume urgency with pioneers such as V.S. Naipaul and Chinua Achebe, linguistic limits on ethical and political values emerge as defining concerns for apartheid-riven writers such as Nadine Gordimer and Zoë Wicomb, while the scope and constraints of postcolonial representation energise the essays of Shashi Deshpande and Amit Chaudhuri. The fluid and constantly changeable identity of the postcolonial subject that drives the aspirations of the postcolonial essay finds language in its promiscuous texture and heterogeneous structure, its dalliance with analysis, narrative, and image, and its perpetually wandering and unfinished form.

During his visit to Ethiopia in 1968, the shah spoke to representatives of the Organisation of African Unity about his commitment to combatting colonialism and racial discrimination. It is surprising, therefore, that not long after the shah had returned to Iran, his diplomats began to discuss with South African diplomats the establishment of political relations between the two countries. The chapter explores the origins of this engagement and examines what drove the two sides together in this period. At the United Nations and other international forums, the shah and his diplomats spoke out in harsh terms against discrimination, racism and human rights violations in Southern Africa. But in spite of this public condemnation, the shah developed and maintained strong security and economic ties with apartheid South Africa. The chapter questions to what extent the shah was able to maintain his position as a champion of independence and human dignity, while enjoying such friendly ties with the apartheid regime.

Returning to some of the themes addressed in Chapter 3, this final chapter considers the wider social responsibilities of archaeologists working in southern Africa in the twenty-first century. Matters discussed include gender and racial equity within the discipline itself (especially with respect to South Africa), how best to relate the work done by archaeologists to the wider public, heritage management and conflicts over this (including the restitution of cultural sites, property, and human remains), the roles of contract archaeology, university teaching departments, and museums, the importance of publication, and the potential for developing post-colonial approaches to the interpretation of archaeological evidence. In highlighting possible future research trends, the chapter concludes by emphasising the need for work that is both intellectually sound and socially engaged and by reiterating the global significance of southern Africa’s immensely long and varied archaeological record.