Reading Bonhoeffer in South Africa after the Transition to Democracy

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Transition To Democracy

DEMOCRACY AT THE SERVICE OF FOREIGN POLICY OF THE REPUBLIC OF SOUTH AFRICA

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. FREDDIE
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Human Rights ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Transition To Democracy ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Activities ◽  
Foreign Policy Change ◽  
The Republic ◽  
Apartheid Regime

The article examines the place and role of democracy and human rights in South Africas foreign policy. The author analyzes the process of South Africas foreign policy change after the fall of the apartheid regime and transition to democracy. He gives characteristics of the foreign policy under different presidents of South Africa from 1994 to 2018 and analyzes the political activities of South Africa in the area of peacekeeping and human rights on the African continent.

The Land Question in South Africa: 1913 and Beyond

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cherryl Walker
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Land Reform ◽  
Local Development ◽  
Legal Framework ◽  
Transition To Democracy ◽  
Agrarian Change ◽  
Political Resistance ◽  
History Of ◽  
Land Question ◽  
White Hegemony

Since 1913, the “land question” in South Africa has revolved around the major inequalities in access to and rights over land between the black majority and the white minority of the population, and how these disparities should best be understood and overcome. The roots of this inequality are commonly traced back to the promulgation of the Natives Land Act in June 1913, which provided the legal framework for the subsequent division of the country into a relatively prosperous white heartland and a cluster of increasingly impoverished black reserves on the periphery. Historians have cautioned against according this legislation undue weight within the much longer history of colonization, capitalist penetration, and agrarian change that has shaped modern South Africa. The spatial divide of white core and black periphery has, however, been central to the political economy of 20th-century South Africa. Beginning in the 1950s, the apartheid government attempted to maintain white hegemony, drive an urban–industrial economy, and deflect political resistance by turning these reserves into the ethnic “homelands” of African people. This involved increasingly repressive policies of urban influx control, population relocation, and the tribalization of local administration in the reserves. Since the transition to democracy in 1994, the post-apartheid state has struggled to develop an effective land reform program that can address the crosscutting demands for land redistribution, local development, and representative government that this history has bequeathed. For many analysts, these ongoing challenges mean that “the land question” remains unresolved; for others it means that the question is itself in need of reformulation. In order to review these developments, a three-part periodization is used to organize the discussion: (1) the segregation era (1910–1948), (2) the apartheid era (1948–1990), and (3) the transition to democracy and the post-apartheid era that began in 1990.

Representation of Post-Apartheid Social Reality after the Collapse of Racism in Nadine Gordimer’s No Time Like the Present

Matatu ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 48 (1) ◽  
pp. 130-144
Author(s):  
Henry J. Hunjo
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Critical Discourse Analysis ◽  
Transition To Democracy ◽  
Democratic Governance ◽  
Critical Discourse ◽  
Social Changes ◽  
The People ◽  
Data Source ◽  
Apartheid Regime ◽  
The Ideal

The essay demonstrates that a literary writer is not just an advocate for the ideal life but is also capable of reflecting how life could be lived by confronting potentially emergent social changes. Drawing on theoretical and methodological tools of Faircloughian critical discourse analysis and using Nadine Gordimer’s No Time Like the Present, a novel that represents post-apartheid social realities as its data source, the essay shows that, after the collapse of apartheid, many problems remain with which South Africa must contend. Gordimer shows that post-apartheid South Africa must gradually extract itself from the psychological fangs of apartheid and make the transition to democracy. She draws attention to the benefits of the repeal of the racist laws of the apartheid regime and the need for democratic governance to have direct impact on the people. The essay concludes that with another twenty years from now, a vision Gordimer tenaciously holds to in her narrative, post-apartheid South Africa should rank among other democratic nations.

scholarly journals Afrikaners in post-apartheid South Africa: Inward migration and enclave nationalism

2016 ◽  
Vol 72 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Christi Van der Westhuizen
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Transition To Democracy ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Imagined Community ◽  
Late Capitalism ◽  
Local Dynamics ◽  
Primary Mode ◽  
Middle Class Family ◽  
Territorial Claims

South Africa’s transition to democracy coincided and interlinked with massive global shifts, including the fall of communism and the rise of western capitalist triumphalism. Late capitalism operates through paradoxical global-local dynamics, both universalising identities and expanding local particularities. The erstwhile hegemonic identity of apartheid, ‘the Afrikaner’, was a product of Afrikaner nationalism. Like other identities, it was spatially organised, with Afrikaner nationalism projecting its imagined community (‘the volk’) onto a national territory (‘white South Africa’). The study traces the neo-nationalist spatial permutations of ‘the Afrikaner’, following Massey’s (2005) understanding of space as (1) political, (2) produced through interrelations ranging from the global to micro intimacies, (3) potentially a sphere for heterogeneous co-existence, and (4) continuously created. Research is presented that shows a neo-nationalist revival of ethnic privileges in a defensive version of Hall’s ‘return to the local’ (1997a). Although Afrikaner nationalism’s territorial claims to a nation state were defeated, neo-nationalist remnants reclaim a purchase on white Afrikaans identities, albeit in shrunken territories. This phenomenon is, here, called Afrikaner enclave nationalism. Drawing on a global revamping of race as a category of social subjugation, a strategy is deployed that is here called ‘inward migration’. These dynamics produce a privatised micro-apartheid in sites ranging from homes, to commercial and religious enterprises, to suburbs. Virtual white spaces in the form of Afrikaans media products serve as extensions of these whitened locales. The lynchpin holding it all together is the heteronormative, middle-class family, with consumption the primary mode of the generation of its white comfort zones.

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