THE RENAISSANCE FACTOR IN SOUTH AFRICA AND THE CHANGING LANDSCAPE OF AFRICAN REGIONAL GOVERNANCE (1999-2008)

ABSTRACT

This article examines a likely South African hegemony in Africa between 1999 and 2008. Hegemony is admittedly difficult to define in African regionalism studies, as it is counter intuitive to Pan-Africanism discourse. However, this article aims to show that hegemony can be a credible argument in explaining the South African driven changes that occurred in African regionalism between 1999 and 2008. The article locates key characteristics which underpin arguments of South African hegemony during the study timeline. It argues that Thabo Mbeki's governance philosophy of African renaissance was the central piece of South African Africa foreign policy that distinguishes this period from any other before or after it. By establishing hegemonic credibility in South Africa's interaction with Africa in this period, the article demonstrates how South Africa was able to contribute to transformational governance changes in Africa. This also holds lessons for South African regional ascendancy in the future.     

The psychological Renaissance

Abstract

Psychological renaissance is a critical step to an African Renaissance. It raises our level of self‐awareness and historical awareness. It is a precursor to the mental growth that is part of African Renaissance. Both in Africa and throughout the African Diaspora, we must be more awake, conscious of our history, our environment, of all the changes taking place, constantly processing information, and in full use of our brains ‐ at all times. In the struggle against economic and psychological enslavement which are the dual legacies of slavery and colonialism, it is absolutely necessary that we draw from our African values, our history and the examples set by our ancestors. This essay argues that a greater understanding of the motives for enslavement and racial domination is part of a psychological renaissance in a step towards an African Renaissance.     

Thabo Mbeki’s African developmental agenda through Pan-Africanism and the African renaissance

In 1996, the then South African deputy president thabo Mbeki opened parliament with his since then acclaimed ‘I am an African’ speech. Subsequently, Mbeki publicly persuaded Africans to embrace and advance the concept of an African renaissance for Africa’s development. While Mbeki’s African renaissance project was welcomed on the one hand; on the other, it was anticipated that it would be an elitist project. In this article, it is argued that to the contrary, the African renaissance as pursued by Mbeki has sought to benefit ordinary Africans in a practical sense. This article uses a historical narrative approach so as to give a historical context against which Mbeki’s African renaissance emerged, highlighting the successes, failures, constraints, setbacks and challenges that he had to confront. the argument is that African intellectuals and academics who correctly point out the absence of a mass-based African renaissance movement must not stand apart and merely point fingers, but must be actively engaged in the realisation of the African renaissance ideals.     

TRANSFORMATION: THE CHANGING CONTEXT OF ACADEMIA IN POST-APARTHEID SOUTH AFRICA

The transformatory paradigm of post-apartheid South Africa hasleft few of the country's institutions free of critical scrutiny.Higher education has been no exception. As elsewhere in Africaunder new post-colonial governments, South African universitieshave a relatively high profile on the agenda of change. Thisinterest has been spurred not only by the ANC government's awarenessof its large share in the funding of universities but also becauseof the political imperatives engendered by the disaffectionagainst the historically white universities (HWU's) among itsyouth constituency. This article assesses the current interplaybetween universities and their new environment and focuses onthe following issues central to the debate on university transformation:the higher education heritage of apartheid; the impact of thechanging racial profile of students at HWU's; perceptions ofthe role of universities; affirmative action staffing policies;competing claims by universities, the government and the privatesector on scarce black and especially African human resources;the negative implications of the African brain drain from universitieson civil society; and the question of Afrocentrism versus Eurocentrism.Where relevant these issues are examined against the backdropof the African experience. In doing so a number of yet to beresolved problems are highlighted.     

Norm dynamics and international organisations: South Africa in the African Union and International Criminal Court

Over the past two decades, South Africa has sought to perform several roles on the world stage, such as the economic dynamo of Southern Africa, a diplomatic heavyweight representing the African continent, and a norm leader on the world stage as a so-called ‘middle-power’. Although South Africa's evolution and rise as an important player in global affairs has generated a welcome body of critical scholarly literature, comparatively little analysis has been allocated to understanding how norm dynamics and the country's ever-evolving international identities have enabled it to construct and reconstruct its ‘interests’. Social constructivism is best suited for such an analysis because it can operationalise norms, commitments, identities, and interests, and it provides the epistemological tools to map the increasingly multilateral connections between global, regional, and domestic forums. By employing a rationalist approach to constructivism, this paper remedies the aforementioned gap in the literature by illustrating how South Africa constructs and reconstructs its identities and interests in relation to membership in international organisations (IOs). To that end, the paper examines the evolution of South Africa's participation in the African Union (especially ‘peacekeeping’ contributions) and the International Criminal Court. The paper concludes by assessing the theoretical implications and practical ramifications of the norm dynamics involved in South Africa's commitment to these two IOs.     

Looking from South Africa to the World: A Story of Identity for our Times

The article is a consideration of the question of identity in South Africa, and also in a global context. Just as South Africa has looked to the world in order to understand its place, so too the world might look to South Africa to illuminate patterns less immediately visible elsewhere. Far from being unrepresentative in the apartheid period, South Africa was the ‘state of exception’ that incarnated and concentrated global realities; equally in the current era the reciprocal relations between the South African and the global evoke haunting concerns. The article begins with a consideration of the ‘classic’ generation of anti-apartheid activists, including figures such as Nelson Mandela and Bram Fischer, as they fashioned a new sense of South African identity. Yet it goes on to consider what happens when the classic period is over, and older definitions and oppositions are no longer available. Here the navigations of fiction, both in South Africa and elsewhere, become significant, and the article examines the work of writers from Gordimer, Coetzee and Ndebele, to Caryl Phillips and W. G. Sebald. It ends with a contemplation of the current period, nearly twenty years after the democratic transition in South Africa. In the era of the Marikana massacre and other pressing developments, both music and fiction open up some of the ambiguities and obligations. Drawing on Agamben, I suggest the intrinsic mutuality of the ‘home’ and the ‘foreign’ in establishing a more promising—and challenging—sense of belonging and identity both in South Africa and the world.     

ISSUES OF RACE,ETHNICITY, SOCIO-ECONOMIC POSITION AND SPATIAL ACKNOWLEDGEMENT IN SOUTH AFRICA: HOW SPATIAL ACCESS AND EXPRESSION STILL PERPETUATE NOTIONS OF DIFFERENCE,SEPARATION AND UNCERTAINTY AMONGST THE SOUTH AFRICAN COLOURED1 POPULATION

ABSTRACT

While the Native Land Act [Act 27 of 1913] and the Native Trust and Land Act [Act 18 of 1936] dispossessed black South Africans of their land physically, the insidious Group Areas Act [Act 41 of 1950] and the Population Registration Act [Act 30 of 1950] reified perceptions of race and ethnicity in the context of phenotype, culture, language and even religion. Although these Acts were repealed the legacy remains part of the South African psyche still. Such perceptions are evident in the Coloured communities where the Population Registration Act classified and defined the group as a singular unit while the Group Areas Act segregated and confined them, and restricted their association within the group almost exclusively. This meant that education, access to information, socialising, and religious assembly and to a limited extent employment were restricted mostly to these designated segregated areas. Limited interaction between various legislated groups, even within the Coloured group itself reinforced the socio-economic racial hierarchy and the prejudices linked to economics. The combination of these Acts created an ‘us’ versus ‘them’ hostility further (re)enforcing notions of separateness and difference. The article seeks to examine social and racial interpretation (based on income and spatial realities) of the Coloured population in the Eastern Cape and how the group perceives its primary identity and allegiance in terms of ethnicity or national identity as salient in the current socio-political environment. The objectives are first to assert that legislated segregation created rigid jingoist structures of ethnic and racial identities that will take longer to dismantle than the Acts of separation had and secondly that national identity can be salient amongst a minority group irrespective of socio-economic position. The conclusion highlights that the social and identity Acts, spatial acts, regarded once as a legislated absolute, reduced the Coloured communities specifically, to regard themselves as different yet the same, inferior and superior, marginalised yet included, but that this is not incompatible with nation building.     

“Putting Food back on the table”: Decolonising towards a Sustainable University that Feeds Us in South Africa

Abstract

The higher education landscape in South African (SA) has recently experienced a wave of student movement organised under the #MustFall campaign, where students demanded quality and accessible higher education. This movement spoke against the colonial character of the curriculum, demographic representation, institutional cultures, and architecture of the university in South Africa today, which excludes the majority of the students who cannot access higher education in South Africa. It is in this context that the high cost of higher education was questioned, with some questioning the very “idea of the university”, and the role of the university in a society contending with income inequalities, unemployment, and poverty. This article seeks to position food at the centre of decolonising tools towards a sustainable African university of the future. Looking at growing levels of hunger, and the lack of access to food among our students, I argue that in putting food at the centre, regarding our understanding of the curriculum, shape, size, and future of the university in South Africa, we might begin to transform the exclusivist, uncaring and elitist spaces that define a university. In trying to rethink the ‘‘idea of the university’’ in South Africa I look at one of the enduring institutions of knowledge in African societies—uMakhulu (“Senior Mother/Grandmother”) as a body that can reconnect the African university to its matriarchal heritage, in order to define a university that can feed itself beyond the narrow neoliberal understanding of sustainability.     

The Voice of (Which?) Africa: Miriam Makeba in America

Throughout her time as a concert singer in 1960s America Miriam Makeba was promoted as the embodied voice of a sonic, imagined Africa. Where her white audiences were attracted to the complete ‘‘otherness’’ of her African blackness, her black American audiences saw themselves – or imagined versions of themselves – put on stage, and built solidarities between their own struggle and the struggle against apartheid. In this essay, I argue that the discourses that followed Makeba’s voice and body reflected the evolving attitudes of America towards Africa, and, through Africa, its contradictory relationship to its own African American citizens. Makeba played on these discourses to craft a political and musical identity in solidarity with black and diasporic causes. This identity, embodied in the persona of ‘‘Mama Africa,’’ allowed Makeba the flexibility to speak to and for her fellow (South) Africans with cultural authority. By joining the oft-opposed positions of ‘‘Africa’’ and ‘‘The World,’’ Makeba became what I’m calling an African Cosmopolitan.     

African Renaissance: The need for gender-inclusive developmental states

ABSTRACT

This article was developed from a paper presented at a seminar at the Africa Institute of South Africa in Pretoria in 2006 while the author was an Archie Mafeje Fellow. It argues the urgent need for the construction and consolidation of gender-inclusive democratic developmental states as central to grounding the concept of an African Renaissance, for an effective transformation of the human condition, and for ensuring that this renaissance does not become romanticised and meaningless. While the notion of developmental states has gained currency in recent years, very little, if at all, has been said about gender in relation to these debates – despite the United Nations warning that ‘without engendering development, development itself is endangered.’ In other words, formulating and implementing development policies with gender lenses are crucial for development.     

The absence of a home curriculum in post-apartheid education in South Africa

Abstract

While it is important that education be relevant to the context of students, education systems struggle to introduce curricula that relate to the context of students. In South Africa the national curriculum, which is outcomes based, attempts to address the local context of students by introducing critical outcomes restricted to learning areas, and guide classroom methodology, the selection of content and the motivations for teaching and learning. In this article I argue that due to centralisation and bureaucratisation, the national curriculum does not sufficiently address the context of students. In the analysis, I discuss critical aspects of the curriculum development process, and argue that in order to address the local context, the home curriculum must be introduced in schools. In this way the education system will be striving for the Africanisation of education.     

NEPAD: Talking from the South,governing from the West

The formation of the New Partnership for African Development (NePAD) in 2001 at the African Union (AU) Summit in Lusaka, Zambia, marked the advent of what is regarded as a novel development strategy crafted by Africans for Africa. Rooted in former South African President thabo Mbeki’s call for an African renaissance, the initiative seeks to trigger the continent’s economic development by encouraging African states to explore the prevailing international economic order or globalisation. this article explores NePAD’s capacity to foster economic development in Africa, assesses the reasons for its establishment, reviews its mandate and examines institutional mechanisms for achieving its goals. the article takes issue with the ‘westernisation’ of the ‘discourse’ of Africa and calls for the revitalisation of NePAD’s strategy for sustainable African development.     

Ecologies of relation: post-slavery,post-apartheid,and rethinking race across the Atlantic in Zakes Mda’s Cion

This article will argue that Zakes Mda’s 2007 novel Cion stages a dialog, one where two “Souths” – South Africa and the American South – speak to one another and give a critical voice to an under-acknowledged history of transatlantic discursive exchange on race and racial governance. Mda’s fictional South African critique, of an America still struggling with the cultural and political legacies of slavery, gestures towards a history of exchange between the two countries that in many ways is representative of a more global dialog on racial segregation during the first half of the twentieth century – of which both southern (US) segregation and apartheid are seminal examples. Moreover, this article explores various conceptualizations of race as well as the governance of racial relations as they have been articulated through ecological imaginaries, and especially between South Africa and the Southern United States over the course of the twentieth century. In this article, I argue that not only can apartheid (as well as pre-apartheid segregation) be rethought of as part of a global conversation on race and thus less as a South African anomaly, but also that the United States through its examples of various racialist technologies was highly influential across the colonial and apartheid worlds.     

Re-membering my ways of knowing and learning while ‘learning otherwise’

ABSTRACT

To some people, African languages are insufficiently valued or good for nothing. Such people do not find any economic value in African languages. However, the African renaissance can inject a new lease of life into African languages. The African linguistic renaissance implies uplifting the status and use of African languages. It also means taking African languages into domains where their economic value will rise. This requires a drastic change in how African languages are perceived and treated. This article argues that, as part of the African renaissance, African languages should become income generators or job-creating entities. There is great potential for African languages to attain such economically rewarding status. African languages have slept for so long that they can now be compared to devalued currencies. The article suggests some ways through which a vibrant African languages industry can be developed and sustained.     

Toward a “Modernizing” Hybridity: McAdoo’s Jubilee Singers,McAdoo’s Minstrels,and Racial Uplift Politics in South Africa, 1890–1898

This essay focuses on Orpheus McAdoo, an African American performer/entrepreneur who contributed to late nineteenth century Black Atlantic cultural formations. In the 1890s, he brought two tours to South Africa, the first of which was a singing troupe based on the Fisk Jubilee model. The second tour included a non-traditional minstrel show. This essay addresses McAdoo’s attempts to present racial narratives that countered the prevailing race discourse of the South African colonies. During both tours, McAdoo disseminated a specific variant of uplift politics. Racial uplift politics developed in the postbellum era as a middle-class African American response to notions of black backwardness. Advocates of racial uplift believed that discourses which advanced the notion that blacks were incapable of fully participating in modern democratic societies, could be challenged with images of black civility and refinement. McAdoo was a proponent of uplift politics, and he used the stage as a means to spread these notions in South Africa. McAdoo was able to successfully merge uplift politics with minstrelsy, two concepts that often seem incompatible. Furthermore, McAdoo was also aware of the three-tiered racial classification system of South Africa, and how it could be used to his advantage. In a “spectacularly opaque” gesture, McAdoo claimed to be “Coloured” American so that he could gain access to the cultural and social capital of mixed race identity.     

Africa unknown: Addressing the effects of an alienating education amongst learners in South Africa

Abstract

The article argues for the Africanisation of the South African education system, most critically at high school and tertiary levels. Using both experiential and theoretical reasoning, it seeks to present a compelling argument for the value of teaching our children, using methodologies, examples and stories they can relate to. It argues that this relatability is what will best develop the cognition of learners and better equip them to turn knowledge into action. The South African education system has often been seen as lacking a critical thinking and problem-solving element, and the article argues that this limitation is embedded in the abstractness of our curricula. The article presents a short case study highlighting just how little about Africa some of our best learners know. It ends by offering practical suggestions about how the education system could incorporate critical African knowledge in its learning models.     

In search of elusive humanity: Philosophy in 159 years of Africa's independence

ABSTRACT

This article was developed from a paper presented at the Unesco World Philosophy Day Symposium hosted by the University of South Africa, 21 November 2006, under the theme ‘Philosophy and 159 years of Africa's Independence.’ It explores the subject through the prism of African humanity from the perspectives of Western philosophy, traditional African philosophy and contemporary African philosophy, exposing the weaknesses of each in their treatment of the African. Throughout, the article endeavours to deconstruct the elitist self-image of the discipline and concludes by questioning the utility of philosophy in enhancing development in modern Africa.     

Arte Blanco con Motivos Negros: Fernando Ortiz's Concept of Cuban National Culture and Identity

The purpose of this article is to analyze Fernando Ortiz's treatment of the poetic production of the 1920s and 30s movement of Afrocubanismo . The first section explains his belief in a process which would culminate with the consolidation of a mulatto Cuban national identity. It is argued that Ortiz conceived of this process as one which would eliminate what he assumed were pure African forms, which he viewed as primitive and inferior. The second section explores how these notions affected his evaluations of the poetry of the movement. The third section compares Ortiz's methodology in determining identities to what is known in anthropology as an etic perspective. It is argued that Ortiz ascribes mulatto identities to cultural forms without considering the perspectives of their practitioners. The article reaches three main conclusions regarding Ortiz's treatment of afrocubanista poetry. Firstly, that he used it as the confirmation of a process of formation of a mulatto Cuban national identity. Secondly, that he viewed it as a genre which could stylize and make acceptable inferior African cultural forms. Thirdly, that he used it as an instrument through which to dilute conflictive black or African identities.     

Knowledge production and the construction of ‘Africa(ns)’ in the Caribbean

Abstract

There is a considerable lack of awareness of the interrelated nature of human activities due to insufficient information. A community without relevant information or public sensitivity to participation, in fostering a sense of personal environmental responsibility and greater motivation towards achieving personal goals, becomes problematic. Using the poststructuralist theory, this article takes a qualitative approach to analyse discourses and people's reaction to an ‘insecure’ environment within South African communities. It examines organisations which provide support to empower communities through education in Cape Town. One assumption here is that people gain knowledge about themselves, their environment and others around them, if they are empowered. The focus thus is on educational schemes and activities that communities and organisations undertake to challenge, accept and negotiate their ideological positions. The inventiveness and responses of the organisations considered, through the local communities and pupils, are therefore significant as they enable an understanding of the challenges encountered in democratic South Africa, including the causes of xenophobia. Ultimately, the consequences of ignorance about one's environment are detrimental to both neighbouring communities and people at large. The local communities considered expressed this sentiment while implicating the government's role in depriving its people of vital socio-cultural and politico-economic information.     

South African foreign policy and China: converging visions,competing interests,contested identities

South Africa's burgeoning relationship with China exposes the increasing complexities of its post-apartheid international relations. On one hand bilateral relations have deepened since 1998, due to the increasing complementarities with South Africa's foreign policy priorities that emphasise developmental pragmatism and a Southward orientation within the broader African context. On the other hand this relationship emphasises the deeper schisms within South African society itself, where divergent and multi-layered perspectives on South Africa's post-apartheid identity and relationship with China, the country's largest trading partner, remains unresolved. This article maps out the nature of China–South Africa relations through a thematic approach. This allows for nuanced consideration of South Africa's contemporary foreign policy, one that remains compressed between a combination of external and domestic factors.