Demitrios Tsafendas and the Subversion of Apartheid's Paper Regime (original) (raw)
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Apartheid Vertigo, the dizzying sensation following prolonged oppression and delusions of skin colour, is the focus of this book. For three centuries, the colour-code shaped the state and national ideals of South Africa, created social and emotional distances between social groups, permeated public and intimate spheres of life alike, and dehumanized Africans of all nationalities. Two decades after the demise of apartheid, despite four successive black governments, apartheid vertigo still distorts postcolonial reality. The colour-code, notably the aversion toward Africa and blackness, still prevails, but now in postcolonial masks. Despite political freedom, to a greater or lesser extent, a vast section of the black citizenry has adopted the code, and adapted it to fit the new reality. This vertiginous reality is manifest in the neo-apartheid ideology of Makwerekwere - the postcolonial colour-code mobilized to distinguish black outsiders from black insiders. Apartheid vertigo ranges from negative sentiments to outright violence against black outsiders, including insults, humiliations, extortions, searches, arrests, detentions, deportations, tortures, rapes, beatings, and killings. Ironically, the victims are not only the outsiders against whom the code is mobilized but also the insiders who mobilize it. Drawing on evidence from interviews, observation, press articles, reports, research monographs and history, this project deconstructs the idea of visible differences between black nationals and black foreign nationals. It demonstrates that in South Africa violent conflict lurks on the surface of everyday life and it can burst through the fragile limits set upon it, with the potential to escalate into ethnic cleansing.
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How do we know when a state is rehearsing genocide? This question has been answered in spectacular fashion in contemporary Africa: the veiled language of the Biafran war in Nigeria, which masked mass murder; the state-sponsored near-annihilation of the Tutsis within 100 days in Rwanda; the unbridled love for power by Islamic militias in Somalia that has rendered the country stateless; and the violation of Darfurians with impunity in Sudan. Such obvious cases make Africa appear to be a place where anything that can go wrong will destroy social norms overnight. Such instances also mask the violations of humanity occurring in neoliberal democracies such as South Africa. For example, the xenophobic attacks on resident black Africans from elsewhere are the product of the revived neurosis of separate development in the aftermath of 1994. South Africa's black middle class condones xenophobia and colludes in the state's failure to deliver real independence to the masses of unemployed South African blacks. Many of South Africa's black academics collude in the popular discourse that accuses black foreigners of taking their jobs and their women. The persecution of black foreigners, derisively known as Makwerekwere in South African official and local parlance, is also a consequence of the contradiction of globalisation and its bounded citizenship. Some have suggested ordinary South Africans have their own parochial biases, even though both local and national leaders have inspired them to assault and berate black foreigners. I draw on Francis Nyamnjoh's book, Insiders and Outsiders: Citizenship and Xenophobia in Contemporary Southern Africa (2006), and Michael Neocosmos' work, From 'Foreign Natives' to 'Native Foreigners', Explaining Xenophobia in Post-Apartheid South Africa: Citizen and Nationalism, Identity and Politics (2006), to discuss how xenophobia choreographs everyday life in South Africa. The paper argues that beyond the role that South African leaders and the masses continue to play in persecuting individual and black foreigners, other African countries have not stood up against South Africa's chauvinistic behaviour and its crimes against humanity. Whatever the source of this silence from the rest of the continent, the South African state and a significant portion of the country's population has felt free to deploy its resources to persecute, undermine and exploit foreign blacks without censure either from the African Union or from the United Nations.
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The Journal of the Historical Society, 2003
Although some might think the exercise pointless, one could learn much about the plight of rural black people in South Africa's former western Transvaal from a careful reading of George Lefebvre's Les Paysans du Nord. 1 Lefebvre's account of how the particularly intransigent feudal institutions of Normandy and the northern portions of France withstood more than a century of communal riots and peasant uprisings before falling to the full, desolating force of the French Revolution is instructive, if only because it demonstrates what did not happen in South Africa-even during the most brutal and violent moments that followed the imposition of the state of emergency in June 1985 or, alternatively, during the atrociously murderous guerilla phase of the Anglo-Boer or South African War of 1899-1902. From the end of the nineteenth century until the end of the twentieth, South Africa's history has been punctuated by revolutionary situations that somehow failed to achieve revolutionary outcomes. 2 Like segregation and apartheid, South Africa's underachieving revolutionary situations were due in part to the firm but pliant hold
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Aotearoa through an exploration of the online print media coverage of the raids on that same day as well as the policing techniques employed. These two key instruments of state power and legitimacy, I argue, sought to produce a racialised moral panic around terrorism. Drawing on the works of Mbembe, Agamben, and Foucault, I examine the media practice as media necropower at work and the arrests in terms of state of exception and biopower to suggest that the racialisation of terror is a deliberate strategy of consolidating the sovereignty of the nation-state, a sovereignty preconditioned upon racism. The coverage of the event and the policing techniques both animates and perpetuates a racialised sovereignty that is foundational to the legitimacy of the postcolonial nation-state.
Mediterranean Journal of Social Sciences, 2016
This paper attempts to explore liminality in the lives of the post-apartheid ethnicities through Brink s The Rights of Desire. Victor Turner s theory of liminality will be used to enumerate liminal beings and situations. We endeavor to find out how Brink portrays ethnicities in regard to the existing liminal spaces. Ethnicities share a common pain which is the very truth of being a minority. Brink's narrative exemplifies the enmeshed characters within the sociopolitical whirlwind that has thrown the minorities off balance. The present paper comes up with this conclusion that although liminality is supposed to be a temporary phase, it has become an integral component of South Africa and its ethnicities. The seed of apartheid is that deeply planted. It demands a long time for its roots to be perished. Apartheid has just been modernized and not devastated. Consequently, post-apartheid South Africa just like apartheid becomes a communitas or an anti-structured entity in which the political transition of power in 1994 does not change anything in regard to the lives of its ethnicities.