Fighting for an intervention in history in the face of dreams deferred in the making: Twenty years of South African democracy (original) (raw)
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Liberation Diaries - Reflections on 20 Years of Democracy in South Africa.pdf
The book Liberation Diaries: Reflections on 20 Years of Democracy by was published by Jacana Media in April 2014. The book has 50 chapters including contributions from prominent scholars like Professors Raymond Parsons, Hebert Vilakazi, Ntongela Masilela and Metz Thaddeus. We also have chapters by social activists like Mugabe Ratshikuni and Wayne Duvenage, journalists like Nozipho Mbanjwa, business women like Khanyisile Kweyama of Anglo American as well as university students like Mhlengi Ngcaweni and Mpho Tshivhase. These writers give different critiques of what it means to live in South Africa @ 20. Many of those who categorize the book as a spin in favor of the ruling party and government are immediately disappointed when they navigate the first chapters of the book. This is a critical reflection of the journey we have traveled as a nation, the victories scored and dreams differed. However, even among the worst critics like Wayne Duvenage of OUTA (opposition to urban tolling), the book’s overall conclusion is that South Africa is a country on the move, making strides towards creating a better life for all. Although the book was meant to contribute to the discourse on 20 years of democracy, it has actually achieved more. Most chapters as well as book reviews have moved beyond a critical reflection of the state of the nation @ 20 to pose the question: given what we know about South Africa @ 20 (both negative and positive), using historical and current trends, where will South Africa be @ 30, 40 and so on. Whilst some of the chapters to speculate about our prospects, others challenge us to think hard about the future we chose and the extent to which it will influence the future we choose. This rhetorical exposition suggests that choices made in 1994 have influenced the outcomes 20 years later. Concomitantly, the choices we make today, like introduction of the National Development Plan, will determine the kind of society South Africa will be in the year 2034. The book was among the best sellers of 2014 and has gone through a reprint. It is available in major bookstores internationally. Timeline and Milestones 1. Publication date: April 2014 2. First launch: Oxford University, United Kingdom 3. Featured in the City Press, April 2014 4. Featured in the Sunday Times Autumn Hot Reads, April 2014 5. Second launch: May 2014 at Wits University 6. Featured on CNBC Africa: May 2014 7. Reviewed on Power FM, June 2014 8. Featured on the Mail and Guardian, June 2014 9. Reviewed by Chai FM (Jewish Radio Station), June 2014 10. Reviewed by the Cape Times, June 2014 11. Reviewed in the Public Sector Manager Magazine, July 2014 12. Reviewed on Ukhozi FM in July 2014 13. Reviewed by the Centurion ANC Youth League Branch, July 2014 14. Launch at North West University by Progress Professionals Forum, August 2014 15. Reviewed on Metro FM in August 2014 16. Featured at Jozi Book Fair in September 2014 17. Reviewed at Poppy’s Café, September 2014 18. Reviewed at The Presidency, December 2014 19. Special Reconciliation Day Feature, SABC, 16 December 2014
2021
In this peer-reviewed seminal work, the spotlight is thrown on Culture as a Weapon of Struggle in and for South Africa and beyond. How music, drama, dance, poetry and visual art formed the inspiration that fostered the spirit of rebellion and elevated the level of national conciousness towards a liberated South Africa. The editor, Lebogang Lance Nawa, himself a scion of the liberation struggle, puts together an impressive compilation of contributors, who in turn pay homage to the myriad artists, personalities, intellectuals and legends who, individually and collectively, built bridges towards a new political dawn in South Africa. The editor's own words best describe what propelled the determination and brilliance that culminated in this unparalleled literary work, I live and die by the mantra that life has no rehearsal, I live and speak once, and my voice must not haunt me even in my eternity. Thus, whatever I write is done with my faculties highly charged and receptive of the consequences. Making most of the influences from international struggles against cultural domination, especially in Africa and the Diaspora, the trailblazers, profiled herein, mobilised and guided their people - in villages, townships, suburbs, towns and cities - through the injustices of Colonialism into the light of the post-Apartheid era, by rediscovering their voices and reclaiming their uniquely African culture by means of magazines, newspapers, stages, screens, and the airwaves. The book paints a vivid picture of a rich and diverse history and heritage that shaped the new South Africa and endeavours to plot the continuation of the cultural revolution that seemed to have become dormant in its embryonic stage since the dawn of a new political dispensation that is gradually turning into a nightmare, or is it not?
Imagined pasts, suspended presents: South African literature in the contemporary moment
2009
Scholarship on Post-Apartheid South African literature has engaged in various ways with the politics of identity, but its dominant mode has been to understand the literature through an anxious rupture-continuation paradigm in which the Apartheid past manifests itself in the present. However, in the contemporary moment, there are writers whose texts attempt to forge new paths in their depictions of identities both individual and collective. These texts are useful in contemplating how South Africans experience belonging and dislocation in various contexts.
Voice of Protest against Choice of Politics: A Study of Selected Texts in South African Literature
Asian Journal of Humanity, Art and Literature, 2015
This paper interrogates the nature of protest literature as well as their issues and problems while addressing the discourse on apartheid South Africa underlined the politics. In this paper, I explore the connection of banned books of history with the present time. In South Africa: the numbers of the books banned, and these books never become part of a literary form. As a result, it also claims to the Censorship Act (have an authority to ban the books). This paper relates to examine the relationship between these two major research queries, which underpins as under two contexts as: (i) Protest literature and (ii) Racial discrimination. The racial discrimination needs for understanding the problems and struggle in South African. It also ignites to the fight for human rights of the people, who suffer from inequality and struggling for their identity crisis. South African novels represent the problems and concerns of people who belong to the marginal group. However, this paper focuses on South African protest literature, which demands to the end of racial discrimination, unequal educational system and segregation as divided land policy represents through the discourses. This paper has significant to demand for equality and justice through the protest literature also it demands of non-racial society as well. I come to conclude, it can be inferred in apartheid and the postapartheid government failed to give equal rights to all.
Public History and Culture in South Africa
2019
African Histories and Modernities This book series serves as a scholarly forum on African contributions to and negotiations of diverse modernities over time and space, with a particular emphasis on historical developments. Specifically, it aims to refute the hegemonic conception of a singular modernity, Western in origin, spreading out to encompass the globe over the last several decades. Indeed, rather than reinforcing conceptual boundaries or parameters, the series instead looks to receive and respond to changing perspectives on an important but inherently nebulous idea, deliberately creating a space in which multiple modernities can interact, overlap, and conflict. While privileging works that emphasize historical change over time, the series will also feature scholarship that blurs the lines between the historical and the contemporary, recognizing the ways in which our changing understandings of modernity in the present have the capacity to affect the way we think about African and global histories.
At the heart of this study is the idea of constitutionalism; its promise, conception and deployment in South Africa’s post-apartheid constitutional discourse; and ultimately the need for its re-imagination if it is to be part of advancing a truly decolonising liberatory project. A core premise of this study is that there exists, in post-apartheid South Africa, a stark discursive disjuncture between what has emerged as a hegemonic liberal democratic constitutional discourse and the discourse of liberation that served as the ideological pivot of the anti-colonial struggles. Animated by this premise, this study asks why it is that liberation as a framing set of ideas has either played no part or exerted so little obvious influence on how post-apartheid South Africa self-comprehends and organises itself in constitutive terms? Recognising that the formal end of colonial-apartheid as a system in 1994 inaugurated a seismic shift in the country’s constitutional discourse as the notion of constitutionalism took centre stage, this study seeks to problematize this idea by examining its underlying assumptions, connotations and import as deployed in mainstream South African academic and public discourses. In doing this the study aspires to offer a novel perspective that shifts the fixity of the conceptualisation of constitutionalism by amplifying the point that how one chooses to conceptualise constitutionalism has profound implications for what one understands to be the function, scope, ambition and possibility of a constitution. Crucially, the study seeks to advance a historicised, yet non-ideological understanding of the emergence of modern constitutionalism. This, the study argues, is necessary if the real constitutive work and worth of constitutions of different types and thrusts is to remain open to critical engagement as well as fostering the possibility of constitutional imaginings of new, different forms of society or social ordering. As the study works towards responding to the core question it poses, it embarks upon a critical historiography of South African constitutionalism from the 1910 Union constitution to the present one. It does this in an attempt to demonstrate that some of the challenges faced by the current constitution are, profoundly influenced, if not directly produced, by legal, structural, cultural and economic continuities rooted in the past, with race being a central axis around which South African constitutionalism has been imagined, enacted, opposed and resisted. In so doing, the study seeks to demonstrate that despite the indisputable paradigmatic shift ushered in by the fall of colonial-apartheid, on current evidence that shift has been unable to displace nor disrupt the many continuities that remain stubbornly etched into the South Africa’s constitutive DNA inherited from earlier racially exclusive and exploitative constitutional expressions. Engaging South African constitutionalism from a critical historical perspective, the study turns its attention to the emergence and eventual ascendance of transformative constitutionalism as arguably the mainstream conception of contemporary South African constitutionalism. The study argues that transformative constitutionalism, whilst claiming radical far-reaching means and ends, has established limited intellectual and programmatic horizons focused on litigation. From within this discourse, it is argued, there is little or no evidence of other work directed at inculcating institutional or structural power shifts or innovations beyond the courts and lawyering. Ultimately, the study argues that transformative constitutionalism is an inadequate framework through which we can begin reimagining South African constitutionalism and its attendant political, social and cultural dynamics in a more emancipatory and inclusive ways. Finally, in light of the discursive disjuncture identified earlier, the study concludes by turning its attention to the notion of liberation. It does this in an attempt to reveal liberation thought’s constitutive potentialities through its political, social, economic, and cultural dimensions that exist as the epistemic underpinnings of the visions of liberated societies and states as imagined and put forward by the likes of Steve Biko, Amilcar Cabral and Frantz Fanon amongst others.