This book examines violence against the rural African population and Africans in general before apartheid became the justification for the existence of the South African state.
The lens of apartheid-era Jewish commemorations of the Holocaust in South Africa reveals the fascinating transformation of a diasporic community. Through the prism of Holocaust memory, this book examines South African Jewry and its ambivalent position as a minority within the privileged white minority. Grounded in research in over a dozen archives, the book provides a rich empirical account of the centrality of Holocaust memorialization to the community’s ongoing struggle against global and local antisemitism. Most of the chapters focus on white perceptions of the Holocaust and reveals the tensions between the white communities in the country regarding the place of collective memories of suffering in the public arena. However, the book also moves beyond an insular focus on the South African Jewish community and in very different modality investigates prominent figures in the anti-apartheid struggle and the role of Holocaust memory in their fascinating journeys towards freedom.
This edited volume encompasses a range of themes and approaches relevant to the field of South African history today, as viewed from the perspective of practicing historians at the cutting edge of research in the discipline. The collection features the historians offering critical reflection on the theoretical and methodological aspects of their work. This involves them both looking back at the inherited historiographical tradition in the respective areas of their research, while also pointing forwards to possible future directions for scholarly engagement.
On 6 September 1966, inside the House of Assembly in Cape Town, Dimitri Tsafendas stabbed to death Hendrik Verwoerd, South Africa’s Prime Minister and so-called “architect of apartheid”. Tsafendas was immediately arrested and before he had even been questioned by the authorities, they declared him a madman without any political motive for the killing. In the Cape Supreme Court, Tsafendas was found unfit to stand trial on the grounds that he suffered from schizophrenia and that he had no political motive for killing Verwoerd. Tsafendas spent the next 28 years in custody, making him the longest-serving detainee in South African history. For most of his incarnation he was subjected to cruel and inhumane treatment by the prison authorities. From 2009 to 2018, Harris Dousemetzis extensively researched the assassination of Verwoerd and the life of Tsafendas. For this research, he travelled to South Africa, Mozambique, Greece, France, and Turkey, and interviewed about 150 people who either knew Tsafendas or Verwoerd or were involved with the case of the assassination. He discovered about 12,000 pages of documents on the case, most of them previously unpublished, in archival collections in South Africa, Portugal and the UK. Dousemetzis collaborated with prominent South African jurists, psychiatrists and psychologists, and concluded his research, by writing the Report to the Minister of Justice in the Matter of Dr. Verwoerd’s Assassination. The report conclusively proved that Tsafendas had assassinated Verwoerd for political reasons and that the apartheid authorities had orchestrated a massive operation to declare him insane and apolitical. This ground-breaking report and this book corrected the historical record regarding Verwoerd’s assassination and Tsafendas. The Man Who Killed Apartheid, based on Dousemetzis’s groundbreaking research, chronicles in detail Tsafendas’s life and conclusively demonstrates that he was a perfectly sane and deeply political person with a long history of political activism. At the same time, the book exposes the lie at the heart of apartheid’s posture on the assassination of Hendrik Verwoerd and provides a rare picture of how the racist regime operated and what it was like to live and die under apartheid.
This book explores how social and territorial boundaries have influenced the approaches and practices of the South Africa Police Service (SAPS). By means of a historical analysis of South Africa, this book introduces a new concept, ‘police frontierism’, which illuminates the nature of the relationships between the police, policing and boundaries, and can potentially be used for future case study research. Drawing on a wealth of research, this book examines how social and territorial boundaries strongly influenced police practices and behaviour in South Africa, and how social delineations amplify and distort existing police prejudices against those communities on the other side of the boundary. Focusing on cases of high-density police operations, public-order policing and the recent policing of the COVID-19 lockdown, this book argues that poor economic conditions combined with an increased militarisation of the SAPS and a decline in public trust in the police will result in boundaries continuing to fundamentally inform police work in South Africa. This book will be of interest to scholars and students interested in policing in post-colonial societies characterised by high levels of violence, as well as police work and police militarization.
This edited volume systematically analyzes the connection between xenophobia, nativism, and Pan-Africanism. It situates attacks on black Africans by fellow black Africans within the context of ideals such as Pan-Africanism and Ubuntu, which emphasize unity. The book straddles a range of social science perspectives to explain why attacks on foreign nationals in Africa usually entail attacks on black foreign nationals. Written by an international and interdisciplinary team of scholars, the book is divided into four sections that each explain a different facet of this complicated relationship. Section One discusses the history of colonialism and apartheid and their relationship to xenophobia. Section Two critically evaluates Pan-Africanism as a concept and as a practice in 21st century Africa. Section Three presents case studies on xenophobia in contemporary Africa. Section Four similarly discusses cases of nativism. Addressing a complex issue in contemporary African politics, this volume will be of use to students and scholars interested in African studies, African politics, human rights, migration, history, law, and development economics.
As the most influential and powerful country on the entire continent of Africa, an understanding of South Africa’s past and its present trends is crucial in appreciating where South Africans are going to, and from where they have come. South Africa changed dramatically in 1994 when apartheid was dismantled, and it became a democratic state. Since 2000, when the previous edition appeared, further big changes occurred, with the rise of new political leaders and of a new black middle class. There were also serious problems in governance, in public health, and the economy, but with a remarkable popular resilience too. This third edition of Historical Dictionary of South Africa contains a chronology, an introduction, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has more than 600 cross-referenced entries on important personalities as well as aspects of the country’s politics, economy, foreign relations, religion, and culture. This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about South Africa.
Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd (1958–1966) is widely regarded as the mastermind of apartheid in South Africa. This study examines how he developed the ideology of racial separation into a comprehensive system. It also looks into Verwoerd’s intellectual development and his academic career before he entered politics. Apartheid was to Verwoerd less a defense of colonialism but a policy for the future, he was an authoritarian modernizer and a true representative of the Age of Extremes.
How an audacious environmental engineering plan fanned white settlers’ visions for South Africa, stoked mistrust in scientific experts, and gave rise to the Apartheid state. In 1918, South Africa’s climate seemed to be drying up. White farmers claimed that rainfall was dwindling, while nineteenth-century missionaries and explorers had found riverbeds, seashells, and other evidence of a verdant past deep in the Kalahari Desert. Government experts insisted, however, that the rains weren’t disappearing; the land, long susceptible to periodic drought, had been further degraded by settler farmers’ agricultural practices—an explanation that white South Africans rejected. So when the geologist Ernest Schwarz blamed the land itself, the farmers listened. Schwarz held that erosion and topography had created arid conditions, that rainfall was declining, and that agriculture was not to blame. As a solution, he proposed diverting two rivers to the Kalahari’s basins, creating a lush country where white South Africans could thrive. This plan, which became known as the Kalahari Thirstland Redemption Scheme, was rejected by most scientists. But it found support among white South Africans who worried that struggling farmers undermined an image of racial superiority. Green Lands for White Men explores how white agriculturalists in southern Africa grappled with a parched and changing terrain as they sought to consolidate control over a Black population. Meredith McKittrick’s timely history of the Redemption Scheme reveals the environment to have been central to South African understandings of race. While Schwarz’s plan was never implemented, it enjoyed sufficient support to prompt government research into its feasibility, and years of debate. McKittrick shows how white farmers rallied around a plan that represented their interests over those of the South African state and delves into the reasons behind this schism between expert opinion and public perception. This backlash against the predominant scientific view, McKittrick argues, displayed the depth of popular mistrust in an expanding scientific elite. A detailed look at the intersection of a settler society, climate change, white nationalism, and expert credibility, Green Lands for White Men examines the reverberations of a scheme that ultimately failed but influenced ideas about race and the environment in South Africa for decades to come.
Race is arguably the single most troublesome and volatile concept of the social sciences in the early 21st century. It is invoked to explain all manner of historical phenomena and current issues, from slavery to police brutality to acute poverty, and it is also used as a term of civic denunciation and moral condemnation. In this erudite and incisive book based on a panoramic mining of comparative and historical research from around the globe, Loïc Wacquant pours cold analytical water on this hot topic and infuses it with epistemological clarity, conceptual precision, and empirical breadth. Drawing on Gaston Bachelard, Max Weber, and Pierre Bourdieu, Wacquant first articulates a series of reframings, starting with dislodging the United States from its Archimedean position, in order to capture race-making as a form of symbolic violence. He then forges a set of novel concepts to rethink the nexus of racial classification and stratification: the continuum of ethnicity and race as disguised ethnicity, the diagonal of racialization and the pentad of ethnoracial domination, the checkerboard of violence and the dialectic of salience and consequentiality. This enables him to elaborate a meticulous critique of such fashionable notions as “structural racism” and “racial capitalism” that promise much but deliver little due to their semantic ambiguity and rhetorical malleability—notions that may even hamper the urgent fight against racial inequality. Wacquant turns to deploying this conceptual framework to dissect two formidable institutions of ethnoracial rule in America: Jim Crow and the prison. He draws on ethnographies and historiographies of white domination in the postbellum South to construct a robust analytical concept of Jim Crow as caste terrorism erected in the late 19th century. He unravels the deadly symbiosis between the black hyperghetto and the carceral archipelago that has coproduced and entrenched the material and symbolic marginality of the African-American precariat in the metropolis of the late 20th century. Wacquant concludes with reflections on the politics of knowledge and pointers on the vexed question of the relationship between social epistemology and racial justice. Both sharply focused and wide ranging, synthetic yet controversial, Racial Domination will be of interest to students and scholars of race and ethnicity, power and inequality, and epistemology and theory across the social sciences and humanities.