Gendered livelihoods and social change in post-apartheid South Africa

This article employs gendered livelihoods analysis and participatory methods to examine the politics of development among small-scale rooibos tea farmers in a rural coloured area of southwestern South Africa. Differentiating between sources of conflict and cohesion, I discuss how communities navigated resource scarcity, unstable markets, and shifting relations. While patriarchal dynamics informed livelihoods, with males and elders enjoying greater access than females and young adults, women took advantage of relatively fluid female roles to enter into agriculture and commerce. In contrast, rigid male roles and unattainable expectations of manhood isolated men, engendering destructive behaviors among young men in particular. Communities maintained social cohesion through democratic arrangements, and a politics of identification enabled research participants to relate to differential interests. In addition to providing situated and relational insight into the identitarian aspects of rural development, participatory gendered livelihoods analysis offers a critical means for deconstructing power and decolonizing knowledge.     

Barbed Bone Points: Tradition and Continuity in Saharan and Sub-Saharan Africa

Examination of African barbed bone points recovered from Holocene sites provides a context to interpret three Late Pleistocene occurrences from Katanda and Ishango, Zaire, and White Paintings Shelter, Botswana. In sites dated to ca. 10,000 BP and younger, such artifacts are found widely distributed across the Sahara Desert, the Sahel, the Nile, and the East African Lakes. They are present in both ceramic and aceramic contexts, sometimes associated with domesticates. The almost-universal presence of fish remains indicates a subsistence adaptation which incorporates a riverine/lacustrine component. Typologically these points exhibit sufficient similarity in form and method of manufacture to be subsumed within a single African tradition. They are absent at Fayum, where a distinct Natufian form occurs. Specimens dating to ca. 20,000 BP at Ishango, possibly a similar age at White Paintings Shelter, and up to 90,000 BP at Katanda clearly fall within this same African tradition and thus indicate a very long-term continuity which crosses traditionally conceived sub-Saharan cultural boundaries. L'étude des pointes barbelées en os del' Holocène africaine fournit un contexte à l'interprétation de trois gisements du Pleistocene superieure, notamment, Katanda et Ishango (en République Démocratique du Congo, ex-Zaire), et White Paintings Shelter au Botswana. Cettes pointes ont une distribution étendue à travers le Sahara, le Sahel, le Nil et les grands lacs du rift d'Afrique orientale, notamment sur certains sites datant de 10,000 ans avant notre ère. Ces pointes sont associées avec des types d'industries céramiques ou acéramiques, avec ou sans squelettes de faune domestiques, mais toujours avec des squelettes de poisson, indiquent une subsistence comportant des ressources lacustres ou riveraines. Sur le plan typologique, cettes pointes présentent une telle ressemblance, soit de forme, soit de manufacture, qu'elles constituent une tradition unique africaine. Au Fayum en Egypte, les formes des pointes rappellent, par contre, plutôt les series Natufiennes du Levant. Les pointes barbelées d'Ishango, datant de 20,000 ans environ, celles de White Paintings Shelter, datant probablement de la même époque, et celles de Katanda datant au maximum de 90,000 ans BP, appartiennent à la même tradition africaine, ce qu montre ainsi l'existence d'une continuité de très longue durée àtravers les frontières culturelles traditionelles.     

Continuity and change in Angola: insights from modern history

Angola may be entering a pivotal moment, triggered by persistently low oil prices and its president José Eduardo dos Santos (the world's second longest‐serving president) signalling that he may step down in 2018. Will this result in continuity or change? This review article of six books on modern Angola shows that since 1820, significant dips in international commodity prices have marked moments of lasting political change in the country. They also show that the history of Angolan nationalism is one of deep divisions and that political loyalty and support were often more about survival or ambition than about ideology and ethnicity. Throughout modern Angolan history personalities, such as Agostinho Neto, Jonas Savimbi and José Eduardo dos Santos, have also played a critical role in determining the country's fortunes. The single greatest foreign influence on Angola might be Cuba's ‘internationalist solidarity’ of sending up to five per cent of its population to Angola between 1976 and 1991 in support of the Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola (MPLA). Over a decade later, the Chinese also found that the MPLA government determined their partnership. This review article examines the strength of Angolan agency and how the drivers of change are complex, determined by personality politics, geopolitics, prestige, solidarity, cost–benefit analysis and timing.     

初春 邂逅彩虹之国

正南非共和国,位于非洲大陆的最南端,拥有十分丰富的自然资源和深厚的文化底蕴,从草原上五颜六色的生灵,到街边风格迥异的建筑,再到肤色各异的人种,南非"彩虹之国"的美名也就不言而喻了。从大西洋沿岸向远方望去,形状奇特的桌山便会清晰地出现在视线内。桌山意为"海角之城",是南非的平顶山,已成为世界上最令人难忘的陆标。     

South Africa and the African Renaissance

This article addresses the question of the new South Africa's relationships with other countries in Africa in the context of the idea of an 'African Renaissance' which has recently gained currency. The authors identify two opposing conceptions of Africa's development, which they call 'globalist' and 'Africanist' respectively, and explore the tensions besetting South Africa's participation in an 'Africanist' project. They discuss the dilemma of South Africa's role on the continent as both an obvious and an impossible candidate for leadership, and argue for an 'Africanist' and post-structuralist approach to the political, economic and cultural development of the African continent.     

Continuity and change in regional disparities in Belgium during the twentieth century

This paper presents estimates of regional GDP per capita for certain benchmark years during the first half of the twentieth century using the method proposed by Geary and Stark. After testing the robustness of the Geary and Stark methodology for the Belgian situation, these estimates are linked to the official regional GDP figures, available since 1955, so that we can cover the whole of the twentieth century. Next we test the suggestion put forward by many historians of a contrast between a ‘poor Flanders’ and a relatively ‘prosperous Wallonia’ around 1900. For the remainder of the analysis Belgium’s nine provinces are used as a geographical unit to take a broader view than just the Flanders/Wallonia controversy. The analysis shows a dramatic reversal of fortune between the northern and southern provinces. We explain the main causes of this process and assess the effect of state policies on regional development. Finally, the paper considers whether the twentieth century witnessed a process of convergence.     

Reforming Land and Water Rights in South Africa

Redress of historical injustice in access to land provided a mobilizing force for the overthrow of the apartheid government in South Africa. Inequality of access to water resources marks South Africa's history even more profoundly than inequality of access to land. Yet in South Africa, post‐apartheid legislative reform relating to land and water has followed largely separate, if parallel, paths. This article traces the development and current status of water reforms in the Inkomati Water Management Area, where water use is dominated by established commercial agriculture and forestry, by important environmental interests, including the Kruger National Park, and by demands for improved access to water from a black population of around 1.5 million living in former Bantustan areas. It indicates that in practice water and land reform are interdependent, but, although both have become more closely linked within local political and economic arenas, they remain largely disconnected and disabled by unresolved tensions within their separate policy processes. The article argues that the commoditized nature of land and water use within the established patterns of commercial agriculture sets constraints on what redistributive land and water reform can deliver to those historically dispossessed. In particular, increasing recourse to ‘strategic partnerships’ between African community landowners and commercial agribusiness as a means of maintaining the productivity of commercial farmland poses questions about the control and beneficial use of new forms of communal property.     

Christianity and Political Engagement in Post-Apartheid South Africa

Abstract

This paper focuses specifically on the impact of the Christian churches on the social, cultural and political contexts of South Africa. It considers the political role of the mainline Christian churches and their ecumenical bodies during the apartheid era. In post-apartheid South Africa, the social and political context has changed and the Christian churches relate to this new context in varied ways. The rapid growth and proliferation of Christian churches under forces of globalization to some extent undermines social cohesion and development. The traditional practice of the public gathering, or imbizo, is particularly threatened. This article therefore seeks to address the question of whether Christian institutions in a rapidly globalizing Africa are an asset or liability for promoting identity and belonging, social cohesion, and the development of social capital.     

Land and society in early Canada and South Africa

The rural societies of early Canada and South Africa overwhelmingly comprised independent families on their own land and, in comparison with their European antecedents, were strikingly egalitarian and homogeneous. The transformation and simplification of European society in early Canada and South Africa was not the result of fragmentation—the isolation of particular elements of the European whole in remote new settings. Rather, these two colonial societies were common products of the introduction of European assumptions about family and land into settings where land was cheap and markets for farm produce were poor. Taken together these factors are sufficient to explain the general character of rural society in early Canada and most of early South Africa.     

Experimental determination of use wear on stone adzes from Boomplaas Cave,South Africa

To test the assumption that Later Stone Age adzes were used primarily for woodworking, replicas of adzes were made and used to chisel and to plane wood. The use wear on these replicas was then compared with that on 51 prehistoric examples from Boomplaas Cave in the southern Cape Province, South Africa. The results show that all the prehistoric adzes examined have wood polish, and that charcoaling was part of the technique of Later Stone Age woodworking at least as early as 14,200 bp.     

Behavioral ecological models of lithic technological change during the later Middle Stone Age of South Africa

This paper examines changes in the organization of lithic technological systems during the later Middle Stone Age (MSA) of South Africa. Using principal components analysis (PCA), the study looks at the lithic data from two important South African MSA sites: Blombos Cave and Klasies River Mouth. The paper uses PCA to describe the transition to (1) the biface-dominated Still Bay industry at Blombos Cave and (2) the microlithic Howiesons Poort industry at Klasies River Mouth. Based on these analyses, the paper offers a synthetic scenario of the emergence of the Still Bay industry from earlier MSA industries, closely followed by the dramatic transition to the Howiesons Poort. Using a few principles of tool design and behavioral ecological models derived from the study of modern foragers, the paper suggests that the Still Bay came about as the result of deteriorating environmental conditions at the beginning of Oxygen Isotope Stage 4, which caused resources to become scarce and more widely distributed. The study proposes that the bifacial point strategy of the Still Bay was a response to wider mobility patterns and increased movement away from lithic raw material sources. The paper then suggests that Howiesons Poort emerged as information sharing strategies improved, and resources in the environment could be more efficiently targeted with more task-specific tools. The paper closes by reviewing the implications of these findings for modern human origins in South Africa.     

“世界尽头”开普敦 地球上最美丽的海角

<正>如花园般美丽的开普敦,有着不同于非洲其他城市的旖旎风情,悬崖峭壁,澄净蓝空,优美的自然风光,连第一位抵达此地的德瑞克爵士都忍不住赞叹这里是"地球上最美丽的海角"。它曾被评为一生中必去的20个城市之一。