Substituting for Families? Schools and Social Reproduction in AIDS‐affected Lesotho

Abstract: Families, the state and employers all have a broad if differentiated interest in securing the daily and generational reproduction of society. Whereas in Western countries, the past two decades have witnessed a progressive displacement of responsibility for social reproduction from the state to families, in southern Africa, day‐to‐day social reproduction has always remained overwhelmingly the preserve of families. Today, however, the AIDS pandemic is radically transforming family life for many children, and prompting concerns (arguably a moral panic) about the potential breakdown of social reproduction. Even in Africa, schools have long supplemented families in delivering generational reproduction, albeit geared around the transfer of “factual” knowledge and with a narrow focus on preparing new generations of workers. In light of the AIDS pandemic, a number of commentators have suggested ways in which schools could further substitute for the diminishing capacities of families. Based on interviews with decision‐makers and analysis of policy documents, I explore a number of interventions being enacted in Lesotho's schools. I argue that such initiatives remain small in scale and often justified in relation to retaining children in school. In practice both government and employers remain more interested in the generational reproduction of workers than in daily reproduction. If the welfare needs of AIDS‐affected children are to be met through schooling, there is a need for the education sector's role to be understood in relation to an ethics of care, rather than the functionalist production of a future workforce.     

Gender,migration, mobility and transnationalism

In reviewing the expanding body of work on the linkages between gender, mobility, migration and transnationalism in Gender, Place and Culture over the last decade, this article highlights three significant contributions. First, through critical engagement with transnationalism studies, the journal has produced a sophisticated and variegated strand of work on gender politics and multiple forms of migration and mobility. In this article, we focus primarily on mobility in terms of human movement across national borders, rural–urban migration, as well as the ‘to-ing and fro-ing’ that inform the embodied experiences of being here and there simultaneously as iterated in transnationalism studies [L. Basch, N.G. Schiller, and C.S. Blanc, Nations Unbound: Transnational Projects, Postcolonial Predicaments, and Deterritorialized Nation-States. London: Routledge, 1994]. A second area of strength lies in the coalescence of work providing insights into the connections between social reproduction in a globalising world and intimate forms of global mobility and migration. A third highlight relates to the mutually constitutive relationship between the construction of masculinities and masculinist ideologies, on the one hand, and migration, mobility and transnationalism, on the other. The article concludes with a discussion of two more embryonic areas which merit further development in the journal: the first concerns the social and geographical (im)mobilities implied in cross-border reproductive care1^1. CBRC is what Payne (2013 Payne, J.2013. “Reproduction in Transition: Cross-Border Egg Donation, Biodesirability and New Reproductive Subjectivities on the European Fertility Market.” Gender, Place and Culture, doi:10.1080/0966369X.2013.832656. [Google Scholar]) attributes to the rapid development and spread of assisted reproductive technologies that have given rise to a global market for human eggs, sperm and surrogates. and the global mobility and assemblage of body parts, while the second relates to the distinctive role that feminist geographers interested in migrations and mobilities can play in working collaboratively and transnationally across different worlds.     

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.     

Photographing dispossession, forgetting solidarity: waiting for social justice in Wentworth, South Africa

South Africans today inhabit a fragmented and discontinuous landscape, often despite their most cosmopolitan intentions. Grounded in the Coloured neighbourhood of Wentworth in Durban, this paper asks how remains of the past appear as differently temporalised artefacts, some buried in the archaic past and others more readily used to critique the present. In particular, I explore photographs of inmates of a concentration camp from 1902, township youth appropriating a specific commons in the early 1980s, black political photography from the late 1980s, and film wrestling with the ambiguities of post-apartheid political life in a Coloured neighbourhood next to an oil refinery. What unites these moments is not just a meta-theoretical concern with photography as both documentary and aesthetic, but the specific political uses of images, exemplified by the work of two black political photographers. Their practice provides cues for situating these other photographs in a long century of multiple dispossessions. The paper explores when and how photographs might shock the viewer into recognising resemblances, connections and potential solidarities, not just with the past, but with subaltern critique of racial space and subjectivity in the present. I suggest how we might view photographs from various moments relationally, to understand how, in one corner of contemporary South Africa, people continue to wait for justice despite uncertainty and official dissimulation, in a state of anticipatory frustration.     

Curriculum development and society: West German geographers respond to the American high school geography project

Abstract

Industrial geography courses at the Historically Black Universities (HBUs) and the Historically White Universities (HWUs) in South Africa are a true reflection of apartheid education designed by the government in the 1950s. The education system offers whites good and quality education, while blacks receive poor education. The nature and history of the HBUs have affected the content and the teaching of industrial geography. Unlike the HWUs industrial geography courses at the HBUs do not contain much of the recent changes in the subject.     

Animal Disease Challenges to the Emergence of Pastoralism in Sub-Saharan Africa

Despite the antiquity of domestic cattle in the Sahara-Sahel, archaeological evidence from two sub-Saharan regions indicates that the first pastoralist colonization of sub-Saharan Africa may not have proceeded so smoothly as modern appearances suggest. The first appearance of cattle-based economies seems to have been delayed by as much as a thousand years after the first appearance of small stock, in both eastern and southern Africa. This article reviews the relevant archaeological evidence and argues that the lag in successful introduction of cattle stems from new animal diseases encountered by pastoral colonists entering biogeographic zones south of the Sahel. Diseases that are often fatal to cattle, including wildebeest-derived malignant catarrhal fever (WD-MCF), East Coast fever (ECF), foot-and-mouth disease (FMD), and Rift Valley fever (RVF), as well as trypanosomiasis, are described as probable barriers to the early entry of cattle-based economies into these regions.Malgré l'antiquité des animaux domestiques dans le Sahara-Sahel, les données archéologique de deux régions subsahariennes indiquent que les premières colonisations pastoraux des zones au sud du Sahel ne se propagèrent pas aussi promptement que suggèrent les apparences actuelles. En l'Afrique orientale et en l'Afrique du sud, l'apparition d'économies basées sur l'élevage des gros bovins paraît être retardée de quelque mille ans par rapport à l'apparition des petits ruminants domestiques dans ces mêmes régions. L'article recense les données archéologiques pertinentes et propose que le délai de l'introduction effective des gros bovins fût causée par des nouvelles maladies vétérinaires rencontrées par les premiers colonisateurs pastoraux entrant dans les zones biogéographiques au sud du Sahel. Des maladies fréquemment fatales aux gros bovins, telle que le coryza gangreneux, la thèleriose, la fièvre aphteuse, l'arbovirus des Bunyaviridae, aussi bien que la trypanosomiase, sont proposées comme des obstacles probables à la diffusion des économies à gros bovins dans ces régions.     

试析南非种族主义政权的区域“扰乱政策”

20世纪70年代,南非种族主义政权根据国际国内形势的变化制定了总战略。总战略在南部非洲区域层面体现在要将相关国家纳入南非控制的体系,而对拒绝接受控制的国家,南非则采取扰乱政策,对它们进行多种形式、不间断、低烈度的扰乱。南非的扰乱政策给这些国家造成了巨大的损失,也阻碍了整个南部非洲区域的发展。但是,随着种族主义政权的垮台,南非的这一政策最终归于失败。