Why the Homeless Rebel: Housing Struggles in post-Apartheid South Africa

Abstract

Post-apartheid housing struggles urgently need to be addressed in order to consolidate the inclusivist democracy in South Africa. Former white minority governments restricted housing in order to control the movement of Africans and their labour. This paper analyses aspects of post-apartheid housing protest. The argument is that such protests are rooted in a problematic rights discourse of the anti-apartheid struggle, and in the new constitution's recognition of the right of access to adequate housing, which is nonetheless, subjected to fiscal constraints. The article's second focus is on a legacy of land dispossession, which also hinders housing delivery. Failure to realise the right to housing fuels some of the most important conflict that will shape future organisation of state institutions and relations between the state and society.     

陈独秀与近代上海社会的变迁

陈独秀与上海社会联系密切。上海是他认识半殖民地半封建社会的窗口。他的革命生涯从上海开始,一生主要时光在上海度过,革命生涯最辉煌的业绩在上海实现。他对上海社会有着比较深刻的研究和十分复杂的感情,总体上说还是一分为二的。近代上海造就了陈独秀的崇高声望,陈独秀也给上海留下丰富的思想文化遗产。今天的上海已经成为中国经济发展、社会进步、文化先进、教育发达的中心城市,其作为全国思想文化中心的地位,无疑是从新文化运动的发起开始确立的。     

By the soil divided: The roots of geographical variation in English social conservatism

Using English data, we show that geographical variation in measures of social conservatism in the 19th and 21st centuries is strongly associated with variation in measures of social conservatism in the 17th century. Our statistical model includes a range of 19th-century and 21st-century economic and demographic characteristics, so the inter-temporal persistence in social conservatism is not to be explained by persistence in these characteristics. The association is still present when we fit a model with instrumental variables for the measures of 17th-century social conservatism, which suggests that the association is not a consequence of persistence in unobserved heterogeneity across locations. Rather, there does appear to be some inter-generational transmission of attitudes. A great deal of attention has been paid to the volatility of the British electorate in recent years, but our results show that the continuity in the country's political geography should not be overlooked.     

Struggles for Environmental Justice in US Prisons and Jails

In this paper I ask how might environmental justice studies scholarship be recast if we consider the phenomenon of environmental injustice as a form of criminalisation? In other words, since environmental injustice is frequently a product of state‐sanctioned violence against communities of colour, then what are the implications of reframing it as a practice of treating those populations as criminally suspect and as deserving of state punishment? Moreover, how are the targets and survivors of environmental injustice/racism enlisted in generative ways that resist that criminalisation and support abolition? I answer these questions through a consideration of how struggles inside and outside of carceral spaces represent urgent and timely opportunities to rethink the possibilities of environmental justice theory and politics by linking them to practices and visions of abolition ecology and critical environmental justice.     

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.     

The Middle Stone Age in East Africa and modern human origins

East Africa, the region where Merrick Posnansky started his professional career, has long been accepted as the major centre for the study of the origins of hominids and their technological systems. Recently, human geneticists and some palaeoanthropologists have also proposed an African origin for anatomically modern humans (Homo sapiens sapiens), although much of the proof cited is from non-African sources — mainly Europe and the Middle East. Fortunately these models have stimulated reassessment of the sub-Saharan Middle Stone Age (MSA), the archaeological phase between 200,000 and 30,000 years ago which represents the beginnings of regional variation in technology and cultural adaptation as well as the period in which modern humans appeared. Long ignored by East African archaeologists in favour of the earliest cultural record, or, at the other extreme, Neolithic and Iron Age research, the MSA is critical to the evaluation of models of the emergence of our own species. This paper reviews the current arguments concerning the origin and dispersal of modern humans, and the importance of the MSA for the resolution of the problem. It also describes the results from a 1990 survey for MSA sites conducted in southwestern Tanzania within the framework of these current models.

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Résumé L'Afrique orientale, où Merrick Posnansky commença sa carrière professionnelle, est depuis longtemps reconnue comme un centre important pour l'étude des origines des hominides et de leurs systèmes technologiques. Récemment, des généticiens et des paléoanthropologues ont aussi suggéré que les humains anatomiquement modernes (Homo sapiens sapiens) auraient des origines africaines, bien qu'un grand nombre des preuves citées proviennent de sources non-africaines, principalement d'Europe et du Moyen-Orient. Heureusement, ces modèles ont encouragé la réévaluation de l'âge de pierre moyen (MSA) sous-saharien, phase archéologique d'il y a 200.000 à 30.000 ans, qui représente les débuts des variations régionales sur le plan de la technologie et de l'adaptation culturelle. C'est aussi la période durant laquelle les étres humains modernes sont apparus. Longtemps ignoré par les archéologues d'Afrique orientale en faveur de témoignages cultures plus anciens ou, à l'autre extrême, des recherches de l'âge néolithique et de l'âge de fer, le MSA est crucial pour l'évaluation de modèles d'émergence de notre propre espèce. Cet article examine les arguments actuels concernant l'origine et la dispersion des humains modernes, et l'importance du MSA pour la résolution de ce problème. Il décrit également les résultats d'une recherche de sites MSA menée en 1990 dans le sud-ouest tanzanien, dans le cadre de ces modèles actuels.

     

Ownership matters: Natural resources property rights and social conflict in Sub-Saharan Africa

Empirical tests of the “resource curse” thesis have provided inconclusive evidence for the claim that natural resource abundance increases the risk of social conflict. The present article argues, based on a novel political economy framework and a new data set, that it is important to analyze how states regulate the access to their natural resources to understand the interrelationship between resources and public resistance against resource extraction arrangements. We claim that international rather than state resource ownership fosters the regional protest potential and overshadows the efficiency gains that foreign investment might create. Especially the siphoning of resource rents to international owners instigates resentment among the local population. Distinguishing between private, public, domestic and international ownership arrangements, we assess the effects of natural resources control rights regimes on state repression using new GIS-based data on diamond and gold mines as well as oil and gas fields in Sub-Sahara Africa. Our multilevel analysis shows that repression as an answer to societal dissent is particularly likely in grids hosting international oil companies. Furthermore, we find that international oil firms further state repression especially under insecure property rights.     

全球化形势下的民族主义与阶级斗争

阶级认同与民族认同是两个不同的认同范畴。民族主义与资产阶级民族国家相伴而生,因而具有明显的资产阶级属性。苏联、东欧集团的解体和中国在“文化大革命”中所犯的阶级斗争扩大化的严重错误,使全球化进程中阶级斗争学说的话语权被极大地削弱,但阶级矛盾依然存在。全球化形势下不合理的国际经济秩序造成的“南北”矛盾既有民族矛盾的属性,也有阶级矛盾的属性。     

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.     

Mapungubwe and Great Zimbabwe: The origin and spread of social complexity in southern Africa

Stratified societies in southern Africa first developed in the Shashe–Limpopo Basin. As is well known, rank-based society at K2 developed into class distinction at Mapungubwe. The transfer of this new social organisation to Great Zimbabwe has received less attention. New research on rainmaking practices suggests that a Mapungubwe dynasty introduced class structures at Great Zimbabwe. Poor climatic conditions at the end of the 13th century undermined sacred leaders at Mapungubwe itself, and while vulnerable, the elite at Great Zimbabwe took over the important gold and ivory trade. Among other things, the new elite used the unique Zimbabwe birdstones to establish their legitimacy.     

Perpetuating neo-colonialism through population control: South Africa and the United States

Third world women in the global economy are valuable as a cheap source of labor and as producers of additional cheap labor sources (children). This discussion focuses on the interrelationships between race, class, and gender bias in international population programs and the unequal power relationship between colonizers and the colonized. For example, USAID directs over 33% of its family planning (FP) service delivery funding and 50% of policy funds to Africa, and African women and women of color in general are blamed for their own poverty and underdevelopment. Madi Gray is cited as suggesting that African FP is the cure for "illegitimacy, misery in the ghettos, and rising crime." The paternalistic and racist population policies of the US are traced to a 1905 speech of President Theodore Roosevelt, who expressed concern about the Yankee stock being overwhelmed by immigrants, non-Whites, and the poor. In 1933, the US Birth Control Federation targeted Black women. Birth control and eugenic practices were integrated before the Second World War and shared the goal of reducing the immigrant and Black populations. The current South African equivalent to this situation is the White power rhetoric of "Black peril" which is said to threaten White power, safety, and profits. Structural changes in both the US and South Africa are creating large surplus labor pools comprised largely of Black Africans. When labor reserves are too large, poverty and underemployment are identified as the result of overpopulation. Unhealthy and unproved birth control technologies have been distributed to Africans while health care, economic resources, and social security have been neglected. Population control is used for selective population reduction.