Dreaming of a Golden Bengal: Discontinuities of Place and Identity in South Asia

This article analyses five different representations of the homeland category “Bengal”. The region of Bengal was partitioned twice in the twentieth century and imagined in a multitude of forms at different historical moments. The article describes the conditions that allowed different territories and peoples to crystallise as “Bengal” and “the Bengalis”, and investigates why some versions of the Bengali homeland proved durable as others faded away. Rather than asking who is the real Bengali and where is the real Bengal, it investigates how particular identity categories become popularly practised and why particular images of the homeland come to be perceived as true, legitimate and authentic. It concludes that homeland categories are never fixed and finalised, but are rather always in a process of becoming, and are contested, reimagined and redefined as socio-political contexts change.     

Christianity and Justice in the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission: A Case Study in Religious Conflict Resolution

Abstract

Historically, international conflict resolution theorists have largely adopted the position that organized religion is an instigator of violence. As a result, these theories have tended to exclude religion as a force for peacebuilding. Recently, however, scholars have suggested that religion can contribute constructively to a theory of conflict resolution. Their general thesis is that, if religion played a significant part in people's lives, and if religion played a part in fuelling the conflict, then when resolving the conflict, religion must be at least taken into account. An example of a conflict resolution process in which religion, specifically Christianity, played a central role was South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). In dialogue with leading critics of the TRC process, particularly Richard Wilson, this article examines the ambiguous role that Christianity played in influencing concepts of justice in the TRC.     

The Booming Russo-Japanese Economic Relations

A noted Japanese economist analyzes the history, present status, and future prospects for Russo-Japanese economic relations. The author demonstrates that the boom in trade between the two countries in the 2000s is unprecedented, ending the stagnation in bilateral trade that began in the early 1980s, when the era of large-scale Siberian resource development projects came to an end. He argues that underlying the current boom is an eastward shift in the Russian economy, characterized by its energy and investment policies as well as foreign economic relations. The paper considers in detail two important factors supporting this boom: (1) Japan’s exports of automobiles to Russia; and (2) Russia’s exports of oil and gas to Japan. He concludes with a guardedly optimistic prognosis suggesting growth in the bilateral economic relations on the grounds of the continuing eastward shift of the Russian economy and a marked correspondence between the demand and supply of the two countries. Journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: F140, O520, P280, Q430. 7 figures, 4 tables, 50 references.     

Comparing Projection Assumptions of Fertility in Six Advanced Asian Economies; or ‘Thinking Beyond the Medium Variant’

The United Nations' (UN) World Population Prospects are perhaps the most widely used population projections in both academic and policy discourses. In this short research note, we examine six advanced Asian economies, and compare the fertility assumptions used by the UN with those derived from local statistical offices (LSOs). We identify a significant divergence between them. When translated into total projected population size of younger age groups (0–14 years), the use of the UN rather than the LSO ‘medium’ projection can increase the total projected population size by up to 50% by 2040.     

‘Personifying the coloured community’: Sonny Leon and the ambiguities of the politics of co-option and resistance in the apartheid state

Abstract

The traditional focus regarding the Angolan Civil War, 1974–1976, has been on the nature of Soviet and Cuban involvement, the American response to communist activities, and South Africa's invasion. A point often mentioned, but rarely elaborated upon in the literature, is the degree to which the United States of America (USA) encouraged South Africa to intervene in the Angolan conflict. This paper investigates the extent and nature of American collusion with South Africa in the civil war, and the degree of complicity of senior American officials. The paper argues that on balance, the evidence suggests that senior elements of the United States executive branch, covertly and informally, colluded with South Africa. South African politicians overestimated the depth and extent of American support for its intervention, and when the USA ceased its assistance, they felt betrayed by Kissinger.     

The Antinomies of Black Identity Formation in West Africa, 1820–1848

Abstract

During the mid-nineteenth century, a group of United States-born property-holding free blacks struggled to establish themselves and fashion a new polity on the coast of West Africa. In doing so, these Liberians embraced a pair of simultaneously complementary and opposing aspirations: first, the insertion, entrenchment and expansion of a successful black commercial bourgeoisie into the global Atlantic economy of the nineteenth century, an aspiration tied to and dependent upon the accumulation of capital and the creation of a state which would operate in the interest of this group and no other. Secondly, they aspired to the creation and institutionalisation of a separate and distinct black nationality - a black identity - that covered the entire spectrum of people of African descent, that held out the prospect of solidarity for all black people in republican equality and citizenship, and that subsumed all other classes and categories of black people under the tent of the imagined black nation. In this way they contributed to the uneven, reciprocal and trans-Atlantic work of black identity formation during the middle of the nineteenth century.     

“Punching Above its Weight”. The Mafikeng Anti-Repression Forum (Maref) and the Fall of Bophuthatswana

Abstract

This article traces the history of the Mafikeng Anti-Repression Forum (Maref) that operated in the former homeland of Bophuthatswana from early 1990 to late 1994. It was the only human rights organisation in Bophuthatswana. Maref's work was in five areas. Firstly, it monitored human rights abuses as a consequence of political repression in the homeland. Secondly, it responded to these abuses by means of disseminating the facts behind them. Thirdly, it attempted to defend the interests of the victims by means of seeking legal redress and relief from suffering and deprivation. Fourthly, it agitated for political change in Bophuthatswana in accordance with the changing nature of political reform in South Africa as a whole. Lastly it collated and published the information that formed an essential component of the negotiations that led to the new dispensation in 1994. For these activities, Maref members were severely harassed. The role the organisation played generally has received little analysis or comment, and is deserving of a place in the annals of human rights activities and activists during this period of transformation and upheaval in South Africa.     

Frontiers of Disease: Human Desire and Environmental Realities in the Rearing Of Horses in Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century South Africa

Abstract

Horses have played an important economic, military and cultural role in South African history. However, disease has always posed a threat to their survival. Horsesickness, a viral infection transmitted by midges from the genus culicoides, is endemic in much of the country but has historically assumed epizootic proportions in certain years. In the lowveld and Zululand nagana (trypanosomosis), spread by tsetse flies, has killed both horses and cattle and affected the distribution of human settlement and agricultural activities. In addition, much of South Africa is very arid, yet has rich floral taxa. Several plants, such as Senecio spp. are highly toxic to horses, but in times of drought and fodder shortages, equines are faced with the choice of starvation or potentially succumbing to toxicosis by eating poisonous weeds. This paper considers the environmental impact of these three types of horse diseases in South Africa and explores the scientific and ecological investigations undertaken since the late nineteenth century to try to control them. Research into horse diseases brought together the laboratory and the field and raised important questions about the part played by environmental factors, as opposed to just germs, in the distribution of livestock infections and the ability of farmers and scientists to tackle them effectively.     

Historical Perspectives on Pre-Colonial Irrigation in Southern Africa

Abstract

One of the basic areas of interaction between water as natural resource and human societies as agents of cultural transformation is the technology of irrigation. In Africa at least 66 per cent of the available water is used for purposes of irrigation. For more than 4 000 years irrigation has secured food supplies for humans on a continent that is noted for its relative shortage of sufficient natural water supplies.

There is a remarkable hidden power of water in the history of southern Africa. This is particularly the case when we consider the development of early irrigation technologies of Iron Age farmers. The small irrigation furrow of the subsistence farmer was just as important to an insular community of Bantu-speaking people in pre-colonial times, as is the sophisticated irrigation technology in present-day South Africa. Currently there is a paucity of information about pre-colonial indigenous irrigation technology. This can be ascribed to a number of factors of which the invasion of modern Western traditions in the nineteenth century is perhaps the most important. A number of other factors for the apparent blind-spot is also presented in this study.

In southern Africa there are traces of indigenous pre-colonial irrigation works at sites such as Nyanga in Zimbabwe; the Limpopo River Valley; Mpumalanga; and South Africa's eastern Highveld. Reference is also made in this article to specific strategies of irrigation used by Iron Age communities, prior to the advent of a colonial presence. Finally, attention is also drawn to pre-colonial land tenure and state formation against the backdrop of Wittfogel's theories on hydraulic society.