Legacy Underplayed or Ignored? Tsietsi Mashinini: The Forgotten Warrior of South Africa's Liberation Struggle

Tsietsi Mashinini symbolises youth resistance to racism and imperialism after he heroically led the June 16 1976 Soweto student uprisings that defied South Africa's apartheid government. Subsequently, the United Nations condemned apartheid as a crime against humanity, but Tsietsi became a political exile at the tender age of 19. In exile, he formed the South African Youth Revolutionary Council (SAYRCO) together with his comrades from the Soweto Students Representative Council (SSRC) that was banned by Pretoria in 1977 along with numerous other organisations. Ironically, Tsietsi's individual and collective legacy is underplayed or ignored in contemporary South Africa. His illustrious role has only grudgingly been recognised long after South Africa achieved liberal democracy in 1994. Yet Tsietsi's heroism and legacy inspired the students that he led when confronting the apartheid system. Like Tsietsi, thousands left the country to join the anti-apartheid liberation struggle. Thus, his activities remain etched deeply in their minds whenever they reflect on his legacy annually during the 1976 uprising's anniversary, now called Youth Day. Others put increasing pressure on apartheid at home until it relinquished power through negotiations. This article examines Tsietsi Mashinini's legacy and his contribution to South Africa's freedom struggle based on a review of the literature, historical records and media reports, theoretical reflection guided by Rational Choice Theory and Game Theory, and an analysis of the awards given to freedom struggle stalwarts and other South African luminaries. It concludes with observations on Tsietsi Mashinini's legacy, with the author's contention that his legacy—underplayed or ignored—will forever haunt post-1994 South Africa's democracy.     

The story of Comanche: horsepower,heroism and the conquest of the American West

Marked by the Census Bureau’s closure of the frontier; the symbolic end of American Indian resistance at Wounded Knee and powerful articulations on the ‘winning of the West’ from Frederick Jackson Turner and Buffalo Bill Cody, the early 1890s was a critical moment in the history of the American West. It also saw the death of one of the region’s most famous cavalry horses, Comanche, who succumbed to colic in 1891 aged twenty-nine. Famously billed as ‘the only living thing to survive the Battle of the Little Bighorn’, this article uses Comanche as a locus around which to examine the history of warhorses in the military culture of the American West, and, more broadly, to point towards a growing scholarship on war and the environment that emphasises the usefulness of such themes as spatiality and inter-species exchange in embellishing our understanding of the experience, impact and cultural memory of war. Not only does Comanche’s lifespan (c.1862–1891) usefully coincide with the federal government’s final conquest of the West but his equine biography serves as valuable testament to the use of horses in the US military as both practical and symbolic agents of American expansionism.     

Masculinity under the knife: Filipino men,trafficking and the black organ market in Manila,the Philippines

The Philippines has recently achieved notoriety as one of the top five source countries for commercially provided organs, particularly kidneys, globally. The vast majority of commercial organ providers are economically marginal men, thus throwing into question conventional wisdom regarding the gendered nature of human trafficking in which most trafficked persons are presumed to be female. This article examined the motives of men who sell kidneys in Manila's black organ market and their ongoing negotiations when their aspirations are not fulfilled. I suggest that family considerations figure prominently amongst many of the men, who attempt to use the money from the sale of a kidney as a livelihood or family security strategy. Narratives of economically marginal men in the Philippines about the commercial value of their body parts are situated in discourses of traditional Philippines ideas about masculinity, particularly concerning the male breadwinner and also about heroism. Thus, although an emotionally and relationally complex decision, selling a kidney nonetheless allows these men to attempt to reclaim their masculine roles, but often with contradictory outcomes.     

Jabotinsky and Jewish autonomy in the Diaspora

This article examines the customary assumption that ultra-Orthodox memory of the Holocaust is a counter-memory, which confronts, consciously and unconsciously, the dominant secular, Zionist memory of the Holocaust. However, in the early postwar period, the memory of the Holocaust in ultra-Orthodox society was variegated and multifaceted. The article shows that not only did some members of ultra-Orthodox society adopt part of the Zionist narrative on issues such as the lessons of the Holocaust and the centrality of the Land of Israel but that they even took part in its creation and consolidation. During the 1960s some of the ultra-Orthodox spokesmen shifted their commemoration efforts to within their own community for a variety of reasons. Nonetheless, the sectorial barriers between the secular majority and the ultra-Orthodoxy minority in Israel in the first decades were not as high or as rigid as they appear to be today.