Book Review: Review Article: An Analysis of Freedom and Justice in South Africa: Forty Lost Years: The Apartheid State and the Politics of the National Party 1948–1994, Segregation and Apartheid in Twentieth-Century South Africa, Now That We are Free: Coloured Communities in a Democratic South Africa, Nelson Mandela Speaks: Forging a Democratic National South Africa

1996 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-25
Author(s):  
Kwame Nantambu
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Review Article ◽  
National Party ◽  
Nelson Mandela

Shakespeare’s Tragedies in Southern Africa

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Colette Gordon ◽  
Daniel Roux ◽  
David Schalkwyk
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
South African ◽  
Southern Africa ◽  
Titus Andronicus ◽  
Nelson Mandela ◽  
Shakespearean Tragedy ◽  
Thabo Mbeki ◽  
Robben Island

This chapter discusses the place of Shakespeare’s tragedies in apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa. It begins with the imposition of apartheid in 1948 and Afrikaans Shakespeare; it goes on to look at Sol Plaatje’s Setswana translations of Shakespeare; and then considers rhetorical and allegorical treatments of Shakespearean tragedy in relation to Robben Island, Nelson Mandela, and Thabo Mbeki. This is followed by an account of the reception, in South Africa and abroad, of three landmark South African productions in the twentieth century: Janet Suzman’s Othello, Gregory Doran’s Titus Andronicus, and Welcome Msomi’s Umabatha. It concludes with a brief discussion of the representation of Africa in the Globe-to-Globe 2012 festival at Shakespeare’s Globe in London.

Revolution and Non-Violence in Tolstoy, Gandhi, and Mandela

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Imraan Coovadia
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Political Violence ◽  
The State ◽  
Political Organization ◽  
Leo Tolstoy ◽  
War And Peace ◽  
Mass Mobilization ◽  
Nelson Mandela ◽  
Robben Island

The dangers of political violence and the possibilities of non-violence were the central themes of three lives which changed the twentieth century—Leo Tolstoy, writer and aristocrat who turned against his class; Mohandas Gandhi, who corresponded with Tolstoy and considered him the most important person of the time; and Nelson Mandela, prisoner and statesman, who read War and Peace on Robben Island and who, despite having led a campaign of sabotage, saw himself as a successor to Gandhi. Tolstoy, Gandhi, and Mandela tried to create transformed societies to replace the dying forms of colony and empire. They found the inequalities of Russia, India, and South Africa intolerable, yet they questioned the wisdom of seizing the power of the state, creating new kinds of political organization and imagination to replace the old promises of revolution. Their views, along with their ways of leading others, are closely connected, from their insistence on working with their own hands and reforming their individual selves to their acceptance of death. On three continents, in a century of mass mobilization and conflict, they promoted strains of nationalism devoid of antagonism, prepared to take part in a general peace. Looking at Tolstoy, Gandhi, and Mandela in sequence, taking into account their letters and conversations, as well as the institutions they created or subverted, placing at the centre their treatment of the primal fantasy of political violence, reveals a vital radical tradition which stands outside the conventional categories of twentieth-century history and politics.

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