Following the image: Examining the multiple afterlives of apartheid-era prison identification photographs

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 137-161
Author(s):  
Bianca van Laun
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
State Archives ◽  
The 1960S

Drawing on debates on materiality, this article investigates the lives and multiple afterlives of prison identification photographs of individuals hanged by the apartheid state in South Africa during the 1960s for crimes framed as political. In recent years these photographs have been recovered and repurposed as part of post-apartheid nation-building and memorialization projects. Under the auspices of the Gallows Memorialization Project, bureaucratic records and photographs have been recovered from the apartheid state archives, reinterpreted and placed into different and new ‘presentational circumstances’ that desires to overturn their original oppressive logic. However, as the photographs and documents are used to fix the identities of particular individuals that the project seeks to commemorate, the logic that drives their reproduction in the new configurations and contexts seems to replicate the bureaucratic rationality that produced them.

Contract Archeology in South Africa

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ndukuyakhe Ndlovu
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
South African ◽  
Research Funding ◽  
Legal Requirements ◽  
Heritage Sites ◽  
Legislative Framework ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
Potential Damage ◽  
Legislative Changes ◽  
The 1960S

The roots of contract archeology were laid even before the development of a legislative framework that prescribed the processes to be followed. Contract archeology was being seen by the museums and universities as the best avenue to the subsidizing of archeological research. The increased research funding of the 1960s and 1970s was on the decline in the 1980s. Universities, therefore, were at a disadvantage and needed to explore other avenues of funding. Legislative changes over the years, which made it mandatory for developers to fund impact assessments to mitigate potential damage of valuable heritage resources from their proposed activities, have led to a significant proliferation of private archeological companies. These have been established to provide developers with the expertise they need to satisfy these legal requirements. The approach used in South Africa is that the developer must pay to assess the nature of the likely impact of their proposed activity. Government entities are then tasked with the responsibility of reviewing studies undertaken by specialists subcontracted by developers. The subdiscipline of archeology has grown significantly in South Africa, specifically enabled by legislative changes over the years requiring that predevelopment assessments of heritage sites be undertaken prior to approvals being made. However, archeology has continued to be defined as racially unrepresentative of the South African demography. In addition, the management of heritage resources through the use of contract archeology has been characterized by a variety of administrative challenges.

The seeds of ethnic or tribalistic manifestations in Limpopo: The case of Makhado, Vuwani and Malamulele

2021 ◽  
Vol 77 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ndwamato G. Mugovhani
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Social Cohesion ◽  
Personal Experience ◽  
New South ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
Essential Property ◽  
Research Article ◽  
Democratic Elections

This research article argued that the current conflicts between Vhavenda and Vatsonga, two decades and four years later after the first democratic elections for a new South Africa in 1994, are manifestations of the seeds that were sown by the Voortrekkers since their arrival around the Soutpansberg in the northern parts of South Africa in 1836. Makhado (Louis Trichardt), Vuwani and Malamulele have been embroiled in continuous arguments and counterarguments, advocacies and counter advocacies, including protests, and in some instances, destruction of the essential property. Before then, Vhavenda and Vatsonga used to live alongside each other and even together. In their traditional village settings, there was no discrimination based on language or ethnicity. Through review of early scholarly writings, oral resources garnered from elders and the author’s personal experience, a few episodes were highlighted, and the ramifications thereof were discussed.Contribution: This study also postulated that although the promotion of the tribes’ uniqueness was culturally significant, social cohesion and multiculturalism could have been sustained without institutionalising the segregation laws and demarcations, for these decisions have come back to haunt the present democratic South Africa’s ideals of nation building and social cohesion.

Interrogating Sartre and Apartheid

2021 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 25-36
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Personal Life ◽  
Firm Commitment ◽  
The 1960S

In an important article published last year (2020), Tal Sela asserts that Sartre’s contributions to the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa throughout the 1960s are overblown and overestimated. Sartre was motivated, Sela argues, by a desire for self-aggrandizement rather than by any genuine concern for the victims of apartheid racism. This article refutes those claims. In countering Sela’s arguments, I revisit in detail Sartre’s interventions denouncing the phenomenon of apartheid and establish the importance of Sartre’s tireless struggle against racism to highlight the force of his opposition to South Africa’s infamous policy and his equally firm commitment to freedom both in his philosophy and personal life.

Scala Is Scala and Eoan Is Eoan: The Struggle to Breathe

2018 ◽  
pp. 98-139
Author(s):  
Hilde Roos
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Family Relations ◽  
Cape Town ◽  
Job Opportunities ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Professional Artists ◽  
Opera Production

Chapter 4 covers the latter half of the 1960s, a time during which the group consolidated its reputation as an opera company, not only in Cape Town, but also elsewhere in South Africa. The chapter illustrates how operatic activities were pursued with immense energy and dedication as members sacrificed time, family relations, and job opportunities to be able to participate in opera production. During this time, they remained hopeful that acknowledgment as professional artists on a par with their white counterparts would be forthcoming. This period, however, also saw the tightening grip of apartheid starting to take its toll as the system relentlessly continued to foil the group’s aspirations.

(Un)Liberated and Contested Narratives

2019 ◽  
pp. 334-347
Author(s):  
Bongani C Ndhlovu
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
South African ◽  
Social Cohesion ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
The State ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
The Many ◽  
Contested Narratives

This chapter analyses the influence of the state in shaping museum narratives, especially in a liberated society such as South Africa. It argues that while the notion of social cohesion and nation building is an ideal that many South African museums should strive for, the technocratisation of museum processes has to a degree led to a disregard of the public sphere as a space of open engagement. Secondly, the chapter also looks at the net-effect of museums professionals and boards in the development of their narrative. It argues that due to the nature of their expertise and interests, and the focus on their areas of specialisation, museums may hardly claim to be representative of the many voices they ought to represent. As such, the chapter explores contestations in museum spaces. It partly does so by exploring the notion “free-spokenness” and its limits in museum spaces. To amplify its argument, the chapter uses some exhibitions that generated critical engagements from Iziko Museums of South Africa.

Nation Building through Andragogy and Lifelong Learning

2013 ◽  
pp. 480-506
Author(s):  
John A. Henschke
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Adult Learners ◽  
Lifelong Learning ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
International Experience ◽  
Learning Processes ◽  
Cutting Edge ◽  
Adult Educator ◽  
Unique Approach ◽  
Do So

This chapter addresses the author’s international experience of and involvement in the very essence of exemplifying my conception of the following in various countries around the globe – nation building through andragogy and lifelong learning: on the cutting edge educationally, economically, and governmentally. Although I have been privileged to engage adult learners in research and learning experiences in a dozen countries through andragogical and lifelong learning processes, the chapter presents only a sketch of the author’s personally unique approach of work and learning in what he calls nation building with people in five countries: Brazil, South Africa, Mali, Thailand, and Austria. The purpose is to clearly articulate some of the who, what, when, where, why, and how of the most successful facilitation activities of helping adults learn in such a way that any adult educator, who may be disposed and committed to do so, could learn these processes and replicate them with others.

Ainslie, Bill (1934–1989)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jessica Stephenson
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
South African ◽  
Eastern Cape ◽  
African Art ◽  
Art Programs ◽  
Non Profit ◽  
Black Artists ◽  
The Social ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S

Born in 1934 in Bedford, Eastern Cape, South Africa, William (Bill) Stewart Ainslie was a painter and educator, and the founder of a number of visual art programs and workshops that countered discriminatory racial and educational policies in apartheid-era South Africa. These programs encouraged students to work in abstract and other modernist idioms not practiced in the country at the time. Until his untimely death at age 55, Ainslie melded his career as an artist with his vision of art as a means to combat apartheid. In the 1960s and 1970s, Ainslie fostered the only multiracial art programs in the country, culminating in a formal art school, the non-profit Johannesburg Art Foundation (1982). He helped found the Federated Union of Black Artists (FUBA) and the art schools Fuba Academy (1978), Funda Center (1983) (funda means "learn" in Xhosa), and the Alexandra Arts Centre (1986). The generation of modern African artists and educators trained at these institutions shaped the course of art after apartheid. Ainslie also organized short-term workshops, most notably the Thupelo Art Workshop (thupelo means "to teach by example" in Southern Sotho) in 1983. Thupelo linked local and international artists and focused on abstraction, a radical departure from the social realist style expected of politically engaged South African art of the 1980s.

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