Genetic Diaspora: Producing Knowledge of Genes and Jews in Rural South Africa

After Lemba South Africans participated in genetic tests that aimed to demonstrate their ancient links to contemporary Jewish populations, American Jews began to visit the Lemba to connect with them on the basis of an assumed shared Judaism. Some Lemba people welcomed and endorsed these visits, but they also maintained their own ideas about the meaning of their “genetic Jewishness” and the terms of their new diasporic relationships, which often contradicted the understandings of visiting Jews. This article privileges the perspectives of Lemba South Africans, and the historical and ethnographic contexts through which Lemba genetic data emerged and circulated, to offer an alternative reading of the social and political significance of DNA. It poses the question: How do divergent genomic knowledges articulate with the politics of belonging and the pursuit of citizenship in South Africa and transnationally? I argue that DNA and diaspora converge to create new sites of political belonging, ones marked by precarious connections that balance on the production of knowledge and its refusal. I introduce the concept of genetic diaspora to theorize how these connections, marked by inequality, are tenuously forged through national, racial, and religious difference that is imagined to be the same. Genetic diaspora offers Lemba South Africans the possibility to produce and circulate their own new knowledge about Jewish history and genetic belonging. This article demonstrates that those implicated in genetic studies transform DNA into a resource that authorizes their own histories and politics of race and religion.

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‘Bending the rules’: South African Refugees in the UK, 1960–1980

In Defence of Learning ◽

10.5871/bacad/9780197264812.003.0017 ◽

2011 ◽

Author(s):

Shula Marks

Keyword(s):

South Africa ◽

South African ◽

Educational Environment ◽

Highly Qualified ◽

The South ◽

African Refugees ◽

South Africans ◽

The Social ◽

The 1960S ◽

The Uk

In this chapter, the author reflects on her long personal association with the Society for the Protection of Science and Learning (SPSL)/Council for Assisting Refugee Academics and many of its South African grantees. The academic refugees who came to the SPSL's notice in the 1960s, specially the South Africans, bent the ‘rules’ and signalled the new ways in which the SPSL was going to have to work in a very changed social and educational environment in Britain, and equally great changes in the nature of the academic refugees. Before the rise of Hitler, German scholars had advanced the frontiers of knowledge in the sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities. And in many of these fields the Jews of Central Europe had played a crucial role. Increasingly from the 1960s, however, many of the refugee academics to the UK were from the so-called ‘third world’, especially Latin America and countries just emerging from colonialism in Africa. Academic refugees from South Africa formed something of a bridge between the old and the new. While most of the South African grantees were white and from institutions modelled on British universities, they were on the whole younger and less highly qualified than the earlier generation of grantees. The very small number of Africans assisted at this time were in fact far more eminent; significantly, however, they were the very first Africans to be assisted by the Society.

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Determinants of skills demand in a state- intervening labour market

Higher Education Skills and Work-based Learning ◽

10.1108/heswbl-08-2017-0050 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 7 (4) ◽

pp. 408-422 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Khotso Tsotsotso ◽

Elizabeth Montshiwa ◽

Precious Tirivanhu ◽

Tebogo Fish ◽

Siyabonga Sibiya ◽

...

Keyword(s):

South Africa ◽

Private Sector ◽

Labour Market ◽

South African ◽

The State ◽

Transport Sector ◽

Content Type ◽

South Africans ◽

Wage Rates ◽

The Social

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to improve the understanding of the drivers and determinants of skills demand in South Africa, given the country’s history and its current design as a developmental state. Design/methodology/approach In this study, a mixed methods approach is used. The study draws information from in-depth interviews with transport sector stakeholders including employers, professional bodies, sector regulatory bodies and training providers. Complementary to the interviews, the study also analyses employer-reported workplace skills plans from 1,094 transport sector firms updated annually. A Heckman correction model is applied. Findings The study finds that changes in competition, technology, ageing employees, market conditions and government regulations are among the most frequently stated determinants reported through interviews. Using a Heckman regression model, the study identifies eight determining factors, which include location of firm, size of a firm, occupation type, racial and generational transformation, subsector of the firm, skills alignment to National Qualification Framework, reason for skills scarcity and level of skills scarcity reported. The South African transport sector skills demand is therefore mainly driven by the country’s history and consequently its current socio-economic policies as applied by the state itself. Research limitations/implications Wage rates are explored during stakeholder interviews and the study suggests that wage rates are an insignificant determinant of skills demand in the South African transport sector. However, due to poor reporting by firms, wage rates did not form a part of the quantitative analysis of the study. This serves as a limitation of the study. Practical implications Through this research, it is now clear that the state has more determining power (influence) in the transport sector than it was perceived. The state can use its power to be a more effective enabler towards increasing employer participation in skills development of the sector. Social implications With increased understanding and awareness of state’s influence in the sector, the country’s mission to redress the social ills of the former state on black South Africans stands a better chance of success. Private sector resources can be effectively mobilized to improve the social state of previously disadvantaged South Africans. However, given the economic dominance of the private sector and its former role in the apartheid era in South Africa; too much state influence in a supposedly free market can result in corporate resistance and consequently, market failure which can be seen as result of political interference. Originality/value South Africa has had an unprecedented social and economic trajectory to date. This said, its economic and social policies are unlike what we have observed before. Thus, identification of determinants and understanding of mechanisms of influence, on skills demand in the sector in which an African state plays such a close and active role, is in itself a unique contribution to knowledge and compels us to revisit our traditional assumptions about market behaviour. This study is one of the very few of its kind in the labour market research with a South African context.

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Household transitions in rural South Africa, 1996—2003

Scandinavian Journal of Public Health ◽

10.1080/14034950701355429 ◽

2007 ◽

Vol 35 (69_suppl) ◽

pp. 130-137 ◽

Cited By ~ 17

Author(s):

Martin Wittenberg ◽

Mark A. Collinson

Keyword(s):

South Africa ◽

Living Arrangements ◽

Surveillance System ◽

Transition Probabilities ◽

Rural South ◽

Single Person ◽

The Social ◽

System Data ◽

Rural South Africa ◽

Hiv Aids

Aims: To investigate changes in household structure in rural South Africa over the period 1996—2003, a period marked by politico-structural change and an escalating HIV/AIDS epidemic. In particular, the authors examine whether there is dissolution of extended family living arrangements. Methods: Data from the Agincourt demographic surveillance system, in rural north-eastern South Africa, and the rural sub-samples of selected nationally representative data sets were used to compare changes in the cross-sectional distribution of household types. Surveillance system data were further analysed to estimate the transition probabilities between household types. The latent pressures for change within the Agincourt area were analysed by projecting the household transition probabilities forward and comparing the projected steady-state distributions to the current distributions. Results: The national surveys show dramatic changes in the social structure in rural areas, particularly an increase in the importance of single person households. These trends are not confirmed in the surveillance system data. The national ``changes'' can possibly be ascribed to changes in sampling frames or household definitions. The transition probabilities within the Agincourt area show considerable changes between household types, despite a slower change in the aggregate distributions. The most important projected long-run changes are an increase in the proportion of three-generation linear households. ``Simpler'' household types such as single person households and nuclear households will become relatively less common. Conclusions: The structure of households is evolving under the pressure of social change and increased mortality due to HIV/AIDS. There is no evidence, however, that the social fabric is unravelling or that individuals are becoming increasingly isolated residentially.

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Religion as Race, Recognition as Democracy

The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science ◽

10.1177/0002716211407702 ◽

2011 ◽

Vol 637 (1) ◽

pp. 148-164 ◽

Cited By ~ 9

Author(s):

Noah Tamarkin

Keyword(s):

South Africa ◽

South African ◽

African State ◽

The South ◽

South Africans ◽

Black Jews ◽

Politics Of Race ◽

Media Discourses ◽

Forms Of Violence ◽

Past Injustices

Apartheid South Africa enacted physical, structural, and symbolic forms of violence on racially marked South Africans, and postapartheid South Africa has enacted ambitious—though also limited—laws, policies, and processes to address past injustices. In this article, the author traces the South African political histories of one self-defined group, the Lemba, to understand how the violence they collectively experienced when the apartheid state did not acknowledge their ethnic existence continues to shape their ideas of the promise of democracy to address all past injustices, including the injustice of nonrecognition. The Lemba are known internationally for their participation in DNA tests that indicated their Jewish ancestry. In media discourses, their racialization as black Jews has obscured their racialization as black South Africans: they are presented as seeking solely to become recognized as Jews. The author demonstrates that they have in fact sought recognition as a distinct African ethnic group from the South African state consistently since the 1950s. Lemba recognition efforts show that the violence of nonrecognition is a feature of South African multicultural democracy in addition to being part of the apartheid past. The author argues that the racialization of religion that positions the Lemba as genetic Jews simplifies and distorts their histories and politics of race in South Africa.

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The social dynamics of consent and refusal in HIV surveillance in rural South Africa

Social Science & Medicine ◽

10.1016/j.socscimed.2012.11.015 ◽

2013 ◽

Vol 77 ◽

pp. 118-125 ◽

Cited By ~ 18

Author(s):

Lindsey Reynolds ◽

Thomas Cousins ◽

Marie-Louise Newell ◽

John Imrie

Keyword(s):

South Africa ◽

Social Dynamics ◽

Rural South ◽

Hiv Surveillance ◽

The Social ◽

Rural South Africa

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Conclusion

Ambivalent Embrace ◽

10.5149/northcarolina/9781469635439.003.0008 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Rachel Kranson

Keyword(s):

Middle Class ◽

Jewish History ◽

Social Acceptance ◽

Economic Security ◽

American Jews ◽

American Jewish History ◽

The Social ◽

Jewish Resistance ◽

Important Means ◽

Political Investments

By and large, during the postwar years, Jewish resistance to middle-class norms took the form of verbal and written warnings that did not translate to concrete change. The gap between the widespread denigration of middle-class Jewish life and the minimal attempts to create alternatives to it represents more than just a quirk of postwar American Jewish history. Instead, these critiques of Jewish upward mobility comprised, in and of themselves, a crucial means by which American Jews adapted to prosperity and social acceptance, and an important means by which Jews, and especially their leaders, articulated their difference from other middle-class Americans. Significantly, this manner of asserting their Jewishness did not jeopardize the social and economic security that this new status afforded them. Even so, this continued tendency among middle-class American Jews to identify with histories of poverty and marginalization has continued to influence Jewish political investments and ideologies well into the contemporary moment.

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On extending the truncated parameters of transformation in higher education in South Africa into a language of democratic engagement and justice

Transformation in Higher Education ◽

10.4102/the.v1i1.7 ◽

2016 ◽

Vol 1 (1) ◽

Cited By ~ 4

Author(s):

Nuraan Davids

Keyword(s):

Higher Education ◽

South Africa ◽

Race And Racism ◽

South Africans ◽

The Past ◽

The Social ◽

Democratic Engagement ◽

The Arab Spring ◽

Real Challenge ◽

Do So

Universities, in their multiplex roles of social, political, epistemological and capital reform, are by their constitution expected to both symbolise and enact transformation. While institutions of higher education in South Africa have been terrains of protest and reform – whether during apartheid or post-apartheid – the intense multiplex roles which these institutions assume have metaphorically come home to roost in the past 2 years. Not unlike the social-media-infused rumblings, coined as the ‘Arab Spring’, the recent cascades of #mustfall campaigns have brought to the fore the serious dearth of transformation in higher education and have raised more critical questions about conceptions of transformation, and how these translate into, or reflect, the social and political reform that continues to dangle out of the reach of the majority of South Africans. What, then, does transformation mean and imply? How does an institution reach a transformed state? How does one know when such a state is reached? These are a few of the concerns this article seeks to address. But it hopes to do so by moving beyond the thus far truncated parameters of transformation – which have largely been seeped in the oppositional politics of historical advantage and disadvantage, and which, in turn, have ensured that conceptions of transformation have remained trapped in discourses of race and racism. Instead, this article argues that the real challenge facing higher education is not so much about transformation, as it is about enacting democracy through equipping students to live and think differently in a pluralist society.

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The Turn to Sabotage by The Congress Movement in South Africa*

Past & Present ◽

10.1093/pastj/gtz030 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 245 (1) ◽

pp. 221-255

Author(s):

Simon Stevens

Keyword(s):

South Africa ◽

Southern Africa ◽

The Other ◽

Guerrilla Warfare ◽

Extended Phase ◽

Political Consequences ◽

South Africans ◽

Nelson Mandela ◽

The Social ◽

Violent Action

Abstract Why did leaders of the Congress movement in South Africa abandon their exclusive reliance on non-violent means in the struggle against apartheid, form an armed unit (Umkhonto we Sizwe), and launch a campaign of spectacular sabotage bombings of symbols of apartheid in 1961? None of the earlier violent struggles from which Congress leaders drew inspiration, and none of the contemporaneous insurgencies against white minority rule elsewhere in southern Africa, involved a similar distinct, preliminary and extended phase of non-lethal symbolic sabotage. Following the 1960 Sharpeville massacre, Congress leaders feared the social and political consequences of increased popular enthusiasm for using violence. Nelson Mandela, Joe Slovo, and the other founders of Umkhonto we Sizwe did not launch their sabotage campaign because they believed it would prompt a change of heart among white South Africans, nor because they believed urban sabotage bombings were a necessary prelude to the launch of rural guerrilla warfare. Rather, the sabotage campaign was a spectacular placeholder, a stopgap intended to advertise the Congress movement's abandonment of exclusive non-violence and thus to discourage opponents of apartheid, both inside and outside South Africa, from supporting rival groups or initiating uncontrolled violent action themselves.

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Traditional, Democratic, Accountable? Navigating Citizen-Subjection in Rural South Africa

Africa Spectrum ◽

10.1177/000203971404900102 ◽

2014 ◽

Vol 49 (1) ◽

pp. 27-54 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Robin L. Turner

Keyword(s):

South Africa ◽

Community Development ◽

Hybrid Organizations ◽

Rural South ◽

Governance Framework ◽

South Africans ◽

Traditional Leaders ◽

Black South Africans ◽

Rural South Africa ◽

Traditional Governance

Nearly two decades after South Africa's democratization, questions of tradition and accountability continue to trouble the polity as more than 14 million black South Africans remain subject to state-recognized, so-called “traditional” leaders – kings, queens, chiefs and regents. This article deepens our understanding of contemporary governance by exploring the agency of these citizen-subjects through close examination of traditional leaders’ strategies and citizen-subjects’ mobilizations in four rural localities. These cases illustrate how citizen-subjects are working with, against and through traditional leaders and councils, hybrid organizations and independent groups to pursue community development and effective, accountable governance, and show how the present governance framework enables traditional leaders to block or undermine collective initiatives. In drawing attention to citizen-subjects’ agency and their difficulties in holding traditional leaders accountable, this analysis of contemporary traditional governance underscores the need for further democratizing reforms.

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