scholarly journals Editorial: Father Connections

2014 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-17
Author(s):  
Mzikazi Nduna ◽  
Grace Khunou
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Young People ◽  
Urban Areas ◽  
Black People ◽  
Father Absence ◽  
Migrant Labor ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Labor System ◽  
Post War ◽  
Biological Fathers

South Africa celebrated twenty years of democracy in 2014 following more than 100 years of colonization and institutionalized discrimination through Apartheid. A ‘broken’ family structure is one of the pathetic legacies left by political instability in post-colonial and post war countries globally. This phenomenon of broken families is evident in South Africa following the period of discrimination against Black people and the systematic migrant labor system that was sponsored by and for the Apartheid government. The migrant labor system separated fathers from their families and men left their families in the rural communities to work in the burgeoning mines and factories in urban areas. The current democratic State has a responsibility to strengthen broken families through policies and intervention informed by research evidence. There is an emerging body of research on Father Connections in post-war and post-colonial settings. This special issue brings together eight articles on Father Connections in South Africa. The articles present data from diverse but interesting research; for example the piece by Nduna M and Taulela M focuses on the experiences of ‘discovering’ biological fathers for youth who grew up with absent and unknown fathers. The participants that the article draws from are young women from a small town, in Mpumalanga. Through narrative analysis, the article explores how young people deal with finding out who their biological fathers are. In the article by Selebano N and Khunou G, the experiences of young fathers from Soweto are explored. It is illustrated in this article that, there are strong ties between young men’s experiences and the community values, history and culture where they experience fatherhood. The article by Langa M interestingly looks at narratives and meaning makings of young boys who grew up without fathers. Langa looks at how young boys can adopt alternative ideas of what it means to be a man in contexts that would otherwise be assumed to automatically lead to an embrace of hegemonic notions of masculinities. On a similar note the article by Nduna M focuses on experiences of young people who grow up without a father entering into endeavours to find and use their father’s surname. The article looks at how the signifying paternal ancestry is developed and maintained in contexts of father absence, through pursuing an absent father’s surname as the ‘right surname’. The article by Lesch E and Ismail A focuses on the significant question of the father daughter relationship and examines constraining constructions of fatherhood for daughters with a specific focus on the Cape Winelands community in South Africa. In Chauke P and Khunou G‘s contribution on the media’s influence on societal notions of fatherhood in relation to the maintenance system is examined. The article looks at how cases of maintenance are dealt with in print media. Franklin A & Makiwane M’s article provides a significant examination of male attitudes of family and children. This article begins to speak to the transformations of expectations of men in families. This transformation is addressed through a look at racially disaggregated quantitative data. Mthombeni A reviews a book, Good Morning Mr. Mandela by Zelda Le Grange where she examines some of the challenges of fatherhood in South Africa’s past and present.

Health Justice, Activism, and the Crisis of HIV/AIDS in South Africa

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mandisa Mbali
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Black People ◽  
Migrant Labor ◽  
Health Politics ◽  
Concept Of Health ◽  
Aids Crisis ◽  
History Of ◽  
Labor System ◽  
Health Justice

The political economy of the AIDS crisis in South Africa’s past can be understood in terms of the concept of health justice. In particular, health justice can help us interpret the history of AIDS in South Africa according to the intersecting manifestations of socioeconomic inequality in the country, including the migrant labor system, the apartheid-era health system, with its racial segregation and inferior service provision for black people, the feminization of poverty, and, legal and institutionalized homophobia and transphobia. We can also use the overarching concept of health justice to understand the histories of public health and progressive health advocacy in relation to the epidemic over three periods. First, early in the history of the disease in South Africa, health injustice was manifest in the socioeconomic phenomena behind its arrival in the country in 1982. Secondly, its subsequent entrenchment in the country in the pre-1994 period can be related to South Africa’s late-apartheid political economy. Thirdly, in the postapartheid period, the Nelson Mandela (1994–1999) and Thabo Mbeki (1999–2008) administrations exhibited deficits in political will in the development of effective AIDS policies, most notably evident in Mbeki’s AIDS denialism. In response to this, in 1998 the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) emerged from the AIDS advocacy of various strands of antiapartheid activism. The last section highlights how the TAC’s activism influenced global health politics from the late 1990s to the early 2000s. This history points to the TAC’s valuable legacy of activism in addressing AIDS and general health injustices. Interpreting the socioeconomic and political history of AIDS is of wider relevance to important historiographical bodies of literature in relation to South Africa, including those around medicine and health, gender and sexuality, black politics and social movements, and, South Africa’s role in world history. The topic is therefore especially deserving of sustained study.

The Reflection of Apartheidic Trauma / Traumatic Apartheid in None to Accompany Me by Nadine Gordimer

2017 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 328
Author(s):  
Şahin KIZILTAŞ
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Black People ◽  
Native People ◽  
Nadine Gordimer ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
White People ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Violence Victimization ◽  
White Settlers ◽  
Almost All

The world has gone through a trauma for centuries. Almost all nations have experienced all sorts of traumatic events and feelings in this period. Among those nations, the black seem to be the most unlucky and ill-fated suffered from traumatic disasters. However, among those black nations, the natives of South Africa have been the most piteous and wretched ones. Their misfortune began in 1652 with the arrival of white colonists in the country. Since then, the oppression and persecution of white European colonists and settlers on natives increasingly continued. Those native people were displaced from the lands inherited from their ancestors a few centuries ago. They were not allowed to have equal rights with white people and to share same environment in public premises. The natives have put up resistance against the racial and colonial practices of white settlers which excluded them from all living spaces; yet, they could not manage, even they came into power in 1994. Today their exclusion and violence victimization still go on and they are still subjected to inferior treatment by (post)colonial dominant white powers. As a white intellectual and writer who had European origins, Nadine Gordimer witnessed the repression and torturing of European settlers on native people in South Africa. In her novels, she has reflected the racial discrimination practiced by white people who have considered of themselves in a superior position compared to the black. This study aims to focus on how Gordimer has reflected the trauma which the black people of South Africa have experienced as a consequence of racist practices. This will contribute to clarify and get across the real and true-life traumatic narratives of native people in the colonized countries.

scholarly journals The Relationship between the Economic Strand of Contemporary Pentecostalism and Neo-Liberalism in Post-1994 South Africa

Religions ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 156
Author(s):  
Mookgo Solomon Kgatle
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
South African ◽  
Economic Reform ◽  
Black People ◽  
Racial Segregation ◽  
Economic Policies ◽  
National Party ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Poverty And Inequality ◽  
The Relationship

South Africa endured racial segregation under the national party for many years until 1994, with the attainment of democracy. In the process of negotiating a democracy like the CODESA negotiations, the ANC-led government found itself adopting economic policies that embraced neo-liberalism, which later became unfavorable to the black majority in South Africa. Consequently, although these economic policies of the post-colonial South Africa have made a few black people rich, many still live under the triple socio-economic challenges like unemployment, poverty, and inequality. In addition to the triple challenges, many people still lack basic needs like water, sanitation, food, clothing, and shelter. This paper is a discourse on the relationship between contemporary Pentecostalism and neo-liberalism in South Africa. Given their economic standing, the paper seeks to demonstrate that contemporary South African Pentecostalism has potential to become an alternative economic reform.

From Black Consciousness to Consciousness of Blackness

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xolela Mangcu
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Young People ◽  
South African ◽  
Black People ◽  
Global South ◽  
Black Consciousness ◽  
Constitutional Democracy ◽  
Black Intellectuals ◽  
Racial Identities ◽  
South African Constitution

This essay argues for a revision of Black Consciousness philosophy to make it more consistent with the requirements of South Africa’s constitutional democracy and relevant to the aspirations of young people in South Africa and the Global South. The philosophy was founded within an oppressive racist society, and while it defined blackness in terms of the legal oppression of Black people, those conditions no longer exist in South Africa. On the contrary, the South African constitution adopted both the inclusive view of Black people as Africans, Indians, and Coloureds, and expressly forbids racial or other forms of discrimination. The new political and constitutional setting thus demands a new articulation of blackness as a set of historical values that emanate from the experience of oppression. These values were expressed by Black intellectuals during self-reliant development and struggles against racism and can form the basis for reshaping racial identities in the Global South.

scholarly journals The Power Struggle between The Colonizer and The Colonized through Fanonism in July’s People by Nadine Gordimer

2015 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 169
Author(s):  
Şahin Kızıltaş ◽  
M. Başak UYSAL
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Black People ◽  
National Consciousness ◽  
Nadine Gordimer ◽  
White Family ◽  
Important Place ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Colonial Studies ◽  
Apartheid Regime ◽  
The Third World

Frantz Fanon is an outstanding figure whose theories are attached great importance in post-colonial studies by researchers and literary critics. His theories particularly on violence and national consciousness have been discussed for many years, even today. The colonizers have charged him with legitimating violence and for them he is responsible for the bloody picture in the colonial world. On the other hand, the colonized people have regarded him as the prophet of the Third World raising national consciousness of the oppressed and the excluded. As a white novelist in South Africa during and after apartheid regime, Nadine Gordimer takes an important place in post-colonial studies due to her attention on political and racial issues. Among her masterpieces, written in 1981 after Soweto Uprising and banned by the white regime, July’s People comes to the forefront. It is the story of a white family, The Smales, fleeing from Johannesburg to the small village of their black servant, July, during the civil war in South Africa. In this requisite travel, the roles of white family and their black servant substitute. The black people become the protectors of the white family who have been the master of the black in the city. However, the white family does not seem to be eager to leave their power, dominion and superiority even in rural area among black society. In this study, the dilemma of this role replacement through racial implications and references according to Frantz Fanon’s theory is aimed to be discussed.

India and Africa

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edward A. Alpers
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Migrant Labor ◽  
East African ◽  
African Students ◽  
Colonial Era ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Trade Relations ◽  
Domestic Livestock ◽  
The Creation

Connections between India and Africa have existed for thousands of years, with the intensity of linkages varying over time. The earliest known relations involve the anonymous exchange of food crops and domestic livestock, which date to the second millennium bce. Commercial contacts are recorded from the beginning of the Current Era, while from the rise of Islam and the creation of Islamic states in India from the 14th century on enslaved and war captive Africans begin to appear in India. Trade relations continued throughout the early modern period (c. 1500–1750) and intensified in the 19th century, focusing on Gujarat and Zanzibar. Indian textiles were the most important Indian commodity during these centuries, while ivory and other primary products dominated exchanges from Africa. The consolidation of a British Empire in the Indian Ocean intensified these relations, giving rise to the movement of migrant labor to both South Africa and the East African Protectorate (eventually Kenya Colony). During the high colonial period an Indian merchant class developed from Ethiopia to South Africa. Indian nationalism played out in various ways in South Africa, Tanganyika, and Kenya. In turn, African nationalism and independence had its own reciprocal, sometimes violent, impact on Indians residing in East Africa, while Afrikaner nationalism and the creation of formal apartheid differentially affected Indians and Africans in South Africa. In the post-colonial era, state relations between India and the independent states of Africa focused on questions of both national and human development. Finally, Indian residents continue to seek their place in independent Africa, while African students in India face prejudice there.

The Role of the ILO during and after Apartheid

2020 ◽  
pp. 0160449X2096709
Author(s):  
Edward Webster ◽  
Kally Forrest
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Industrial Relations ◽  
Forced Labor ◽  
Migrant Labor ◽  
African Countries ◽  
Indentured Labor ◽  
Clear Cut ◽  
Employee Relationships ◽  
The Government ◽  
Labor System

The International Labour Organization (ILO) at times played an important role in challenging race discrimination in the workplace, both as apartheid legislation intensified and in the new democratic South Africa. The controversy around forced labor, and the participation of independent African countries in the ILO, ultimately led to the withdrawal of South Africa. Subsequently, ILO Conventions and the 1964 Declaration influenced the government to establish the 1978 Wiehahn Commission to examine industrial relations. Its recommendations led to extensive unionization. The ILO was initially reluctant to recognize the independent unions but subsequently worker organizational power led to its support. Later, it contributed to creating a post-apartheid workplace order. However, despite its intention to build an inclusive industrial relations system, many workers remain excluded from the regulatory framework and the labor movement. The ILO’s rigid binary between direct coercion on the one hand and the voluntary recruitment of workers on the other does not capture the continuity from slavery, indentured labor, and the migrant labor system through to use of casual labor in contemporary South Africa. The ILO seems more comfortable with traditional unions and clear-cut employer-employee relationships.

scholarly journals Young Women’s Experiences Following Discovering a Biological Father in Mpumalanga Province, South Africa

2014 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 62-68 ◽  
Author(s):  
Motlalepule Nathane-Taulela ◽  
Mzikazi Nduna
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Young Women ◽  
Positive Relationship ◽  
Father Absence ◽  
Common Interest ◽  
Growing Up ◽  
Biological Father ◽  
Mpumalanga Province ◽  
Face To Face ◽  
Biological Fathers

In South Africa, it has been established that a high number and growing proportion of children are growing up without fathers in their lives. Research suggests that some children who grow up without their biological fathers seek to know them during adolescence. Some discover them whilst others never do. This paper aimed to investigate experiences of young women who discover their fathers during adolescence. We undertook a qualitative study in the Mpumalanga Province of South Africa to understand experiences of children who grow up with absent fathers. We conducted face-to-face, gender-matched interviews with young women aged 15 to 26. Five case studies are presented here. We used Topical structural analysis to examine the narratives. Findings reveal that mother or someone else from the maternal family was instrumental in the disclosure of the father’s identity. Four topics that cover the resultant experiences in relation to the father were; a weak or no relationship formed, a positive relationship was formed, the child was disinterested or the mother barred regular visits to the father. This study concludes that the maternal family context, reasons for father absence, how the disclosure happened influence experiences that follow discovering one’s father. Forming a positive relationship with the father depended on the child and father’s common interest.

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