Free but fragile: Human relations amidst poverty and HIV in democratic South Africa

2015 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 85-94
Author(s):  
Christina Landman

Dullstroom-Emnotweni is the highest town in South Africa. Cold and misty, it is situated in the eastern Highveld, halfway between the capital Pretoria/Tswane and the Mozambique border. Alongside the main road of the white town, 27 restaurants provide entertainment to tourists on their way to Mozambique or the Kruger National Park. The inhabitants of the black township, Sakhelwe, are remnants of the Southern Ndebele who have lost their land a century ago in wars against the whites. They are mainly dependent on employment as cleaners and waitresses in the still predominantly white town. Three white people from the white town and three black people from the township have been interviewed on their views whether democracy has brought changes to this society during the past 20 years. Answers cover a wide range of views. Gratitude is expressed that women are now safer and HIV treatment available. However, unemployment and poverty persist in a community that nevertheless shows resilience and feeds on hope. While the first part of this article relates the interviews, the final part identifies from them the discourses that keep the black and white communities from forming a group identity that is based on equality and human dignity as the values of democracy.

Literator ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jacomien Van Niekerk

This article analyses the role of ‘race’ in Antjie Krog’s non-fiction trilogy Country of My Skull (1998), A Change of Tongue (2003) and Begging to Be Black (2009). It explores her explicit use of terms such as ‘heart of whiteness’ and ‘heart of blackness’. Claims that Krog essentialises Africa and ‘black’ people are investigated. The article also addresses accusations of racism in Krog’s work. A partial answer to the persistent question of why Krog is so determinedly focused on ‘race’ is sought in the concept of complicity. There is definite specificity in the way Krog writes about ‘white’ perpetrators and ‘black’ victims in South Africa, but her trilogy should be read within the broader context of international restitution discourses, allowing for a somewhat different perspective on her contribution to the discussion of the issue of whether ‘white’ people belong in (South) Africa.


2017 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 328
Author(s):  
Şahin KIZILTAŞ

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.


2020 ◽  
Vol 38 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ricardo Bruno Santos Ferreira ◽  
Climene Laura De Camargo ◽  
Maria Inês Da Silva Barbosa ◽  
Maria Lúcia Silva Servo ◽  
Marcia Maria Carneiro Oliveira ◽  
...  

Objective. To understand the implications of institutionalracism in the therapeutic itinerary of patients withchronic renal failure (CRF) in the search for diagnosis andtreatment of the disease. Methods. Descriptive, qualitativestudy developed with 23 people with CRF in a regionalreference hospital for hemodialysis treatment in NortheastBrazil. Two techniques of data collection were used: semistructured interview and consultation to the NEFRODATAelectronic medical record. For systematization andanalysis, the technique of content analysis was used. Results. Black and white people with CRF showedsignificant divergences and differences in their therapeuticitineraries: while white people had access to diagnosisduring outpatient care in other medical specialties, blackpeople were only diagnosed during hospitalization. Inaddition, white people had more access to private health plans when compared to black people, which doubles the possibility of access tohealth services. Moreover, even when the characteristics in the itinerary of blackand white people were convergent, access to diagnosis and treatment proved tobe more difficult for black people. Conclusion. The study showed the presence ofinstitutional racism in the therapeutic itinerary of people with kidney disease inwhich black people have greater difficulty in accessing health services. In this sense,there is a need to create strategies to face institutional racism and to consolidate theNational Policy for Comprehensive Health Care of the Black Population.


2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (5) ◽  
pp. 66-71
Author(s):  
Nikita Gupta

This paper deals with the concept of racism, which is considered as a dark topic in the history of the world .Throughout history, racist ideology widespread throughout the world especially between black people and white people. In addition, many European countries started to expand their empire and to get more territories in other countries. Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness which is his experience in the Congo River during the 19th century dealt with the concept of racism, which was clear in this novel because of the conflicts that were between black and white people and it explained the real aims of colonialism in Africa, which were for wealth and power.


2021 ◽  
pp. 167-200
Author(s):  
Cynthia J. Davis

With other turn-of-the-century Black intellectuals, Charles Chesnutt remained skeptical about the putative value of both human suffering and emotionally restrained and distanced responses to it. As a self-identified realist writing about race relations both during slavery and after Reconstruction, Chesnutt could not have ignored suffering altogether, yet representing it risked inadvertently perpetuating pernicious contemporary myths about Black inurement to pain. The challenge for Chesnutt across a range of fictional genres was to get a predominantly white audience to finally see Black suffering that they otherwise routinely ignore, discount, or deny. Upending racialized sensitivity hierarchies, Chesnutt flips the racist script that casts white people as sensitive to pain and Black people as insensitive to it. He also associates civilized superiority not simply with a remarkable sensitivity to suffering but with an even rarer inclination to respond altruistically even on behalf of those from whom the respondent feels demonstrably distanced.


Author(s):  
James Wierzbicki

This introductory chapter explains how music is considered less as a phenomenon unto itself than as a manifestation of the conditions under which it emerged or receded. The music under consideration represents a wide range of styles that attracted the attention of a wide range of audiences, which sounds have little in common. What these types of music do have in common is the fact that all of them sprang up in a particular cultural environment: the postwar Fifties. A great many forces—technology; the economy; domestic and international politics; relationships between black and white people, between men and women, between young and old—animated American society during the Fifties. The lenses through which the whole of American music in the Fifties is examined here represent forces whose interconnected dynamics between 1945 and 1963 are linked to the fact that, for America, the war ended the way it did.


2020 ◽  
pp. 40-50
Author(s):  
Michael D. Yates

As the long history, right to the present day, of police and vigilante violence against black people has shown with great clarity, the racial chasm between black and white people in the United States lives on. A few black men and women have climbed into the 1 percent, and a sizable African-American middle class now exists. But by every measure of social well-being, black Americans fare much worse than their white counterparts. Just as for the economic, political, and social distance between capitalists and workers, so too is there a differential between black and white people, for these same interconnected components of daily life continue because of the way our system is structured.


Author(s):  
W. Zhang ◽  
J.Z. Groenewald ◽  
L. Lombard ◽  
R.K. Schumacher ◽  
A.J.L. Phillips ◽  
...  

The Botryosphaeriales (Dothideomycetes) includes numerous endophytic, saprobic, and plant pathogenic species associated with a wide range of symptoms, most commonly on woody plants. In a recent phylogenetic treatment of 499 isolates in the culture collection (CBS) of the Westerdijk Institute, we evaluated the families and genera accommodated in this order of important fungi. The present study presents multigene phylogenetic analyses for an additional 230 isolates, using ITS, tef1, tub2, LSU and rpb2 loci, in combination with morphological data. Based on these data, 58 species are reduced to synonymy, and eight novel species are described. They include Diplodia afrocarpi (Afrocarpus, South Africa), Dothiorella diospyricola (Diospyros, South Africa), Lasiodiplodia acaciae (Acacia, Indonesia), Neofusicoccum podocarpi (Podocarpus, South Africa), N. rapaneae (Rapanea, South Africa), Phaeobotryon ulmi (Ulmus, Germany), Saccharata grevilleae (Grevillea, Australia) and S. hakeiphila (Hakea, Australia). The results have clarified the identity of numerous isolates that lacked Latin binomials or had been deposited under incorrect names in the CBS collection in the past. They also provide a solid foundation for more in-depth future studies on taxa in the order. Sequences of the tef1, tub2 and rpb2 genes proved to be the most reliable markers. At the species level, results showed that the most informative genes were inconsistent, but that a combination of four candidate barcodes (ITS, tef1, tub2 and rpb2) provided reliable resolution. Furthermore, given the large number of additional isolates included in this study, and newly generated multigene DNA datasets, several species could also be reduced to synonymy. The study illustrates the value of reassessing the identity of older collections in culture collections utilising modern taxonomic frameworks and methods.


1978 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 291-294
Author(s):  
L. Davis

South Africa has a long tradition of law journal publishing. The Cape Law Journal was founded in 1884. Its name was changed to the South African Law Journal in 1901 and it has continued to appear ever since. Certain other journals commenced in the past, then either disappeared or now appear in another guise. For instance the South African Law Times was published for a few years in the 1930's only. Similarly Butterworths South African Law Review was the precursor to the current Acta Juridica. However, today a wide range of titles are published. Juta and Company Limited (P.O. Box 123, Kenwyn, Cape Province 7790) publishes the South African Law Journal and several other law and law-related periodicals and law reports. Another regular publisher of legal journals is Butterworths and Co. (S.A.) (Pty) Limited, (P.O. Box 792, Durban 4000).


1988 ◽  
Vol 26 (4) ◽  
pp. 567-590 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pierre Hugo

Many students of human relations in South Africa would probably agree that an understanding of the policy of racial separation and the general determination of whites not to yield power to the black majority necessitates an awareness of their fears. The importance of this factor can hardly be overlooked, especially if it is defined broadly along the lines suggested by Philip Mason in his succinct study of racial tensions around the globe: There are fears of all kinds… There is the vague and simple fear of something strange and unknown, there is the very intelligible fear of unemployment, and the fear of being outvoted by people whose way of life is quite different. There are fears for the future and memories of fear in the past, fears given an extra edge by class conflict, by a sense of guilt, by sex and conscience… Fear may also act as a catalytic agent, changing the nature of factors previously not acutely malignant, such as the association in metaphor of the ideas of white and black with good and evil… Where the dominant are in the minority they are surely more frightened.1


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