“Born Free”? Youth Reflections on Post-1994 South Africa in Thought We Had Something Going

Imbizo ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Doreen Rumbidzai Tivenga
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Racial Identity ◽  
South African ◽  
Lived Experiences ◽  
Conspicuous Consumption ◽  
Social Experiences ◽  
Central Issue ◽  
Online Media ◽  
Media Space ◽  
Personal Reflections

The condition of being young and a “born free” South African is the central issue that young writers featured in the 2015 e-anthology Thought We Had Something Going, edited by Thando Sangqu, contend with as they make their own contributions to South African literary discourses and writings. The writers find their niche in an online media space to make personal reflections and representations on what it means to be youth in post-1994 South Africa. The focus of this article is specifically on the stories and thought pieces “Hashtag #WhiteGirlsInNyanga: An Anecdotal Reflection on Racial Affinity and Racial Identity in a Post-Apartheid South Africa,” “The Youth Is Dark and Full of Bullshit” and “Skhothane Behaviour.” I explore the paradoxes that characterise the writings and are associated with characters’ lived experiences; and drawing on the concepts of space and conspicuous consumption, I examine how remnants and legacies of apartheid continue to shape and define youth spatial, political and social experiences and lifestyles. The main contention in these writings and in this article is that the label “born free” is superficial and far from a true reflection of the conditions of being the youth in post-1994 South Africa.

scholarly journals Atypical Black Leader Emergence: South African Self-Perceptions

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Angel Myeza ◽  
Kurt April
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Racial Identity ◽  
South African ◽  
Lived Experiences ◽  
Black People ◽  
Shared Responsibility ◽  
Survivor Guilt ◽  
Black Professionals ◽  
Self Perceptions ◽  
Black Employees

The research aimed to gain understanding of the self-perceptions of black professionals in relation to business leadership, and how these self-perceptions influenced their behaviors, aspirations and self-perceived abilities in leadership positions. The study was specifically focused on black South African professionals. Black professionals were found to exhibit signs of deep-rooted pain, anger and general emotional fatigue stemming from workplace-, socio-economic- and political triggers that evoked generational trauma and overall negative black lived experiences. The negative lived experiences could have led to racial identity dissonance and, in extreme cases, complete racial identity disassociation. Moreover, black professionals were found to display symptoms of ‘survivor guilt,’ stemming from the shared history of oppression amongst black people in South Africa. The ‘survivor guilt’ contributed toward a profound sense of shared responsibility and purpose to change the circumstances, experiences and overall perceptions about the capabilities of black professionals. Results showed that upbringing, determination, resilience, black support networks, and black leadership representation within organizational structures were important ingredients that positively contributed to the leadership aspirations and success of black professionals. The research discovered that, in some cases, black professionals leveraged white relationships to propel their careers forward, however, this practice reportedly resulted in the black professionals experiencing feelings of self-doubt in their own abilities. Self-doubt, also found to be a result of historical oppression, could have and have been shown to eventually lead to self-deselection, negatively impacting the aspirations and career advancement prospects of black professionals in organizational leadership. Furthermore, the research found that black leaders believed that their blackness, specifically, its unique texture of experiences and history in South Africa, provided them with superior empathetic leadership abilities toward other black employees. Black leaders frequently highlighted the distinctive values of ubuntu as the cornerstone of their leadership approach. In addition, it was found that black professionals also considered their blackness, particularly the shade of their skin, to detract from their leadership opportunities, as it reduced the odds of being authorized as natural leaders, thus fortifying a skewed self-perception of their own leadership capabilities.

scholarly journals Reflections on a field across time and space: the emergent medical and health humanities in South Africa

2018 ◽  
Vol 44 (4) ◽  
pp. 263-269 ◽  
Author(s):  
Victoria Jane Hume ◽  
Megan Wainwright
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
South African ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
The South ◽  
Health Humanities ◽  
Cultural Experience ◽  
The North ◽  
Qualitative Evidence ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Personal Reflections

In this paper, we draw on our own cross-cultural experience of engaging with different incarnations of the medical and health humanities (MHH) in the UK and South Africa to reflect on what is distinct and the same about MHH in these locations. MHH spaces, whether departments, programmes or networks, have espoused a common critique of biomedical dualism and reductionism, a celebration of qualitative evidence and the value of visual and performative arts for their research, therapeutic and transformative social potential. However, there have also been differences, and importantly a different ‘identity’ among some leading South African scholars and practitioners, who have felt that if MHH were to speak from the South as opposed to the North, they would say something quite different. We seek to contextualise our personal reflections on the development of the field in South Africa over recent years within wider debates about MHH in the context of South African academia and practice, drawing in part on interviews conducted by one of the authors with South African researchers and practitioners and our own reflections as ‘Northerners’ in the ‘South’.

Violences in the South African Student Movement

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Buhle Khanyile
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
South African ◽  
Lived Experiences ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Student Movement ◽  
Student Experiences ◽  
African Student ◽  
Qualitative Exploration ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Current Experience

This essay draws attention to the complexities of understanding violence as a phenomenon and experience that almost always involves multiple parties, and contestations about violence itself and its use. It does so as both a theoretical and qualitative exploration of the concept and its lived experiences. The essay begins by puzzling over the intelligibility of violence and its definitional issues. Drawing on disciplinary approaches to violence (e.g., biological, sociological and political) as well as violence as spectacle, symbolic, embodied, systemic or implicit, it shows how violence has been and is mobilized to bring attention to sociopolitical and economic challenges currently and historically. Next it examines student experiences of violence during the recent student movement events in South Africa, and locates this event within the historical context of South Africa’s past and current experience of violence. Ultimately, the essay attempts to offer a way of thinking about violence less as an aberration to our peaceful existence but rather argues that violence might shape our very existence. It concludes by offering “existential violence” as a concept to help think through the relationship between existence and violence in a more nuanced way.

‘My race is Habesha’: Eritrean refugees re-defining race as pan-ethnic identity in post-apartheid South Africa

Ethnicities ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 146879682093136
Author(s):  
Amanuel Isak Tewolde
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Ethnic Identity ◽  
Racial Identity ◽  
South African ◽  
First Generation ◽  
Racial Classification ◽  
Self Identity ◽  
Racial Categories ◽  
The Face ◽  
Research Gap

Scholars studying race and racial classification in post-apartheid South Africa have paid little attention to how African refugees navigate the South African racial classification scheme and how they self-identity in the face of their everyday encounters with imposed racial classification in South Africa. This paper addresses this research gap by exploring how first-generation Eritrean refugees self-identify in the context of an imposed South African racial classification system. The result reported here forms part of a broader research study that explored how Eritrean refugees in South Africa self-defined in the face of racialization. The broader study identified various themes but this paper only reports on those who defined their race as Habesha in the face of their experiences with racial classification. I argue that by defining their race as Habesha, participants re-defined race as a pan-ethnic identity dissociating racial identity from physical appearance and skin colour. Some refugees who never self-identified in terms of phenotype-based racial categories are nuancing traditional definitions of racial identity in post-apartheid South Africa.

What Does It Mean to Be a Girl? Teachers’ Representations of Gender in Supplementary Reading Materials for South African Schools

2016 ◽  
Vol 48 (4) ◽  
pp. 394-422 ◽  
Author(s):  
Audrey M. Dentith ◽  
Misty Sailors ◽  
Mantsose Sethusha
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Education Reform ◽  
International Development ◽  
South African ◽  
Lived Experiences ◽  
Development Project ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
African Feminism ◽  
Critical Content ◽  
Reading Materials

Education reform, including methods to create greater gender equality, is an ongoing process in post-Apartheid South Africa. Using an African feminism theoretical framework and a critical content analysis approach, we examined the representation of female characters in a subset of supplementary reading titles created under an international development project. Through constant comparison of prepositions in the books, our findings indicated that the authors of these books (South African teachers) depicted females in complex, multifaceted, and, at times, contradictory roles. These panoramic roles created by the authors appeared to be situated in the very practical and lived experiences of children in South Africa. This study has implications for curriculum development in international settings.

scholarly journals Tapping into Leadership in Early Childhood Development Centers: Learning from the Lived Experiences of Principals in South African Townships

SAGE Open ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 215824402110613
Author(s):  
Sibonelo Blose ◽  
Evelyn Muteweri
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Early Childhood ◽  
South African ◽  
Rural Areas ◽  
Lived Experiences ◽  
Early Childhood Development ◽  
Childhood Development ◽  
Educational Institutions ◽  
Community Based

Leadership is one of the critical drivers of educational institutions and has been overwhelmingly researched across countries. However, there is little with regards to early childhood development centers in the scholarship of educational leadership. South Africa has an assortment of early childhood development centers (ECD) ranging from fully registered and well-resourced centers in affluent areas to less regulated and poorly resourced community-based centers in townships, informal settlements and rural areas. In these centers, there are individuals performing a pivotal role of leading and managing the institutions. In this paper, we hone in on these individuals, specifically in a township setting, whom we refer to as ECD center principals. By means of narrative inquiry methodology, we solicited and interpreted the lived experiences of selected ECD center principals to garner an understanding of what it means to lead an ECD center in a township setting. The paper makes two broad contributions, namely, ECD center principals’ self-cognitions and their experiences of leading centers in townships.

I’m Not a Fruit which Fell from a Tree: Migrants’ Discourses of Resistance in the Context of Dehumanization and Economic Exploitation in Southern Africa

Transilvania ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 42-49
Author(s):  
Buhle Mpofu
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
South African ◽  
Working Conditions ◽  
Lived Experiences ◽  
Critical Discussion ◽  
Public Officials ◽  
The Past ◽  
Economic Exploitation ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Forms Of Violence

This discussion highlights how some African foreign migrants living in South Africa articulate resistance to exploitative and corrupt tendencies in what emerges as life affirming and death denying developmental discourses. This article triangulated data collected from a Module PRT112 – an Introduction to Missiology – with data which emerged from a study designed to interrogate the lived experiences of foreign migrants in Johannesburg South Africa. Framed within the postcolonial paradigm, the contribution is premised on the idea that the discourses of African migrants are a viable hermeneutical optic for a theological and developmental agenda which legitimises marginal voices of the poor. At the heart of this critical discussion is a statement; ‘I am not a fruit which fell from a tree,’ which emerged as a response to ward off and rebuke corrupt public officials who often demand bribes from foreign migrants as a way to keep them intimidated and confined to liminal working conditions in the informal South African economic sector. By interrogating the radical response ‘I am not a fruit’ alongside data which reflect hostility towards migrants, the study highlights religious resistance to economic exploitation and life denying practices. These articulations are located within the postcolonial resistance discourses which counter neoliberal and dehumanizing tendencies and the study concludes by drawing on Bosnian and Rwandan examples to caution against dehumanization of migrants as it sets parameters for catastrophic genocide and other forms of violence perpetrated in the past.

Embracing colouredness in Cape Town: Racial formation of first-generation Eritrean refugees and asylum seekers in South Africa

2018 ◽  
Vol 67 (3) ◽  
pp. 419-437
Author(s):  
Amanuel Isak Tewolde
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Racial Identity ◽  
South African ◽  
Asylum Seekers ◽  
First Generation ◽  
Cape Town ◽  
Foreign Born ◽  
Snowball Sampling ◽  
Coloured Identity ◽  
Refugees And Asylum Seekers

Sociologists of ‘race’ studying ‘coloured’ racial identity in South Africa have exclusively focused on its socio-historical invention throughout the colonial and apartheid eras and its continuity in post-apartheid South Africa as it relates to South African nationals. What has been missing in the literature, however, is how coloured identity is being navigated by foreign-born non-South African nationals in post-apartheid South Africa, such as refugees, asylum seekers and immigrants more generally. Furthermore, migration scholarship in South Africa has paid little attention to this phenomenon to date. This article addresses this lacuna by interviewing first-generation Eritrean refugees and asylum seekers residing in Cape Town to explore the extent of their attachment to coloured racial identity in their everyday lived experiences. An interpretative phenomenological analysis was employed to examine the lived racial self-identification patterns of the participants. Convenience and snowball sampling were utilised to select study participants. This article forms part of the results from a larger project. Sixteen participants were recruited and three major themes identified: (1) awareness of one’s phenotype; (2) adopting spouse and offspring’s racial identity; and (3) embracing colouredness as a positive racial identity. The article argues that, in everyday life, coloured racial identity, which was historically created to categorise South African citizens, is being adopted by refugee and asylum-seeker communities for whom coloured identity was never socio-politically constructed. It is also argued that extra-somatic social and perceptual factors informed the racial self-identification choices of the participants rather than their racial phenotype, which has traditionally informed the racial self-identification practices of South African citizens. Furthermore, the participants redefined coloured as a positive racial identity, effectively displacing negative discourses associated with coloured racial identity.

scholarly journals Racial Identity in Post-Apartheid South Africa: J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 39-51
Author(s):  
Roshni Joyso ◽  
Dr. Cynthia Catherine Michael
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Racial Identity ◽  
South African ◽  
Entire Body ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Black Skin ◽  
Binary Oppositions ◽  
New Ideas ◽  
Apartheid Regime ◽  
Representative Work

J.M. Coetzee is a South African novelist, critic and an active translator of Dutch and Afrikaans literature. His novels are conspicuous for their well- crafted composition, pregnant dialogues and analytical brilliance. Coetzee’s earlier novels question the apartheid regime, while his later works offer an apocalyptic vision of post- apartheid South Africa. His major works include Disgrace, Waiting for the Barbarians, Life and Times of Michael K, Boyhood, Age of Iron and The Childhood of Jesus. In 1999, Coetzee has been the recipient of numerous awards throughout his career, although he has a reputation for avoiding award ceremonies. Coetzee became the first author to be twice awarded the Booker Prize, winning it as second time for Disgrace which portrays the post-apartheid society. Coetzee went on to win the Nobel Prize for literature in 2003 for his entire body of works. During the years of apartheid, he was at the forefront of the anti-apartheid movement among writers. Scholar Isadore Dalia labelled J.M Coetzee as one of the most distinguished white writers with an anti-apartheid sentiment. Coetzee’s earlier novels question the apartheid regime, while his later works offer an apocalyptic vision of post- apartheid South Africa. Disgrace can be analyzed as a representative work of the new south Africa where the social problems relating binary oppositions such as black- white, white- immigrant, powerless- powerful, are stressed. This paper attempts to show through the protagonist, David Lurie, that the way to adapt to the changes in the country is to make a fresh start, a way to adapt to the new times, where no ideas of the old are retained. Frantz Fanon’s concepts within the field of post colonialism which he articulated in Black Skin, White Masks (1967) and The Wretched of the Earth (1963) have much relevance in Disgrace. The objective of this paper is to stretch his new ideas in a new direction by applying his theories on nation and culture onto a white subject Lurie, a white native South African. In the light of Fanon’s text, The Wretched of the Earth it can be argued that following the revolutionary political changes in South Africa in 1994, the former colonizer can be seen in the same way as the colonized usually is: a powerless native, regardless of racial identity.

Reframing Xenophobia in South Africa as Colour-Blind: The Limits of the Afro Phobia Thesis

2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 433-444
Author(s):  
Amanuel Isak Tewolde
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
South African ◽  
Analytical Framework ◽  
Conflict Theory ◽  
Black African ◽  
South Africans ◽  
Theoretical Perspectives ◽  
Online Newspaper ◽  
Close Proximity ◽  
Realistic Conflict Theory

Many scholars and South African politicians characterize the widespread anti-foreigner sentiment and violence in South Africa as dislike against migrants and refugees of African origin which they named ‘Afro-phobia’. Drawing on online newspaper reports and academic sources, this paper rejects the Afro-phobia thesis and argues that other non-African migrants such as Asians (Pakistanis, Indians, Bangladeshis and Chinese) are also on the receiving end of xenophobia in post-apartheid South Africa. I contend that any ‘outsider’ (White, Asian or Black African) who lives and trades in South African townships and informal settlements is scapegoated and attacked. I term this phenomenon ‘colour-blind xenophobia’. By proposing this analytical framework and integrating two theoretical perspectives — proximity-based ‘Realistic Conflict Theory (RCT)’ and Neocosmos’ exclusivist citizenship model — I contend that xenophobia in South Africa targets those who are in close proximity to disadvantaged Black South Africans and who are deemed outsiders (e.g., Asian, African even White residents and traders) and reject arguments that describe xenophobia in South Africa as targeting Black African refugees and migrants.

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