Perceived social context of AIDS in a Black township in Cape Town

2003 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-38 ◽  
Author(s):  
Seth C Kalichman ◽  
Leickness Simbayi
Keyword(s):  
Social Context ◽  
Cape Town ◽  
Black Township

Guns and Gang Spaces in South Africa

Politeia ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Godfrey Maringira
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Cape Town ◽  
Gang Members ◽  
Everyday Lives ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Black Township

The gun is not just an object and or a weapon; it has particular, deep relations with those who carry and possess it. The gun is embedded in the mentality of the man who uses it. Once gun life is inculcated in the mind, it is difficult to leave it behind. In post-apartheid South Africa, gangs and the use of guns have continued unabated. Despite this continued relationship between gangs and guns, studies have skirted around the ways in which guns are experienced and embodied in a context which is imbued with violence. Guns define the gang members who carry them in their everyday lives, as well as the spaces in which gangs operate. Importantly, understanding the spaces of gangs, such as the streets, is critical to understanding the ways in which they help gangs to forge a particular relationship with guns. This article is based on an ethnography of the black township Gugulethu in Cape Town, South Africa.

Between mediation and critique: Quaker nonviolence in apartheid Cape Town, 1976–1990

2017 ◽  
Vol 19 (4) ◽  
pp. 593-613
Author(s):  
MTC Shafer
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Social Context ◽  
Cape Town ◽  
Small Community ◽  
Civil Resistance ◽  
Political Position ◽  
Political Theories

In the final years of legal apartheid, the small community of Quakers in Cape Town, South Africa sought to apply their tradition of political and theological nonviolence to the systematic injustice of their social context. Drawing on archival evidence, this article examines the writings of Hendrik W van der Merwe, a prominent white Afrikaner sociologist, activist, and Quaker. I argue that van der Merwe developed an unusual account of Quaker pacifism that cast nonviolence in terms of engaged mediation rather than civil resistance or critique, and I demonstrate how this ethical and political position required a specific conceptualization of “violence” as an idea in order for its account of peacemaking to be intelligible as an interpretation of that Quaker tradition. The study of the development of van der Merwe's ideas has a twofold significance: it uncovers a form of anti-violence politics that has been widely neglected within political theories of nonviolence and pacifism, and it illuminates the concrete political stakes of ongoing debates about “narrow” and “wide” definitions of violence.

‘No effort, no entry’: Fashioning Ubuntu and becoming queer in Cape Town

Sexualities ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 21 (7) ◽  
pp. 1125-1145
Author(s):  
Joseph Bryce Mann
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Survey Data ◽  
Gay Men ◽  
Women Of Color ◽  
Multiple Scales ◽  
Cape Town ◽  
Gay Identity ◽  
Queer Of Color Critique ◽  
Queer Of Color ◽  
Black Township

This article presents data from five years of research on fashion, gay identity, and post-apartheid democracy in Cape Town, South Africa. Through interviews, observations, and survey data on the experiences of young “black” and “coloured” gay men, it shows how admission standards at nightlife venues in the city’s “Gay Village,” De Waterkant, police patrons’ clothing and institutionalize essential models of raced and classed gay belonging that complicate the multicultural “Ubuntu” promised by the state. The article troubles the multiculturalism coincident with tourism media, which frames De Waterkant as “Africa’s Gay Capital,” and instead argues that participants’ understanding and use of clothing in city and black township nightlife present aesthetic anomalies through which the becoming of Ubuntu can be productively rethought. Contributing to geographies of sexuality work, the article shows how classed-race exclusions in De Waterkant help fashion Ubuntu at the junction of multiple scales of spatiality, and by applying Women of Color Feminism and Queer of Color Critique to African Studies, how everyday spaces, and the clothed bodies therein, can reveal the mutually constitutive becoming of Ubuntu and queerness.

Time and Latitude in South Africa

1972 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 27-38
Author(s):  
J. Hers
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Cape Town ◽  
Astronomical Observations ◽  
Royal Observatory ◽  
The Republic ◽  
Astronomical Determination ◽  
Limited Accuracy ◽  
Better Than

In South Africa the modern outlook towards time may be said to have started in 1948. Both the two major observatories, The Royal Observatory in Cape Town and the Union Observatory (now known as the Republic Observatory) in Johannesburg had, of course, been involved in the astronomical determination of time almost from their inception, and the Johannesburg Observatory has been responsible for the official time of South Africa since 1908. However the pendulum clocks then in use could not be relied on to provide an accuracy better than about 1/10 second, which was of the same order as that of the astronomical observations. It is doubtful if much use was made of even this limited accuracy outside the two observatories, and although there may – occasionally have been a demand for more accurate time, it was certainly not voiced.

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