“A Fatal Compromise”: South African Writers and “the Literature Police” in South Africa (1940–1960)

2021 ◽  
pp. 137
Author(s):  
Maria Kurbak
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
South African ◽  
Prime Minister ◽  
African National Congress ◽  
Political Struggle ◽  
The Government ◽  
African Writers ◽  
Apartheid Regime ◽  
And Control ◽  
The Military

After the victory of the National Party (NP) in the 1948 elections and the establishment of the apartheid regime in South Africa, politics and culture were subordinated to one main goal – the preservation and protection of Afrikaners as an ethnic minority. Since 1954, the government headed by Prime Minister D. F. Malan had begun implementing measures restricting freedom of speech and creating “literary police”. In 1956 the Commission of Inquiry into “Undesirable Publications” headed by Geoffrey Cronje was created. In his works, Cronje justified the concept of the Afrikaners’ existence as a separate nation, with its own language, culture, and mores. Cronje considered the protection of “blood purity” and prohibition of mixing, both physically and culturally, with “non-whites” as the highest value for Afrikaners. The proposals of the “Cronje Commission” were met with hostility not only by political opponents but also by Afrikaner intellectuals One of Cronje's most ardent opponents was the famous poet N.P. Van Wyk Louw. Yet, the creation of a full-fledged censorship system began with the coming into power of the government headed by Prime Minister H. Verwoerd, who took a course to tighten racial laws and control over publications. 1960 became the turning point in the relationship between the government and the South African intelligentsia. After the shooting of the peaceful demonstrations in Sharpeville and Langa, the NP declared a state of emergency, banned the activity of the Communist Party and the African National Congress (ANC), and apartheid opponents turned to a military struggle. The political struggle against censorship became more difficult during the armed stand-off between the apartheid loyalists and the NP deposition supporters. The transition to the military struggle was an important force for the radicalization of the intellectuals and the appearance of the “literary protest” and “black voices”. The time for negotiations and searching for compromises was over.

South African Foreign Policy

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fritz Nganje ◽  
Odilile Ayodele
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
South African ◽  
Foreign Relations ◽  
Lessons Learned ◽  
African National Congress ◽  
Liberal Democratic ◽  
The World ◽  
Role Conception ◽  
The Government

In its foreign policy posture and ambitions, post-apartheid South Africa is like no other country on the continent, having earned the reputation of punching above its weight. Upon rejoining the international community in the mid-1990s based on a new democratic and African identity, it laid out and invested considerable material and intellectual resources in pursuing a vision of the world that was consistent with the ideals and aspirations of the indigenous anti-apartheid movement. This translated into a commitment to foreground the ideals of human rights, democratic governance, and socioeconomic justice in its foreign relations, which had been reoriented away from their Western focus during the apartheid period, to give expression to post-apartheid South Africa’s new role conception as a champion of the marginalized interests for Africa and rest of the Global South. Since the start of the 21st century, this new foreign policy orientation and its underlying principles have passed through various gradations, reflecting not only the personal idiosyncrasies of successive presidents but also changes in the domestic environment as well as lessons learned by the new crop of leaders in Pretoria, as they sought to navigate a complex and fluid continental and global environment. From a rather naive attempt to domesticate international politics by projecting its constitutional values onto the world stage during the presidency of Nelson Mandela, South Africa would be socialized into, and embrace gradually, the logic of realpolitik, even as it continued to espouse an ethical foreign policy, much to the chagrin of the detractors of the government of the African National Congress within and outside the country. With the fading away of the global liberal democratic consensus into which post-apartheid South Africa was born, coupled with a crumbling of the material and moral base that had at some point inspired a sense of South African exceptionalism, Pretoria’s irreversible march into an unashamedly pragmatic and interest-driven foreign policy posture is near complete.

American Opposition to South African Apartheid

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
David L. Hostetter
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
South Africa ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
African American ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
South African ◽  
Economic Sanctions ◽  
The United States ◽  
African National Congress ◽  
Apartheid Regime

American activists who challenged South African apartheid during the Cold War era extended their opposition to racial discrimination in the United States into world politics. US antiapartheid organizations worked in solidarity with forces struggling against the racist regime in South Africa and played a significant role in the global antiapartheid movement. More than four decades of organizing preceded the legislative showdown of 1986, when a bipartisan coalition in Congress overrode President Ronald Reagan’s veto, to enact economic sanctions against the apartheid regime in South Africa. Adoption of sanctions by the United States, along with transnational solidarity with the resistance to apartheid by South Africans, helped prompt the apartheid regime to relinquish power and allow the democratic elections that brought Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress to power in 1994. Drawing on the tactics, strategies and moral authority of the civil rights movement, antiapartheid campaigners mobilized public opinion while increasing African American influence in the formulation of US foreign policy. Long-lasting organizations such as the American Committee on Africa and TransAfrica called for boycotts and divestment while lobbying for economic sanctions. Utilizing tactics such as rallies, demonstrations, and nonviolent civil disobedience actions, antiapartheid activists made their voices heard on college campuses, corporate boardrooms, municipal and state governments, as well as the halls of Congress. Cultural expressions of criticism and resistance served to reinforce public sentiment against apartheid. Novels, plays, movies, and music provided a way for Americans to connect to the struggles of those suffering under apartheid. By extending the moral logic of the movement for African American civil rights, American anti-apartheid activists created a multicultural coalition that brought about institutional and governmental divestment from apartheid, prompted Congress to impose economic sanctions on South Africa, and increased the influence of African Americans regarding issues of race and American foreign policy.

scholarly journals Tribalism: Thorny issue towards reconciliation in South Africa – A practical theological appraisal

2018 ◽  
Vol 74 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Elijah M. Baloyi
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Ethnic Groups ◽  
South African ◽  
African Government ◽  
South Africans ◽  
Black South Africans ◽  
Theological Perspective ◽  
The Government ◽  
Apartheid Regime ◽  
Practical Theological

The apartheid regime used various strategies to ensure that South Africans formed a divided nation. It was through the differences between ethnic groups and tribes, among other things, that the government of the time managed to manipulate and entrench hatred and a lack of trust among most black South Africans. Tribalism, which existed even before apartheid, became instrumental in inflicting those divisions as perpetuated by the formation of homelands. The various ethnic groups had been turned against one other, and it had become a norm. Nepotism, which is part and parcel of the South African government, is just an extension of tribalism. It is the objective of this article to uncover how tribalism is still rearing its ugly head. From a practical theological perspective, it is important to deal with tribalism as a tool that plays a part in delaying tribal reconciliation, which was orchestrated by apartheid policies in South Africa.

Ruth First

1982 ◽  
Vol 11 (6) ◽  
pp. 29-30
Author(s):  
Ronald Segal
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
South African ◽  
Political Development ◽  
African National Congress ◽  
Police Harassment ◽  
South West Africa ◽  
Ruth First ◽  
The Government ◽  
International Research Team ◽  
The Guardian

Ruth First, Director of the Centre for African Studies in Maputo, Mozambique, was killed by a letter bomb in her office on 17 August 1982: the final act of censorship on a lifetime of active opposition to apartheid and other forms of social injustice in South Africa. Born in Johannesburg in 1925, she was a student of social science at Witwatersrand University when she joined the Communist Party and founded a multi-racial students' group. During the great African mine strike of 1946 she was among a handful of whites who assisted the strikers. In 1947, despite risk of police harassment, she helped to expose farm labour conditions on the Bethal potato farms, writing investigative articles which led directly to a month-long boycott of potatoes organised by the Congress Alliance, headed by the African National Congress. Soon afterwards she was appointed Johannesburg editor of three radical South African investigative papers: the Guardian, the Clarion, and New Age, each in turn banned by the government. With her husband Joe Slovo, an Advocate, and with Fatima Meer (see outside back cover), she was one of the 156 people accused but acquitted in the Treason Trial of 1956. In the early 1960s she visited South West Africa (Namibia) and wrote a searing expose of apartheid in that territory which was, and remains, under United Nations mandate but is run by South Africa. The book resulted in tighter government restrictions on her activities, prohibiting any publication of her work and forbidding her from even entering newspaper offices. In 1963 she was detained and held for 117 days, much of it in solitary confinement. Shortly after her release from prison, when it was obvious that she would be rearrested, she left South Africa. During her years of exile in England, she wrote The Barrel of a Gun, a study of African coups, and a portrait of Libya entitled The Elusive Revolution. She lectured in sociology for several years at Durham University. In 1978 she returned to Africa, to take up the post in Mozambique which she held at the time of her death. As head of an international research team, she was helping to initiate plans for the new Mozambique: economic and socio-political development projects which promised to make Mozambique economically independent of South Africa. It seems she became a target in South Africa's apparent programme of destabilising its black neighbours. Ruth First's book, 117 days, an account of her confinement and interrogation under the South African 90-day detention law, was first published in 1965. It was republished by Penguin Books in November 1982, with a new preface by Ronald Segal, which we reprint below:

scholarly journals Journalism during South Africa's apartheid regime

2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 7-11
Author(s):  
Vic Alhadeff
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
English Language ◽  
African National Congress ◽  
English Speakers ◽  
Daily Newspaper ◽  
Defence Budget ◽  
The Law ◽  
The Government ◽  
Set Up ◽  
Apartheid Regime

Vic Alhadeff was chief sub-editor of The Cape Times, Cape Town’s daily newspaper, during the apartheid era. It was a staunchly anti-apartheid newspaper, and the government had enacted a draconian system of laws to govern and restrict what media could say. The effect was that anti-apartheid activists such as Mandela were not 'merely’ imprisoned, they were also banned, as was the African National Congress. Under the law, it was illegal to quote a banned person or organisation. This meant if there was to be an anti-apartheid rally in the city – and we reported it – it could be construed as promoting the aims of a banned organisation. As chief sub-editor, I had to navigate this minefield. In addition, most English-language newspapers were anti-apartheid and had a resident police spy on staff (one of our senior journalists); on a number of occasions I would receive a call from the Magistrate’s Office after the newspaper had gone to print at midnight, putting an injunction on a story. We would have to call back the trucks and dump the 100,000 copies of the newspaper and reprint. The challenge was to inform readers as what was happening and to speak out against apartheid – without breaking the law. South Africa had its own Watergate equivalent. The apartheid government understood that English speakers generally were anti-apartheid, so it siphoned 64 million rands from the Defence budget and set up the Information Department. The aim was to purchase media outlets overseas which would be pro-apartheid, and it set up an English-language newspaper in South Africa, to be pro-apartheid. It was called The Citizen – and I was offered a job as deputy editor at double my salary, plus an Audi. (I declined the offer, for the record). Two journalists uncovered the scandal, and brought down the Prime Minister.

scholarly journals Michiel Heyns’s Lost Ground: The white man’s sense of identity and place in a decolonised Africa and a democratic South Africa

Literator ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Renate Lenz
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
South African ◽  
African National Congress ◽  
Space And Place ◽  
The Novel ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
Perception Of Self ◽  
White Settlers ◽  
Apartheid Regime ◽  
Narrative Framework

In Lost Ground, Michiel Heyns portrays the former white settlers’ position and experience in South Africa, Africa and Europe after the overturn of South Africa’s apartheid regime. An analysis of the novel illustrates that the legacy of the colonisation of Africa and apartheid in South Africa still shapes the settler descendants’ perception of self and the other and the formers’ place in South Africa and Africa. After the electoral victory of the African National Congress, contemporary white South African men, as exemplified by the English-speaking male protagonist who features in the novel, tend to dissociate themselves from the country and the African continent as home. Although the original colonisers’ experience of alienation and ambivalence about apartheid has been widely depicted, the significance of this experience in relation to white South African male identity has not been fully explored in a study of Heyns’s Lost Ground, principally as regards the novel’s detective narrative framework and the counterdiscursive technique of intertextual referencing that implies other interpretative possibilities. Lost Ground will be critically analysed in terms of the central character’s experience of space and place, and the influence of these paradigms on Peter Jacobs as he makes strides towards abandoning historical/racial restrictions and locating his identity in people.

scholarly journals Countering corruption in South Africa: The rise and fall of the Scorpions and Hawks

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Moses Montesh
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
South African ◽  
African National Congress ◽  
Constitutional Court ◽  
The South ◽  
Police Service ◽  
South African Police Service ◽  
Crime Investigation ◽  
The Government ◽  
South African Police

In 1999 a new directorate of the National Prosecuting Authority was launched to ‘complement and, in some respects, supplement the efforts of existing law enforcement agencies in fighting national priority crimes’.Over the following seven years the Directorate of Special Operations, nicknamed the ‘Scorpions’, gained public favour; however, they were accused of, amongst other things, exceeding their jurisdiction by performing functions that fell outside their mandate. During the African National Congress conference of 2007, delegates took a decision that the Scorpions should be disbanded. In 2008, Parliament passed the South African Police Service Amendment Bill that replaced the Scorpions with the Directorate for Priority Crime Investigation, located within the South African Police Service. In 2010 this move was challenged in Hugh Glenister v President of the Republic of South Africa & Others [CCT 48/10]. The key question in this case was whether the national legislation that created the Directorate for Priority Crime Investigation, known as the Hawks (DPCI), and disbanded the Scorpions, was  constitutionally valid. In March 2011 the Constitutional Court ruled that the legislation establishing the Hawks was unconstitutional and ‘invalid to the extent that it fails to secure an adequate degree of independence for the Directorate for Priority Crime Investigation.’ The Court gave the government 18 months to rectify the situation. This article provides an overview of the decisions that led to the formation and closure of the Scorpions, and the formation of the Hawks.

Dancing for the Nation: Ballet Diplomacy and Transnational Politics in Post-Apartheid South Africa

2018 ◽  
Vol 50 (3) ◽  
pp. 85-98
Author(s):  
Meryl Lauer
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
South African ◽  
Transition To Democracy ◽  
African National Congress ◽  
Transnational Politics ◽  
International Diplomacy ◽  
Generous Support ◽  
Sources Of Support ◽  
National Congress ◽  
Apartheid Regime

This article argues that nationalism and international diplomacy are embodied practices, as evidenced through the movement of international ballet dancers in South Africa. Under the apartheid regime, South African professional ballet received generous support from governmental sources. Since the transition to democracy, professional ballet companies have utilized creative strategies to court new sources of support including that of the ruling African National Congress. A key move in this campaign has been “ballet diplomacy” with Cuba—the transnational circulation of dancers, teachers, techniques, and performances in the name of the nation. Professional ballet's buy-in into South African nationalism locates dancers’ bodies in the maintenance and dissemination of state politics.

scholarly journals Afrique du Sud : politique extérieure et rapports avec le continent

2005 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 369-391 ◽  
Author(s):  
Douglas G. Anglin
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
South African ◽  
Policy Decision ◽  
African National Congress ◽  
Decision Makers ◽  
Afrique Du Sud ◽  
Leave Policy ◽  
National Congress ◽  
The Military ◽  
The Relationship

The principal preoccupation of South African foreign policy decision makers has consistently been the preservation and perpetuation of white power and privilege. This has been especially the case with respect to relations with the rest of Africa, and above all Southern Africa which South Africa has long regarded as its natural hinterland. Traditionally, the neighbouring states have been a source of minerals, markets and migrant labour, but more recently they have also been perceived as a source of insecurity. Pretoria countered the alleged "total onslaught" it faced with its "total strategy" which, in the region, amounted to a combination ofathump and talk. "The military reverse South Africa suffered in Angola in 1988 forced a reassessment of policy, leading to the independance of Namibia and the prospect of an end to apartheid domestically. How the emergence of a non-racial democratic regime in South Africa will affect policy towards the continent is uncertain. While the African National Congress recognizes the need to put the relationship on a new and mutually beneficial basis, it is likely to be preoccupied with its own formidable domestic agenda. This may leave policy effectively in the hands of the technocrats and the businessmen, which does not augur well for an end to the present exploitative relationship.

Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK): The ANC’s Armed Wing, 1961–1993

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arianna Lissoni
Keyword(s):  
African National Congress ◽  
Guerrilla Warfare ◽  
Political Struggle ◽  
Armed Struggle ◽  
Guerrilla War ◽  
Political Work ◽  
Initial Stage ◽  
History Of ◽  
Apartheid Regime ◽  
The Military

Launched in 1961 by leaders of the African National Congress (ANC) of South Africa and the South African Communist Party (SACP), Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) was the military wing of the ANC until its disbandment in 1993. The initial stage of MK’s armed struggle involved sabotage against government installations and other symbols of the apartheid regime by a small group of operatives. Under increasing repression by the apartheid state, and thanks to the support received from African and socialist countries, MK adopted a strategy of guerrilla warfare as armed struggle assumed an increasingly central role in the liberation struggle, although the military was understood as an extension of political work, that is, linked to the reinvigoration of political struggle and organizations. Geopolitical constraints prevented MK from waging a conventional guerrilla war, and from the 1970s MK adjusted its strategy by turning to armed propaganda and people’s war. While debates on the role of MK in South Africa’s liberation are often reduced to the relative success or failure of military strategy and action, the history of MK remains a sensitive topic post-apartheid, carrying significant weight both symbolically and in the lives of thousands of people who served in its ranks, including women, who joined and participated in MK throughout the three decades of its existence.

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