The Effects of Intergenerational Poverty and Unemployment on South African Township Youth

Author(s):  
Ndwakhulu Stephen Tshishonga

Young people throughout the world are an afterthought of policy and program interventions. In Africa, and particularly in third world nations, the irony of sloganizing youth as the cream or the future of the nation exists alongside tendencies and behaviors that impede their development towards being responsible and full citizens which rather aggravates youth underdevelopment and marginalization. It is an undisputed fact that young people have been the vanguard of liberatory struggles that resulted in dismantling colonialism and apartheid. On one hand, the chapter examines strategies adopted to overcome intergenerational poverty by using narratives (daily experiences of youth) of post-apartheid South Africa. On the other hand, the chapter highlights the uncertainties and frustrations of living in a democratic South Africa, with its failure to open up opportunities for their socio-economic growth, the apartheid discriminatory system, and survival.

Author(s):  
P. Mozias

South African rand depreciated in 2013–2014 under the influence of a number of factors. Internationally, its weakness was associated with the capital outflow from all emerging markets as a result of QE’s tapering in the US. Domestically, rand plummeted because of the deterioration of the macroeconomic stance of South Africa itself: economic growth stalled and current account deficit widened again. Consumer spending was restrained with the high household indebtedness, investment climate worsened with the wave of bloody strikes, and net export was still prone to J-curve effect despite the degree of the devaluation happened. But, in its turn, those problems are a mere reflection of the deep institutional misbalances inherent to the very model of the national economy. Saving rate is too low in South Africa. This leads not only to an insufficient investment, but also to trade deficits and overdependence on speculative capital inflows. Extremely high unemployment means that the country’s economic potential is substantially underutilized. Joblessness is generated, first and foremost, by the dualistic structure of the national entrepreneurship. Basic wages are being formed by way of a bargaining between big public and semi state companies, on the one hand, and trade unions associated with the ruling party, on the other. Such a system is biased towards protection of vested interests of those who earn money in capital-intensive industries. At the same time, these rates of wages are prohibitively high for a small business; so far private companies tend to avoid job creation. A new impulse to economic development is likely to emerge only through the government’s efforts to mitigate disproportions and to pursue an active industrial policy. National Development Plan adopted in 2012 is a practical step in that direction. But the growth of public investment is constrained by a necessity of fiscal austerity; as a result, the budget deficit remained too large in recent years. South African Reserve Bank will have to choose between a stimulation of economic growth with low interest rates, on the one hand, and a support of rand by tightening of monetary policy, on the other. This dilemma will greatly influence prices of securities and yields at South African financial markets.


2019 ◽  
Vol 45 (4) ◽  
pp. 416-427 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alys Young ◽  
Lorenzo Ferrarini ◽  
Andrew Irving ◽  
Claudine Storbeck ◽  
Robyn Swannack ◽  
...  

This article concerns deaf children and young people living in South Africa who are South African Sign Language users and who participated in an interdisciplinary research project using the medium of teaching film and photography with the goal of enhancing resilience. Specifically, this paper explores three questions that emerged from the deaf young people’s experience and involvement with the project: (i) What is disclosed about deaf young people’s worldmaking through the filmic and photographic modality? (ii) What specific impacts do deaf young people’s ontologically visual habitations of the world have on the production of their film/photographic works? (iii) How does deaf young people’s visual, embodied praxis through film and photography enable resilience? The presentation of findings and related theoretical discussion is organised around three key themes: (i) ‘writing’ into reality through photographic practice, (ii) filmmaking as embodied emotional praxis and (iii) enhancing resilience through visual methodologies. The discussion is interspersed with examples of the young people’s own work.


Literator ◽  
1997 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 83-92 ◽  
Author(s):  
Z. Roelofse-Campbell

Two millenarian events, one in Brazil (Canudos Rebellion, 1897) and the other in South Africa (Bulhoek Massacre, 1921) have inspired two works of narrative fiction: Mario Vargas Llosa's The War of the End of the World (1981) and Mike Nicol’s This Day and Age (1992). In both novels the events are presented from the perspectives of both the oppressed landless peasants and the oppressors, who were the ruling élites. In both instances, governments which purported to be models of enlightenment and modernity resorted to violence and repression in order to uphold their authority. Vargas Llosa's novel was written in the Latin American tradition where truth and fiction mingle indistinguishably while in the South African novel fictional elements override historical truth.


Werkwinkel ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 14 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 37-58
Author(s):  
Paulina Grzęda

AbstractNumerous commentators have recently indicated a prevailing sense among South africans of a historical repetition, a pervasive sentiment that the country has failed to shake off the legacy of apartheid, which extends into the present, and possibly also the future. 1 Such an observation has led South African psychologist, derek Hook, to conclude that in order to adequately address the post-apartheid reality and allow the process of working through trauma, there is a need to abandon the linear Judeo-Christian model of time derived from the Enlightenment. Instead, Hook advocates to start thinking of post-apartheid South Africa not as a socio-economically or racially stratified society, but rather as a country of unsynchronized, split, often overlapping temporalities. Thus, he offers to perceive of ‘chaffing temporalities’ of the contemporary predicament. Resende and Thies, on the other hand, call for a need for a reconceptualised approach to temporality not only when dealing with heavily traumatized postcolonial countries such as South Africa, but more generally when addressing the geopolitics of all the countries of the so-called ‘Global South.’ My paper will discuss the manner in which reconceptualised postcolonial temporality has been addressed by South African transitional writings by André Brink. I will argue that, although Brink’s magical realist novels of the 1990s imaginatively engage with ‘the chaffing temporalities’ of the post-apartheid predicament, their refusal to project any viable visions of the country’s future might ultimately problematise the thorough embrace of Hook’s ‘ethics of temporality.’


2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 43-49
Author(s):  
Tonto Chioma Dominic ◽  
Iyabo Ike Sobowale

This article discusses career development management that can help career empowerers combine skills such as applying theoretical constructs realistically and creatively to focus on innovative ways of doing things that make careers possible as factors that provide support to employees in the workplace and contribute on their professional development. In contrast to other approaches to career development, the conventional approach to career development is mainly focused with techniques that are meant to utilize skill development and supply to drive economic growth rather than anything else. However, although the promotion of economic growth is an important goal for career development in South Africa, it is not the only goal for the country's development agenda, which includes a number of other goals. Globally, a vision of career development based on clearly defined economic goals would be at conflict with South Africa's development rhetoric, according to the World Bank's Africa Development Report


1973 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 17-27
Author(s):  
Colin Legum ◽  
Margaret Legum

Two great changes have been brought by twenty-five years of apartheid rule in South Africa. Its internal contradictions have been sharpened by the simultaneous attempts to divide the country along even more rigid color lines and to stimulate more rapid economic growth; and its external relations have declined to the point where the Republic today has become the “polecat of the world.” These two developments are inextricably linked so that it makes little sense to try and describe the South African situation without focussing on their interrelationship.


1995 ◽  
Vol 142 ◽  
pp. 388-422 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven F. Jackson

The people who have triumphed in their own revolution should help those still struggling for liberation. This is our internationalist duty. Mao ZedongIn the middle of October 1975, a dusty column of South African troops, equipped with armoured cars and helicopters, rumbled north into Angola, further internationalizing the already complex civil war there. The South African attack not only broadened the war, prompting an even greater Cuban intervention, it also posed a dilemma for China, which supported the same Angolan parties as did South Africa: should China follow its policy of tit-for-tat opposition to Soviet expansion world-wide, even if it meant allying with the racist government of South Africa? Or should it follow the opinions of its fellow Third World nations in Africa, even if it led to a Soviet bloc advance? The difficulty China's leaders faced in the autumn of 1975 was one which had hidden origins in the different ways in which China viewed conflicts around the world, a difficulty that had lain dormant for years but which erupted in 1975 into full view, and with disastrous consequences for Chinese foreign policy in Africa. It is, moreover, a discrepancy which continues to exist in China's views of the world today.How does China view conflicts and revolutions in the Third World? How do the Chinese organize their relations with Third World revolutionary organizations and their post-independence governments? This article examines the tensions and shifts of Chinese policy towards two essentially simultaneous revolutionary struggles and their post-independence governments: Angola and Mozambique.


2014 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Marcel Barnard

Julian M�ller, in his advocacy of a narrative theology, has called for an autobiographical theology. In addition to Julian M�ller�s plea, the author turned to what may be seen as the liturgical and ritual variant of this method, namely autoethnography. Thus he would honour Julian M�ller and his tireless commitment to Practical Theology. Autobiographical and autoethnographical theology do not start from well-ordered and systematically arranged knowledge, but from a life as it has developed and as it is developing in its connections with others. Difference is therefore a keyword in the method. Others and other worlds evoke the consciousness of differences, incite reflections on the cracks, fractures and fissures that show themselves to the self and provoke negotiations with the otherness of the other. Never in his existence as a theologian had the author experienced this process more intensely than in his contacts with colleagues and religious practices in South Africa. It was described in the article how the author became acquainted with South Africa and, more particularly, with its liturgical rituals and visual arts since 2001. The different experiences of successive visits to Church Square in Pretoria functioned as a point of reference in the article. It was shown how the self re-negotiated its position in the world through the confrontation with a totally �other� � in this case, South African liturgical rituals and visual arts. This re-negotiation focused on the Western academic position of the self when confronted with African epistemologies and ontologies.


2016 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 749-768
Author(s):  
Nadea Le Roux ◽  
Anculien Schoeman

The South African government is dedicated to improving the country’s economy. The establishment of economic zones is used throughout the world as a method to improve a country’s economic growth. The main purpose of this study is to compare the key aspects of the new Special Economic Zones (SEZ) Programme in South Africa to those of Malaysia and Indonesia, since both these countries have successfully established SEZs which have contributed to the development of these countries. It was found that South Africa’s programme design was on par with that of these two countries, but further recommendations were made.


Derrida Today ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-36
Author(s):  
Grant Farred

‘The Final “Thank You”’ uses the work of Jacques Derrida and Friedrich Nietzsche to think the occasion of the 1995 rugby World Cup, hosted by the newly democratic South Africa. This paper deploys Nietzsche's Zarathustra to critique how a figure such as Nelson Mandela is understood as a ‘Superman’ or an ‘Overhuman’ in the moment of political transition. The philosophical focus of the paper, however, turns on the ‘thank yous’ exchanged by the white South African rugby captain, François Pienaar, and the black president at the event of the Springbok victory. It is the value, and the proximity and negation, of the ‘thank yous’ – the relation of one to the other – that constitutes the core of the article. 1


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