scholarly journals Mostly ‘black’ and ‘white’: ‘Race’, complicity and restitution in the non-fiction of Antjie Krog

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.

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.


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.


2004 ◽  
Vol 60 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
P.G.J. Meiring

The author who served on the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), focuses on the Hindu experience in South Africa during the apartheid years. At a special TRC Hearing for Faith Communities (East London, 17-19 November 1997) two submissions by local Hindu leaders were tabled. Taking his cues from those submissions, the author discusses four issues: the way the Hindu community suffered during these years, the way in which some members of the Hindu community supported the system of apartheid, the role of Hindus in the struggle against apartheid, and finally the contribution of the Hindu community towards reconciliation in South Africa. In conclusion some notes on how Hindus and Christians may work together in th


2021 ◽  
Vol 56 (1) ◽  
pp. 18-33
Author(s):  
Lucky Mathebe

After almost 25 years of what could justifiably be called transformative change in South Africa, a truism is that the country’s new legal order, established by the Constitution in 1993 and 1996, provides the critical foundation of peace and security upon which its freedom has been built. The Constitutional Court was one of the most important of the new democratic institutions in the shaping of the country’s position as a constitutional democracy, upholding the values for which millions of people, black and white, had fought. This article is a brief reflection on the role of the Court in establishing the meaning of this democracy and giving it effect. The main goal of the article is to understand how the Court’s new jurisprudence works in particular contexts, how its work is related to crime and punishment, and what it means for the rights of marginalised groups in society. Using the examples of the Court’s decision in Makwanyane on the death penalty, and the Court’s decision on the findings of the Public Protector’s report on Nkandla, the article finds that the Court’s new jurisprudence takes quite a different view of legal developments in South Africa, insofar as the jurisprudence entrusts broad discretion to the Court and emphasises the need for sustained leadership of the Court to advance the battle for fundamental human rights, the rule of law, and democratic accountability.


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.


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.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document