The Revelation of Race: On Steve Biko

Author(s):  
Vincent W. Lloyd

This chapter focuses on the dramatic change affected by the South African anti-apartheid leader Steve Biko. The apartheid regime had used racial labeling to divide Indian, African, and mixed communities, preventing them from seeing their shared interests. Rather than reading Biko as a secular militant in the black power tradition, this chapter argues that Biko is best understood as rejecting a pragmatic, secularist understanding of politics. Through a seemingly simple practice of re-labeling, grouping all non-whites under the label black, Biko was able to transform not only political language but also political practice and ultimately political possibilities. This transformation is best understood in theological terms, as revelation that solicits fidelity; understood thusly, whiteness is identified with heresy. The chapter concludes by comparing Biko’s work of revelation with the reactionary, secularist racial labeling in the United States context, where words are tied increasingly tightly to worldly referents (“Negro” to “black” to “African American”).

Author(s):  
David L. Hostetter

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.


2020 ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
Rehana Cassim

Abstract Section 162 of the South African Companies Act 71 of 2008 empowers courts to declare directors delinquent and hence to disqualify them from office. This article compares the judicial disqualification of directors under this section with the equivalent provisions in the United Kingdom, Australia and the United States of America, which have all influenced the South African act. The article compares the classes of persons who have locus standi to apply to court to disqualify a director from holding office, as well as the grounds for the judicial disqualification of a director, the duration of the disqualification, the application of a prescription period and the discretion conferred on courts to disqualify directors from office. It contends that, in empowering courts to disqualify directors from holding office, section 162 of the South African Companies Act goes too far in certain respects.


2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 149-174
Author(s):  
Paul Nkoane

The jurisdiction of the South African Constitutional Court has been extended for the court to administer ‘matters of general public importance’ in addition to administering constitutional matters. There is no South African court that accepted appeals on the grounds that the matter raised an arguable point of law of general public importance. This novelty in the South African law requires an inspection of other jurisdictions to determine which matters the Constitutional Court should accept for appeals. In this respect, the article inspects the Supreme Court of the United States case docket to determine the kinds of cases the court accepts for appeals.


Black Opera ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 55-84
Author(s):  
Naomi André

This chapter examines the song cycle (also thought of as a monodrama or solo opera) by composer William Bolcom and playwright/librettist Sandra Seaton, From the Diary of Sally Hemings. The chapter includes a discussion of the DNA, kinship, and social controversies over the interracial pairing of Jefferson, a founder of the United States as a nation, and Hemings, his slave and consort. Through an analysis of the compositional genesis of the work, the text, and the music, this chapter also explores what is at stake for thinking about the breakdown of black-white racial categories. Extended references are made to Saartijie Baartman (the South African “Hottentot Venus”) and Edward Ball, the descendent of the Ball plantation who looked up interracial relationships with slaves in his family.


Literator ◽  
1988 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 29-43
Author(s):  
R. Marais

This article investigates the views on woman and womanhood that are expressed in the poetry and prose of several contemporary women writers in Afrikaans. The study is conducted against the background of certain tendencies in feminist movements in Europe, Britain and the United States of America as well as views pronounced in the writings (both literary and feminist) of a number of feminist writers in Europe, Britain and the USA. For the purposes of this investigation a short exposition is given of what feminism entails, as well as of a number of the different views and approaches which it accommodates. Subsequently different views on womanhood as expressed in the creative writings of a number of women writers who have written extensively on this topic are discussed at the hand of their poetry and prose. Specific attention is paid to the South African woman’s views on men, marriage, her own sexuality and motherhood as revealed in the writings of these women.


2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (12) ◽  
pp. 58-66
Author(s):  
Celia Ceby ◽  
Dr Cynthia Catherine Michael

The rallying cry of “Black Lives Matter” that reverberated all through the U.S. after the George Floyd murder case brought to light the reality that racism is a living reality in the American soil. It is no legend of the past. It is not a bygone history. Therein lies the significance of the inspiring memoir by the former First Lady of the United States. Michelle Obama’s Becoming is more than a memoir. It is a social document that faithfully portrays the ground reality of ‘Being Black’ and ‘Becoming Black' in a “White Society”. In her memoir, while recounting her rise from modest origins to the closest this country has to nobility, Michelle is taking the readers on an intimate tour of everyday African-American life. Her book illustrates how all Americans must part with the idea of post-racial society, the quaint notion that race and racism are relics of the United States’ long-ago past. In the memoir, she establishes that prejudice is so woven into the fabric of America that it won’t be gone in her lifetime, or even longer. The article“Becoming Me: Journey from the ‘South” traces the early stages of her life as a “striver”, residing in the ‘South’ side of Chicago, identified with the city’s African American population


2015 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 141-147
Author(s):  
Ntebogang Dinah Moroke

The purpose of this paper was to test convergence of household debts in the United States and South Africa taking a pairwise unit root tests based approaches into account. Substantial number of studies dealt with convergence of several macroeconomic variables but to my knowledge no study considered this subject with respect to household debts of the identified countries. Quarterly data on household debts consisting of 88 observations in the South Africa and United States spanning the period 1990 to 2013 was collected from the South African and St. Louis Federal Reserve Banks. Focused on the absolute value of household debts, this study proved that South Africa is far from catching-up with the United States in terms of overcoming household debts for the selected period. The findings of this study can be used by relevant authorities to help improve ways and means of dealing with household debts South Africa.


Author(s):  
Vipin Narang

This chapter traces South Africa's nuclear posture—how it intended to operationalize and use its six nuclear devices—and explores the sources of that particular strategy. Since 1978, in a very explicit strategy statement outlined by Prime Minister P. W. Botha who held the reins of the South African program for its duration, South Africa clearly envisioned and operationalized a catalytic nuclear posture designed to draw in Western—particularly American—assistance in the event of an overwhelming Soviet or Cuban-backed conventional threat to South Africa through Angola, Namibia, or Mozambique. Given the risk of additional sanctions and isolation if South Africa became an open nuclear power, optimization theory predicts that South Africa would adopt a catalytic posture if it believed it could successfully compel the United States to intervene on its behalf in the face of a severe threat.


1910 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 325-349 ◽  
Author(s):  
W. F. Dood

Perhaps the two most important constitutional events during recent years are the establishment of the South African Union and the struggle in Great Britain over the budget and with reference to the powers of the House of Lords. Both of these events are excluded from treatment here—the South African Union is discussed somewhat fully in another part of this Review; the British constitutional struggle is still in progress, and cannot be satisfactorily treated at the present time.However, with reference to the South African Union it may be well to call attention to the movement away from loosely-constructed federal states. In the United States the state governments have steadily tended to become of less importance as compared with the national government, but this change has necessarily been produced not so much by textual changes in the constitution as by judicial interpretation. By the German imperial constitution of 1871 a fairly centralized federal organization was established, and since 1873 when the federal legislative power was extended over the whole field of civil law there have been no important extensions of federal power by textual changes in the constitution; but here as in the United States the federal power has increased at the expense of the states in a manner not shown by changes in the written instrument of government. “The most important and most weighty interests of the nation are common to all and must be cared for in a uniform manner, and all branches of public law and political life stand in a close and indissoluble relation the one to the other, so that by the logic of facts particularism must give place to unity, the common will must to an ever increasing extent displace the separate wills of the individual states.”


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