“I need to respect that person and that person needs to respect me”

2020 ◽  
pp. 82-109
Author(s):  
Christine Jeske
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
South African ◽  
Social Group ◽  
Good Life ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
Moral Code ◽  
African People ◽  
People’S Perception

This chapter explores the narrative that people associate strongly with a Zulu identity, but which also resonates beyond South Africa, a moral schema demanding that the good life requires respect for all people. It talks about hierarchies, how it affects people's perception of who they are, and how they learn to live with them. It defines inequality as the kind of situation when someone with lesser power has to figure out how to demand better treatment from someone in power. The chapter discusses how South African people manage with precarity — a situation when people have a source of income, a supportive social group, and a home to live in, yet they are always hovering just at the edge of losing those basic necessities. It also talks about respect as a moral code, respect being at the intersection of work and the good life, and it asks if respect is truly achievable.

The Laziness Myth

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christine Jeske
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Ethnic Groups ◽  
South African ◽  
Good Life ◽  
Hard Work ◽  
Good Work ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
The People ◽  
Good Lives

When people cannot find good work, can they still find good lives? By investigating this question in the context of South Africa, where only 43 percent of adults are employed, this book invites readers to examine their own assumptions about how work and the good life do or do not coincide. The book challenges the widespread premise that hard-work determines success by tracing the titular “laziness myth,” a persistent narrative that disguises the systems and structures that produce inequalities while blaming unemployment and other social ills on the so-called laziness of particular class, racial, and ethnic groups. The book offers evidence of the laziness myth's harsh consequences, as well as insights into how to challenge it with other South African narratives of a good life. In contexts as diverse as rapping in a library, manufacturing leather shoes, weed-whacking neighbors' yards, negotiating marriage plans, and sharing water taps, the people described in the book will stimulate discussion on creative possibilities for seeking the good life in and out of employment, in South Africa and elsewhere.

“We want to live a good life”

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-25
Author(s):  
Christine Jeske
Keyword(s):  
South African ◽  
Good Life ◽  
Hard Work ◽  
Good Work ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
African People ◽  
Economic Trends

This chapter introduces the book and talks about the ways people seek a good life, and how their various ways of seeking a good life do — or don't — intersect with work. It aims to help in understanding some of the global political and economic trends that make it rare for South African people to find the good life through a paid job, and how people go on finding the good life anyway. It explains that when good work is hard to find, politically polarized discourses of scapegoating abound. It then discusses how the different narratives people are inclined to believe shape their lives. Finally, the chapter talks about the danger of the hard-work narrative.

How Apartheid Education Encouraged and Reinforced Tribalism and Xenophobia in South Africa

2021 ◽  
pp. 131-151
Author(s):  
Mashudu Peter Makhado ◽  
Tshifhiwa Rachel Tshisikhawe
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
South African ◽  
The Other ◽  
The South ◽  
African People

Apartheid like colonialism was anchored on the divisions of African people according to ethnic and tribal orientations among others. The idea of the South African apartheid government was to build tribal exceptionalism and superiority which would make one tribe feel more superior than the other. A Zulu would feel better human than a Sotho, while a Venda would feel the same over a Tsonga, for example. This is a qualitative desktop study investigating how apartheid education was used to fuel tribalism and xenophobia in South Africa.

scholarly journals Towards A Bill of Rights for a Democratic South Africa

1991 ◽  
Vol 35 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 21-43 ◽  
Author(s):  
Albie Sachs
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Human Rights ◽  
South African ◽  
Bill Of Rights ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
World Community ◽  
African People ◽  
Constitutional Level ◽  
The World ◽  
The Individual

All revolutions are impossible until they happen; then they become inevitable. South Africa has for long been trembling between the impossible and the inevitable, and it is in this singularly unstable situation that the question of human rights and the basics of government in post-apartheid society demands attention.No longer is it necessary to spend much time analysing schemes to modernize, reform liberalize, privatize, or even democratize apartheid. Like slavery and colonialism, apartheid is regarded as irremediably bad. There cannot be good apartheid, or degrees of acceptable apartheid. The only questions are how to end the system as rapidly as possible and how to ensure that the new society which replaces it lives up to the ideals of the South African people and the world community. More specifically, at the constitutional level, the issue is no longer whether to have democracy and equal rights, but how fully to achieve these principles and how to ensure that within the overall democratic scheme, the cultural diversity of the country is accommodated and the individual rights of citizens respected.

scholarly journals Epistemologi Penafsiran Farid Esack terhadap Ayat-Ayat Pembebasan

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 171-191
Author(s):  
Kamaruddin Mustamin ◽  
Basri Basri
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
South African ◽  
Life Experiences ◽  
Research Result ◽  
Philosophical Approach ◽  
Critical Reasoning ◽  
African People ◽  
Library Method ◽  
Historical Origins

This article discusses Farid Esack 's epistemological side, who proposed an emancipatory interpretation of what was generally known as liberation hermeneutics in responding to social problems in South Africa. The method used in this research is the library method with analytical material and a historical-philosophical approach that functions to (a) analyze the text itself; (b) objectively trace the historical origins of the character's context, why it carried the hermeneutic idea of its liberation; and (c) analyze the socio-historical circumstances surrounding the character and find the essential building. Based on the research result, the researcher found that Farid Esack 's thought-building was highly motivated by South Africa's socio-historical circumstances enduring humanitarian problems (apartheid). Farid Esack used critical reasoning (al-aql al-naqdy) in which the role of revelation (text), truth (context), and interpreter (reader) was linked in the compilation of his tafsir book. Meanwhile, the method of interpretation was the hermeneutics of the Qur'an based on the context and life experiences of the South African people, whose results were intended as the philosophical basis for freeing the whole society from all types of inequality and exploitation of economy, race, gender, class, and religion.

Back to the Good Life: Towards an Enlarged Conception of Social Justice

1997 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-35 ◽  
Author(s):  
David M Smith
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Social Justice ◽  
Good Life ◽  
Ethic Of Care ◽  
Central Feature ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
Conception Of The Good ◽  
Universal Ethic ◽  
Intellectual Environment

Social justice has returned to the geographical agenda, but in an intellectual environment different from that in which ‘radical geography’ emerged more than two decades ago. The author attempts to (re)integrate the notion of social justice with some broader conception of the good life. An egalitarian formulation of distributive justice is posited, to set the scene for an argument that its application requires reference to the way of life in which it is embedded. Postapartheid South Africa is used for illustrative purposes. It is argued that the interdependence of distributional and relational aspects of justice might find fruitful expression in a universal ethic of care, as a central feature of a good way of life.

“Despite the contradictions”

2020 ◽  
pp. 185-194
Author(s):  
Christine Jeske
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Structural Changes ◽  
Good Life ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
Racial Inequalities ◽  
The People ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Social Narrative

This chapter offers closing thoughts that reiterate and summarizes the main points of the book. The chapter explores the ways people make a careful survey of their situation and work out a method to yield growth despite life's contradictions and pressures. If their lives look at times like wind-torn shrubs, that does not mean that they are poorly adapted or lethargic. Instead, it offers evidence of the hard work it takes to thrive in a world where the good life is hard to find. It shows that a dominant myth blaming inequality on laziness has guided, upheld, and justified racial inequalities in South Africa and the world since the earliest mercantile and colonial encounters between Europeans and Africans, and this narrative was never eradicated, despite antislavery, civil rights, and anti-apartheid movements that achieved important legal and structural changes. The struggle to change this social narrative is an unglorified resistance with no clear ending point, but it is essential to the pursuit of the good life. It also shows evidence that in order to generate employment while aiming for the higher goal of seeking good, South Africa must address the history of antiblack disrespect that perpetuates dysfunctional employment structures. The people described in this book refuse to conform to narratives of inevitable happy endings or easy hope, but neither do their stories end only in despair.

scholarly journals Nation Building and the Construction of Identity: Xenophobia in South Africa

Refuge ◽  
2001 ◽  
pp. 4-11 ◽  
Author(s):  
Janet E. Reilly
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
National Identity ◽  
South African ◽  
Immigration Policy ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
South Africans ◽  
Construction Of Identity ◽  
People’S Perception ◽  
History Of

This article examines the process of nation building in South Africa and its effect on the rise of xenophobia. It explores the ways in which South Africa’s efforts, since the elections of 1994, to construct a non-racial national identity have led to the exclusion of and the denial of rights to non-citizens. Looking at the history of immigration policy in South Africa, it argues that increased levels of xenophobia among South Africans represent an ever-widening gap between the country’s attempts to restructure itself constitutionally (by altering its laws) and culturally (by changing the people’s perception of what it means to be South African).

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