Health Justice, Activism, and the Crisis of HIV/AIDS in South Africa

The political economy of the AIDS crisis in South Africa’s past can be understood in terms of the concept of health justice. In particular, health justice can help us interpret the history of AIDS in South Africa according to the intersecting manifestations of socioeconomic inequality in the country, including the migrant labor system, the apartheid-era health system, with its racial segregation and inferior service provision for black people, the feminization of poverty, and, legal and institutionalized homophobia and transphobia. We can also use the overarching concept of health justice to understand the histories of public health and progressive health advocacy in relation to the epidemic over three periods. First, early in the history of the disease in South Africa, health injustice was manifest in the socioeconomic phenomena behind its arrival in the country in 1982. Secondly, its subsequent entrenchment in the country in the pre-1994 period can be related to South Africa’s late-apartheid political economy. Thirdly, in the postapartheid period, the Nelson Mandela (1994–1999) and Thabo Mbeki (1999–2008) administrations exhibited deficits in political will in the development of effective AIDS policies, most notably evident in Mbeki’s AIDS denialism. In response to this, in 1998 the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) emerged from the AIDS advocacy of various strands of antiapartheid activism. The last section highlights how the TAC’s activism influenced global health politics from the late 1990s to the early 2000s. This history points to the TAC’s valuable legacy of activism in addressing AIDS and general health injustices. Interpreting the socioeconomic and political history of AIDS is of wider relevance to important historiographical bodies of literature in relation to South Africa, including those around medicine and health, gender and sexuality, black politics and social movements, and, South Africa’s role in world history. The topic is therefore especially deserving of sustained study.

Segregated Landscapes in South Africa, 1800–1994

This chapter investigates the origins of the segregation in South Africa and analyzes how a white minority established political and economic hegemony over the country’s black majority. It recounts the establishment of the apartheid government in 1948, which intensified the processes of exclusion and segregation under colonialism and white rule. It also looks at historical work that highlights important facets of the history of land segregation and keeps sight of the power dynamics and violence that accompanied centuries of segregation in South Africa. This chapter looks at several streams of scholarship around land segregation, including the intersection of gender and land. It examines debates on South Africa’s highly segregated land system and massive landownership inequalities.

Rethinking Representations’ of Trade Unionism in South Africa

This essay reviews the literature on trade unions in South Africa in the last century. It points to some of its limitations seeking to challenge narrow conceptions and worn binaries of worker resistance and trade unionism, spontaneity and organization, that still plague some histories of labor and labor unions. It therefore attempts to review the literature in a way that opens up new readings and theoretical perspectives on labor and trade unions. It seeks to show how migrant and women’s organizing continue to be two areas that the literature has not adequately grasped. That women have often organized themselves outside of unions and dominant political structures implies that there is broad scope for theoretical perspectives that challenge masculine notions of organizing and institutional culture. In addition, there needs to be more attention paid to the issue that migrant members of unions themselves are finding more expression for their grievances outside of trade union bureaucratic structures. Moreover, in a country such as South Africa, with extremely high unemployment in a global economy of fewer and fewer jobs, it is necessary to ask whether the notion of industrial unionism, which has for so long excluded those on the margins of the so-called formal economy, is still viable, or whether new forms of organizing that are more cognizant of the local and global interconnectedness of all spheres of the economy, beyond the public/private divide, must be sought. In order for these perspectives to emerge, however, it is necessary to rethink the categories that people impose on history and how it limits future possibilities.

Historical Memory-Making in South Africa

In South Africa, as elsewhere, historical memory is a social thing. It takes on object properties through memorials, museums, archives, and other sites of memory. Some movement leaders, academics, and ordinary citizens took issue with apartheid-era memory projects, while others fiercely defended them. The memorial landscape in democratic South Africa is thus an unsettled collective space where claims about the past—what happened and what should we make of it—are challenged just as quickly as they are asserted. This chapter discusses these challenges and assertions as historical memory making endeavors to establish norms and rituals of collective remembrance.

The Apartheid Project

This chapter provides a wide-ranging overview of the extant historical literature and latest research on Apartheid South Africa. After assessing the contributions of scholars to debates about the origins and purposes of apartheid, the chapter focuses analytical attention on the paradoxical nature and legacies of the apartheid state. At the heart of the chapter is a concern with how the racially delimited political economy bequeathed by apartheid has shaped an increasingly dysfunctional post-apartheid order.

The Nazaretha, Zionists, and Other Rebels in Segregated South Africa

Zionist churches proliferated in South Africa’s segregation era amid a global revival of the doctrine of divine healing. Among the nearly eight hundred new denominations that emerged were some of the largest Zionist churches, including Ignatius Lekganyane’s Zion Christian Church (ZCC) and Isaiah Shembe’s Nazaretha Church. All of these new denominations took root in the absence of government recognition and during a period when church-state relations were in flux. Many Zionists found ways to work around and in spite of segregation-era laws, but these efforts occasionally ended in disaster—as at Bulhoek in 1921. For scholars, Zionist churches have long posed problems of categorization. Scholars once imagined Zionists as embodying a distinctively African expression of faith, but important new scholarship has challenged this understanding. The time is ripe, however, to reassess what made Zionists different. This entry looks to Zionists’ doctrine and methods of evangelism to understand them as segregation-era rebels.

South African Urbanization and Industrialization to 1948

The South African city during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has often been viewed as moving inexorably toward the fully segregated urban space of the high apartheid era. However, insofar as this view suggests a unilinear process with an inevitable outcome, it is misleading. South African cities at the turn of the century, and even to some extent after the formation of the unified South African state in 1910, had far more porous racial boundaries than is sometimes realized. The mining revolution did generate a dramatic process of industrialization and urbanization characterized by great racial inequality and coercion. But segregationists were trying to impose a pattern on a complex hybrid reality and did not always do so effectively. Nor was state policy consistent, with repression being far less continuous than was the case under apartheid. The 1940s saw the development of a crisis, with contradictory forces and policy directions in urban society. Apartheid arose out of this context but was not the predetermined result of what had come before.

The Politics of Chiefs and Commoners before the 1830s

The field of pre-1830 South African history has been subject to periodic interrogations into conventional narratives, sources, and methods. The so-called mfecane debates of the 1980s and 1990s marked a radical departure from characterizations of warfare in the interior, generally regarded in earlier decades as stemming solely or mostly from the Zulu king Shaka. Efforts to reframe violence led to more thorough considerations of political elites and statecraft from the late eighteenth to the early nineteenth century but also contributed to new approaches to ethnicity, dependency, and to some extent gender. A new wave of historiographical critique in the 2010s shows the work of revision to be ongoing. The article considers the debates around the wars of the late precolonial period, including unresolved strands of inquiry, and argues for a move away from state-level analysis toward social histories of women and non-elites. Though it focuses on the 1760s through the 1830s, the article also presents examples highlighting the importance of recovering deeper temporal context for the South African interior.

Women and Popular Politics in Twentieth-Century South Africa

This chapter examines the history and historiography of women’s engagement in popular politics in twentieth-century South Africa. Over the first half of the century, women’s combination of marginality from male-dominated politics and centrality to social life made them critical to a range of grassroots movements. Feminist scholars have demonstrated how contending visions of nationalism aimed at transforming the state not only through moments of protest, but also by everyday transformations of social institutions. Women became central to both apartheid state-building and antiapartheid politics, often by organizing in ways that shared much with older forms of organization: most strikingly, they continued to mobilize as mothers. While women’s grassroots activism enabled the survival of the antiapartheid movement, an entrenched history of male leadership worked to women’s disadvantage in the democratic transition.

Land and Reparation Politics and Policy after Apartheid

Two successive 2018 court judgments guaranteed people living in the parts of South Africa demarcated as communal areas the right to refuse to allow mining on their land. As debates around land restitution and redistribution gripped the country, these cases shone a light on land tenure security in people’s struggles to remain on their ancestral land in the face of continued dispossession after 1994. This article argues that in preserving core elements of the colonially created tribal administration system in the democratic landscape, the state has retained the structures and the imaginative framework that allow particular people to be treated as “natives” who can be moved and stripped of foundational rights, as tribal institutions were designed to do. The Maledu and Baleni cases are illustrative of struggles across the country in which people in communal areas are demanding full recognition and exercise of their rights as citizens.