Understanding South African Political Violence: A New Problematic?

Political violence has deep historical roots in South Africa. But if violence has figured prominently, it usually has not proved too difficult to make sense of it: the violence of conquest, the violence of frontier wars, the violence of apartheid and of the struggle against apartheid, the criminal violence of gangs and the ritualized violence of faction fights. Understanding such types of violence has consisted in relating the pathologies and instrumentalities of violence in appropriate ways to these primary social processes and political phenomena. The extent and intensity of current political violence is, however, more difficult to comprehend. This essay, by André du Toit, is in part an attempt to provide an interpretation of the “new political violence”. At one level, the current process of transition has resulted in a shift from the politics of violence to the politics of negotiation. At another level, however, the process has been marked by increasing political violence in the black townships. The incidence of interracial violence has been more limited. The current patterns of violence need to be understood in part in the context of local struggles that are independent of the “master narrative” of violence. They are also not unrelated to the processes of modernization generated by apartheid and to the rapidly diminishing expectations from the negotiations currently underway. The paper places political violence in the context of attempts and steps toward modernization that date back to the seventeenth century. The earlier forms of violence involved warfare between isolated communities, the expansion of the frontier, the formation of the modern state and the suppression of resistance to colonial rule by the Boers and the Zulus. The key feature of African resistance to oppression in the twentieth century was, however, its non-violent character. The resistance was based on demands for full incorporation in the modern state with civil and political rights of citizenship. Even the enforced recourse to violence after the imposition of apartheid did not represent a rejection of the values and ideals of the modern political state and society

Experiments with Truth and Justice in South Africa: Stockenström, Gandhi and the TRC

This article sets out to trace the intellectual and political antecedents of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in the longer perspective of South African history. It does so by taking a closer look at some of the longstanding if intermittent series of South African projects invoking notions of truth and justice, most recently exemplified by the TRC in the context of the new democratic and post-apartheid South Africa of the 1990s. It traces the history from Stockenstro ̈m’s stand for truth and justice on the frontier in the 1830s, through Gandhi’s mobilisation of ‘truth-force’ as a resource for popular protest at the beginning of the twentieth century, to truth and justice in the theory and practice of the TRC. It argues that the TRC process was characterised by a major shift from a central concern with truth as acknowledgement and justice as recognition during the initial victims’ hearings to the quasi- judicial aims and procedures of the amnesty hearings and the perpetrator findings of the TRC Report. It concludes that no direct line can be traced from Stockenstro ̈m and Gandhi’s truth experiments to the TRC process as a founding action of the ‘new South Africa’. None of these experiments is deemed anything like an unqualified ‘success’, or even to have produced clear and unambiguous outcomes. In trying to speak of ‘truth’ and ‘justice’ in South African conditions, Stockenström, Gandhi, and the TRC successively became ensnared in a range of confusions, ambivalences and contradictions

The Legacy of Daantjie Oosthuizen: Revisiting the Liberal Defence of Academic Freedom

The classic formulations of the liberal notion of academic freedom in the South African context date from the period of the late 1950s and early 1960s when the ‘Open Universities’ had to define their stance in the face of the onslaught of Verwoerdian apartheid ideology and rampant Afrikaner nationalism. Adumbrated in the hallowed T. B. Davie formula (‘our freedom from external interference in (a) who shall teach, (b) what we teach, (c) how we teach, and (d) whom we teach’) and articulated more extensively in two short books, The Open Universities in South Africa (1957) and The Open Universities in South Africa and Academic Freedom, 1957-1974 (1974), jointly published by the universities of Cape Town and Witwatersrand, these classic formulations were, above all, concerned with a defence of academic freedom essentially conceived as the institutional autonomy of the university vis-à-vis possible interference or regulation by the state. Forty years on, it is time to revisit these classic defences of academic freedom from the very different vantage point of the newly democratic South Africa. Both the external and the internal contexts of academic freedom have radically changed. Not only has the statutory framework of the apartheid state been dismantled and the ideological force of Afrikaner nationalism spent but the former ‘open universities’ have themselves been transformed in various ways (though not in others). The relatively small-scale collegial institutions almost wholly dependent on state subsidies are now part of a massively expanded tertiary sector subject to the macro-politics of educational restructuring as much as the domestic impact of the managerial revolution within the university itself. In this new context academic freedom no longer has to be defended primarily against the external threat of state intervention; rather it has to be defined in relation to basic democratic norms of accountability and in the often non-collegial context of the contemporary academic workplace

Preslab - micro-computer analysis and design of prestressed concrete slabs

Bibliography: pages 128-132.A micro-computer based package for the analysis and design of prestressed flat slabs is presented. The constant strain triangle and the discreet Kirchhoff plate bending triangle are combined to provide an efficient "shell" element. These triangles are used for the finite element analysis of prestressed flat slabs. An efficient out-of-core solver for sets of linear simultaneous equations is presented. This solver was developed especially for micro-computers. Subroutines for the design of prestressed flat slabs include the principal stresses in the top and bottom fibres of the plate, Wood/Armer moments and untensioned steel areas calculated according to Clark's recommendations. Extensive pre- and post-processing facilities are presented. Several plotting routines were developed to aid the user in his understanding of the behaviour of the structure under load and prestressing

Clearing the ground: Spurious attacks and genuine issues in the debate about philosophy in a post‐colonial society

For anyone somewhat in touch with the philosophical community in South Africa it must come as a surprise to learn that analytical philosophy has been under attack, and needs to be defended against its "critics". The very idea of attacking or defending "analytical philosophy" now seems strange and dated; a generation or two ago there was no lack of critics, nor of defences and counterattacks, but much has changed in the philosophical world since then

Institutionalizing Free Inquiry in Universities during Regime Transitions: The South African Case

For South African higher education and institutionalized research, the transition to a democratic "new South Africa" in the 1990s opened the way to different kinds of fundamental change. The transition also brought new risks and more insidious threats to free inquiry. Taken together these make for a complex and confusing overall picture that can be read in opposite ways. Some changes, especially those that signal the achievement of long social and political struggles, take center stage as dramatic manifestations of a new order of free inquiry. Other changes, especially those brought about by the unanticipated impact of global trends on the restructuring of South African higher education, were only remarked in retrospect. Perhaps the most difficult to assess are those the transition made conceivable, but in the event did not take place. Thus South Africa's democratic transition suggested that beyond the deracialization of the elite sector, inclusive access to higher education would enable free inquiry to draw on the intellectual resources of society as a whole. Regime change from apartheid to democracy promised the institutionaliza- tion of a more robust and flourishing culture of free inquiry fit for a democratic society. (And if this was not realized, how should that lack be identified and assessed?