48 research outputs found
The TRC Report: what kind of history? what kind of truth?
Paper presented at the Wits History Workshop: The TRC; Commissioning the Past, 11-14 June, 199
The construction of apartheid, 1948-1961
African Studies Seminar series. Paper presented August 1988What was distinctive about Apartheid in the 1950s,as compared
with the 1960s? How was it constructed, and how did it change?
Much of the academic and journalistic literature on Apartheid
pre-'reform' depicts it as the product of a single, long-term
'grand plan', pursued systematically and unfalteringly by the
National Party (NP) since its accession to power in 1948. Such
views are challenged in this paper, which argues that although
the Apartheid state has certainly been characterised by a
singular degree of co-ordination, planning and coercion, the
construction of Apartheid has not been a wholly linear,
systematic or monolithic project. The state's uncertainties,
conflicts, weaknesses, changes and failures, although far less
visible than its cohesiveness and triumphs, have also made their
mark on the construction of Apartheid. Moreover, some (but
obviously not all) of the premises and objectives of Apartheid
changed in fundamental ways at the onset of the 1960s. (The
presentation of these arguments is very brief and schematic,
being a summary of large chunks of my doctoral thesis.
The State and policy-making in apartheid's second phase
Paper presented at the Wits History Workshop: Structure and Experience in the Making of Apartheid, 6-10 February, 1990
Modernity and measurement: Further thoughts on the apartheid state
African Studies Seminar series. Paper presented 19 August 1996In 1957, the Commission of Enquiry in regard to Undesirable Publications, which had been appointed
to 'investigate the problem of undesirable and inferior publications as systematically and scientifically
as possible', presented its findings. In pursuit of' reliable data.. and a scientific explanation of them, the
Commission had commissioned a case-study of 'reading matter and illustration among the Bantu in
Pretoria', and had nominated the head of the Mathematics Division of the SA Council for Scientific and
Industrial Research (CSIR), together with a government ethnologist, to do the job. The Commission
concluded, inter alia, that illustrations of White women were probably having a harmful effect on ‘the
Bantu in Pretoria’. This is how it reached that conclusion:
The illustrations encountered as decorations in the homes or rooms of the Bantu in Pretoria are
analysed below under various headings. By this means, an idea may be formed of the types of
illustrations in which the Bantu are primarily interested....
Specious logic and the inexpert use of statistics, no doubt. But why did the Commission think it
necessary to appoint the head of the Maths Division of CSIR, along with an ethnologist6, to oversee this
research in the first place? Why was 'the nature of reading matter and illustrations among the Bantu in
Pretoria' considered and presented as a statistical issue?
It will take a while to suggest an answer to these questions. I have cited the Commission's report at the
outset as what might seem to be a farcical example of the subject of this paper: an enduring and familiar
(although fractured) preoccupation within the apartheid state, with generating and storing vast amounts
of statistical 'knowledge', particularly in respect of the African population, hi fundamental ways,
apartheid was elaborated in and along with continual efforts to count and classify the population, so as
to try to measure - inter alia - the exact size of the African majority and the rate at which it reproduced
itself compared with other racial groups; the spatial distribution of various races within segregated spaces;
the extent of interracial sex and marriage; the numbers of Africans 'legally' resident in urban areas; the
numbers considered 'surplus' to urban labour requirements and therefore liable for removal; the
fluctuations in African labour 'supply' relative to labour 'demand'; the extent of' idleness' amongst African
youth in the cities - not to mention the extent of moral harm inflicted by illustrations of white women in
African homes. And the list could go on.
This paper aims to reflect more closely on some of the connections between capacities to count
and control in South Africa (particularly during the first phase of apartheid). In some ways this exercise is a rather obvious one, and it might seem surprising that little along these lines has been attempted before.
It reflects, perhaps, a lingering reluctance to engage with the growing body of historical work influenced
in some way or other by Foucault's writings on the knowledge/power nexus in the 'modem' world
Traditions of power and the power of tradition: the state and African customary marriage in South Africa
Paper presented at the Wits History Workshop: Democracy, Popular Precedents, Practice and Culture, 13-15 July, 1994
Speak out on poverty: Hearing, inaudibility, and citizenship in post-apartheid South Africa
In 1998, Speak Out on Poverty held hearings across South Africa shortly after the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) completed eighteen months of highly publicized, nationwide hearings at which victims testified. Speak Out challenged the TRC’s focus on overt political violations, seen to occlude forms of structural violence central to apartheid's policy and practice, as well as longer legacies of colonialism. Reading Speak Out alongside the TRC puts pressure on supposed differences between official truth commissions or tribunals and those run by civil society. Discussing Speak Out in relation to the TRC signaled more than a set of comparisons. In a time of transition, Speak Out spoke from within and against the noise of the TRC. It aimed to make poverty and inequality the nation's priority rather than reconciliation, or at least to challenge notions of reconciliation that did not have inequity and poverty at its center