The Changing Nature of Employment and the Reform of Labor and Social Security Legislation in Post-Apartheid South Africa

This paper tries to understand the current status of South African labor market, which is changing in contradictory directions, i.e. a strengthening of the rights and protection of workers at the same time as the flexibilization of employment, in the context of the characteristics of labor and social security legislation in South Africa, as well as the nature of labor and social security reforms after democratization. We put emphasis on the corporatist nature of labor policy-making as the factor influencing the course of reforms; it is argued that the apparently contradictive changes can be explained consistently by the corporatist labor policy-making process which has been practiced notwithstanding the problem of representativeness.

Soccer, South Africa and celebrity status:Mark Fish, popular culture and the post-apartheid state

The rise of celebrity culture is a theme that has attracted a significant amount of attention within both mainstream sociology and cultural studies in more recent times. Ensuing debate has identified contemporary sports figures as an important facet of the celebrity‐media nexus and as possible signifiers of cultural change. In this paper we take one particular sports celebrity, South African soccer star Mark Fish, and evaluate his image in relation to debates surrounding sport, politics and the post‐apartheid state. We argue that because Fish appears to enjoy all the benefits of celebrity status (within his home country at least), an analysis of his career and identity provide a useful means by which to think about the changing political and nationalistic values within South African society.

L'Afrique du Sud post-apartheid : le temps de la reconstruction, des réformes et des mutations à travers le Globe and Mail de Toronto et le Times de Londres (1994-2004)

La décennie 1994-2004 est d’une importance majeure pour l’Afrique du Sud nouvellement démocratique. Au cours de cette période, le pays jette les bases de sa reconstruction à travers la mise en place de réformes politiques, économiques et sociales afin de combattre les méfaits de quarante années d’apartheid et de poser les jalons de son développement. Dans ce contexte, les médias internationaux ont porté une attention particulière à ces nombreux changements, plus spécifiquement la presse écrite canadienne et britannique, en particulier le Globe and Mail et le Times. Notre mémoire s’intéresse donc au traitement fait par ces deux quotidiens, l’un torontois l’autre londonien, de la reconstruction sud-africaine et ce, à travers l’analyse de thèmes précis et de ses réformes marquantes. Il sera plus spécifiquement question des réformes politiques et constitutionnelles avec la figure de Nelson Mandela, héros de la lutte contre l’apartheid, père de la « nation arc-en-ciel » ainsi que celle de son successeur à la présidence sud-africaine en 1999, Thabo Mbéki. Aussi, la Commission Vérité et Réconciliation et la nouvelle Constitution, toutes deux mises en place durant l’année 1996 sont majeures puisqu’elles dictent la nouvelle identité donnée au pays. Les réformes socioéconomiques de la reconstruction ont également attirés l’attention de nos deux journaux. Particulièrement, nous analyserons les points de vue de ceux-ci concernant le Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) ainsi que de la « discrimination positive » et du Black Economic Empowerment (BEE), deux mesures censées contribuer à l’amélioration de la qualité de vie de la population et à effacer les profondes inégalités socioéconomiques léguées par l’apartheid. Or, cet espoir d’une vie meilleure laisse rapidement place à un désenchantement. La forte criminalité et la dramatique explosion du VIH-sida dans une nouvelle Afrique du Sud qui cherche à se reconstruire a beaucoup retenu l’attention du Globe and Mail et du Times. Ces deux défis de taille s’avèrent être l’envers de la médaille du miracle sud-africain et ne manquent pas d’attirer l’attention des deux journaux, mettant clairement en évidence les « ratés » socioéconomiques » de la reconstruction.

From apartheid to unity: white capital and black power in the racial integration of South African football, 1976-1992

This article analyses the complex process that deracialised and democratised South African football between the early 1970s and 1990s. Based mainly on archival documents, it argues that growing isolation from world sport, exemplified by South Africa's expulsion from the Olympic movement in 1970 and FIFA in 1976, and the reinvigoration of the liberation struggle with the Soweto youth uprising triggered a process of gradual desegregation in the South African professional game. While Pretoria viewed such changes as a potential bulwark against rising black militancy, white football and big business had their own reasons for eventually supporting racial integration, as seen in the founding of the National Soccer League. As negotiations for a new democratic South Africa began in earnest between the African National Congress (ANC) and the National Party (NP) in the latter half of the 1980s, transformations in football and politics paralleled and informed each other. Previously antagonistic football associations began a series of 'unity talks' between 1985 and 1986 that eventually culminated in the formation of a single, non-racial South African Football Association in December 1991, just a few days before the Convention for a Democratic South Africa (CODESA) opened the process of writing a new post-apartheid constitution. Finally, three decades of isolation came to an end as FIFA welcomed South Africa back into world football in 1992 - a powerful example of the seemingly boundless potential of a liberated and united South Africa ahead of the first democratic elections in 1994.

South Africa and the global game:football, apartheid and beyond

Firmly situating South African teams, players, and associations in the international framework in which they have to compete, South Africa and the Global Game: Football, Apartheid, and Beyond presents an interdisciplinary analysis of how and why South Africa underwent a remarkable transformation from a pariah in world sport to the first African host of a World Cup in 2010. Written by an eminent team of scholars, this special issue and book aims to examine the importance of football in South African society, revealing how the black oppression transformed a colonial game into a force for political, cultural and social liberation. It explores how the hosting of the 2010 World Cup aims to enhance the prestige of the post-apartheid nation, to generate economic growth and stimulate Pan-African pride. Among the themes dealt with are race and racism, class and gender dynamics, social identities, mass media and culture, and globalization. This collection of original and insightful essays will appeal to specialists in African Studies, Cultural Studies, and Sport Studies, as well as to non-specialist readers seeking to inform themselves ahead of the 2010 World Cup. This book was published as a special issue of Soccer and Society. 1. Introduction Peter Alegi and Chris Bolsmann Part 1: Past is Prologue – History of Football in South Africa 2. Football as Code: The Social Diffusion of ‘Soccer’ in South Africa Lloyd Hill 3. White Football in South Africa: Empire, Apartheid and Change, 1892 – 1977 Chris Bolsmann 4. A Biography of Darius Dhlomo: Transnational Footballer in the Era of Apartheid Peter Alegi 5. Women and Gender in South African Soccer Cynthia Fabrizio Pelak Part 2: Football Culture after Apartheid: Local and Transnational Dynamics 6. "You Must Support Chiefs: Pirates Already Have Two White Fans!" Race and Racial Discourse in South African Football Fandom Marc Fletcher 7. "It wasn’t that I did not like South African Football": Media, History, and Biography Sean Jacobs 8. Soccer in a Rugby Town: Restructuring Football in Stellenbosch Sylvain Cubizolles 9. Differing Trajectories: Football Development and Patterns of Player Migration in South Africa and Ghana Paul Darby and Eirik Solberg Part 3: The 2010 World Cup: Challenges and Opportunities 10. Football's Tsars: Proprietorship, Corporatism and Politics in the 2010 FIFA World Cup Scarlett Cornelissen 11. Sports as Cultural Diplomacy: The 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa’s Foreign Policy Sifiso Mxolisi Ndlovu 12. World Cup 2010: Africa’s Turn or the Turn on Africa? Ashwin Desai and Goolam Vahed 13. The 2010 FIFA World Cup: Critical Voices From Below Percy Ngonyama.

Reckoning With Apartheid: The Conundrum of Working Through the Past, An Introduction

From April 26-29, 1994, South Africa held its first universal, democratic elections. Witnessed by the world, South Africans of all races waited patiently in line to cast their ballots, signaling the official and symbolic birth of the “new” South Africa. The subsequent years, marked initially with euphoric hopes for racial healing enabled by institutional processes such as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), have instead, most recently, inspired deep concern about epidemic levels of HIV/AIDS, violent crime, state corruption, and unbridled market reforms directed at everything from property to bodies to babies. Now, seemingly beleaguered state officials deploy the mantra “TINA” (There Is No Alternative [to neoliberal development]) to fend off criticism of growing income and wealth disparities. To coincide, more or less, with the anniversary of 1994—less to commemorate than to signal something about the trajectory of the past twenty years—we are proposing an interdisciplinary, special theme section of Comparative Studies in South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East (CSSAAME) entitled “The Haunted Present: Reckoning After Apartheid” (tentative title). The special theme section is framed around questions of reckoning in the double sense of both a moral and practical accounting for historical injury alongside the challenges and failures of the no-longer “new” South Africa. Against accounts depicting the liberation era as non-violent and peaceable, more nuanced analysis we argue suggests not only that South Africa’s “revolution” was marked by both collective and individual violence—on the part of the state and the liberation movements—but that reckoning with the present demands of scholars, the media, and cultural commentators that they begin to grapple more fully with the dimensions and different figurations of South Africa’s violent colonial history. Indeed, violence and reckoning appear as two central forces in contemporary South African political, economic, and social life. In response, we are driven to pose the following questions: In the post-apartheid period, what forms of (individual, structural) violence have come to bear on South African life? How does this violence reckon with apartheid and its legacies? Does it in fact reckon with the past? How can we or should we think about violence as a response to the (failed?) reckoning of state initiatives like the TRC? What has enabled or enables aesthetic forms—literature, photography, plastic arts, and other modes of expressive culture—to respond to the difficulties of South Africa’s ongoing transition? What, in fact, would a practice or ethic of reckoning defined in the following way look like? ˈrekəniNG/ noun: • the action or process of calculating or estimating something: last year was not, by any reckoning, a particularly good one; the system of time reckoning in Babylon • a person’s view, opinion, or judgment: by ancient reckoning, bacteria are plants • archaic, a bill or account, or its settlement • the avenging or punishing of past mistakes or misdeeds: the fear of being brought to reckoning there will be a terrible reckoning (Oxford English Dictionary) Looking back on the period, just before 1994, is sobering indeed. At the time, many saw in the energies and courage of those fighting for liberation the possibilities of a post-racial, post-conflict society. Yet as much as the new was ushered in, old apartheid forms lingered. Recalling Nadine Gordimer’s invocation of Gramsci’s “morbid symptoms” more and more it seems “the old is dying and the new cannot be born” (Gramsci cited in Gordimer 1982). And even as the new began to emerge other forces—both internal and external to South Africa—redefined the conditions for transformation. The so-called “new” South Africa, as Jennifer Wenzel has argued, was really more than anything “the changing face of old oppressions” (Wenzel 2009:159). The implications for our special theme section of CSSAAME are many. We begin by exploring the gender, race, and class dimensions of contemporary South African life by way of its literatures, histories, and politics, its reversion to custom, the claims of ancestors on the living, in brief, the various cultural expressive modes in which contemporary South Africa reckons with its past and in so doing accounts, day by day, for the ways in which the present can be lived, pragmatically. This moves us some distance from the exercise in “truth and reconciliation” of the earlier post-transition years to consider more fully the nature of post-conflict, the suturing of old enmities in the present, and the ways of resolving those lingering suspicions both ordinary and the stuff of the dark night of the soul (Nelson 2009:xv).

Reckoning With Apartheid: The Conundrum of Working Through the Past

From April 26-29, 1994, South Africa held its first universal, democratic elections. Witnessed by the world, South Africans of all races waited patiently in line to cast their ballots, signaling the official and symbolic birth of the “new” South Africa. The subsequent years, marked initially with euphoric hopes for racial healing enabled by institutional processes such as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), have instead, most recently, inspired deep concern about epidemic levels of HIV/AIDS, violent crime, state corruption, and unbridled market reforms directed at everything from property to bodies to babies. Now, seemingly beleaguered state officials deploy the mantra “TINA” (There Is No Alternative [to neoliberal development]) to fend off criticism of growing income and wealth disparities. To coincide, more or less, with the anniversary of 1994—less to commemorate than to signal something about the trajectory of the past twenty years—we are proposing an interdisciplinary, special theme section of Comparative Studies in South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East (CSSAAME) entitled “The Haunted Present: Reckoning After Apartheid” (tentative title). The special theme section is framed around questions of reckoning in the double sense of both a moral and practical accounting for historical injury alongside the challenges and failures of the no-longer “new” South Africa. Against accounts depicting the liberation era as non-violent and peaceable, more nuanced analysis we argue suggests not only that South Africa’s “revolution” was marked by both collective and individual violence—on the part of the state and the liberation movements—but that reckoning with the present demands of scholars, the media, and cultural commentators that they begin to grapple more fully with the dimensions and different figurations of South Africa’s violent colonial history. Indeed, violence and reckoning appear as two central forces in contemporary South African political, economic, and social life. In response, we are driven to pose the following questions: In the post-apartheid period, what forms of (individual, structural) violence have come to bear on South African life? How does this violence reckon with apartheid and its legacies? Does it in fact reckon with the past? How can we or should we think about violence as a response to the (failed?) reckoning of state initiatives like the TRC? What has enabled or enables aesthetic forms—literature, photography, plastic arts, and other modes of expressive culture—to respond to the difficulties of South Africa’s ongoing transition? What, in fact, would a practice or ethic of reckoning defined in the following way look like? ˈrekəniNG/ noun: • the action or process of calculating or estimating something: last year was not, by any reckoning, a particularly good one; the system of time reckoning in Babylon • a person’s view, opinion, or judgment: by ancient reckoning, bacteria are plants • archaic, a bill or account, or its settlement • the avenging or punishing of past mistakes or misdeeds: the fear of being brought to reckoning there will be a terrible reckoning (Oxford English Dictionary) Looking back on the period, just before 1994, is sobering indeed. At the time, many saw in the energies and courage of those fighting for liberation the possibilities of a post-racial, post-conflict society. Yet as much as the new was ushered in, old apartheid forms lingered. Recalling Nadine Gordimer’s invocation of Gramsci’s “morbid symptoms” more and more it seems “the old is dying and the new cannot be born” (Gramsci cited in Gordimer 1982). And even as the new began to emerge other forces—both internal and external to South Africa—redefined the conditions for transformation. The so-called “new” South Africa, as Jennifer Wenzel has argued, was really more than anything “the changing face of old oppressions” (Wenzel 2009:159). The implications for our special theme section of CSSAAME are many. We begin by exploring the gender, race, and class dimensions of contemporary South African life by way of its literatures, histories, and politics, its reversion to custom, the claims of ancestors on the living, in brief, the various cultural expressive modes in which contemporary South Africa reckons with its past and in so doing accounts, day by day, for the ways in which the present can be lived, pragmatically. This moves us some distance from the exercise in “truth and reconciliation” of the earlier post-transition years to consider more fully the nature of post-conflict, the suturing of old enmities in the present, and the ways of resolving those lingering suspicions both ordinary and the stuff of the dark night of the soul (Nelson 2009:xv).

Violent urbanism is us

This paper explores violent urbanism in the recent science-fiction filem District 9 whhich depicts an alien immigration camp, filmed on location in Soweto in 2008 in the midst of a series of violent clashed between indigenous South Africans and the new wave of African immigrants. Violent Urbanism is the State of method of control of bodies and populations by those precise biological techniques that determine geopolitical sites for the control of cities. This film while presented as cinema verite speaks the real invasion of traditional, spatio-disciplinary regimes such as corporate-run detention centres, refugee camps, border control and enforced relocation by those imperceptible techniques which violate the body by reducing it to a biological datum, tool, or specimen to serve the security agenda of the twenty-first century nation-state. These techniques are chemical and biological warfare proliferation; genetic engineering; and surveillance systems, such as biometrics, whose purview is no longer limited to the specular but includes the molecular. District 9 evinces a compelling urban image of contemporary biopolitics that disturbs the received historiography of post-apartheid urbanism. Clearly Johannesburg is not the only place this could or is happening - the reach of biopolitics is worldwide. District 9 visualises with utter precision the corporate hijacking of the biological realm in contemporary cites, just as it asks the unsettling question, who exactly is the "audience" of Violent Urbanism?

Theorising South Africa's corporate governance

South Africa’s principal corporate governance report aspires to an ‘inclusive’ approach to corporate governance, in which companies are clearly advised to consider the interests of a variety of stakeholders. Yet, in common with many other countries, there is little discussion of the theoretical foundations and assumptions implicit in the recommended approach to corporate governance. The purpose of this article is to provide an analysis of corporate governance and the corporate environment in South Africa in terms of existing theory and models of corporate governance, and to provide a critique based on a consideration of traditional African values and the socio-economic necessities of post-apartheid South Africa. The result is the identification of an incompatibility between the current corporate environment in South Africa and the given exposition of African values. Some prospects for change are then identified.

The Tourism-Development Nexus in Namibia : A Study on National Tourism Policy and Local Tourism Enterprises' Policy Knowledge

The tourism development nexus in southern Africa involves highly topical issues related to tourism planning, power relations, community participation, and natural resources. Namibia offers a particularly interesting context for the study of these issues due to its colonial legacy, vast tourism potential, recently adopted tourism policy and community-based approaches to tourism and natural resource management. This study is an interdisciplinary endeavour to analyse the role of tourism in Namibia s post-apartheid transformation process by focusing on Namibian tourism policy and local tourism enterprises' policy knowledge. Major attention is paid to how the tourism policy's national development objectives are understood and conceptualised by the representatives of different tourism enterprises and the ways in which they relate to the practical needs of the enterprises. Through such local policy knowledge the study explores various opportunities, challenges and constraints related to the promotion of tourism as a development strategy. The study utilises a political economy approach to tourism and development through three current and interrelated discourses which are relevant in the Namibian context. These are tourism, power and inequality, tourism and sustainable development, and tourism and poverty reduction. The qualitative research material was gathered in Namibia in 2006-2007 and 2008. This material consists of 34 semi-structured interviews in 16 tourism enterprises, including private trophy hunting farms and private lodges, small tour operators and community-based tourism enterprises. In addition, the research material consists of observations in the enterprises, and 37 informal and 23 expert interviews. The findings indicate that in the light of local tourism enterprises the tourism policy objectives appear more complex and ambiguous. Furthermore, they involve multiple meanings and interpretations which reflect the socio-economic stratification of the informants and Namibian society, together with the professional stratification of the tourism enterprises and restrictions on the capacity of tourism to address the development objectives. In the light of such findings it is obvious that aspects of power and inequality affect the tourism development nexus in Namibia. The study concludes that, as in the case of other southern African countries, in order to promote sustainable development and reduce poverty, Namibia should not only target tourism growth but pay attention to who benefits from that growth and how. From a political economy point of view, it is important that prevailing structural challenges are addressed equally in the planning of tourism, development and natural resource management. Such approach would help the Namibian majority to enjoy the benefits of increasing tourism in the country.

African Pasts: Memory and History in African Literatures

Woods, T. (2007). African Pasts: Memory and History in African Literatures. Manchetser: Manchester University Press. RAE2008

Bystander Narratives: The Fiction of J.M. Coetzee and the Holocaust

J.M. Coetzee’s novels are suffused with a pervasive, though often oblique, Holocaust awareness. Direct references to the event and to the historical era to which it belongs, subtle stylistic and thematic echoes of Holocaust writing, and the recurrent mobilization of Holocaust imagery in Coetzee’s novels all contribute to suggest the significance of the event to the author’s work and thought. Providing Coetzee with a lens through which to view the contemporary situation, both local and global, the Holocaust offers Coetzee a means by which difficult and complex questions of ethics and historiographical truth may be approached. Above all, the Holocaust and its representation contribute to Coetzee’s exploration of the dilemmas of translating the traumatic lived experience of atrocity – including, but not limited to, life in apartheid South Africa – into narrative form. Taken as a whole, Coetzee’s oeuvre initially anticipates and later responds to, in characteristically oblique fashion, the narrative project(s) facing post-apartheid South Africa as the newly-democratic nation sought to make sense of its past through a variety of means, the most important of which was the country’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Implicitly challenging the TRC’s findings as well as its narrative assumptions, the Coetzean oeuvre accordingly invites being read as offering a continuous and evolving counter-narrative to the TRC and its construction of a narrative of the apartheid past for the post-apartheid nation. In utilizing the Holocaust, its representations, and the reception thereof to frame his response to apartheid, Coetzee implicates both in a critique of the Western model of modernity, suggesting, in the process, the importance of reconfiguring modernity in a more ethical shape.