Suchergebnisse

The article explores core themes arising from a sustained ethnography spanning South Africa's transition to democracy. Focusing on emerging tensions in what used to be a strong horizontal solidarity of 'comradeship' since the 1980s, it explores why the 'elastic band' that held the movement together still holds despite class mobility, divergent socioeconomic needs and mounting challenges to its 'elasticity'. In this longitudinal study of 400 people the author traces the shifts in consciousness and notions of solidarity and analyses how livelihood strategies, notions of race and ethnicity and most importantly notions of class had been redefined by the year 2000. This article is for a generation of black worker leaders who, since the 1973 Durban strikes that ushered the new trade unions onto the historical stage, were a core component of the resistance against racial domination and economic inequality in the country.

It was only used for the special gatherings to taste the fruit of the harvest. The pot was made of dark clay and decorated with intricate light-blue lines. Each line, the elders explained, told a story. And in those gatherings everything was solved—the hurricane was tamed and the absence of rain was given a name and the dead were given a meaning. The pot was eventually broken. For decades people tried to remake it: they used dark clay and light-blue paints, they dug deeper than a goldmine for the right consistency; they even used twigs, sackcloth and diamonds; they even stole old pots from museums. They failed. The hurricane lifted cows off the ?elds, the drought parched the soul, the dead were meaningless. The new pots were wonderful to look at.

This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics. Please check back later for the full article.South African trade unions had a decisive role in the political life of the territory that became the Union of South Africa and later the Republic of South Africa. Such a role was both formative and reactive; since their inception in the 1880s, trade unions attempted to shape the body politic, its legislation, its inclusions and exclusions, its bill of rights, and a whole range of social rights. They had a formative role to play in the construction and destruction of the country's racial order. They also reacted to policy and law in all periods, creating serious challenges that continue well into the Post-Apartheid period.

Instead of focusing on the elections and the implications of the polling outcome, ARI SITAS suggests we channel our pre-occupation with the past and our recent spate of commemorations of political and economic milestones into revisiting the 'dream' and restoring a commitment to hope. The last two years have been all about political nostalgias in South Africa. They were marked by serious commemorative events that emphasised the "possible" that never was: 50 years since the Durban strikes, the spontaneous upsurge there of a black working-class; 40 years since the launch of the United Democratic Front (UDF), the unprecedented popular-democratic movement that challenged apartheid to its core. That was 2023.

Diary of the deliberations of the Convention for a Democratic South Africa (Codesa), edited and commented by Mandela biographer Fatima Meer. In addition, several political players were given the opportunity to comment upon the negotiations. The volume also contains an extensive appendix of 116 pages which includes the Organisation of African Unity's Ad Hoc Committee on Southern Africa's "Harare Declaration" (1989), President F. W. de Klerk's so-called reform speech (opening of Parliament 1990), the key documents of bilateral negotiations between the government and the African National Congress (Groote Schuur and Pretoria Minutes 1990), the National Peace Accord (1991) and documents related to the internal discussion in the African National Congress pertaining its negotiation strategy. (DÜI-Eng)

"Labour Beyond Cosatu is the fifth publication in the Taking Democracy Seriously project which started in 1994 and comprises of surveys of the opinions, attitudes and lifestyles of members of trade unions affiliated to the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu). This survey was conducted shortly before the elections in 2014, in a context in which government economic policy had not fundamentally shifted to the left and the massacre of 34 mineworkers at Marikana by the South African Police Service had fundamentally shaken the labour landscape, with mineworkers not only striking against their employers, but also their union, the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM). Cosatu leaders had started to openly criticise levels of corruption in the State, while a `tectonic shift' took place when the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (Numsa) was expelled from Cosatu at the end of 2014. In its analysis of the survey, Labour Beyond Cosatu shows that Cosatu, fragmented and weakened through fi ssures in its alliance with the African National Congress, is no longer the only dominant force influencing South Africa's labour landscape. Contributors also examine aspects such as changing patterns of class; workers' incomes and their lifestyles; workers' relationship to civil society movements and service delivery protests; and the politics of male power and privilege in trade unions. The trenchant analysis in Labour Beyond Cosatu exhibits fiercely independent and critically engaged labour scholarship, in the face of shifting alliances currently shaping the contestation between authoritarianism and democracy."--Back cover