Suchergebnisse

Siphokazi Magadla's Guerrillas and Combative Mothers rests on 40 life histories of women who joined armed struggles of many kinds to fight apartheid. The book is a result of her doctorate which in turn rests on work she did while being a research consultant at the Institute for Security Studies. In 2010, on the tenth anniversary of the United Nations' (UN's) adoption of Resolution 1325, Magadla and Chery Hendricks produced the documentary Women and Security Sector Transformation in South Africa (2010). Magadla interviewed Major General Ntsiki Memela-Motumi, then chief director of transformation management in the South African National Defence Force (SANDF); Thandi Modise, a previous chair of the Portfolio Committee on Defence in the National Assembly and; Mala Singh, former deputy national commissioner of the South African Police Service (SAPS). Memela-Motumi and Modise are both former combatants in Umkhonto weSizwe (MK). They provided rich accounts of how their experiences as women in MK informed their later roles in transforming the SANDF. However, the study also has a prior genesis in Magadla's own experience of being the daughter of a soldier in the Transkei Defence Force. He ended his military career at 40 after that force was integrated into the SANDF. Her mother, a psychiatric nurse, also made her aware of the unstable mental conditions of many soldiers who were demobilised from the various armed forces in the period around 1994. This personal knowledge plus the experience of working with the Institute for Security Studies (ISS) gives the impetus for an important study. It is a study arising out of the complicated and turbulent moment in time when seven armies were integrated. These seven armies include the South African Defence Force (SADF), MK, the Azanian People's Liberation Army (APLA) and the four 'homeland' armies. This was a period in which those who had chosen to fight apartheid were faced with the question of whether they were career soldiers or not; and whether a return to civilian life was possible now that there was no longer a war.

At the heart of the 1996 South African Constitution is a new vision of citizenship. The Constitution is premised on the eradication of apartheid separation and provisions for a shared humanity. Bearing in mind an authoritarian history and a systematic denial of voice to the majority of people, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission entrenched the right to speak and the recognition of a shared humanity as factors in our shared public life. But questions about who is a South African, who belongs and who has the right to speak and criticise erupt frequently in the media as themes alongside issues of great public importance being debated. There is also a steady increase over the years since 1994 in protest action, which could be considered a demand by citizens to be heard. These protests have provoked violent response from state agents, thus undermining ordinary South Africans' sense of their ability to affect political processes. We ask whether these features of our public life are indicative of a crisis in citizenship in a post-authoritarian, "new" democracy and what mediated modes of practising citizenship, apart from casting votes, are available to South Africans and whether these have value in deepening democracy. The article explores the relationship between the media and the emergence of new forms of citizenship in democratic South Africa by providing a brief overview of various notions of citizenship before illustrating how these notions find manifestation in contemporary South Africa.

In this timely and erudite collection, writers from the Global South demonstrate that forms of publicness are multiple, mobile and varied. Drawing primarily on materials from Africa for their capacity to speak to global developments, they propose new concepts and methodologies to analyse how public engagements work in society.

Composed after the election of the first black U.S. president, after the post-global financial crisis, more than a decade after 9/11, and concomitant with a rash of xenophobic incidents across the globe, Unveiling Whiteness distills key themes associated with a post-millennial global whiteness