Suchergebnisse

In South Africa, where the current movement to decolonize universities and cultural institutions has drawn international attention, its arguments often clash with the historical realities of apartheid.

South Africa has reinvented itself repeatedly throughout its history. Now the post-apartheid "freedom generation" is searching for a way to realize its aspirations for a better life.

'The men who have produced this war, and into whose hands England has fallen in these sad times, will pass away. Rhodes, Chamberlain, and Milner may attain the gold, or the power, or the titles, or the glory to which they have aspired; then they will pass away. But the young South African people now coming to its birth in these days of stress and anguish, and which today lies prostrate with the blood upon its forehead for baptismal water weighing down its eyelids-the young South African people will live and grow. It will wax with the centuries, and to it belongs the future.' The antiwar critic Olive Schreiner wrote these words in 1900, when the Anglo-Boer War (now known as the South African War) was fully under way. By singling out the three men whom she held responsible for the British jingoism that led to hostilities, she was also affirming her own sympathies with the Boer cause. The power of her words now lies not in her condemnation of the British colonial leaders Cecil Rhodes, Joseph Chamberlain, and Alfred Milner, but in her optimistic prediction of the rebirth of South Africa and the emergence of the 'young South African people.' Her vision of what the nation would become is part of a long tradition of projects to rejuvenate South Africa-an entity that has had several different manifestations since the mid-nineteenth century. Adapted from the source document.

If South Africa's intellectual history is defined in generational terms then it is possible to speak of a "generation gap" in the history of political and social ideas. Whereas in the 1940s, the elitist and quiescent leadership of the African National Congress was jostled into action by the "Young Lions" of the Youth League; and whereas the literary opposition to apartheid was led from within the Afrikaner/Afrikaans community by the Sestigers—"the Generation of theSixties"—"youth" in South Africa today is not synonymous with political and philosophical innovation. This paper will explore the problems of "youthfulness" and "rejuvenation" in South African political thought by describing the ways in which the "Born Frees" could conceive an intellectual "manifesto," as both an alternative to the post-apartheid "death of ideas" and as a revision of the historiography on "youth" that has been the foundation of narratives about the young since the 1976 Soweto uprising.

Includes bibliographical references. ; The case of Magema Magwaza Fuze (c. 1840-1922) is about the problem of the introduction of writing in a colonial context and, more specifically, in the context of extensive missionary activity. The relative 'success' of this missionary endeavour appeared not only in the small but growing number of converts to Christianity, but perhaps even more momentously with the emergence of a small but critical mass of individuals who were literate and therefore no longer confirmed to an oral culture only. By the end of the nineteenth century one could talk of an incipient 'class' of educated and literate Africans. As the products of mission education they collectively shared an identity of being both Christian and educated. They were amakholwa (plural noun for 'believers'). Being an ikholwa was a political and social, rather than just a religious identity. Above all, by converting to Christianity and by subscribing to progressive ideals of private property ownership, individual rights and the Protestant work ethic, the amakholwa within the limited political sphere of colonial governance acquired, according to their own understanding, the rights of British subjects.