{"title":"The Political Economy of Government Subsidised Housing in South Africa ed. by Sithembiso Lindelihle Myeni and Andrew Okem (review)","authors":"A. Mabin","doi":"10.1353/trn.2021.0024","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/trn.2021.0024","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45045,"journal":{"name":"Transformation-Critical Perspectives on Southern Africa","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2021-10-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76761581","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Keywords: an invitation","authors":"G. Maré, P. Vale","doi":"10.1353/trn.2021.0014","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/trn.2021.0014","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45045,"journal":{"name":"Transformation-Critical Perspectives on Southern Africa","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2021-10-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84778973","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:This article assesses the likelihood that land reform will reduce poverty and inequality by highlighting important historical processes and relevant comparative experiences. These lead us to a different perspective than the one driving calls for a radicalisation of land reform. Conquest and colonial rule reserved most of the land for whites, and processes of land alienation and discrimination were constantly exacerbated until South Africa became a democracy. At the same time, while a system of private property and individual title was secured for whites, land rights were systematically diminished within black societies. Through most of the twentieth century an entrenched system of migrant labour ensured a massive flow of people, initially mostly men, between rural 'reserves' and white-owned mines, offices, suburban households and the factories of the emerging manufacturing sector. Influx control prevented black families from moving to, or acquiring property rights in, urban areas. During the apartheid era, these processes destroyed the ability of most Africans to generate any income from agriculture, while also leading eventually to mass unemployment and a dependence on state grants for those who continued to live in rural areas. Meanwhile, rather than benefitting from state attempts to boost their productivity on the land, weaker white farmers mostly exited the rural areas and moved to urban centres, where their standards of living rose substantially. Combining these historical insights with the reality that the successful land reform programmes of Asia were based on providing poor farmers with access to land titles rather than additional amounts of land, leads us seriously to question the notion that transferring huge amounts of land to black families will substantially reduce poverty or inequality over the next ten years.
{"title":"What can land reform achieve in the 2020s? Historical and comparative reflections on the potential of land redistribution to contribute to transformation and poverty alleviation in South Africa","authors":"P. Delius, S. Schirmer","doi":"10.1353/trn.2021.0016","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/trn.2021.0016","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article assesses the likelihood that land reform will reduce poverty and inequality by highlighting important historical processes and relevant comparative experiences. These lead us to a different perspective than the one driving calls for a radicalisation of land reform. Conquest and colonial rule reserved most of the land for whites, and processes of land alienation and discrimination were constantly exacerbated until South Africa became a democracy. At the same time, while a system of private property and individual title was secured for whites, land rights were systematically diminished within black societies. Through most of the twentieth century an entrenched system of migrant labour ensured a massive flow of people, initially mostly men, between rural 'reserves' and white-owned mines, offices, suburban households and the factories of the emerging manufacturing sector. Influx control prevented black families from moving to, or acquiring property rights in, urban areas. During the apartheid era, these processes destroyed the ability of most Africans to generate any income from agriculture, while also leading eventually to mass unemployment and a dependence on state grants for those who continued to live in rural areas. Meanwhile, rather than benefitting from state attempts to boost their productivity on the land, weaker white farmers mostly exited the rural areas and moved to urban centres, where their standards of living rose substantially. Combining these historical insights with the reality that the successful land reform programmes of Asia were based on providing poor farmers with access to land titles rather than additional amounts of land, leads us seriously to question the notion that transferring huge amounts of land to black families will substantially reduce poverty or inequality over the next ten years.","PeriodicalId":45045,"journal":{"name":"Transformation-Critical Perspectives on Southern Africa","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2021-10-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76446414","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:This review article discusses two recent publications dealing with the life and work of Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe (1924-1978), namely Lie on Your Wounds: the prison correspondence of Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe (2019), and Pogrund's edited collection Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe: new reflections (2019). The article makes a case for the importance of Sobukwe's prison letters in the ongoing scholarship of this neglected figure of the South African political struggle for freedom. The main aim is to retrieve a view of Sobukwe as an intellectual, a deeply engaged political thinker, and a man committed to ethical leadership. Inevitably, Sobukwe's life and ideas also operate as a vehicle for criticising South Africa's post-apartheid leaders' lack of integrity, corrupt practices, and the forgotten promise of alleviating the suffering of the majority of poor people who elected them.
{"title":"On remembering Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe","authors":"Grahame Hayes","doi":"10.1353/trn.2021.0019","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/trn.2021.0019","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This review article discusses two recent publications dealing with the life and work of Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe (1924-1978), namely Lie on Your Wounds: the prison correspondence of Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe (2019), and Pogrund's edited collection Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe: new reflections (2019). The article makes a case for the importance of Sobukwe's prison letters in the ongoing scholarship of this neglected figure of the South African political struggle for freedom. The main aim is to retrieve a view of Sobukwe as an intellectual, a deeply engaged political thinker, and a man committed to ethical leadership. Inevitably, Sobukwe's life and ideas also operate as a vehicle for criticising South Africa's post-apartheid leaders' lack of integrity, corrupt practices, and the forgotten promise of alleviating the suffering of the majority of poor people who elected them.","PeriodicalId":45045,"journal":{"name":"Transformation-Critical Perspectives on Southern Africa","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2021-10-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77596636","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Renewing Workers' Education: a radical vision ed. by Linda Cooper and Sheri Hamilton (review)","authors":"L. Chisholm","doi":"10.1353/trn.2021.0021","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/trn.2021.0021","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45045,"journal":{"name":"Transformation-Critical Perspectives on Southern Africa","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2021-10-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81546358","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A Short History of Modern Angola by David Birmingham (review)","authors":"Claudia Gastrow","doi":"10.1353/trn.2021.0022","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/trn.2021.0022","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45045,"journal":{"name":"Transformation-Critical Perspectives on Southern Africa","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2021-10-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81378609","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Cape Radicals: intellectual and political thought of the New Era Fellowship by Crain Soudien (review)","authors":"C. Sandwith","doi":"10.1353/TRN.2021.0001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/TRN.2021.0001","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45045,"journal":{"name":"Transformation-Critical Perspectives on Southern Africa","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2021-05-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86359769","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:In the last three decades, university systems in the Global North have been through a major shift towards greater dependence on temporary and casual academic workers, and a decrease in permanent or tenured academic jobs. This phenomenon – the casualisation of academic labour – has received almost no scholarly attention in South Africa, and statistics and literature describing the academic profession here tend to cover permanent academics only. This paper narrates two of the author’s own experiences of doing temporary academic work – a one-semester teaching contract and a postdoctoral fellowship – and considers their implications for the nature of the ‘university community’ and for the sustainability of the academic profession or pipeline. Relatively poorly paid temporary academic workers are often employed in exploitative conditions precisely so as to improve permanent academics’ working conditions, which has ethical implications for the nature of the ‘university community’ and transformation. Moreover, temporary academics, including postdoctoral fellows, are absent from policy documents on growing the next generation of South African academics, which focus on the potential of those already in permanent jobs. Consequently, temporary academics appear to be in a ‘parallel pipeline’ which is not necessarily leading to permanent employment. The paper proposes some explanations of what is driving the proliferation of short-term contracts of various kinds, including issues of cost, permanent staff workload, and the way Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET) ranks South African universities. It concludes with suggestions for further research on the scale, purposes and consequences of temporary academic work in South African higher education.
{"title":"Are we in a parallel pipeline? Bringing the casualisation of academic work onto the South African higher education agenda","authors":"Philippa Kerr","doi":"10.1353/TRN.2021.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/TRN.2021.0005","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:In the last three decades, university systems in the Global North have been through a major shift towards greater dependence on temporary and casual academic workers, and a decrease in permanent or tenured academic jobs. This phenomenon – the casualisation of academic labour – has received almost no scholarly attention in South Africa, and statistics and literature describing the academic profession here tend to cover permanent academics only. This paper narrates two of the author’s own experiences of doing temporary academic work – a one-semester teaching contract and a postdoctoral fellowship – and considers their implications for the nature of the ‘university community’ and for the sustainability of the academic profession or pipeline. Relatively poorly paid temporary academic workers are often employed in exploitative conditions precisely so as to improve permanent academics’ working conditions, which has ethical implications for the nature of the ‘university community’ and transformation. Moreover, temporary academics, including postdoctoral fellows, are absent from policy documents on growing the next generation of South African academics, which focus on the potential of those already in permanent jobs. Consequently, temporary academics appear to be in a ‘parallel pipeline’ which is not necessarily leading to permanent employment. The paper proposes some explanations of what is driving the proliferation of short-term contracts of various kinds, including issues of cost, permanent staff workload, and the way Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET) ranks South African universities. It concludes with suggestions for further research on the scale, purposes and consequences of temporary academic work in South African higher education.","PeriodicalId":45045,"journal":{"name":"Transformation-Critical Perspectives on Southern Africa","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2021-05-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88090713","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:Many countries across the world, including on the African continent, legislated increased independence for their central banks since the early 1990s. The way in which this happened took different forms. In some cases these legal processes were wrapped either into constitutional reforms in the context of democratic transitions or into economic reforms that changed the strategic direction of their development. This research note provides a fresh assessment of the affirmation of central bank autonomy and independence in South Africa during the period of constitutional negotiations up to the country’s first democratic elections in 1994. Although the independence and autonomy of the SA Reserve Bank (SARB), the central bank of the country, are enshrined in its Constitution, little has been written about the ideas and processes that culminated in such inclusion in the Constitution, in itself an unusual step at that time. This note addresses this void in the literature. The affirmation of central bank autonomy and independence (CBI) from political interference coincided with similar processes at that time in other developed and middle-income developing countries. In South Africa the decision taken at the time of the constitutional negotiations to grant the SARB its independence followed on an unfortunate history of government intervention in the central bank in the 1980s. In this research note we analyse some key documents on this policy debate, previously undiscovered, and present the views of a range of key actors in the negotiations process. Some economic policy think tanks such as the Economic Trends Research Group, and the Industrial Strategy Project, did not have a view on the matter of CBI, as far as we could gather. Our conclusions, based on this new evidence, are both surprising and unexpected. SARB independence was enshrined in the Constitution, we show, as much ‘by accident than by design’.
{"title":"The Political Economy of South Africa’s constitutional road to Central Bank Independence (1993–1996)","authors":"V. Padayachee, J. Rossouw","doi":"10.1353/TRN.2021.0007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/TRN.2021.0007","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Many countries across the world, including on the African continent, legislated increased independence for their central banks since the early 1990s. The way in which this happened took different forms. In some cases these legal processes were wrapped either into constitutional reforms in the context of democratic transitions or into economic reforms that changed the strategic direction of their development. This research note provides a fresh assessment of the affirmation of central bank autonomy and independence in South Africa during the period of constitutional negotiations up to the country’s first democratic elections in 1994. Although the independence and autonomy of the SA Reserve Bank (SARB), the central bank of the country, are enshrined in its Constitution, little has been written about the ideas and processes that culminated in such inclusion in the Constitution, in itself an unusual step at that time. This note addresses this void in the literature. The affirmation of central bank autonomy and independence (CBI) from political interference coincided with similar processes at that time in other developed and middle-income developing countries. In South Africa the decision taken at the time of the constitutional negotiations to grant the SARB its independence followed on an unfortunate history of government intervention in the central bank in the 1980s. In this research note we analyse some key documents on this policy debate, previously undiscovered, and present the views of a range of key actors in the negotiations process. Some economic policy think tanks such as the Economic Trends Research Group, and the Industrial Strategy Project, did not have a view on the matter of CBI, as far as we could gather. Our conclusions, based on this new evidence, are both surprising and unexpected. SARB independence was enshrined in the Constitution, we show, as much ‘by accident than by design’.","PeriodicalId":45045,"journal":{"name":"Transformation-Critical Perspectives on Southern Africa","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2021-05-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82716829","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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