Pub Date : 2021-09-02DOI: 10.1080/02533952.2021.1984146
E. Webster
ABSTRACT The article provides a socio-historical account of worker education rooted in the African working class, and more specifically in the three competing strands within this tradition – the communist strand, the “workerist” strand and the “professional” strand – each linked to contesting definitions of workers’ education. It details the rich history of the first two strands, with their different origins in distinctive generational moments, and then moves on to the emergence of the professional strand in the post-democracy era where the labour movement’s new socio-political role is reflected in new education institutions. The different character of this newer tradition reflects the changing profile of trade union membership and a dominant emphasis on specialised training for leadership. The article ends by describing new initiatives in worker education which attempt to deal with the new challenges to the working class thrown up in the age of digitalisation and globalisation.
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Pub Date : 2021-09-02DOI: 10.1080/02533952.2021.2003074
S. Allais
This section of the special edition offers unique insight into the history and current state of a significant educational tradition in South Africa: that of an emancipatory tradition of workers’ education. The focus of these papers is not on workplace training but rather on workers’ education as defined in one of the papers: education of workers by workers, workers’ organisations and their institutions, for purposes that they themselves determine. This education is understood to include not only trade union education (although this is an important component) but also education directed towards the employed but unorganised, the unemployed as well as workers in precarious employment. South Africa is distinctive in sub-Saharan Africa in the depth and strength of its workers’ movement. However, with the exception of a 2009 paper by Bernard Dubbeld on labour studies in South Africa (Dubbeld 2009), there has not been extensive coverage of labour-related issues in Social Dynamics. Dubbeld’s paper provides a critique of labour studies in South Africa, arguing that there is a need to move beyond the workplace. This is precisely what workers’ education did in the seventies and eighties: it dealt with the totality of workers’ lives. Workers’ education transcended the narrow confines of the union bosses’ exclusive focus on collective bargaining and the workplace. This collection explores the neglected and rich tradition of workers’ education that emerged beside this movement, sometimes as its handmaiden, often as a critic. The papers track aspects of workers’ education from its rich history to its precarious state today, with significant shifts post-democracy, including its formalisation and institutionalisation alongside a steady decline in the strength of organised labour; and new initiatives in the face of new forms of work and new challenges presented by the era of globalisation. All five papers, in different ways, offer a similar and fairly pessimistic view of workers’ education in South Africa today, but all offer some grounds for optimism. The pessimism is perhaps the common thread across the papers: an analysis that workers’ education is weaker today than it was in the past, and less focused on building collective democratic organisations and struggles. The papers use different terms, but all suggest a turn towards less radical, less political education, and a focus on education for leaders as opposed to members.
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Pub Date : 2021-06-07DOI: 10.1080/02533952.2021.1909949
H. Dawson
Informal entrepreneurship is increasingly presented as the solution to youth unemployment in South Africa. This reflects a new development paradigm that views the informal economy as a space of ent...
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Pub Date : 2021-06-07DOI: 10.1080/02533952.2021.1906148
Christopher Webb
ABSTRACT Research on youth unemployment in South Africa has largely been dominated by quantitative accounts that highlight skills’ mismatches, educational levels and industrial transformations. Missing from these is a sense of how youth navigate labour markets and why they might choose to abandon the job search. Based on qualitative interviews with youth from an urban township, this article examines the obstacles they face searching for stable employment and their experiences of the labour market itself. It calls attention to two significant, and largely unexplored, issues affecting young people’s relationship to labour markets. First is the role of place-based identities and the stigmatisation associated with representations of place. Second is how low-wage, insecure work acts as a disincentive for remaining in the labour market. For many young people, wage work is rarely experienced as dignified or fulfiling, nor does it provide the resources required for transitions to adulthood. Building on Kathi Weeks’s concept of “anti-work politics,” it proposes improvements to the quality of existing work and the need to expand social protections to young people. It contributes to a broader geographical literature on labour market segmentation, by highlighting how cultural representations of place affect young people’s employment prospects and work identities.
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Pub Date : 2021-05-04DOI: 10.1080/02533952.2021.1958316
Macharia J Mwangi
ABSTRACT This paper examines the role of Nexus/Busara as one of the foundational literary magazines in Kenya. Founded in the late 1960s by literature students at the University College, Nairobi, the journal was immersed in the politics of literary and cultural production in the East African region of the time. It was one of the major reviews that gave upcoming young writers space to hone their skills in creative writing and literary criticism. Using a historical approach, this paper places the magazine in the context of the postcolonial Kenyan landscape in the period immediately after independence. Through a close-reading of specific texts in the journal, the paper also explores the influences of pioneer East African writers and underscores the pivotal role that the University played in laying the foundations of modern Kenyan literature. The study shows that literary magazines are brooding nests for creative writers and literary critics, nurture literary cultures, and build bridges between generations of writers and between traditions.
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Pub Date : 2021-05-04DOI: 10.1080/02533952.2021.1964338
Christopher E. W. Ouma
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Pub Date : 2021-05-04DOI: 10.1080/02533952.2021.1969635
Carina Venter
ABSTRACT This article engages the aporias that arise at the intersection of postcolonial aesthetics, trauma and ethics through a consideration of Philip Miller’s REwind: A Cantata for Voice, Tape, and Testimony, composed to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Following an introduction of REwind, I briefly touch on the creative instrumentalisation of testimony before considering the lengths to which Miller went to replicate an ethic of reconciliation as it had been instituted by the TRC. What I uncover is an exemplary victim-centred ethics, deployed by Miller, which closely mirrors that of the TRC. Yet, REwind is riven with incommensurabilities, from its white reception to the seminal musical moment that sounds the testimony of Eunice Miya against a musical gesture that signifies convention and cliché. To make sense of these, I turn to the work of Timothy Bewes to enable a framing of REwind in terms of postcolonial shame and incommensurability. That is, I follow Bewes in reading the “difficulties and infelicities” of the text, ”not along a continuum of evaluative aesthetic criteria, but rather as instances of inevitable failure–the inevitable failure of postcolonial aesthetics to meet adequately the imperatives of postcolonial ethics.
摘要本文通过对菲利普·米勒为纪念南非真相与和解委员会成立十周年而创作的《REwind:a Cantata for Voice，Tape，and Testimony》的思考，探讨了后殖民美学、创伤和伦理交叉点上的寓言。在介绍了REwind之后，我简要地谈到了证词的创造性工具化，然后考虑了Miller在多大程度上复制了真相与和解委员会制定的和解道德。我发现的是米勒所倡导的以受害者为中心的道德规范，这与真相与和解委员会的道德规范非常相似。然而，REwind充满了不可通约性，从它的白人接待到开创性的音乐时刻，这一时刻听起来是尤妮丝·米娅反对一种象征传统和陈词滥调的音乐姿态的见证。为了理解这些，我转向Timothy Bewes的作品，从后殖民的羞耻感和不可通约性的角度来构建REwind。也就是说，我跟随贝维斯阅读文本的“困难和不适当之处”，“不是沿着一个连续的评价美学标准，而是作为不可避免的失败的例子——后殖民美学在充分满足后殖民伦理要求方面的不可避免的失败。
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Pub Date : 2021-05-04DOI: 10.1080/02533952.2021.1960723
J. Currey
ABSTRACT This is the story of a duel between a small magazine and the South African police Special Branch. The South African government maintained they had a free press. They therefore wanted to avoid outright censorship. They hoped that they could make The New African give up and shut up. The Ministry of Justice used the Special Branch to censor by harassment – police raids, confiscation of equipment, destruction of copies of the magazine, intimidation of printers, and a verdict of obscenity, which was turned down on appeal. One editor enabled the other editor to escape on a Norwegian cargo boat to Canada by jumping over the side of the boat to escape going to Canada as well. They then restarted the journal in Britain and slipped free copies into South Africa.
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Pub Date : 2021-05-04DOI: 10.1080/02533952.2021.1960128
Christopher E. W. Ouma
The period of the Cold War has generated a significant amount of scholarship, especially in relation to the place of Africa after World War II. This period encapsulates a very intriguing political time, in which a new global order sought to re-configure the world after the war. While Europe was going back into reconstruction, its colonies were emerging as sites of a new political order, new nation states emerging onto the world stage on the back of anti-colonial movements during the first half of the twentieth century. It was a period that inevitably brought together anti-colonialism of the first half of the century, anti-fascist movements that culminated in World War II, the fight for civil rights in the US after the period of reconstruction, and the beginnings of decolonisation in the postcolonial world. These intersections signalled the coming together, the coalition of minority and minoritised communities of the old imperial order and more specifically what nowadays goes by various names: the “global south;” the “South Atlantic;” the “Black Atlantic” amongst others. Africa and Asia were at the heart of these formulations, in relation to the Caribbean as well as to the African American world. The Cold War arrived to intervene in this new order, to confront, appropriate and disrupt it, for its own uses. The Cold War – this Orwellian formulation – came to define this period as overdetermined by the threat of nuclear warfare. The “coldness” of this war – its ideological imperium – belied its ripple effect in many parts of the world: espionage, regime changes, political assassinations, cultural patronage and the general effort to undermine the sovereignty of newly independent nations. Bhakti Shringarpure’s Cold War Assemblages: Decolonizaton to Digital (2020) contributes towards the idea of examining this “war” as specifically intervening in the postcolonial world. Shringarpure’s book is part of recent studies that return to the Cold War, to look at how it shaped cultural production, as well as the intellectual categories that emerged to define ways in which this production was studied (Kalliney 2015; Popescu 2020). Most of these studies can be classified in three dimensions: firstly, how the Cold War created conditions for late modern and modernist cultural production and intellectual work within postcolonial societies (Benson 1986; Kalliney 2015; Bulson 2017; Popescu 2020). Secondly how Cold War cultural patronage began to generate the category “World Literature” (Rubin 2012; Bulson 2017) and thirdly within the sites of Africa and Asia, Cold War influence on postcolonial studies (Popescu 2020; Shringarpure 2020). Shringarpure’s particular intervention speaks to how “this history of postcoloniality” is yoked “with that of the Cold War” (3) and therefore how postcolonial studies/ theory/criticism was produced through what she calls “The Cold War paradigm” (134).
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Pub Date : 2021-05-04DOI: 10.1080/02533952.2021.1958306
Nathan Suhr-Sytsma
ABSTRACT This article asks what we are reading for when we read poems in African-run literary magazines that are increasingly online. How can we begin to theorise the significance of publication and experience of reading in digital formats? In the wake of a debate in literary studies about lyric reading, the author suggests that reading African poetry in digital litmags gives us an opportunity to rethink how exactly poems are entangled with history – and that reading for lyric involves attending to how a poem might aspire to outlive its initial historical context. Drawing on unpublished sources as well as online and print materials, the article discusses such African-run litmags as Sentinel Poetry (Online), Maple Tree Literary Supplement, Jalada, Saraba and Agbowó. For poets including Ogaga Ifowodo, Tsitsi Jaji, Jumoke Verissimo and Logan February who have chosen to publish in these litmags, political liberation entails reimagining sociality, subjectivity and sexuality. Ultimately, the article argues, their poems should not only be located in the recent past but also recognised as opening up temporalities of recurrence and futurity that show up the limitations of the present.
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