Drawing on nearly two decades of multi-case and comparative qualitative research, this article examines the relationship between social cohesion and xenophobic violence in South Africa. Echoing emerging scholarship, it challenges the conventional wisdom that social cohesion is inherently a panacea for violence. It demonstrates that, under certain conditions, social cohesion, enacted through collective efficacy, is linked to xenophobic violence, not as a solution but as a driver. The article argues that intersections between migration-induced diversity, severe socio-economic deprivation, and local governance deficits turn existing bonding cohesion into "exclusionary cohesion," thereby rendering aspects of social cohesion (i.e., social cohesion itself) a driver of xenophobic violence in South Africa. It makes a three-fold scholarly contribution: i) it introduces the concepts of "exclusionary cohesion" and "deprivation-induced cohesion" (an extension of Weber's 'social closure') which capture the essence of aspects of social cohesion making it a driver of xenophobic violence; ii) it provides empirical evidence that supports calls to reconceptualise social cohesion as its conventional understandings become increasingly anachronistic; and iii) it extends the debate on the social cohesion - violence nexus by beginning to identify factors linking specific forms of cohesion to specific forms of violence.
Families in South Africa are undergoing rapid changes that have reshaped family structures and parenting roles. One notable trend is the growing number of absent fathers, which has led to an increase in non-custodial fathers. However, limited research in South Africa has explored black non-custodial fathers' perspectives on good fatherhood, the strategies they employ, and the challenges they face in maintaining involvement with their children. The study conducted face-to-face semi-structured in-depth interviews with 30 black non-custodial fathers residing in various areas of Johannesburg, South Africa. The data was analysed using inductive thematic analysis. The findings reveal that non-custodial fathers defined good fatherhood as both financial provision and active physical involvement in their children's lives. While they acknowledged the importance of providing financially, the fathers also expressed a desire to be present in their children's daily lives to offer guidance, care and emotional support. The study concludes that awareness campaigns should target communities to promote the importance of enabling fathers to participate meaningfully in parenting. Traditional gender norms that equate fatherhood solely with financial provision should be challenged by promoting the understanding that good fatherhood also involves emotional and physical presence in children's lives.
Drawing on a year of ethnographic research conducted in 2021, this article examines how the public presence of Cape Town's growing unhoused population is treated as a transgression of urban order and a threat to the city's aspirational image, effectively constituting unhoused people as placeless. Building on Douglas's notion of "matter out of place," it argues that homelessness is actively produced as abject through discourse, policy, and practice. Yet it is precisely this condition of being "out of place" in an aspiring world-class city that is instrumentalised in critiques of racialised spatial patterns and unjust social orders. Material practices that transgress prescriptions of place are shown to drive historically structured conditions shaping Black and Coloured lives into wider visibility. In response to Larkin's invitation to examine how infrastructure mobilises (in)visibility, I treat signification through material practice as an open-ended process with the potential to render visible what discourse and policy occlude. The article explores the tension between a discourse that casts the unhoused body as both obstacle to urban development and waste in efforts to erase it from public space, and a counter-politics of agitational visibility that calls for a remaking of the post-apartheid city.
This article locates Stellenbosch zoologist, C.S. (Coert) Grobbelaar at its centre to engage the history of physical anthropology and the study of race within a particular institutional, intellectual and political context at Stellenbosch University. An engagement with Grobbelaar's career reveals that his scientific practice was deeply entrenched in political ideology. This was shaped by Afrikaner nationalism and a home institution which emphasised its intellectual connection with Germany rather than the Commonwealth in the interwar period. The alliance with Germany ultimately shaped Grobbelaar's disciplinary orientation as well as the disciplinary identity of physical anthropology at Stellenbosch University. Grobbelaar pursued his science in the context of Afrikaner nationalism at an institution where science was meant to serve the interests of the Afrikaner volk. During his career Grobbelaar missed profound international departures in the study of race. He could ultimately not detach his scientific practice from the political context in which it operated.
This article explores the relationship between the Amadiba Crisis Committee (ACC), a rural movement from Xolobeni, South Africa, and a non-governmental organisation, Sustaining the Wild Coast (SWC). The ACC was able to successfully prevent mining and other extractivist development projects in Xolobeni which they believed threatened existing livelihoods in the area. Their mobilisation was supported by civil society allies such as the SWC. The SWC's support has included facilitating access to media and civil society networks located in urban areas and using these networks to access information and other resources. Other studies of the relationships between social movements and NGO allies highlight several risks involved in such collaboration such as depoliticisation or deradicalisation. We argue that in the case of the ACC and SWC, these risks were mostly averted. We explore how the SWC was able to support the ACC's activism by facilitating access to information, building networks, providing oppositional research, helping articulate an alternative vision for development and maintaining separation between the ACC and SWC. We conclude that the SWC's involvement has been supportive of the ACC and helped to establish it as a powerful force with the ability to shape local development, policy and public discourse.
This article examines the relationship between photography and the racial category "Indian" through an analysis of the colonial apartheid state's text Meet the Indian in South Africa: A Pictorial Survey (1949) and Fatima Meer's book Portrait of Indian South Africans (1969). Through an examination of the curatorial practices of these texts, this article shows how the state used photographs to construct an official narrative of the Indian by emphasizing economic success and social mobility, conflating all Indians with the trope of the trader/merchant class within the South African imaginary. In Portrait, Meer focuses on class, gender, and the afterlife of indentureship, troubling the state's official narrative by providing a framework to understand difference as a site to re-think an ethical politics of relationality between Indian and Black African communities. Influenced by Meer's attention to vulnerability, this article proposes the concept of indentured vulnerability to understand the category Indian and Afro-Indian relationalities in South Africa "otherwise."
From November 20, 2024 to January 25, 2025, Oude Leeskamer in Stellenbosch hosted Indifference, a multiscreen video installation by Namibian-born artist Nicola Brandt. In this work, Brandt engages the legacy of German colonialism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century in modern-day Namibia, with a particular focus on the German-Namibian War and genocide spanning from 1904 to 1908. The site of engagement is the coastal town of Swakopmund where the individual and mass graves of victims are located. These largely unmarked graves become the backdrop for the exploration of contested memory and history. The impact of Indifference is located both in casting a spotlight on the violent colonial history of Namibia, while considering forms of forgetfulness or ignorance that stand to erase or diminish this history, and in its ability to prompt a form of self-reflection. While set in the Namibian context, Indifference, exhibited in the heart of Stellenbosch, illustrates its renewed relevance as it renders the South African viewer, and particularly the Stellenbosch viewer, open to their own spectres. This article engages Brandt's artwork by considering space and place, while offering a reflection on Stellenbosch's colonial past and its lingering spectres.
Focusing on Allina Ndebele's tapestry My wedding (1963), this study recovers the events of a craft-therapy project initiated at Umpumulo Art School in South Africa in the early 1960s. As few realise, it was out of this Swedish initiative that the better-known Evangelical Lutheran Church Art and Craft Centre, Rorke's Drift, developed. Exposing the segregated, patriarchal nature of life on a Lutheran mission field, the article interrogates mid-century concepts of "Nordic-ness" as a source of cultural and social excellence. More specifically, this study excavates an episode in art history, the sensationalising of My wedding in Sweden. It also implicates the idealistic understandings of Svenska kommitt & eacute;n f & ouml;r st & ouml;d & aring;t afrikanskt konsthantverk (The Swedish Committee for the Support of African Arts and Crafts), which funded two Swedish graduates to train black South African women as Art and Craft Advisors for mission hospitals. Showing how this Committee of "experts" constructed their isiZulu-speaking beneficiaries as a counter-identity to Europeans, the article reveals how they evolved development priorities for local women - sometimes with catastrophic consequences. If the ACA project left a legacy of inventive tapestries, this was due to the resourcefulness of the couple who initiated the project and the agencies of their students, particularly Allina Ndebele.
South African community-based organisations (CBOs) are integral to participatory democracy in South Africa, yet few studies have been done on South African CBO communication, including little research on CBO's choice of collective action frames and their political efficacy. Therefore, this research analysed the collective action frames of two Johannesburg CBOs, i.e. the Inner City Resource Centre, a housing rights organisation, and One Voice of All Hawkers Association, a street traders organisation. Using organisational documents, and notes on member and office bearers' communication (at Participatory Action Research workshops organised by the researcher and during ethnographic observation), the analysis identified the key frames used by each organisation and the extent to which they were useful for building power, in terms of building solidarity (logic of membership) and/or challenging the political status quo in inner-city Johannesburg (logic of influence). The main frames identified were claims-making (poverty and rights), contesting government (crime and grime) and insider/outsider frames (xenophobia/anti-xenophobia). While these were somewhat useful in attracting members, they were not powerful enough to challenge the City of Johannesburg's neglect of its marginalised residents.
South African scholar Premesh Lalu is a leading postcolonial theorist of South Africa. Framed by an introductory note by Fernanda Pinto de Almeida, this interview invites Lalu to discuss his critical work alongside his own intellectual trajectory, beginning with his early essay entitled "Sara's Suicide" (2000). Building on his engagement with the concept of subalternity and a critique of nationalist narratives of the past, it asks whether this essay offers a model for a postcolonial history. The interview also discusses how Lalu's early work may relate to the theoretical approaches developed in his later monographs The Deaths of Hintsa (2009) and Undoing Apartheid (2022).
This paper reflects on my experiences of doing research among ex-soldiers who deserted from the post-conflict Rwandan military, who believe that they are being "hunted" by their government, allegedly, for political reasons. It attends to practices of doing fieldwork among people whose normal lives are suspended by the perpetual need to navigate the daily threat of discovery by the long arm of the Rwandan state and the very real threat of violence and death in exile. I show how fear, as a profound ontological condition, can shape the process of research. I foreground the materiality of fear and propose that the interlocutors' consciousness and sensitivity to the hazards that the field is infused with can influence the nature of ethnography. Through fear, politically sensitive research can produce moving ethnography, that is, a kind of ethnography in which the participants and researcher are in an enhanced state of sensory and nomadic comportment during fieldwork. Analysis of data draws mainly on insights from Vigh's ideas on social navigation, Mbembe's notion of necropolitics and Deleuzian ideas of the control society.
No Longer Whispering to Power: The Story of Thuli Madonsela, Thandeka Gqubule's approved biography, uses the Makhadzi metaphor to understand the formative events in Madonsela's life, which culminated in her becoming a fearless and respected Public Protector during Jacob Zuma's tumultuous presidency. The study explores the Makhadzi's ambivalent role that inadvertently informed Madonsela's role as public protector. The Makhadzi is a senior sister of the family head's or chief's father, she is the paternal aunt and serves as custodian of values and norms in the VhaVenda culture. Drawing on these customs, Gqubule explores Madonsela through the Makhadzi metaphor and by relying on the trope - appropriated by Madonsela herself - Gqubule, through tropological and metaphorical transference, positions the biographee as a credible, legitimate and morally approvable leader. This metaphoric positioning constitutes the biographer's navigation of the turbulent scene of South African politics around accusations of corruption and social injustice, especially against Zuma. Following the Makhadzi metaphor, the biography assertions how women can legitimately exercise power in idioms familiar to South Africans. I argue that Madonsela uses the Makhadzi idea but also re-imagines it, and that she and her biographer ignore the patriarchal trappings of the role, thus eliding an important aspect of how the role functions and is understood.
Research on urban human geography in Africa reveals an increasingly dystopian reality in the continent's major cities, often characterised by high unemployment rates, inadequate service delivery, homelessness and deteriorating physical and social infrastructure. While this urban crisis is largely attributed to the inability of postcolonial metropolitan authorities to manage a population explosion that places immense pressure on resources and life-supporting opportunities, this article underscores the primacy of colonial hegemonies and spatial dynamics in shaping the postcolonial city. Situating the discussion within the theoretical framework of Southern Urbanism, the article largely draws on Avery Gordon's theorisation of hauntology and spectrality to conceptualise postcolonial urban dystopia in Southern Africa, as depicted in Phaswane Mpe's Welcome to Our Hillbrow (2001) and NoViolet Bulawayo's We Need New Names (2013). The article interprets the cities of Johannesburg (South Africa) and Bulawayo (Zimbabwe) as sites haunted by imperial ghosts. This serves to advance the claim that there is a causal relationship between failed urbanism and the persistence of colonial hegemonies and spatial disconnections. The article further examines the postcolonial city as a site of ambivalence, where marginalised urbanites adopt various existential strategies to negotiate belonging and reinvent themselves.
Drawing on Eddie Ombagi's "queer fragmentation as method," and specifically his interest in bringing "disparate and contested archives" into conversation with one another, this paper reads expressions of "queer" "ambivalence" in diverse twentieth- and twenty-first-century texts from Lesotho. In seeking to extend on Ombagi's wide-ranging framework of ambivalence as related to queer (il)legibilities and the evasion of Western sexual identity discourses, the paper adopts a historical lens and considers what emerges as "untranslatable" in these selected texts. I hone in on the notion of a "contested archive" as I consider the problematic aspects of texts written in English by Western authors, and I further explore how some of the texts may offer us "alternative archives:" perspectives that run counter to hegemonic narratives. My discussion of the notion of "untranslatability" involves a consideration of the importance of "cultural literacy," as well as what Lisa Foran has written about as the "untranslatable as an ongoing moment of pause:" the importance of recognising "ambiguity" and "multiplicity," as opposed to the ideals of certainty and universality that so often undergird both Western-authored texts and the discourses of globalised LGBTQI+ activism.
This article discusses the notion of self and community in urban space as represented in selected poems. We examine poems published from the 1970s to 2015 in the literary magazine, Dhana, and the anthology, Boda Boda Anthem and Other Poems. The article interrogates the poets' construction of relationships, perceptions and attitudes towards the "self" and "community" in the urban space. We argue that selfhood is relational but unstable and ever-shifting depending on the space and context of individuals' activities and conditions. The discussion of the poems is based on Augustine Nwoye's notion that the African self as an entity is in close interaction with multiple other aspects of the world. We use this insight to examine how the different poets construct their personas and the nature of Kampala urban space the personas occupy, as well as their relationships to community. The reading of the selected poems reveals that identities are fluid in the urban space, and they structure and restructure people's relationships and interactions in shifting ways. Poets have demonstrated a lack of strong bonds and social networks in the urban community and shown that the urban is subtly but highly restrictive in everyday contexts.
The mass and social media coverage of Zimbabwean immigrants in South Africa highlights the urgent need to address the xenophobic crisis. There appears to be a deliberate muting of ordinary Zimbabwean immigrants' voices in the narrativisation of Johannesburg. This paper foregrounds Zimbabwean migration experiences not solely defined by abjection. Drawing on in-depth interviews and participant observation at music shows and social gatherings, it examines how Zimbabweans employ music-mediated practices to claim belonging and inclusion in the city. Findings reveal that immigrants use music to mediate sociality, build communities, and resist cultural erasure. Their musicking and placemaking practices, often enacted publicly, assert identity amid xenophobic threats while challenging dominant narratives of invisibility and crisis. These practices generate bonding and bridging social capital, strengthening resilience, visibility, and urban participation. The paper concludes that Zimbabwean immigrants' experiences reveal richer dimensions of sociality and community-making than currently acknowledged in media discourse or academic literature.
Migrant subjects both seek and resist inclusion as they navigate host areas. In this process, language becomes vital in forming and maintaining boundaries and social networks, which are important factors in dealing with urban conditions, as well as a common point for (re)creating multiple and hybridised identities. This paper employs the ideas of polyphony, hybridity and people as infrastructure as conceptual and theoretical frameworks to analyse migrants' experiences in urban Accra and how those experiences are mediated by the varied uses and framing of language. I conclude that the migrants' expression of polyphonic selves, as well as their agentic selection and utilisation of resources within the linguistic landscape are shaped by the specific linguistic demands of the destination. The migrants do not just adopt or adapt to the mere use of multilingualism and code-switching for only communication purposes but to also situate themselves within the embedded power dynamics.
Within the Kenyan public psyche, night running is a hinterland ritual that is at once steeped in mystery and playful public revisioning. This paper explores urban night life in Nairobi through the the ritual of night running. The paper positions itself within arguments that situate the African city as an accumulation of contradictory and continuously conflicting philosophies, central to which is the rural-urban oscillation. I make use of an ethnographic understanding of the ritual of night running within Kenya and the mutations of the concept within the urban space through an archival reading of the Kenyan national dailies for the period 1990-2010. I thus position print media as an active site for the collective (re)invention, (re)membering and re-interpretation of night running. I demonstrate how night running emerges in the nocturnal city as a performance of power for marginal subjects. Through the lens of night running, the nocturnal city of Nairobi is is revealed as one that is imbibed with contradictions that define the intermingling of the visible and invisible city.
This paper examines the complex representations of child soldiers in China Keitetsi's Child Soldier and Emmanuel Jal's War Child. I argue that both memoirs employ diverse narrative strategies to illuminate the dichotomies and ambiguities embedded in our understanding of child soldiers. Through these strategies, Keitetsi and Jal challenge us to rethink the subjectivity of child soldiers, particularly in the context of their placement within post-conflict communities.
