This article traces the historical and conceptual development of mountain figurations within the European social imaginary, exploring how mountains are not only physical terrains but also symbolic and rhetorical sites. Using the analytic of figurations from new materialism, the article demonstrates how mountains become subordinate to the political and discursive functions that they perform within a collective. In particular, it examines how the Romantic sublime and picturesque traditions transformed mountains from perceived sites of danger and desolation into elevated spaces of transcendence, creativity, identity formation and ecological aesthetic value. The analysis begins with the master narrative of'mountain gloom' to 'mountain glory', as articulated by Marjorie Hope Nicolson, and it traces how Romantic poets, scientific alpinists and mountaineers embedded mountains within discourses of national identity, exploration and individual enlightenment. These figurations not only influenced environmental aesthetics but also prefigured conservation movements in Europe and North America, particularly through figures such as William Wordsworth, Henry David Thoreau and John Muir. The articlethen movesto the South African contextto examine theways in which these inherited aesthetic values have informed conservation practices within the colonial and postcolonial periods. It reveals how early conservation efforts were shaped by imperial logics, and that the inherited modes of aesthetic appreciation worked in the service of alienating indigenous people from nature and the land, resulting in forms of'colonial conservation' that continue to structure the limits of environmental citizenship today. Finally, it argues that constructing pathways to more inclusive forms of environmental citizenship requires that we more directly interrogate and disrupt the representational legacies that continue to underwrite conservation practices within the present moment.
This article examines the tactical and symbolic use of the rugged landscape of the Baviaanskloof as a site of resistance (referring to the skirmish), a site of concealment (pointing to hiding away) and a site of memory (citing the enduring oral histories that preserve this event) during a minor skirmish between a group of Cape Rebels and the Willowmore District Mounted Troops (DMT), duringthe duringthe South African War (also known as the Anglo-Boer War), which took place between 1899 and 1902. Rather than treatinggeography as a passive backdrop, this research positions landscape as an active agent in shaping insurgent tactics, hiding and survival. Using interdisciplinary historical research and theoretical frameworks on memory, fate of place, and terrains of resistance, it interprets terrain as a lived, remembered, and contested space, showing how the mountainous interior of the Cape Colony, with the Baviaanskloof as an example, became a landscape of resistance. Drawing on the experience of a Cape Rebel, my maternal great-grandfather who served under Commandant Gideon Scheepers, the article demonstrates that resistance relied not only on ideas or military capability but on the ability to read and use terrain, as revealed through the skirmish at Vensterklip. In doing so, this article contributes to the orographical humanities and critical geographical histories of war and memory, employing orography to explore how mountains shaped the lived experience, mobility, and resistance of both Cape Rebels and Imperial forces during the South African War.
Much of South Africa's cinema has prioritised the human as the subject matter. While this has promoted narratives on social, economic, political, cultural and other aspects of everyday human life, missing from the country's cinematic purview are films focused on planetary well-being in the context of everyday life. This article makes a case for Qwaqwa: Place of Barriers and Bridges (2025) as exemplary of how the mountain cinema genre in post-apartheid South Africa has shifted attention towards the planet's well-being. Through a bifurcated discussion of the visual and ecological representation of mountains, the article adopts the Anthropocene as a theory for visual analysis of ecological cinema. It critiques this film as usable material for imagining sustainability, conservation, resilience and regeneration-the new critical paradigms about our planet today-and in cautioning us towards the benefit of rethinking Africa's biospheric priorities.
Mountains make an indelible impression on human life. As dominant features in any landscape, mountains create unique ecosystems, and they influence the daily lives of people living in that environment. They shape human thought and spiritual beliefs and create a collective body of knowledge and ways of knowing and doing, articulated here as mountain epistemes. This kind of knowledge system, or episteme, is indelibly linked to spiritual attachment to the landscape with its own symbolism. Manywell-known mountain peaks are considered sacred natural sites with associative spiritual cultural heritage by local communities, although not necessarily by all who visit, signalling potential conflict between sacred and profane activities. Whereas the concept 'mountain epistemes' positions mountainscapes as sources of embedded knowledge, this type of knowledge is also experiential, evolving over time based on observation and familiarity in this specific natural environment. It is a special kind of indigenous knowledge, or folk knowledge, comprising both knowing and knowing how, that merges together knowledge, skill and art. Epistemologically speaking, it means understanding mountain ecologies, but also the human and non-human dynamics in the mountainscape. This article engages in a comparative mountainscape analysis of the epistemes embedded in the southern Appalachian Mountains in the United States of America (USA) and the Maloti-Drakensberg Mountains in South Africa to demonstrate how mountain inhabitants live their daily lives, produce mountain knowledge and make meaning of the world they inhabit.
This commentary explores the lived experiences, leadership strategies and systemic challenges of mountain women in Kenya and Tanzania, drawing from participatory feminist research conducted under the global Mountain Women of the World initiative. By centring women's narratives, this discussion highlights how women navigate exclusion from land rights, tourism economies and governance structures, while simultaneously leading grassroots innovations through cooperative farming, feminist tourism models and ancestral ecological knowledge. Framed through feminist political ecology and critical development studies, the argument challenges top-down development paradigms and advocates policy reforms that acknowledge mountain women not simply as vulnerable subjects, but rather as agents of climate resilience, cultural preservation and economic transformation. We argue for systemic shifts in governance, infrastructure and resource allocation to prioritise women's leadership and knowledge in mountain regions, positioning them as central actors in the Anthropocene.
This article contributes to a broader conversation about youth movements in Angola, specifically the young urban Angolans known as Rev & uacute;s, key actors in protest demonstrations in Luanda and other provincial capitals of Angola. This article delves into the social and political implications of the protest held on 10 December 2020, during the Covid-19 public health lockdown in Angola. Hundreds of young Angolans from diverse social backgrounds and areas of Luanda took to the streets to protest for citizenship, against the high cost of living exacerbated by the pandemic, for the call for immediate 2021 municipal elections and International Human Rights Day. Despite security measures, arbitrary detentions and the usual repression, the protest unfolded with a high degree of organisation and consideration. By the end of the day, the Governor of Luanda, the police spokesperson and the Political Bureau of the People's Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) issued statements condemning the youth for climbing the statue of Agostinho Neto during the protest, deeming it vandalism and an insult to the figure and memory of the first president of independent Angola. This study examines the act of climbing the statue, its political significance and the social impact of this episode on the Angolan authorities and public opinion. It argues that the youth's boldness challenged the cult of personality surrounding Agostinho Neto within the MPLA and segments of society, questioning the official narrative on national symbols and monuments.
This article explores the limits of foregrounding a particular political subject-the wage worker-in collective struggles aimed at recognising, resisting and undoing systematically unequal power relations. It aims to explore which 'freedom dreams' (Kelley 2002) are excluded when liberation projects solely centre wage workers as agents of liberation, but also when trying to valorise social reproduction work by demanding that it should be waged. We focus on articulations of liberation by a different kind of subject-blackwomen-who historically have had both an ambivalent relationship to waged work and an unavoidable entanglement in 'life-affirming work'. This work is bound up in the land and logics of regeneration, sufficiency, mutual aid and solidarity economies, and cultivated in small and big ways. Drawing on black women's writing, we show how their political demands for liberation are less about wages, work and housework, and more about public recognition of black women's work in southern Africa as part of a broader collective struggle to secure control over the material and symbolic resources that would allow their robust participation in public life. These material resources may include wages, or a basic income grant, but cannot be reduced to this; it may include recognition of the value of social reproduction work, but this recognition in itself is insufficient for bolstering their political agency unless accompanied by structural interventions that enable them to decide the terms on which they-and their household and community members-can build their political agency. The objective in these articulations, we argue, tends to be about building collective and individual political agency, and issues of better work, better wages and public subsidisation of social reproduction take on value in relation to that goal.
Despite two decades of policy interventions and expanded educational access, the profession remains demographically unrepresentative and structurally precarious. This article interrogates the observed phenomenon of demographic stagnation and professional attrition within South Africa's architecture profession through Pierre Bourdieu's sociological lens. Drawing on mixed-methods research combining demographic register data, document analysis and qualitative interviews, the study conceptualises the 'retention-transformation nexus' as a contest over forms of capital-economic, cultural, social and symbolic-mediated by habitus, doxa, illusio and field hysteresis. It argues that persistent inequalities are not only pipeline failures but also expressions of inherited dispositions, institutional inertia and commodification of design labour that constrain capital conversion for historically marginalised actors. Arguing that the KwaZulu-Natal province may be a counter-case, the analysis posits that locally embedded educational pathways and resilient professional networks may shorten hysteresis and enable durable transformation. The article contributes to Southern scholarship on professions in transition by inquiring how Bourdieu's framework could be deployed to reveal the impact of interplay between structure and agency in post-apartheid professional fields. It concludes that sustainable transformation demands reconfiguring the profession's symbolic economy and field structures to render cultural capital convertible and economic participation viable for diverse practitioners.
Lephalale in the Limpopo province currently has an estimated urban population of and 'South Africa's energy hub'. The coal-fired base of its development in the context of the global climate emergency, stubborn spatial, social and governance legacies of apartheid, and the local environmental injustices this development model entails call into question the positive spin. In this article, we deploy Gabrielle Hecht's concept of 'residual governance' and an environmental justice lens to analyse the contradictions of coal-based development within both a national and global context of imperatives for a 'just transition'. We highlight the resistance and alternative visions ongoing on the ground in the municipality and nationally, as a means to imagine sustainable futures beyond extractivism, and in support of gender and environmental justice.
Part I intended to investigate Zimbabwe's 'interregna' theoretically via a review article. But a political murder illustrating Zimbabwe's horrific authoritarian impasse took over. Part II was to briefly close the case by summarising the murdertrial and the victim's funeral, then resuming Part I's goals. However, the judge's trial and sentence statements-in context-proved intriguing for three reasons. First, the accused changed his 'warning and cautioned' statement of 'guilty' on arrest to 'innocent' at the trial. Second and simultaneously with the trial's end, the main opposition party's leaderabandoned his shattered party. Third, the exceptionally arbitrary and cruel way Zimbabwe's rulers treated politician and lawyerJob Sikhala-this tale's main political protagonist, incarcerated for nearly 600 days awaiting bail and trial-is symptomatic of the fate for activists in Zimbabwe's opposition and the annihilation of Zimbabwe's liberal and/or social democratic dreams of the early 2000s. As these aspirations approached finality, an 'uprising' challenging Mnangagwa's efforts to extend his presidential term seemed worthy of inclusion. Part III will return to discussion of 'interregna' globally and locally, beginning by interrogating Nadine Gordimer's 1983 New York Review of Books article on such matters (as the Transformation III editors' introduction recalled).
