African Studies Institute - Seminar Papers

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Author: search.filters.author.Chisholm, Linda

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    State policy and youth unemployment in South Africa, 1976-1992
    (1992-10-12) Chisholm, Linda
    In common with many developing countries, youth unemployment in South Africa is reaching critical proportions. While the dimensions of the problem are not precisely known, studies of the 1976 youth revolt, as well as analyses of youth resistance in the 1980s, identified school-leavers with little or no prospect of employment as a central component in the form and scale of opposition to apartheid and apartheid education (Kane-Berman: 1978; Brookes and Brickhill; 1980; Swilling: 1986; Hyslop: 1988/89; Bundy: 1987). Faced with this situation, the South African state introduced various schemes and projects to soak up the unemployed, amongst whom youth featured prominently. The continuing rapidly escalating levels of unemployment amongst school-leavers are testimony to the failure of these schemes. In a context where the need to intervene and reshape the economic, social and political configuration of youth is perceived as an urgent priority by social and political actors across the board, these need to be examined, and alternatives posed.
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    The state, bureaucracy and gender equity in South African education
    (1998-08-17) Chisholm, Linda; Napo, V.
    South Africa's transition to democracy has highlighted the role of the state and bureaucracy in tackling gender inequalities in education. New initiatives at national and provincial level have focused on the establishment of an extensive machinery to institutionalise gender concerns. Gender equity has found pride of place in the new constitution and legislative frameworks based on it. And yet there is also evidence of continuing conflict and resistances around gender issues at the level of both the state and civil society. In this context, how, to what extent and with what effect new initiatives are addressing gender inequalities becomes a key question. The state has historically been a crucial agency in the subordination of women. It is now seen as an agency and instrument in the liberation of women. To what extent it is actually capable of being so requires much closer scrutiny. The role of the state and bureaucracy can be addressed in a number of ways. On the one hand, it is possible to sketch the actual changes in constitution and legislation and examine the extent to which gender relations and inequalities appear to have altered inside the education system. While helpful and important, such an analysis will simply describe what needs to be explained: the role of the state and bureaucracy in shifting gender relations. On the other, it is possible to draw on an extensive body of feminist literature in other contexts on constraints and possibilities of transformation through the state. In so doing, new light may be cast not only on the extent to which gender inequalities are and can be addressed, but also on the nature of the transitional state in South Africa. This paper will thus proceed by examining new initiatives by the state and bureaucracy to address gender equity in education against the backdrop of the principal insights emerging from the feminist literature on the state. It will look specifically at efforts to mainstream gender and two case studies illustrating the limited reach of the state in addressing the full complexity of gender relations in educational institutions. It will argue that the majority of new initiatives can be described as classically liberal feminist, and are bound to encounter many of the difficulties already pointed to in the literature. The South African state remains a deeply patriarchal state; as such there are significant contradictions between the policy discourse and actual interventions. In analysing these, the paper will make use of Stromquist's differentiation between those gender policies in education which are essentially coercive and not transformative, those which are supportive and those which are constructive, and embody new attempts to change the ideological processes and values which underpin gender inequality (1997). The paper will first examine feminist theories of the state and bureaucracy. It will then consider the discourse of gender equity in education in South Africa and follow this with an analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of efforts to mainstream gender including here a brief consideration of the role and position of gender machinery and women in the bureaucracy. It will conclude with a brief analysis of two incidents of gender violence in schools.
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    The pedagogy of Porter: The origins of the Reformatory in the Cape Colony, 1882-1910
    (1985-04-30) Chisholm, Linda
    This article explores the origins and nature of the reformatory in Cape colonial society between 1882 and 1910. Borne in a transitionary period, its concern was with the reproduction of a labouring population precipitated by colonial conquest. Unlike the prison and compound, which gained their distinctive character from the way in which they were articulated to an emerging industrial capitalist society, the reformatory was shaped by the imperatives of merchant capital ad commercial agriculture. The internal operations were structured by an ideology of rehabilitation through institutionalisatlon and socialisation and by the particular material conditions of the Western Cape, although the segregationist reverberations of the industrial revolution were also heard 'at a distance'. These issues conditioned, and were refracted throgh the internal structure and discipline of the reformatory, the relationship between education and work, between the reformatory and the labour market, responses of the inmates and attempts by the authorities to control these by, inter alia, a strategy of racial segregation.
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