African Studies Institute - Seminar Papers
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Item Contemporary conflict in black teachers politics: The role of the Africanization of the Apartheid education structure, 1940-1992(1992-08-31) Vilardo, PhilipOn April 4, 1988 the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), along with the World Confederation of Organizations of the Teaching Profession (WCOTP), initiated the teacher unity process by bringing the major "recognized" and "emergent" black teachers organizations together in Harare with the intention of forging a unitary, non-racial, nonsexist, and democratic teachers union (1). Two years later, on October 6, 1990, the South African Democratic Teachers Union (SADTU) was launched as the culmination of a difficult negotiation process between these recognized and emergent teachers organizations. Ironically, the formation of SADTU marked the end rather than the begining of teacher unity. The first blow came when the 35,000 member Transvaal United African Teachers Union (TUATA) and the Transvaal Teachers Association, an organization of white english speaking teachers, announced in the week before the launch of SADTU that they would be unable to sign the unity accord. On March 1, 1991, just five months after participating in its launch, the predominantly "coloured" Cape Teachers' Professional Association (CTPA), with a membership of 22,000, also withdrew from SADTU. Monica Bot has attributed the failure of the teacher unity process to three fundamental differences of opinion between the established and progressive teachers' organizations: a preference on the part of recognized teachers' organizations, such as the CTPA, for professionalism over trade unionism; their demand that SADTU be a federal rather than a unitary structure; and an objection to the "charterist spirit" of the new teacher body (2). This understanding of the breakdown of the teacher unity process takes at face value the explanations of the teachers organizations themselves without delving into the more deeply rooted divisions that I will suggest have doomed teacher unity from the outset.Item Modernity and measurement: Further thoughts on the apartheid state(1996-08-19) Posel, DeborahIn 1957, the Commission of Enquiry in regard to Undesirable Publications, which had been appointed to 'investigate the problem of undesirable and inferior publications as systematically and scientifically as possible', presented its findings. In pursuit of' reliable data.. and a scientific explanation of them, the Commission had commissioned a case-study of 'reading matter and illustration among the Bantu in Pretoria', and had nominated the head of the Mathematics Division of the SA Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), together with a government ethnologist, to do the job. The Commission concluded, inter alia, that illustrations of White women were probably having a harmful effect on ‘the Bantu in Pretoria’. This is how it reached that conclusion: The illustrations encountered as decorations in the homes or rooms of the Bantu in Pretoria are analysed below under various headings. By this means, an idea may be formed of the types of illustrations in which the Bantu are primarily interested.... Specious logic and the inexpert use of statistics, no doubt. But why did the Commission think it necessary to appoint the head of the Maths Division of CSIR, along with an ethnologist6, to oversee this research in the first place? Why was 'the nature of reading matter and illustrations among the Bantu in Pretoria' considered and presented as a statistical issue? It will take a while to suggest an answer to these questions. I have cited the Commission's report at the outset as what might seem to be a farcical example of the subject of this paper: an enduring and familiar (although fractured) preoccupation within the apartheid state, with generating and storing vast amounts of statistical 'knowledge', particularly in respect of the African population, hi fundamental ways, apartheid was elaborated in and along with continual efforts to count and classify the population, so as to try to measure - inter alia - the exact size of the African majority and the rate at which it reproduced itself compared with other racial groups; the spatial distribution of various races within segregated spaces; the extent of interracial sex and marriage; the numbers of Africans 'legally' resident in urban areas; the numbers considered 'surplus' to urban labour requirements and therefore liable for removal; the fluctuations in African labour 'supply' relative to labour 'demand'; the extent of' idleness' amongst African youth in the cities - not to mention the extent of moral harm inflicted by illustrations of white women in African homes. And the list could go on. This paper aims to reflect more closely on some of the connections between capacities to count and control in South Africa (particularly during the first phase of apartheid). In some ways this exercise is a rather obvious one, and it might seem surprising that little along these lines has been attempted before. It reflects, perhaps, a lingering reluctance to engage with the growing body of historical work influenced in some way or other by Foucault's writings on the knowledge/power nexus in the 'modem' world.Item Visions, ideals and elections: The struggle for political apartheid within the Nationalist alliance, 1948-1959(1996-05-20) McIntosh, RobertThis paper accepts the major conclusions of Posel, Lazar and others that there did not exist prior to the Nationalists assuming power a plan sufficiently coherent to facilitate its execution by legislators and administrators in the sense of following a "blueprint", and that the Nationalists in government faced numerous political and practical difficulties in their endeavours to translate their aspirations for apartheid into a practical programme. For Lazar, the Nationalist alliance was comprised of factions and classes, "all of whom saw their interests in different ways". The new government sought to develop its policy of apartheid, against a background of the need to keep the alliance together, and to counter escalating African resistance. Lazar describes an ideological struggle between the "visionaries" in the South African Bureau of Racial Affairs (SABRA) and the government, especially in the person of Verwoerd. The struggle lasted throughout the 1950s, until Verwoerd, with the backing of the Broederbond, succeeded in purging SABRA, and capturing it for the, then, Verwoerd-led government. SABRA had endeavoured to invent an ideology for its grand plan, and one which represented a search for a consistent moral position for complete separation. The SABRA vision was dependent upon total separation, which could not be applied to an economic system which used cheap African labour to perpetuate white domination. Posel has argued that the class divisions within the Nationalist alliance generated different "blueprints" for apartheid. Total segregation was espoused by powerful factions comprising Afrikaner intellectuals, particularly among the membership of SABRA. Posel defined the SABRA intellectuals as "purists", as opposed to the members of the government who were pragmatic, and more conciliatory to the needs of industrial and commercial capital for a stable, urbanised labour force. The new government also had to contend with other problems; policy-making and implementation were shaped and constrained by the relations between the government and the largely UP-controlled municipal authorities, and the dominating ideological factions within the Native Affairs Department (NAD). Despite these largely class divisions, the Nationalist Alliance could unite behind a programme of the political disenfranchisement of Africans which was seen as essential to the maintenance of white supremacy.