Africana Library

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Subject: search.filters.subject.South Africa. Politics and government. 1978-1989

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    United Democratic Front: Leadership and ideology
    (1987-08) Lodge, Tom
    The UDF is essentially a federation linking a large and heterodox collection of organisations varying in function, size, and popular impact. It is strongest in the Eastern Cape, traditionally the stronghold of the ANC, with which many local UDF leaders are historically associated. Class and communal cleavages as well as the presence of rivals with a popular following, make the UDF comparatively weaker in Cape Town and Durban. In the industrial heartland of the Transvaal, the UDF is undoubtedly paramount, but the sheer size of the urban centres, their social complexity, and the uncertainties of the UDF' s relationship with a well-established trade union movement, make its own capacity for marshalling disciplined support questionable. In the Transvaal, to a greater extent than in its other four main regions, the UDF has come to depend upon a tacit alliance with an increasingly politicised yet politically independent trade union movement. Any analysis of the UDF, though, should not be limited to the bureaucratic boundaries of its often patchy organisation, for the UDF functions more in the fashion of a social movement than a deliberately contrived political machine. With this consideration in mind, two questions need examining. Which social constituencies does the UDF represent? Is it possible to perceive in the UDF's ideological discourse the interests or concerns of particular social classes?
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    One King, two burials: The politics of funerals in South Africa's Transkei
    (1990-10) Dennie, Garrey
    King Sabata Jonguhlanga Dalindyebo, deposed Paramount Chief of the Thembus, was buried twice. The first interment took place on 20th April 1986; the second took place on 1st October, 1989. The first interment was secretive, hasty and without salute - a pauper's burial. The second was a visible organisation of grief, a public performance, highly orchestrated, and supremely lavish - a king's burial. The first interment attracted minimal media comment; the second was a well chronicled affair receiving significant attention from both the local and international media. This paper represents some musings upon the contrasting burials of Chief Sabata Dalindyebo. Its primary aims are to explore the kinds of contests which produced the different burial rituals, [or lack thereof] and to subject the rituals themselves to closer examination in a search for their meanings. The most crucial argument advanced in this paper is that the struggles which surrounded the control of the burials of the Thembu King were urgent attempts to appropriate the dead body in a bid to inscribe and to re-write specific political messages on the corpse, and to erase others. Furthermore, the burial of Dalindyebo provided a powerful platform from which these messages could be disseminated to a larger audience.