12 results
Chapter 1 - Elite Formation, Factions and Violence in the Political Economy of Corruption
- Edited by Mbongiseni Buthelezi, University of Johannesburg, Peter Vale, University of Pretoria
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- State Capture in South Africa
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- Wits University Press
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- 28 February 2024
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- 01 June 2023, pp 19-38
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Summary
In May 2017, South African president Jacob Zuma fired minister of finance Pravin Gordhan from cabinet – and unleashed a storm of protest and mobilisation. This move was widely seen as the final onslaught in a campaign to ‘capture’ the state for corrupt networks stretching across South Africa and far beyond – to Russia, China, India and Dubai. Opposition political parties and broad social movements calling themselves ‘civil society’ began to organise a campaign to remove Zuma. A split emerged within the African National Congress (ANC) as Gordhan and a network of prominent ANC leaders and veterans launched a struggle to ‘reclaim’ it. The two key Alliance partners of the ANC, the South African Communist Party (SACP) and the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu), also spoke out against Zuma's move and joined the campaign to remove him – ironically, as until then they had been castigating Gordhan for following the same ‘neoliberal’ policies as his predecessors.
Protests, public meetings and well-supported marches took place. The biggest demonstration of the post-apartheid period was estimated to have mobilised tens of thousands in a march to the Presidency in Pretoria, led by opposition political parties, with the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) in the lead. Political rivals, such as the EFF, the liberal opposition Democratic Alliance, the SACP, and some social movements and NGOs, joined hands in what came to be seen as a national crisis. In parliament, opposition parties served notice of a motion of no confidence in the president – the fourth such motion over the previous two years. However, this time it attracted unprecedented interest because of speculation that a number of ANC MPs would support it. Few did, and for a few months, Zuma survived.
Ultimately, however, the turbulence led to the election in December by a narrow margin of Cyril Ramaphosa as president of the ANC, the recall by the ANC of Jacob Zuma as president of South Africa, his replacement in January 2018 by Ramaphosa, and the latter's announcement of a ‘New Dawn’ for South Africa.
The transition from Thabo Mbeki to Jacob Zuma as ANC president in Polokwane in 2007 and the subsequent recall of Mbeki as South African president in 2008 likewise had been accompanied by intense internal struggles and mobilisations.
Prologue - The Johannesburg Moment
- Michael Burawoy, Karl Holdt
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- Conversations with Bourdieu
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- Wits University Press
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- 20 April 2018
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- 31 December 2012, pp 1-6
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Forty years ago, in the early 1970s, Durban experienced a ferment of new ideas that were to profoundly shape resistance to apartheid. The central figures in this ferment were two charismatic intellectuals, Steve Biko and Rick Turner. Biko and his comrades founded the Black Consciousness movement and its organisational forms, the South African Students’ Organisation and the Black People's Convention, from which emerged a new generation of political activists who went on to organise trade unions, community organisations and the United Democratic Front. Rick Turner's ideas about participatory democracy and the projects he initiated to support a nascent black trade union movement, partly in response to the challenge of Black Consciousness, influenced many of those who contributed to the building of the trade union movement.
The Durban ferment was not only about the ideas of intellectuals; it was also about a shift in popular consciousness. In 1973 some 100,000 workers participated in a wave of strikes in Durban, breaking with the quiescence of the 1960s. By the end of the decade both Biko and Turner had been killed by the Security Police. Their ideas, however, continued to shape the resistance movement in different ways throughout the 1980s.
This was what Tony Morphet – drawing on Raymond Williams's idea of a structure of feeling – called the ‘Durban moment’, constituted by profound shifts in ideas and consciousness among intellectuals and workers, and setting off far-reaching reverberations across South Africa, way beyond the immediate locale of Durban (Morphet, 1990: 92–93; Webster, 1993).
That was the Durban moment. This book is subtitled ‘the Johannesburg moment’. What do we mean by this?
At the simplest level, the title is a reference to the fact that the book grew out of a series of lectures on Pierre Bourdieu, the great French sociologist, given at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg in 2010. The significance of the reference to place is not simply that the lectures took place here, but that they presented an occasion for interrogating the relevance of Bourdieu's work to South Africa – and, more importantly, confronting the meaning of South Africa for Bourdieu's theory. It is through exploring the significance of this interrogation and confrontation that we can arrive at some sense of the possible meaning of a ‘Johannesburg moment’.
The Symbolic World of Politics
- from CONVERSATION 7 - INTELLECTUALS AND THEIR PUBLICS
- Michael Burawoy, Karl Holdt
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- Conversations with Bourdieu
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- Wits University Press
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- 20 April 2018
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- 31 December 2012, pp 169-174
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Bourdieu writes about the ‘Realpolitik of reason’ or the ‘Realpolitik of the universal’ as the form of politics engaged in by the public sociologist – in other words, the struggle to defend the social conditions of the exercise of reason and expand access to its fruits. What might this mean in a country such as South Africa, emerging from a long history of colonialism and apartheid into a world order still dominated by the West?
As we noted in Conversation 5 (p121), Bourdieu understands the ‘ambiguity of reason’: on the one hand, it is a form of symbolic capital that serves ‘as an instrument of domination and legitimation’ for injustice and inequality; on the other, it is the basis of emancipation, democracy and human rights. Bourdieu argues for mobilisation and struggle through which those who are denied access to the universal can claim and realise such access (2000 [1997]: 70–72, 77–80), but his formulations are elliptical. What might they mean in practice? And what might they mean in a country of the Global South?
Bourdieu's text conveys a sense of the social scientist whose scholarship provides a unique access to the truth, which, as public intellectual, he conveys to society from his lectern – but at the same time the symbolic weight of the lectern and of his professorial knowledge serves to legitimate the existing authorities and hierarchies of society. There is little sense here of knowledge gained through concrete practice, which is consistent with Bourdieu's distinction between the logic of theory and the logic of practice. The impression is reinforced by the closing scenes of the documentary film on his life and work, La sociologie est un sport de combat, in which he attempts to persuade a militant meeting of immigrant community members in France that they cannot understand their own situation and should therefore read works of sociology – which they angrily reject, asserting the clarity of their own understanding of their oppression as they do so.
This is almost the public sociologist as parody. Any sociologist in South Africa who in the times of struggle against apartheid attempted such a role would have been met with a similar response.
Transforming Patriarchy?
- from CONVERSATION 6 - THE ANTINOMIES OF FEMINISM
- Michael Burawoy, Karl Holdt
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- Book:
- Conversations with Bourdieu
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- Wits University Press
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- 20 April 2018
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- 31 December 2012, pp 145-150
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Both Beauvoir and Bourdieu investigate the invisible domination of woman in a modern Western society – France – where modernity is layered with older orders of patriarchy going back to feudalism and before. Gender domination has been distilled over centuries and becomes for Bourdieu the prime instance of symbolic violence, which is ‘a gentle violence, imperceptible and invisible even to its victims, exerted for the most part through the purely symbolic channels of communication and cognition’ (Bourdieu, 2001 [1998]: 2). As Beauvoir puts it, this is an oppression where the oppressed ‘has no grasp, even in thought, on the reality around her. It is opaque to her eyes’ (Beauvoir, 1989 [1949]: 598).
What would Beauvoir or Bourdieu make of gender domination in South Africa, where ‘gentle’ and ‘invisible’ symbolic violence is joined by what can only be described as a campaign of private, explicit and atrocious physical violence against women? What would they make of the glaring disjunction between the new symbolic order arising out of the transition to democracy, which sets out explicitly to defend women against discrimination and empower them in all spheres – public and private – through policies, legislation and state institutions, and the competing symbolic orders that gain from society the vitality with which they continue to subjugate women?
These extraordinary disjunctions and juxtapositions between old and new, stasis and change, legislation and implementation, formal and informal, official rhetoric and daily practice, and between fractured and competing moralities, and all the contradictions, hypocrisies, clashes, enmities, alliances, polemics and fluctuations of mood – hope, anger, despair, triumph, cynicism, mirth – that accompany them, are precisely what characterise our society, providing formidable challenges to any attempt at Bourdieusian analysis of social order.
The rape trial of Jacob Zuma, at the time deputy president of the ANC, epitomised in the most public way possible the competing moralities and notions of patriarchal order in South Africa. Zuma's defence rested on a performance of himself as a traditional Zulu man deeply embedded in cultural notions of sexuality – themselves publicly contested. Outside the court, he danced and sang his trademark machine gun song before crowds of supporters, who threatened violence against the complainant. On the other side of the road, a coalition of gender activists and feminists demonstrated their support for the complainant.
The Margin of Freedom
- from CONVERSATION 8 - MANUFACTURING DISSENT
- Michael Burawoy, Karl Holdt
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- Book:
- Conversations with Bourdieu
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- Wits University Press
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- 20 April 2018
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- 31 December 2012, pp 198-209
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Pascalian Meditations is, as Michael points out, Bourdieu's ‘ culminating theoretical work’, in which he draws together and elaborates on the core concepts developed in a lifetime's research and reflection, referring back as he does so to his wide-ranging empirical studies. The main force of the book's arguments is to explain the stability and durability of social order: field, habitus and symbolic violence form an interlocking whole that ensures the reproduction of existing hierarchies and social orders.
Yet there is an undercurrent to the main argument, or a counter-current, that emerges briefly but vividly at certain points – a probing of the conditions under which the weight of social order may be destabilised or challenged. Some of these concern the potential of a destabilised field, or a contradictory habitus, to generate dynamics of change; Michael and I touch on these in some of the pieces in this book. However, in the final chapter of Pascalian Meditations, Bourdieu returns to symbolic struggle, and in this account he introduces an entirely new dimension: the symbolic order constitutes a space of relative autonomy with a margin of freedom for redefining the world and opening up new possibilities:
But there is also the relative autonomy of the symbolic order, which, in all circumstances and especially in periods in which expectations and chances fall out of line, can leave a margin of freedom for political action aimed at reopening the space of possibles. Symbolic power, which can manipulate hopes and expectations, especially through a more or less inspired and uplifting performative evocation of the future – prophecy, forecast or prediction – can introduce a degree of play into the correspondence between expectations and chances and open up a space of freedom through the more or less voluntarist positioning of more less improbable possibles – utopia, project, programme or plan – which the pure logic of probabilities would lead one to regard as practically excluded (Bourdieu, 2000 [1997]: 234).
Bourdieu in South Africa
- from CONVERSATION 1 - SOCIOLOGY AS A COMBAT SPORT
- Michael Burawoy, Karl Holdt
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- Book:
- Conversations with Bourdieu
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- Wits University Press
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- 20 April 2018
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- 31 December 2012, pp 25-30
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What I find so striking when reading Bourdieu in South Africa is how alert his texts are to the textures of social order, how acutely conscious they are of the accumulated weight of centuries of social structure that define ‘the way things are’, and how light that weight seems, embedded as it is in language and embodied in practices that have evolved gradually over time. His analysis is fine-tuned to the intimacies of domination and subordination – to the way they are inscribed in bodies, language and psyches.
Our own social reality appears to be the polar opposite – fractured, contested, disputative, disorderly, violent. In contrast to Bourdieu's account of profoundly stable domination, reproduced as it is through the social structure of field, habitus and symbolic violence, we have challenge, reversal and constant shifts in meaning. The order of apartheid was ruptured and overthrown by countless initiatives that entailed not only resistance, but the formation of counter-orders. Symbolic violence is ‘a gentle violence, imperceptible and invisible even to its victims’ (Bourdieu, 2001 [1998]: 2); South African violence has been throughout its colonial history, and still is, rough, physical, all too visible in battered, punctured and dying bodies, whether it is police violence against strikers, subaltern violence against foreigners or domestic violence against women. So why read Bourdieu in South Africa?
It may be that Bourdieu's very attentiveness to the question of order helps us to think about the limits of order and the contestation over these limits. One of our problems is how to think about resistance, about social fragmentation, about disorder, about pervasive violence – which should necessarily mean paying attention to different kinds of order as well. Local orders that emerge ‘from below’, formed by subaltern communities and activities and not infrequently shaped by elements of pre-colonial culture and practice, as well as by new networks and organisational forms, may support or subvert state orders.
Bodies of Defiance
- from CONVERSATION 2 - Theory and Practice
- Michael Burawoy, Karl Holdt
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- Conversations with Bourdieu
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- Wits University Press
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- 20 April 2018
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- 31 December 2012, pp 46-50
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Bourdieu is interested in the subordinated body that the subaltern habitus predisposes to manual labour, as well as to deference, humility and a physical stance of submission. This immediately poses the question of the body in resistance. The body on strike is already a body of defiance, refusing the routines of subordination and of the supervisor's instruction, disrupting authority. Striking workers today chant songs with their roots in the freedom songs of the 1980s, dance the toyi-toyi war dance that originated in the military camps of Umkhonto we Sizwe, and carry sticks that they understand to symbolise acts of fighting or war.
Where does this – the refusal, the defiance – fit into the idea of habitus, which predisposes the dominated to find domination invisible and submit to it? Nor does the body of resistance only come into being at the moment of explicit collective mobilisation. In my study of workers’ struggles at Highveld Steel in the apartheid era, workers talked about a continual resistance to the pace of white managers and their machinery, about an ‘apartheid go-slow’ on the part of African workers. Workers at the Daimler-Benz plant in East London wore wooden AK-47s strapped to their bodies on the production line, symbolising the connection between their struggles and the military struggle of the African National Congress (ANC), while supervisors locked themselves in their offices (Von Holdt, 1990). Can Bourdieu's theory account for the resistant body, the body that refuses the machinery and structures of domination?
According to Bourdieu (2000 [1997]: 182), historical critique is ‘a major weapon of reflexiveness’ which ‘makes it possible to neutralise the effects of naturalisation’. For Bourdieu, it is the scholar who has the time and occupies a location that makes it possible to pursue this task. The first strike I went to after arriving in Johannesburg in 1986 was an occupation strike in a big engineering works. Hundreds of workers were gathered in a solid and disciplined phalanx, toyi-toying slowly up the main roadway between the factory buildings. Many were bearing cardboard shields and steel replicas of spears turned on factory lathes, and in front of them whirled and danced two of the strike leaders, their factory overalls supplemented with animal furs and beads, referencing pre-colonial culture and resistance to colonial conquest.
Symbolic Challenge
- from CONVERSATION 3 - CULTURAL DOMINATION
- Michael Burawoy, Karl Holdt
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- Book:
- Conversations with Bourdieu
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- Wits University Press
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- 20 April 2018
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- 31 December 2012, pp 67-73
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In Bourdieu, the symbolic violence that works through habitus is linked to the broader symbolic order through which the hierarchies of society and the meanings of those hierarchies are stabilised and made normal. Just as in Gramsci the state is central to the organisation of hegemony, so in Bourdieu it is central to maintaining and naturalising this commonsense social order. The state is the authority of authorities and, as such, imposes classification systems that sanctify prevailing hierarchies, establishes and reproduces shared symbolic forms of thought, and presides over a symbolic order that is, ‘in appearance at least, coherent and systematic … adjusted to the objectives structures of the social world’ (Bourdieu, 2000 [1997]: 176). Just as the state claims a monopoly over physical violence, so it claims a monopoly over the legitimate use of symbolic violence (Bourdieu, 1994).
South Africa presents substantial challenges to such conceptions. Here, social order has not settled into a ‘commonsense’ shape. Both in society and in the state, the symbolic order is contested, fluid and ambiguous.
Research into the state (Von Holdt, 2010a) suggests a profound contradiction between the Weberian rationales of a modern bureaucracy – which is, formally speaking, what is enshrined in the constitution, legislation, regulations and policies of the government – and informal rationales that constitute the state as the premier site of African sovereignty and black advancement. The result is a deeply racialised instability in the meaning of skill, authority and ‘face’ within the bureaucracy. Whereas the symbolic order of apartheid stabilised skill as an attribute of whites and fundamentally devalued the skills of blacks, the transition opened up a sharp contestation over the meaning of ‘skill’: many whites continued to question the skills of blacks at the same time as many blacks questioned the skills of whites who, in their view, had gained their positions because of race rather than skill.
The meaning of skill inside the state has become deeply ambiguous, and in many cases managers have been appointed who lack the experience through which complex technical and managerial skills are developed. Black advancement becomes more important than questions of competence or institutional performance. In such cases, incompetence spreads, as managers who lack the necessary skills appoint others who in turn cannot perform.
Discipline
- from CONVERSATION 5 - PEDAGOGY OF THE OPPRESSED
- Michael Burawoy, Karl Holdt
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- Book:
- Conversations with Bourdieu
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- Wits University Press
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- 20 April 2018
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- 31 December 2012, pp 118-122
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My own involvement in the struggle for democracy started in the early 1980s in the adult literacy movement inspired by the work of Paulo Freire. We worked in the huge informal settlement of Crossroads outside Cape Town, where thousands of Africans from the poverty-stricken hinterlands of the Eastern Cape had settled, breaking the pass laws and under constant threat of mass eviction by the police. Every evening we taught to the hiss of gas lamps – there was no electricity – in the classrooms of the local school.
Our practices were participatory and democratic, using pictures and stories to elicit dialogue through which, we hoped, the structural violence of apartheid and capitalism would be exposed. Instead of rows of pupils with the teacher standing in front, we sat in a circle, with the ‘coordinator’ – as we called the teacher – sitting in the circle with the learners. The learners entered gamely into this process, but at times they were frustrated and perplexed by the endless litany of questions they were asked about the blindingly obvious hardships they faced.
One evening, one of our learners, a strong and intelligent woman who had spent five or six years in formal schooling, came in bearing a stick. When the session started, she rose and came to the front with the stick, turned and faced the circle of learners, and said, ‘This is how we want you to teach’, wielding the stick fiercely in the direction of the rest of the class.
We were crestfallen. ‘The old ways die hard’, we told ourselves. But the incident did make us wonder whether we were serious enough about teaching the rules and structures of language, and whether our approach was too loose and open-ended. How astute she was about the significance of discipline and authority in education, I think now, after reading Michael's dialogue between Paulo Freire and Pierre Bourdieu (and Antonio Gramsci).
After some time, we concluded that Freire did not work – at least as he had envisaged. We could not transcend the authority of the teacher, especially (but not only) when the teacher was white, and the exchange of views and knowledge was not equal.
Violence
- from CONVERSATION 4 - COLONIALISM AND REVOLUTION
- Michael Burawoy, Karl Holdt
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- Book:
- Conversations with Bourdieu
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- Wits University Press
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- 20 April 2018
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- 31 December 2012, pp 91-102
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The conversation between Fanon and Bourdieu raises questions of violence and colonialism, and the relation between them. Despite the insight and sympathy with which Bourdieu grasped the realities of colonial domination and resistance in Algeria, these were not the insights he was to take back to France and use in the elaboration of his theory of social order. Rather, what he took back to France to work into a suite of theoretical innovations for understanding society were the insights he drew from his study of rural indigenous society. In consequence, his work has very little to say about social change, transformation, resistance and revolution beyond those occasional and suggestive passages we noted in Conversation 2, frequently marked by references to Algeria or colonisation more broadly. On the face of it, therefore, Bourdieu should have little to say to South African social reality.
But the division between Fanon and Bourdieu – real violence in the colony, symbolic violence in the metropolis; revolution in the colony, invisible and unchallengeable domination in the metropolis – may be too stark. The relationship between symbolic violence and physical violence is much closer than such dichotomies make it appear. And as with symbolic violence, the relationship between the state, the law, and popular violence in communities is a complex and reciprocal one.
This reflection proceeds through a discussion of seven propositions regarding physical violence, drawn from ongoing research into the dynamics of social change in South Africa.
Collective violence on the part of subalterns is frequently a response to the symbolic violence that works to silence them.
Fanon certainly thought so: one reason why subaltern violence was necessary was that it was the only way to break the internal chains of oppression. South Africa's Steve Biko and other intellectuals of the Black Consciousness movement also argued that the first necessity in the struggle for freedom was that blacks should overcome the internal complex of inferiority fostered by white racism. The symbolic violence of
racism, in other words, has enormous force in the colonies. It has been argued by some that popular violence in South Africa, particularly ethnic and xenophobic violence, has roots in the self-denigration fostered by the symbolic violence of racism.
Chapter 13 - Bokfontein amazes the nations: Community Work Programme (CWP) heals a traumatised community
- from PART 2 - ECONOMY AND SOCIETY
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- By Malose Langa, lecturer in the Department of Psychology at the University of the Witwatersrand., Karl von Holdt, Associate Professor and Director, Society, Work and Development Institute, University of the Witwatersrand.
- Edited by John Daniel, Prishani Naidoo, Devan Pillay, Roger Southall
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- New South African Review 2
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- Wits University Press
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- 23 March 2018
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- 28 February 2012, pp 256-274
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INTRODUCTION
At our very first meeting with King George Mohlala and Patrick Ledikwa, two community leaders of Bokfontein, a small and poverty-stricken informal settlement near Brits in North West Province, they told us that theirs had been a community traumatised by the violence of evictions. ‘Eviction robs you of your dignity, respect and self-esteem,’ said Mohlala. ‘It robs you of your history. Your children do not know where you come from. You feel shame in front of other communities.’ They then went on to talk about how the Community Work Programme (CWP) and a community-building programme called the Organisation Workshop (OW) have helped them overcome this trauma: ‘It brought back our humanity, we understood we were part of South Africa. It built us so that we can stand on our own without waiting for help from elsewhere.’
We chose Bokfontein as a site in our research into collective violence in South Africa after hearing that the leadership in this community had prevented a threatened outbreak of xenophobic violence in 2008, at a time when violent attacks on foreign nationals were taking place in many similar communities. At the time, we were told that the state-sponsored CWP had played a part in strengthening the community to resist the apostles of xenophobic pogroms. Bokfontein sounded like the ideal research site in which to investigate the factors of resilience in a community which may reduce or prevent violence.
In this chapter, we describe the origins of Bokfontein and the impact of trauma due to the forced removals, which generated an ongoing cycle of intra-community violence. We then describe the implementation of OW and CWP and how this has helped to transform the community. We go on to discuss community responses to collective trauma and intra-community violence, to the threat of xenophobic violence, and to the multiple local government service delivery failures which, in other communities, have led to community protests. We conclude with an argument that the CWP – which incorporates OW as one of the community development approaches used in the inception stage of new sites – is able to respond to collective histories of traumatic violence as well as to socioeconomic challenges of poverty and joblessness.
Ivan Evans. Cultures of Violence. Lynching and radical killing in South Africa and the American South. Manchester University Press, Manchester [etc.]2009. x, 310 pp. £65.00
- Karl von Holdt
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- Journal:
- International Review of Social History / Volume 56 / Issue 1 / April 2011
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 01 April 2011, pp. 147-149
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