Post-Apartheid

Starting from the concept of ‘ordinary’ as it is outlined in Neville Alexander’s collection of essays, An Ordinary Country (2002), this paper reflects upon some common traits emerging from the bulk of the recent flourishing of novels by new black writers in South Africa. The aim of the paper is a first, tentative sketch of the relationship between these writings (and their authors) and the South African tradition, with a view to exploring whether there is a new canon struggling to emerge from this post-transitional wave of fiction. This essay aims at raising some reflections around authors such as Sello Duiker, Phaswane Mpe, Kopano Matlwa, Renesh Lakhan, etc. and on their liaison with the South African/African literary canon.

This article examines the development of Constitution Hill on the site of the Old Fort prison in Johannesburg, South Africa. Constitution Hill is the location of the new Constitutional Court and has two main purposes. First, as a heritage site it attempts to address the divisions that characterise contemporary South African society by acting as a physical manifestation of the human rights ethos around which much of post-apartheid South African public discourse revolves. Second, it was conceived as a developmental node to encourage urban regeneration in Johannesburg’s inner city. However, while the Court and related heritage areas have been established, tensions regarding the site’s different purposes have remained and resulted in its incomplete development.

The Princess Vlei Wetland in Cape Town, South Africa, has been part of a public debate since 2010 when a plan to build a shopping centre at the wetland resurfaced. This matured a civic-led coalition in opposition, which aimed to ecologically rehabilitate the area as a community and heritage park. These activities have come to ‘load’ Princess Vlei with political content beyond what stakeholder dialogues and other liberal democratic accounting tools can handle. Indeed, Princess Vlei brings a wider lesson about the deep disagreements that urban nature holds in postcolonial societies, and beyond.

In South Africa attempts are being made to address the socio-spatial distortions of the apartheid era through a more equitable distribution of resources, and the re-drawing of municipal geographical boundaries. However, boundaries are not neutral geographic lines. Boundary changes are often associated with a redistribution of political power and resources. The aim of this paper is to analyse the effects of the contemporary territorial and administrative restructuring on urban dynamics in South Africa. More specifically, the focus is on how the process of territorial restructuring impacted on metropolitan areas as well as on secondary cities and their hinterlands. Examining and elucidating the manner in which various social, economic and political forces have manifested themselves in the process of boundary delimitation in a major metropolitan centre as well as adjacent rural areas is a central theme of this paper. There were considerable contestations over the delimitation of new local government boundaries. Affluent metro authorities like that in Durban were opposed to the spatial extension of their boundaries because of the costs of the providing services and infrastructure in the deprived margins. Similarly, there was concern that incorporation of rural areas will result in increased municipal service charges being imposed on these communities. Tensions were heightened between urban and rural regions because traditional leaders believed that their territorial jurisdiction and authority were being undermined. In other parts of the country, the merger of traditionally white and black fragments of secondary cities often resulted in many black locations continuing to be marginalized. There appears to be neither the political will nor the economic capacity to upgrade these zones of marginalized urban communities. While the Municipal Demarcation Board was largely successful in eliminating the political geography of apartheid at a macro- scale, this paper suggests that the greater challenge for government and policy makers is to reduce the socio-spatial and economic inequalities which appears to be still very high and perhaps increasing.

JM Coetzee’s 1994 novel The Master of Petersburg has puzzled its readership with its geopolitical and temporal distance from the South African scene. I argue that the novel actually portrays some of the more salient features of the transition years, as it reflects on the position of the writer vis-à-vis a restructured field of political forces. A meditation on transition time and on the protracted dimension of waiting for a new world to be born, the novel also presents a model of connectivity between Russia and South Africa. It places post-apartheid culture in a special relationship to postcolonialism and the global configuration born at the end of the Cold War.

The rapid development and incredible variety of contemporary placename studies has given birth to a very complex landscape, featuring both theoretical propositions (e.g. critical toponymies) and a vast array of case studies, ranging from the San of Namibia, Singapore or the very heart of Manhattan. In turn, this landscape needs to be deciphered and maybe somewhat structured with a more general interpretative framework that will highlight the importance of context in the production of both knowledge and new placenames. We will try to contribute to this objective in two ways. Firstly, by mapping existing placename literature, assessing what are the places most talked about, and where the studies stem from. It will allow us to highlight the predominance of countries in a “post-” situation (post-apartheid, post-colonial, post-socialist, post-conflict...) in placenames studies, as well as of settler societies. Also, the geography of knowledge production in placename studies reveals both the usual dominance of Northern universities and the importance of specific locations, where the production of toponymic analysis is linked to national issues. Context thus appears as a significant element in the production of toponymic knowledge. Secondly, we will suggest that renaming practices (neotoponymy), as varied as they arethroughout the world, present commonalities. These practices can be broken into three elements: contexts, actors and processes, and objectives. These elements do not have the same potential for generalization, but both the contexts and the objectives of renaming point to more general trends that can help theorize the renaming process. We will argue that three types of political contexts are especially conducive to neotoponymic production: those of revolution, conquest and boosterism. In turn, renaming practices aim at four main objectives: cleansing, restoring, founding, and branding. While the link between a type of context and the objectives of renaming is not straightforward, less alone deterministic, preferential sequences can be identified (e.g. toponymic cleansing and place founding in a context of revolution). By contrast, actors and concrete processes are more rooted in local conditions and their inherent situatedness make them more specific, and thus less easy to generalize. We will illustrate this framework with South African examples.

""This paper seeks to re-describe democratization of heritage by focusing on controversies connected to the work with the exhibition Stories of People´s History in Southern Africa staged at the KwaZulu-Natal Museum (South Africa). The investigation is based on archival material as well as participant observation and qualitative interviews. The material is analyzed using performance theory and theories on democratization processes. The article comes to the conclusion that a focus on curatorial performances reveals controversies and developments that fall outside the traditional conceptualization of a democratization process. The text argues that this focus assists in moving beyond the binary position that democracy and “non-democracy” has received in scholarly publication. The text proposes that a democratization of heritage involves an entanglement of ideas and values. It does not necessarily involve a “better” heritage but instead an appropriation from a different political perspective.

Keywords: Exhibitions, South Africa, democratization, apartheid, performance theory, archaeology.
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