Separate Development and Self-Reliance at the University of Pretoria

Thumbran, Janeke

doi:10.17159/2309-9585/2017/v43a7

Cited by 3 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 1 publication

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“…In the 1930s, the state committed to addressing the poor-white problem. The University of Pretoria established departments of social work and applied sociology to respond to the 'social deviance' among poor whites (Fourie 2006;Thumbran 2017). In 1968, the Rand Afrikaans University (RAU) was established in Johannesburg to serve an urban Afrikaans-speaking population with a '…policy phase that focused on "particularism".…”

Section: Universities Under Apartheid: Place-based and Place-neutral ...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Place, Public Good and Higher Education in South Africa

Molebatsi¹

2022

JHEA

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Worsening poverty and inequality continue to affect large segments of the South African population. Universities are critical in contributing to overcoming these challenges. This article looks at the relationship between South African universities and the communities and places in which they are located. The history of South African higher education shows different kinds of relationships with the places in which universities were set. Data collected from interviews in 2018 with key informants in South African universities notes their criticisms of government development policies that lacked vision with regard to the development of place-based relationships for the public good. This data indicates that in the absence of an enabling policy framework to link communities and places, certain universities, individuals who work in them and members of communities around universities have developed their own approaches. I argue that these activities indicate actions by certain members of a spatial community, which can be understood as practices associated with a public sphere. Through this process individuals and institutions can play a central role in defining and contextualising the public good role of universities in their communities.

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Section: Universities Under Apartheid: Place-based and Place-neutral ...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Place, Public Good and Higher Education in South Africa

Molebatsi¹

2022

JHEA

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“…Such discourses have an emancipatory iteration, both in Black Consciousness' texts and other radical thought. However, Janeke Thumbran (2017) notes that a discourse of self-reliance is lodged in apartheid, while iterations of self-reliance and self-help inhere in neoliberalism (Amable 2011). By situating self-reliance within apartheid's discourse of separate development, and thus an iteration of long histories of trusteeship in colonial South Africa, Thumbran cautions those who underwrite empowerment projects through the discourse of self-help or self-reliance.…”

Section: Speak Out Hearings: Discursive Space and Subjectivitiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Speak Out on Poverty: Hearing, Inaudibility, and Citizenship in Post‐Apartheid South Africa

Rousseau

2019

PoLAR

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In 1998, Speak Out on Poverty held hearings across South Africa shortly after the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) completed eighteen months of highly publicized, nationwide hearings at which victims testified. Speak Out challenged the TRC's focus on overt political violations, seen to occlude forms of structural violence central to apartheid's policy and practice, as well as longer legacies of colonialism. Reading Speak Out alongside the TRC puts pressure on supposed differences between official truth commissions or tribunals and those run by civil society. Discussing Speak Out in relation to the TRC signaled more than a set of comparisons. In a time of transition, Speak Out spoke from within and against the noise of the TRC. It aimed to make poverty and inequality the nation's priority rather than reconciliation, or at least to challenge notions of reconciliation that did not have inequity and poverty at its center. This intention failed to come to fruition, and Speak Out seemed paradoxically inaudible in public debate. In exploring this conundrum, this article considers particular strategic and organizational choices by Speak Out. These shaped the discursive terrain of operations and subjectivities in ways that unintentionally enabled inaudibility and constrained the organizers' transformative intentions. [People's tribunals, South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, structural violence, Speak Out on Poverty, testimony]In 1998, after some fifteen months of highly publicized victim hearings convened by South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), public hearings dubbed Speak Out on Poverty (hereafter Speak Out) took place. A coalition of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), together with rights institutions established by the first post-apartheid parliament, organized the hearings. Speak Out hearings convened in urban and rural areas across South Africa and spoke to what is seen as a "blind spot" in the TRC's mandate: its focus on overt political violations. Critics saw this focus as occluding forms of structural violence, which were central to apartheid's policy and practice, and colonialism's longer legacies.With political negotiations center stage in the early 1990s, behind-the-scenes local and international businesses brought much persuasion and pressure to bear on the post-apartheid economy (Terreblanche 2012). Further, negotiations coincided with the end of the Cold War and an ascendant neoliberal global order, narrowing South Africa's economic options. Thus, while negotiations decisively ended white minority rule, these negotiations were less successful in addressing effects of colonial and apartheid rule, notably poverty and inequality. Indeed, in 1993, a Gini coefficient of 0.593 located South Africa among the most inequitable countries in the world. 1 In 1994, the year of the first democratic elections, South Africa's Human Development Index (HDI) score was 0.699 (United Nations Development Programme 1994, 94). Disaggregated by race, the HDI fell to 0.462 for black Sou...

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The Paradox of Freedom and Fear in Athol Fugard’s My Children! My Africa!

Simango

2023

Imbizo

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The history of South Africa is characterised by fear that stems from violent colonisation by Europeans who had their own interests and neglected the needs of the original inhabitants of the land. The descendants of the colonisers made matters worse with the introduction of apartheid, which saw the implementation of discriminatory policies that included the forced removals of black people from their own land. This article traces and interrogates the fight for freedom by black South Africans against apartheid, a fight that can be described as brutal and accompanied by fear. This fight is nuancedly represented by Athol Fugard in one of his plays, My Children! My Africa! (1989), in which he links fear with the quest for freedom. Applying postcolonial theory to the play, this article argues that Fugard’s representation of apartheid’s oppression of black people complicates understandings of the concept of freedom by making freedom and fear inseparable.

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Separate Development and Self-Reliance at the University of Pretoria

Cited by 3 publications

References 1 publication

Place, Public Good and Higher Education in South Africa

Place, Public Good and Higher Education in South Africa

Speak Out on Poverty: Hearing, Inaudibility, and Citizenship in Post‐Apartheid South Africa

The Paradox of Freedom and Fear in Athol Fugard’s My Children! My Africa!

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