Ari Sitas

The African Renaissance Challenge and Sociological Reclamations in the South

This article critically evaluates whether sociologists in the ‘South’ are offered any creative breathing space by either the adoption of poststructuralist and postcolonial thought or the current indigenization drive of the African Renaissance initiative in South Africa. The article argues that neither does. It traces the impasse to which many of these currents lead, and the way they fail to overcome conventional sociologys derogation of intellectual work that does not take as its founding rules part of any canon. It then provides a suggestion for a way out, by moving away from a ‘culture of application’ and imitation and away from simplistic critiques or ‘deconstruction’ without substantive intellectual work to buttress such critical claims. Only then can an African Renaissance achieve its aims of creating a sociology that does not involve a dialectic of ‘self-abnegation’, one which says that what is ‘absent’ is what ones society does not possess of the ‘norm’; and that what has to be ‘negated’ is that which constitutes ones ‘alterity’ – be it indigenous norms, values or seemingly aberrant institutions.

Beyond the urban-rural divide: linking land, labour, and livelihoods

In the initial post-apartheid period, much social research shared in a general euphoria that South Africa’s journey was to follow a ‘high road’ of industrial development – high skills, high wages, new technology, SMMEs, exports and global competitiveness. Narrowly focused on industry and on the main metropolitan centres, this work assumed that the South African economy would generate a rising tide of remunerative urban jobs ensuring a better life for all. This euphoria trapped a large chunk of scholarship into an iron cage of instrumental knowledge and policy recommendations that were sharply at odds with emerging realities. More recently there has been an explosion of statistical information that maps the contours of persistent and growing poverty, shrinking employment, and collapsing livelihoods in painful detail. These volumes of data, their classificatory grids, and the narrow positivism they employ, are supposed to inform careful policy interventions. One obvious critique of such datagathering is that it signals what Timothy Mitchell (2002) terms ‘the rule of experts’, and illustrates how constructions and deployments of such categories, classifications, and data embody technologies of power. Yet to the extent that this sort of critique focuses simply or primarily on grids of legibility, it is itself quite limited. The danger, in short, is that the production of knowledge will become caught between an instrumental positivism on the one hand, and endless deconstructions of the categories of the new South Africa on the other. There is, in fact, remarkably little critical, sustained research and reflection on the changing power relations and processes of acquiescence and opposition that are emerging in the post-apartheid era. Our purpose in this note is to outline a new research initiative that seeks to illuminate key

Rethinking Africa’s sociological project

This article explores what challenges African sociologists face in the contemporary period. It argues that one needs to go beyond references to resource constraint or the emphasis on the market or the state in order to fathom the deeper canonical and epistemological problems that keep work outside and distant from the sociological canon. Part of the challenge is that most coherent work on the continent occurred outside the confines of sociology as such. After exploring the snares involved, the article turns to the kind of work that animated sociological thought from indigenous and endogenous forms of knowledge, development and underdevelopment debates, violence and power and a growing emphasis on labour studies. It concludes in trying to consolidate the areas of consensus among African sociologists.

Thirty Years Since the Durban Strikes: Black Working-Class Leadership and the South African Transition

The article explores core themes arising from a sustained ethnography spanning South Africa’s transition to democracy. Focusing on emerging tensions in what used to be a strong horizontal solidarity of ‘comradeship’ since the 1980s, it explores why the ‘elastic band’ that held the movement together still holds despite class mobility, divergent socioeconomic needs and mounting challenges to its ‘elasticity’. In this longitudinal study of 400 people the author traces the shifts in consciousness and notions of solidarity and analyses how livelihood strategies, notions of race and ethnicity and most importantly notions of class had been redefined by the year 2000. This article is for a generation of black worker leaders who, since the 1973 Durban strikes that ushered the new trade unions onto the historical stage, were a core component of the resistance against racial domination and economic inequality in the country.

Beyond the Mandela decade: The ethic of reconciliation?

The author claims that there is an emergent ethic of reconciliation which influences social and political action in the recent period. This ethic of reconciliation has four sources: neo-Gandhian dispositions in the global South that provide a critique of arms and of military solutions; post-racist and pro-peace and feminist discourses in the West that emerged through significant social movements of reflexive modernization; and post-Stalinist socialist ideas and practices that have renovated Marxism and the work of the arts, literature and performance. The article goes on to point to some serious sociological reasons why this ethic of reconciliation has consolidated its presence and how the experience of war, violence and instrumental reason have been and are seriously challenged.

Response to the critical comments

The fact that one’s work is noticed at all is heart-warming, especially if such work comes from the margins of the planet. The four respondents dangle an enticing prospect: to deal with the very important tenets of their own recent work. Their critique of my manuscript (Sitas, 2008) and article in Current Sociology can only be explored adequately if their broader conceptual contours are mapped. I have learnt tons in panning for meaning in their texts and I am convinced that Dennis Smith’s concern about broader processes of social displacement and humiliation in his Globalisation: The Hidden Agenda (2006); Wiebke Keim’s concern with the theoretical underpinnings and definitions and her rigorous play on the centres and peripheries of sociological knowledge (2008); Ananta Kumar Giri’s (2010) concern about a new universal take on compassion and reconciliation; and Nicos Trimikliniotis’s (2010) concern with the dialectic of nation-state and conflict, need to be engaged with in a sustained way if the debate is to take their concerns with social theory and social justice further. All I can do in this response is to clarify some ambiguities and defend some of the turf covered in my article.

The human, humanism and the human condition

The importance of explicating the human condition for any knowledge project in the humanities has been made by Premesh Lalu (2012). In a separate but related intervention (Lalu 2011), he raised the issue that we should be careful: what are we defending when we are doing so? He went further to assert that the disciplinary reason animating our fields is deeply implicated with and shackled by the native question. I think these are vital interventions as Lalu asks us to think beyond our disciplinary/programme-linked boundaries at the way we organise our humanities and the social sciences, our universities and, within the corridors of power, how we organise a broader knowledge project. Within all three levels, I understand, we should be reflecting on what would it mean to move beyond the shackles of the inhuman in the human condition. Having emerged from the pressure cooker of developing a ‘Charter for the Future of the Humanities and Social Sciences’ (Ministerial Task Team 2011) and being convinced that the future of these fascinating fields of study seems more secure in South Africa than has ever been the case over the last decade and a half, the question remains of how are we to craft a post-apartheid and decolonised focus on this human condition which is at once a study of our species in and through the natural world that is very much us, about us and about other sentient beings. The human condition is not only about the BA, BEd or the BSocSci but also about the wonders of science. Life itself will be opaque without them and miserable without the eco-friendly sciences flourishing in the contemporary period. The slogan that the humanities are under threat does not necessarily mean that humanism or the human project is under threat. The quick association of humanity and humanism with ‘the’ humanities is a misnomer. One reason why the humanities and social sciences were respected and are respected by some of the political leadership in the liberation movement was because of the role they did play in the struggle against apartheid and against the excesses of the country’s racial capitalism. It would be easy to draw lines, demand relevance, conjure up patterns of evil, castigate and grandstand. That will not get us very far. There is instead a vital imperative to entrench the impulses of humanism in our universities while creating a vibrant scientific project. This dual imperative cannot be ignored, sidelined or postponed. Many of my generation now in senior positions in the academy will remember and argue that we have come from spaces where careful thinking about the ‘human’ has occurred and the coming out of the ‘night’ that Mafika Gwala so eloquently

Freedom’s blind spots: Figurations of race and caste in the postcolony

South Africa was the last country to experience the ascendance of a national liberation movement, India was the first. The movements shared the word Congress, a word that was shared early in the 20 century after Mahatma Gandhi’s turbulent stay in South Africa. By the 1910s after the Boer War when the Briton and Afrikaner excluded the majority from the Union of South Africa on the basis of race, African leaders turned with interest to the Natal and Transvaal Indian Congresses that the diminutive lawyer started in 1894. 2

The musical journey – re-centring AfroAsia through an arc of musical sorrow

Abstract The article weaves together the historical journey of a set of lament-like musical tropes from the seventh century AD to the 15th, to trace the commonalities in composition and performance. It argues that key to this transmission were women in servitude or slavery, and begins to explore the role of Africans in this long-distance transfer of symbolic goods.

The Potential for Reconciliation, Forgiveness, and Social Transformation

The annan plan for the reunification of Cyprus was rejected by a great majority of the Greek-Cypriots (76 percent) in the April 2004 referendum. On the other hand, an overwhelming majority of the Turkish-Cypriots (65 percent) supported it. A wide-ranging research on the “Prospects of Reconciliation, Co-existence and Forgiveness in Cyprus in the Post-Referendum Period”1 was started after the failure of the Annan Plan to comprehend this process and its repercussions. This chapter draws on the key findings of this research in discussing reconciliation and social transformation in Cyprus. The research explored the dispositions of Cypriots on the prospects of reconciliation, coexistence, and forgiveness. One hundred and seventy qualitative interviews were carried out, focusing on two generation of Cypriots: Those now in their 50s that experienced the conflict, and the generation of their children, now in their mid-20s, born and raised on a divided island. The main objective of the study was to understand and interpret the dispositions of Cypriots concerning the terms of reconciliation, coexistence, and forgiveness and to explore how Cypriots defined, related to, and differentiated these terms as they meant diverse things to individuals, groups and social collectives.