Ashwin Desai

World Cup 2010: Africa's turn or the turn on Africa?

The awarding of World Cup 2010 to South Africa was hailed as a great ‘victory’ for the African continent and the cause of much celebration. It heightened expectations not only about the spectacle itself but about the benefits that would accrue to South Africa and the rest of Africa. This essay examines the notion of the successful bid as an ‘African victory’ in the context of global power relations in football, South Africa’s alleged function as a sub‐imperialist power on the continent, and xenophobic attacks on African immigrants in South Africa. After tracing the politics around South Africa’s involvement in FIFA, this essay critically interrogates the benefits touted for South Africa and Africa: development for the SADC region, economic opportunities for ordinary South Africans, increased tourism in South Africa, and football development and peace and nation‐building across the continent. Will the World Cup, as Thabo Mbeki would like, be the moment ‘when Africa stood tall and resolutely turned the tide on centuries of poverty and conflict?’

After the rainbow: following the footprints of the May 2008 xenophobic violence in South Africa

In May 2008, African immigrants were attacked across South Africa. The violence was captured in a horrifying image of Ernesto Alfabeto Nhamuave, a 35-year old father of three from Mozambique, who was burnt to death. He had arrived in Johannesburg just three months before the 18 May attacks, hoping to find work in the building industry. The image of this human fireball drew haunting reminders of necklacing during the apartheid years (The Times 2008). The May 2008 xenophobic attacks resulted in the death of just over 60 people, a third of whom were South Africans. According to official reports, some 342 shops were looted, 213 gutted, and 1384 people arrested (Crush et al. 2008, p. 11). Much has been written on the factors that led to the violence of May 2008 and the response of the state and civil society to the violence (Human Sciences Research Council [HSRC] 2008, Misago 2009). However, once thousands of immigrants had been bundled off to their countries of origin and the camps dismantled, the researchers and media began to write about the violence in the past tense. Alongside this, both the state and much of civil society stopped any support work once those displaced left the camps. This Briefing traces developments after the May 2008 attacks with a particular focus on the impact on the lives of African immigrants. In a limited number of areas the state sought to reintegrate those displaced. In many of the instances the South Africans rejected attempts at reintegration. Journalist Victor Khupiso wrote of how ‘on Friday nights in Ramaphosa squatter camp, it’s time for what locals call their “Kwerekwere-Free (Foreigner-Free) Society” campaign’. In haunting detail Khupiso chronicles how groups of young people spread out over the camp to hunt down foreigners. One of the young people told Khupiso that he could ‘proudly say foreigners had decided to leave our area because they know what would happen to them if they are found. They would burn. Hell is waiting for them. We have stored some tyres’ (Khupiso 2008). These were not empty threats. The example of Francisco Nobunga who fled the Ramaphosa shack settlement in Ekurhuleni during the May xenophobic attacks was a clear signal. He returned to his dwelling with his South African-born wife, Sylvia Nosento, and survived three weeks before he was killed. He produced a South African identity document, as demanded by his attackers, but it had a Mozambican address (The Star 2008). Nyamnjoh vividly unpacks the significance of the use of the word Kwerekwere in his 2006 book, Insiders and Outsiders:

Managing South African transformation: the story of cricket in KwaZulu Natal, 1994–2004

Sport has historically been an important element of South African popular culture, even though it was divided along racial lines for much of the countrys history. In post-apartheid South Africa, sport is seen by politicians, sports officials and many ordinary people as a means to surmount race and class barriers and to forge nationhood. But sport remains a site of acute contestation over what transformation means: ‘merit’ versus ‘affirmative action’, beneficiaries of change, pace of transformation and so on. This conflict reflects the broader tensions over how South African society should be restructured. Change in racial composition at the level of leadership, coaching and players since 1990 has failed to transform cricket into a ‘peoples game’. The cricket establishment is following the lead of government in prioritizing the empowerment of a minority. Class privilege has replaced race privilege. At the same time, tensions generated by change are producing further hostility along the fault lines of race and class. There is, for example, a conflict over resources among those previously labelled ‘Black’: Indians, Coloureds and the majority African population. These struggles reveal the fragmented nature of post-apartheid South African society, notwithstanding attempts to define South Africa as a ‘rainbow nation’. The historical, social, economic and cultural legacy of South Africas conflicting pasts, the impact of globalization—and sport is a principal front of globalization, generating vast economic revenue and creating intolerable pressure to succeed—as well as post-apartheid discrepancies in economic and social conditions are all making it difficult to forge a united national culture, despite the attempt to use sport for the ‘mythic enactment’ of a collective South African identity. The tensions discussed in this article continue to be alive though the ‘patterns of prejudice’ are manifesting themselves in different forms.

Theatre of Struggle: Black Consciousness on Salisbury Island

Most modern institutions of education, despite the apparent neutrality of the materials from which they are constructed (red brick, white tile, etc.) carry within them implicit ideological assumptions which are literally structured into the architecture itself. The categorization of knowledge into arts and sciences is reproduced in the faculty system which houses different buildings … moreover, the hierarchical relationship between teacher and taught is inscribed in the very layout of the lecture theatre with the seating arrangements … dictating the flow of information and serve to naturalise professorial authority. Thus a whole range of decisions about what is and is not possible within education have been made, however unconsciously, before the content of the individual courses is decided.

Between Apartheid and Neoliberalism in Durban's Indian Quarter

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Knowledge and Power in South Africa: Xenophobia and Survival in the Post-Apartheid State

In May 2008, South Africa was racked with the worst xenophobic violence since the end of apartheid. In the space of a few weeks, more than sixty people—overwhelmingly migrants from other African countries—were viciously attacked and killed by bands of vigilantes. Tens of thousands of people were displaced, many seeking protection outside local police stations, community and church halls, and temporary, precarious camps constructed throughout the country.

Stuck in the middle? Indians in South Africa's fading rainbow

ABSTRACT This article examines the political and economic position of Indians in post-apartheid South Africa, where they are sandwiched between an economically dominant white class and the majority African population. It provides a brief background on African and Indian relations since the nineteenth century, and examines how and why these were strained at certain historical junctures. Against this background, the article explores issues of identity, nationality, and citizenship in the post-apartheid period, which has seen the population of Indian South Africans augmented by new migrants from the Indian sub-continent. It argues that while the rubric of ‘Indian’ has been challenged by increasing class divides and fracturing along religious lines, the legal definition of South Africans according to race, the economic competition that recent Indians migrants provide for working class Africans in townships, and Indians’ relatively privileged position vis-a-vis Africans has seen them come under pressure in a context of widening inequality and a racially exclusive African nationalism. They will remain ‘stuck in the middle’ for the foreseeable future.

Aerotropolis Lands in Durban, South Africa : exploring the “satanic geographies” of fast capitalism

King Shaka rose like a colossus in his day and age to make Kwa-Zulu a place of Zulus. … He made one people out of many peoples. … King Shaka … was the greatest visionary of his time. … That great K...

Of Faustian Pacts and Mega-projects: The Politics and Economics of the Port Expansion in the South Basin of Durban, South Africa

For many, the un-banning of the liberation movements and the release of Nelson Mandela was a sign that these expectations were closer than ever. The first utterances of Mandela and his policy pronouncements stimulated the sense that the aspirations that fueled the rebellion against apartheid were on course. Mandela’s first speech on his release from prison paid allegiance to the fundamental tenets of the Freedom Charter (Sampson 1999). But, with Mandela’s stirring words on his release from prison still ringing in our ears, a counter-move was already gaining ground.

The 1946-1948 Passive Resistance Campaign in Natal, South Africa: Origins and Results

This article presents an anatomy of the 1946–48 Passive Resistance campaign. It does this by looking at its historical antecedent, the 1913 strike and then more immediately at the battles between the so-called “moderates” and “radicals” for control of the Natal Indian Congress (NIC) through the first half of the 1940s. It shows how the “radicals” gained control of the NIC and how this laid the basis for a more confrontational approach that drew on Gandhis idea of passive resistance. Against this backdrop, the article seeks to understand why the 1946–48 campaign failed to have any major impact on the South African government. The final part of the article brings into focus the similarities between the 1913 and 1946 campaigns and shows how the latter marked the beginning of the end of a particular line of march for Gandhism. The final part of the article makes some tentative conclusions about the longer term consequences of the 1946–48 campaign.