Clive Glaser

Sexual Socialisation in South Africa: A Historical Perspective

The HIV/AIDS pandemic in Southern Africa has focused attention on how children and youth learn about sex. This research has revealed an alarming failure of communication between parents and children on sexual issues. Parents find it very difficult to broach the issue of sex with their children who as a result have little option but to seek information elsewhere -- normally from their peers. There is also now a considerable body of work on sexual attitudes and practices which paints a bleak picture of contemporary realities. There are high levels of premarital sexual activity and teenage pregnancy. But perhaps most disturbing of all is the research on youth sexuality that suggests that sex -- especially for girls -- is often coercive and violent and that this is to some extent accepted as the norm by both males and females. While these patterns are increasingly well documented they have not been adequately explained. Some commentators have suggested that a promiscuous and violent sexual culture is primordial in Africa and that contemporary realities are an inevitable outcome. This point of view unsurprisingly has angered many people on the continent. It also contradicts historical evidence. (excerpt)

Sex, disease and stigma in South Africa: historical perspectives

This paper attempts to analyse historically why stigma and denial around HIV/AIDS is so powerful in South Africa, so powerful that ailing family members can be shunned and evicted. For many observers, the answer lies simply in its being a venereal disease, in its connotation with promiscuity and unregulated sexuality. We argue that this is not an adequate explanation. Pre-colonial African societies were relatively open about sexuality. Though pre-marital and adulterous pregnancy certainly caused social disruption, extra-marital sex per se was not stigmatised. Even the sexual shame introduced (unevenly) by Christianity and its hybridised forms is inadequate in explaining the degree of stigma associated with HIV/AIDS. We extend the discussion by exploring the stigma associated with various forms of pollution and the inevitability of death. The peculiarly interwoven mixture of sexual transgression, pollution and delayed death, we argue, makes HIV/AIDS an extraordinarily powerful generator of stigma.

‘We must infiltrate the tsotsis’: school politics and youth gangs in Soweto, 1968–1976

By the late 1960s, two major associative structures dominated youth culture in Soweto: the school and the gang. Despite secondary school expansion during the early 1970s, no more than a third of the teenage and adolescent population of Soweto attended school by the middle of the decade. Gangs, which offered a powerful alternative to schooling, attracted a large proportion of unemployed and non‐schoolgoing male adolescents. While the gangs were absorbed by localised competition, a political culture gradually took root in Sowetos high schools. Conflict mounted between high schools and gangs in the lead‐up to the 1976 uprising. It was an uprising of school students rather than ‘the youth’, a contemporary catch‐all category which often obscures deep cultural divisions. School and university‐based activists, recognising the political potential of gangs, made some attempt to draw the gang constituency into disciplined political activity but they were largely unsuccessful. Gangs participated spontaneously in th...

The Western Cape Oral History Project: The 1990s

Since the late 1970s oral history has become a vital element in the production of South African social history. The techniques of oral history have helped to open up previously uncharted areas of research. The experiences of individuals and communities undocumented in written sources have been brought into the mainstream of South African history. Oral history methods have generated fresh insights, on issues such as migrancy, sharecropping and labour tenancy, urban squatter movements and removals, household struggles, youth subcultures and political movements (see La Hausse 1990 for an overview of South African oral history in the 1970s and 1980s).

Portuguese Immigrant History in Twentieth Century South Africa: A Preliminary Overview

Abstract South Africans of Portuguese descent probably constitute ten to fifteen per cent of the white South African population. Yet it is a remarkably under-researched population. This article attempts to lay out a research agenda to address this large historiographical gap. It begins with an overview of the sparse literature on Portuguese immigrants and then provides a basic narrative of three discernible waves of migration from the late nineteenth century until the late 1970s. The first and longest wave involved impoverished citizens of the island of Madeira. The second involved more skilled mainlanders from about 1940–1980, most coming in the 1960s and 1970s. The final wave involved Mozambican and Angolan ex-colonial refugees. The paper suggest several areas of possible historical research on Portuguese-South Africans: the degree of their coherence as a “community”; their generational continuity and discontinuity; and in general, the nature of transnational hybridised identity in its racial, religious and political dimensions.

Soweto's islands of learning: Morris Isaacson and Orlando High Schools under Bantu Education, 1958-1975

Orlando High School and Morris Isaacson High School, the two most famous high schools in Soweto, offer a valuable lens into the shifting culture of teaching and learning in South Africas urban public schooling. These two schools are best known for their role in the 1976 Soweto uprising, but I move away from this aspect of their history and, instead, analyse them as institutions of learning and as crucial generators of Sowetos professional elite over several decades. This article focuses on the schools as they operated under the Bantu Education system from the late 1950s until the mid 1970s. During the 1960s the Nationalist government was hostile to the very notion of African secondary schooling in the cities. Yet in spite of an authoritarian and repressive state bureaucracy, a lack of resources, and overcrowding, the schools established themselves as credible institutions of learning. Under the firm leadership of T.W. Kambule and Lekgau Mathabathe, they attracted talented, dedicated staff and highly motivated students. Working within the state system inevitably aroused suspicions and tensions; nevertheless, the schools offered the most likely avenue for ordinary Sowetan families to achieve some form of professional upward mobility.

Violent Crime in South Africa: Historical Perspectives

Abstract This paper tries to set out an agenda for historical research into the origins of unusually high violent crime levels in South Africa. It argues that there have been few attempts to link historical research on crime explicitly to the contemporary crisis. The paper reviews some of the more recent attempts at an explanation for our levels of violent crime but finds them generally lacking in historical depth. The apartheid legacy paradigm, while essential to the discussion, is inadequate for a number of reasons. Specific indigenous cultural and social practices need to be incorporated more systematically into future research. I argue that two areas of the discussion on crime need urgent historical attention: inequality and youth socialisation. I also suggest that historians need to do much more comparative work with countries that have experienced similar political and economic trajectories in order to understand which dimensions of our criminal legacy are specific to South Africa.

White But Illegal: Undocumented Madeiran Immigration to South Africa, 1920s–1970s

Illegal entry was a central feature of the Madeiran immigrant experience in South Africa between the 1920s and 1970s. Unskilled Madeirans, who were generally not welcomed by the South African state, tapped into human smuggling networks to enter the country. It was a common practice to work illegally on farms or in shops owned by legally resident Madeirans. A large portion of these eventually secured work permits after having worked in the country for long periods. Not only were illegal immigrants generally destitute and illiterate, but they had to live under the radar to avoid arrest and deportation. In spite of their official status as ‘white’ and the many advantages this offered them, illegal Madeirans lived on, at best, the fringes of white society for several decades.

Learning amidst the turmoil: secondary schooling in Soweto 1977-1990

Abstract In spite of immensely difficult circumstances, Orlando High School and Morris Isaacson High School, probably Sowetos two most important high schools, managed to achieve reasonable levels of education under strong leadership during the first two decades of Bantu Education (1956–1975.) They engaged strategically with Bantu Education, in many ways subtly undermining the intentions of the apartheid education system. This article takes the story of these two schools, and Soweto secondary schooling more broadly, into the late 1970s and 1980s. In 1977 most of Sowetos best secondary school teachers, including the extraordinary headmasters of Morris Isaacson and Orlando High, left state schooling in protest. While the reformist apartheid government invested heavily in expanding black urban secondary schooling from the late 1970s, grievances mounted against the grossly unequal education system. High schools became increasingly politicised as student movements reconstituted. New militant teacher unions also emerged from the mid-1980s. There were ongoing disruptions to schooling: boycotts, shut-downs, political meetings, mass detentions. While the student movement and teacher unions succeeded in paralysing the hated Bantu Education system, Sowetos high schools were left with a legacy of damage which has arguably never been repaired.

Home, Farm and Shop: The Migration of Madeiran Women to South Africa, 1900–1980

Madeiran immigration into South Africa from the beginning of the1900s to the 1970s followed a classic male-led migration pattern. It was virtually unheard of for a woman to migrate without a formal attachment to a man. The history of Madeiran migration has therefore usually under-stated the experience of women in the migration chain. This article attempts not only to recover some of the historical experience of women immigrants from Madeira to South Africa but to place gender relationships at the centre of the migration process. Initially they provided the labour and domestic continuity that made the release of young men from the peasant economy possible. After joining men in South Africa, they continued to provide crucial labour, stabilised the community, and became the most important bearers of cultural identity. The first section of the article focuses on male departure. It analyses the conditions in the Madeiran household which made migration both possible and desirable. The second section discusses the migration of women to South Africa through various forms of marriage and family reunification. The final section concentrates on the immigrant family. It examines patriarchal households, the isolation of women, the influence of the Catholic Church and the often unrecognised role of womens labour in establishing family businesses.