Norman Duncan

Liberating South African Psychology: The Legacy of Racism and the Pursuit of Representative Knowledge Production

South Africa’s first nonracial, democratic national elections in 1994 brought to a close the period of legislated racism that had rendered the South African state one of the most reviled of the twentieth century. However, despite these watershed elections and South Africa’s new constitution, which expressly proscribes any form of racism, South African society continues to be strongly characterized by the power of “race” and racism as determinants of social division, interaction and identity. This is manifested in a variety of ways, including ongoing residential segregation based on race, the persistent racialized patterns of friendship, the usage of public spaces, and the consistently negative portrayal of blacks (albeit increasingly covert) in the media (Dixon, Tredoux, & Clack, 2005 ; Duncan, 2003 ; Durrheim, 2005 ; Foster, 2005) . However, perhaps the most salient and debilitating manifestation of the enduring impact of racism in South Africa are the persistent racialized patterns of poverty and privilege that still typify this context. For example, in 2000, May, 6 years after the dismantling of the apartheid order, Woolard and Klasen reported that the income of the average white household was five times higher than the average household income of black 1 families. Data released by Statistics South Africa in 2005 reveal that the rate of unemployment among Africans currently stands at 26.7%, compared to 18.6% and 15.4% for coloreds and Indians, respectively. The rate for whites is 4.4%. Commenting on these figures, Pakendorf (in Pienaar, 2005 , p. 8) observes that “No matter how you look at it, black people are still worse off in contemporary South Africa than whites.”

Decolonisation, Critical Methodologies and Why Stories Matter

The Apartheid Archive Project seeks to expand the archive by inserting everyday stories into the public record, thereby allowing for the reconstruction of historical memory, voicing silenced stories and recognising experiences of excluded communities. Stevens, Duncan and Sonn (in this volume) note that personal memories are the primary raw data within the Apartheid Archive Project at present, and that narratives are a key means for conveying stories about racism during the apartheid era (see Mankoskwi & Rappaport, 1995, for a further explication of the distinction between stories and narratives).

Editorial : towards a psychology of South Africa's histories - living with and through the apartheid archive

The articles that constitute this special issue demonstrate that the collapse of formal apartheid has not erased its powerful racist imprint on the psychic lives and subjectivities of South Africans. Together, these articles show that apartheid continues to shape our inner-worlds, everyday relationships and systems of thinking. As such, this special issue ultimately hopes to contribute to the growing body of literature that insists that real South African transformation will never be realised without moving beyond material redress and acknowledging the importance of remembering.

The Apartheid Archive Project, the Psychosocial and Political Praxis

The interweaving of objective and subjective forms of racism culminated in the horrific and all-encompassing form of oppression and exploitation in South Africa, known as apartheid (Goldberg, 2008; Posel, 1991). This totalising system of subjugation, which depended on various racisms operating in concert — on political, structural, material, sociocultural and administrative technologies, working in tandem with psychical tendencies — approximated what Foucault (2000) referred to as an apparatus (or dispositif) in his writings on power. As such an ensemble of elements, of heterogeneous mechanisms functioning at different levels of influence, racism must be understood along the lines of a series of mutually reinforcing articulations. If we are to apprehend the ongoing echoes of apartheid racism — and thereby other forms of racism in different international locales — we must view its over-determined historical, material, symbolic and structural bases alongside psychological operations, such as the inferiorisation, exclusion and negation of others.

Memory, narrative and voice as liberatory praxis in the apartheid archive

Nineteen years ago the world witnessed the official demise of apartheid — one of the most inhumane and widely condemned forms of institutionalised racism. Today, many South Africans have life experiences that straddle this historical divide. Close to 60 per cent of South Africa’s current population lived for a significant period of their childhood or adulthood through the horrors of the apartheid reality (Statistics South Africa, 2010). Of note too, as Harris (2010) points out, a third of the white voters in the 1992 Whites-Only referendum called by the then ruling National Party supported the maintenance of the apartheid status quo. The remaining two-thirds voted for the continuation of the process aimed at bringing about a negotiated settlement in South Africa, rather than for the abolition of apartheid. Indeed, a significant number of white South Africans alongside various Bantustan leaders and functionaries were involved in various acts of violence aimed at perpetuating apartheid or at least the rewards apartheid afforded them (Harris, 2010).

Living through the legacy : the Apartheid Archive Project and the possibilities for psychosocial transformation

The Apartheid Archive Project is an ongoing, collaborative research project that focuses on the collection of personal stories and narrative accounts from ordinary South Africans about their experiences of racism during apartheid. The primary aim of this initiative is to provide a forum for differing sectors of South African society to share and reflect on their past experiences, in the hope that these will offer us an array of alternative entry points into the past, in addition to the accounts of historians and other scholars. Crucially, the project aspires not merely to record these accounts—in itself an important act of remembering different histories—but also to engage thoughtfully and theoretically with them. In these ways, the Apartheid Archive Project encourages both a commitment to personal and collective remembering, and a joint intellectual and political commitment to interrogating stories and narratives rather than simply accepting them at face value. An intellectual and political cornerstone of the project is to contribute to a form of critical psychosocial mnemonics. Critical psychosocial mnemonics is interested in engaging with those mechanisms and processes that facilitate individual and collective remembering; how these memories intersect with lived experiences and various histories; what they can temporally reveal about the past, the present and an imagined future; how they reflect and/or construct the psychological and social subject, intersubjectivity and intergroup relations; and how they may allow us to make critical, analytic commentaries about the social world and its psychological inscription.

Interrogatory Destabilisation and an Insurgent Politics for Peacebuilding: The Case of the Apartheid Archive Project

Employing the lens of radical peacebuilding, this chapter revisits the histories and contemporary manifestations of race and racism more than 20 years after the transition to a fully enfranchised and democratic political system in South Africa. Framed within the broader Apartheid Archive Project, which examines the nature of the experiences of racism of ordinary South Africans under the old apartheid order, and their continuing effects on individual and group functioning in contemporary South Africa, the chapter explores the ways in which archives, memory, stories and narratives may illuminate the challenges and possibilities for peacebuilding in a racialised society. It argues that archival sites offer us the possibility for a critical engagement with the past and the present through forms of interrogatory destabilisation—a process of persistent and deconstructive critique of status quos in countries that have transitioned from authoritarianism to post-authoritarianism. In addition, it suggests that such a deconstructive approach to archives may inform an insurgent form of citizenship and politics that is necessary for radical peacebuilding in societies that remain structurally violent and socially unequal.

The International Congress of Psychology (ICP 2012) : a brief analysis of the scientific programme

South African Psychology has a unique history and stands out among its peers across the world. In the wake of its divided past and collusion with apartheid, its subsequent international ‘rehabilitation’ was capped by its successful hosting of the International Congress of Psychology (2012) during July 2012. This was the first such event on the African continent, and involved a mammoth organisational effort that spanned more than 6 years. This article briefly analyses the scientific programme within the context of the content areas and the countries represented. Some of the challenges faced by the Scientific Committee are also outlined, together with the strategies developed to manage these challenges.

Addressing childhood adversity, D. Donald, A. Dawes and J. Louw (Eds) : book review

Extracted from text ... S. Afr. J. Psychol. 2001, 31 (1) 54 Book Reviews Addressing childhood adversity D. Donald, A. Dawes and J. Louw (Eds) Cape Town: David Philip, 2000 264 pages This ambitious volume is presented as a sequel to the volume, Childhood and adversity: psychological perspectives from South African research (Dawes & Donald, 1994). While its precursor examined the nature and effects of various adversities on the development of South African children, the present volume examines a range of psychosocial interventions aimed at addressing some of these adversities. According to the editors of the volume, the ultimate goal of this examination ..This ambitious volume is presented as a sequel to the volume, Childhood and adversity: psychological perspectives from South African research (Dawes & Donald, 1994). While its precursor examined the nature and effects of various adversities on the development of South African children, the present volume examines a range of psychosocial interventions aimed at addressing some of these adversities. According to the editors of the volume, the ultimate goal of this examination is to contribute to the development of a theory of practice in the area of psychosocial interventions aimed at addressing childhood adversity in developing contexts such as Southern Africa.