Preben Kaarsholm

Si Ye Pambili Which Way Forward? Urban Development, Culture and Politics in Bulawayo

The last hundred years’ social history of urban development in Bulawayo, Zimbabwes second‐biggest city, has been given special characteristics by the citys closeness to South Africa and by the outcomes of controversies between national governments, the Bulawayo City Council and groups of urban residents over the form urban settlement for Africans should take. Policies before independence fluctuated between attempts at keeping African urban residents ‘temporary’ and underlining their basically rural identities, and modernising efforts at integrating them in town and establishing forms of social control that would discourage them from developing political demands for rights and citizenship equal to those of white urbanites. The culture and politics of Bulawayos African townships were influenced significantly by initiatives to adapt to or resist such policies, and the article seeks to trace lines of continuity between the way in which people reacted to urban conditions and policies of urbanisation in colo...

Public spheres, hidden politics and struggles over space: boundaries of public engagement in post‐apartheid South Africa

The development of a public sphere forms a central ingredient in the consolidation of a new political culture following a transition to democracy. The Habermasian idea of the public sphere has been challenged for not taking into account the role of ‘part’ and ‘counter public spheres’, particularly with reference to ‘developing’ societies. ‘Actually existing’ public spheres must therefore be conceptualised within the framework of a broader category of ‘public space’. A national public sphere in South Africa is held back by inequalities of wealth and power. A minority public of privileged consumers has access to a structure of print and electronic media, while the majority population relies on different systems of networking that make up counter publics. After 1994, the public sphere has been influenced by a dominant‐party system, accompanied by a division into formal and informal politics, with formal politics assuming a ritualistic function and ‘Realpolitik’ being played out within the non‐public structures of the dominant party. Meanwhile, critical public debate has had to find its course through varieties of informal politics. The article examines how moral debates around HIV/AIDS and crime in KwaZulu‐Natal have constituted an alternative arena for debate, and how cultural and religious discourses have been the channels of a local public sphere. The article discusses to what extent debates have constituted a local democratic ‘deliberative public sphere’, and looks at the ways in which the local state in the form of the eThekwini Municipality has interacted with local publics since 1994.

Culture as cure: civil society and moral debates in KwaZulu-Natal after apartheid

Abstract The paper addresses the nature of ‘really existing’ civil society and the workings of the public sphere in informal urban settlements on the outskirts of Durban. It focuses on debates over morality and the health of the community which have emerged locally in the context of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, and highlights the positions taken by different African Initiated Churches – Zionist, apostolic and evangelical churches as well as the Shembe Church. Besides these are placed varieties of virginity testing that have become prominent in the last decade, and the significance of disagreement between the different cultural programmes represented is examined. The paper argues that in these situations of urban informality, poverty and unemployment, there is a richness of debate, cultural invention and entrepreneurship which needs to be recorded and understood in order to appreciate on‐going dynamics of political development and struggles over notions of rights. Finally, it is argued that the recording of discussion within and between popular cultural institutions is significant as a resource for future memorialisation and debate around the transition from apartheid to democracy.

Diaspora or transnational citizens? Indian Ocean networks and changing multiculturalisms in South Africa

This article gives an historical perspective to debates on xenophobia and immigration in South Africa after 1994. It contrasts contexts for immigration and the establishment of claims of belonging within the changing multiculturalisms of apartheid and “the rainbow nation.” It discusses different types of identity tactics deployed by immigrant groups in their struggles for recognition within these contexts. Finally, it compares the development during the twentieth century of the use of transnational Indian Ocean networks to support simultaneous claims for national and transnational belonging, as exemplified by groups of Cape Muslims and Durban Zanzibaris.

Zanzibaris or Amakhuwa? Sufi networks in South Africa, Mozambique, and the Indian Ocean

This article investigates the role of Sufi networks in keeping Durbans ‘Zanzibari’ community of African Muslims together and developing their response to social change and political developments from the 1950s to the post-apartheid period. It focuses on the importance of religion in giving meaning to notions of community, and discusses the importance of the Makua language in maintaining links with northern Mozambique and framing understandings of Islam. The transmission of ritual practices of the Rifaiyya, Qadiriyya, and Shadhiliyya Sufi brotherhoods is highlighted, as is the significance of Maputo as a node for such linkages. The article discusses change over time in notions of cosmopolitanism, diaspora, and belonging, and examines new types of interactions after 1994 between people identifying themselves as Amakhuwa in Durban and Mozambique.

Population Movements, Islam and the Interaction of Indian and African Identity Strategies in South Africa during and After Apartheid.

Colonialist segregation and, subsequently, apartheid in South Africa were centrally focused on the control of population movement, and a central prerogative of the state was the authority to delimit the boundaries between populations and to codify the characteristics of their difference. Against this power of the colonial and the apartheid state were poised the energies of people depending for their livelihoods on movement and capacity to circumvent and demobilise the obstacles placed in their way by geographical restrictions and state authorised definitions of identity. At the same time, the groups of population subjected to such forms of power also sought the recognition of the state, and interacted with it around attempts to fixate boundaries and identities in order to consolidate their own strategic position and situation within the hegemony of cultures, on which the legitimation of state power depended. Following the demise of apartheid and its deconstruction into constitutional democracy after 1994, such confrontations, struggles and manoeuvres have continued, and new types of battles around citizenship and entitlements have emerged in the context of both immigration and affirmative action for greater social justice. This article sets out to examine some of the institutional frameworks and discourses through which African and Indian identities have been articulated, confronted and negotiated in South Africa – and in what is now KwaZulu-Natal in particular – from colonialism and the apartheid era to the “New South Africa.” It discusses some of the ambiguities inherent in Islamic identity formation, and looks at ways in which it has interacted with other strands of identification, with Indian as well as African nationalism in South Africa. In what is now KwaZulu-Natal, Islam has quite predominantly belonged to people of Indian origin– though from very different backgrounds – and has provided an important register of discourse and organisation for both the unification and delimitation of Indian identities against others as well as for the articulation and debate of cultural and political differences within the Indian “community.” African Islam in KwaZulu-Natal has been of much more limited dimensions and – until recently – has been kept carefully apart and segregated from the world of Indian Islam. With the onset of new programmes and mobilisations for dawah among Africans (starting with the work of Achmet Deedat and the Islamic Propagation Centre International from 1957 onwards), with a new political playing field opening up after 1994, and the waves of transnational migration following it, the relationship between Indian and African Islam has begun to change, and new varieties of Islamic discourse and institution building have come about. The paper argues that the impact of these new energies of islamisation is in itself ambivalent: On the one hand it offers possibilities for new dialogue and elaboration of ideas of citizenship across historical divides of racial segregation and discrimination. On the other hand, it also provides the possibility for new hardenings of identity and of new types of confrontation between groups keen to exploit and monopolise the cultural capital represented by Islam.

New Writings on Islam and Muslim Politics in South Africa

Academic writings on the development of Islam in Africa have proliferated over recent years – both before and after 9 September 2001. This has been part of a more general trend of increased interest in religious mobilisation and identity politics as responses to globalisation, in transnational modes of political and cultural articulation, and in competition between Christian Evangelicalism and Islamic reform movements as representing a new dualism of confrontations in Africa in the wake of the Cold War. At the same time, new approaches to the study of Islam in Africa have been motivated by a surge of interest in political cultures, ‘actually existing’ civil societies and public spheres, and in Muslim politics as ‘indigenously’ African, representing potentials not only of ‘fundamentalism’, but also for locally rooted forms of democracy. While such interests continue well-established traditions as far as research on West, East and North Africa is concerned, they represent more of an innovation in the context of South and Southern Africa. In the case of South Africa, studies of Islam have tended to be closely integrated with the history of the Western Cape or of KwaZulu-Natal and with the construction of Coloured and Indian identities. There are excellent examples of this in the books by Abdulkader Tayob on the Muslim Youth Movement and the history of mosques in the Cape and on the Rand as well as in the impressive range of articles produced by Goolam

Durban and Cape Town as Port Cities: Reconsidering Southern African Studies from the Indian Ocean

This special issue arose out of a workshop titled ‘Durban and Cape Town as Indian Ocean Port Cities: Reconsidering Southern African Studies from the Indian Ocean’, held at the University of the Western Cape in September 2014. The volume is located at the intersection of southern African studies and Indian Ocean studies, and explores this exchange as a site for enriching southern African transnational historiographies. This introduction begins with an overview of emerging transnational trends within southern African studies, and locates Indian Ocean studies within this field. Until recently, southern African studies fell outside the remit of work on the Indian Ocean world on two counts. First, the region is located outside the monsoon zone, which constitutes the canonical core of Indian Ocean studies; secondly, Africa as a whole has been marginalised by South Asia in the field. For some time, then, southern Africa has been considered as a belated arrival both chronologically and historiographically in the field of Indian Ocean studies, drawn into the latter arena only during the age of European empires. This collection complicates this picture, exploring the effect of pre-colonial Indian Ocean slave and trade networks on southern African colonial formations. These re-configured geographies, in turn, open up possibilities for drawing new linkages among different southern African historiographies. The articles articulate landand sea-based systems of labour migration and control, suggesting connections between the inland historiographies of mining and migration, on the one hand, and maritime port cities, on the other (and indeed, between these port cities themselves). The volume raises questions of method and scale, and the introduction touches on problems associated with an oceanic approach (how to factor in the ‘sea-ness of the sea’). In concluding, the introduction asks how best to switch between region or area and a global perspective.

Africa Globalized? Multipolarity and the Paradoxes of Time-Space Compression

The Marikana massacre and the South African mining strikes provide a useful occasion for us to rethink what globalization involves for Africa - what are the effects of multipolarity in terms of both politics and economy, and what are the correspondences that exist or do not exist between globalization and the emergence of new forms of modernity within and between African societies? Globalization would make space for alternative modernities to emerge that had been stunted by earlier strategies for development, which were limited in the sense of serving primarily the interests of the North and of the United States and the former European colonial masters. In this perspective both more recent development and African National Congress (ANC) programmatic discourse has tended to see South Africa as a powerhouse of African modernization and catching up. Keywords: Africa; globalization; Marikana; multipolarity

Gendered Lives in the Western Indian Ocean: Islam, marriage, and sexuality on the Swahili coast eds. by Erin E. Stiles and Katrina Daly Thompson (review)

ognize the phenomenal research on which the book is based. The way in which love and sexual relations are woven into broader processes fleshes out the history of urbanization, of customary practices, of gendered migration and of many other important themes in African studies. The dialectical relationships between small-scale legal events in colonial court records and large-scale reconfigurations of the social fabric of Gabonese society provide an insight into cultural change and people’s agency. Jean-Baptiste’s book is an important addition to many debates in African studies.