Suzanne Francis

Representation and Misrepresentation: San regional advocacy and the Global imagery

Abstract The San of southern Africa are one of the most represented peoples of southern Africa. Internationally, they are most often depicted as a hunting-gathering people or as a people recently removed from that way of life. Organisations such as Survival International draw on these images for political advocacy and in campaigns for land rights for indigenous peoples. In southern Africa, San organisations fight for similar rights and, despite their membership being comprised of San people, the images and ideas of San-ness are dominated by the global imagery. The images and ideas of the San draw on racialised caricatures and colonial imagery that freeze San imagery into a mythologised past. We argue that this is a limiting factor in political advocacy that constrains the types of responses possible for aboriginal rights in Africa.

The edge of the periphery: situating the ≠Khomani San of the Southern Kalahari in the political economy of Southern Africa

Abstract In this article, we situate the Southern Kalahari San within the political economy of Southern Africa and within the world system. Here we draw on and critique modernization theory as a model of explanation for the lack of development found locally. In the Southern Kalahari, the ≠Khomani San won a massive land claim that should have empowered and enabled local development. Yet they remain largely impoverished, while seeking out a meaningful life on the edge of the capitalist world system. Within states, contradictions remain as local diversity continues to be reproduced and modernity itself is reproduced as local diversity. The research is premised on empirical fieldwork conducted in the Southern Kalahari in 2013 and supported by a series of earlier field research over the previous five years. The San of the Southern Kalahari are not resisting modernity but drawing on aspects of it selectively for their own vision of meaningful development.

Gender, numbers and substance: Women parliamentarians and the 'politics of presence' in KwaZulu-Natal

This article investigates four dimensions of the political institutional representation of women by women parliamentarians in KwaZulu-Natal. It begins by exploring whether or not women Members of the Provincial Parliament (MPPs) actively seek to substantively represent women, and how they do this. Secondly, it probes the perceptions they hold of their impact in this area. Third, the question of whether and how contested conceptions of political representation impact on attempts to feminise the agenda, is raised. Lastly, the article explores the impact of women MPPs via the institutional mechanism of the Women’s Parliamentary Caucus (WPC). The results show that the majority of parliamentary women do seek to represent women and claim effectiveness in doing so. Challenges to this agenda however include party identity, and racial and cultural conceptions of representation that divide women and strengthen resistance to change. It was also found that while the WPC provides an arena for women to elucidate their specific concerns and partly circumvent the constraints of party and racial and cultural representation, its institutional inadequacies were found to impact negatively upon the women’s agenda – a factor recognised only by a minority of women MPPs.

Human Trafficking in South Africa: Political Conundrums and Consequences

Human trafficking remains a seemingly unsolvable problem despite over a decade of concerted international, regional and, increasingly, domestic attention. Little inroads have been made, especially in attempting to address its most prominent manifestation – human trafficking for the purposes of sexual exploitation. Most government resources, in states from which victims are trafficked and in those in which they are received, have focused upon attempting to end this form of human trafficking. This has been done in two ways: either through draconian measures that focus on the security of the state (and curbing migration), or by attempting to eradicate the sex industry through criminalisation of consumers, and the continued criminalisation of sex workers. Such strategies have had little measurable effect on the supply or demand of those trafficked, which suggests that such counter-trafficking measures remain largely ineffective. Moreover, this preoccupation with the dark, exploitative side of the sex industry has been at the expense of a focus upon what is thought to be a far more pervasive form of human trafficking (which also intersects with sexual exploitation), that is labour trafficking. (Labour trafficking is an umbrella term used to denote trafficking for forced and bonded labour (in an array of industries), which also includes domestic servitude and forced marriage, forced begging, and the exploitation in warfare.) Hence, only the ways in human trafficking is manifested is addressed, and not the root causes of the phenomenon.

Counter-trafficking governance in South Africa: an analysis of the role of the KwaZulu-Natal human trafficking, prostitution, pornography and brothels task team.

ABSTRACT Determining the efficacy of available counter-trafficking strategies is just as important as understanding the phenomenon of human trafficking itself. This is so if anti-trafficking practitioners wish to make in-roads in preventing and combating human trafficking in South Africa. At the heart of the matter are the ways in which counter-trafficking governance is structured in the South African context. In this article we use the KwaZulu-Natal intersectoral task team, an un-resourced agency of provincial government mandated to prevent and combat human trafficking, as a case study to analyse the ‘4P model’ of counter-trafficking favoured in South Africa. We find that while such an integrated model has great potential, issues of institutional cooperation and coordination, pervasive public official corruption and budgetary constraints hamper its current impact and efficacy. We conclude that these issues must be addressed by South African policy-makers once legislation has been promulgated.

Expanding the Frontiers of Africa’s Political Environment

Africa has a long, and contemporary, record of political instability. Any political history of the continent of Africa is incomplete without contextual accounts of these exchanges; that is, processes in which governments are overthrown, borders are shifted, countless human lives lost, property and infrastructure worth millions irreplaceably damaged, the displacement of untold numbers of innocent people, and economic meltdown. These issues beckon questions about the political development of African states. In this volume, authors explore a range of political and conflict situations, discuss efforts to develop indigenous conflict resolution mechanisms and consider some of the key political and economic issues facing the continent. Despite the challenges Africa faces, global economic indicators have indicated that Africa is on the rise in terms of economic growth and political development. In this edited collection we present a multi-disciplinary approach to selected issues in African studies on the key themes covering conflict resolution, indigenous peer review mechanism and functional developments, capitalism, and political foundations of educational development in Africa.

Expanding the Frontiers of African Development Studies

A growing number of scholars acknowledge the interconnectedness of the myriad of problems and prospects across Africa as a relevant part of global development discourse. Given the ever-increasing importance of knowledge for the scholarly agenda and practice of African Studies, we present a picture of contemporary issues in African development. Although, this volume is focused on development issues, it presents in one volume a multi-disciplinary deeply contextual text on the important themes in development studies covering land questions, housing, water, health, economic liberalization, climate, environment, and gender. Though Africa’s problems transcend these basic sector issues, they still remain at the core of development given the fact that many in Africa are food insecure, have poor access to health, water, housing, and are increasingly affected by global environmental change and global neoliberal economic policies. These themes are a microcosm in the general understanding and study of global development issues that confront humanity. This is hoped will lead to novel analytical frameworks, the emergence of new conceptual approaches, and empirical accounts of relevance to scholars studying Africa as well as practitioners in African development and policy makers.