South Africa Books

For a while now, I have been searching for South African books on homosexuality as someone who only now (2005) get interested in the subject. This was one book that is a good beginning as it covers, experiences of gays, social developments and the be (south) african version of gay theology. It consists of essays of different authors with a forword by Bishop Desmond Tutu. It stimulates dialogue and understanding and even being pro gay, is very good introductory reading to the past efforts that brought a bout the resent rights for gays in the new South African Constitution. I have enjoyed most the human side of gays essay.

I am currently reading about South Africa and this title intrigued me. A Victorian spinster accompanied her brother to the unsettled regions of South Africa in the 1850's and lived to tell the tale. The enterprising spirit and stamina she discovered in herself surprised all her contemporaries --- including herself. It was a time when women were beginning to realize that they, too, could live intelligently and comfortably in the world and could experience lives of value without a husband.

If all the merit of this book lay in seeing the world through the opening eyes of a Victorian woman, it would be interesting, but it could have been set in an English garden or in the middle of the ocean. This book also allows us to look at the society of the Zulu tribe before they were impacted so heavily by white colonists. Feared warriors they were, but they were also hospitable to travelers, shrewd cattle herders and traders, and excellent managers of the environment surrounding them. Their outposts served as wayside inns for the hunters and travelers of the times. Because their wealth was concentrated in cattle, the center of their society was extinguished by the bovine flu. Only after that disaster was the tribe vulnerable to integration by other societies. Catherine Barter's observations of them as she traveled are as valuable as they are rare.

Any novel written by an immigrant with the colonizing spirit is bound to be one-sided. Is it racist? Yes. Is it autocratic? Yes. Is it historically accurate? As far as one can tell. Is it worth reading? If you are willing to wade through cultural arrogance to glimpse a tribe as it was. I'd do it again.

Antinomies of Modernity: Essays on Race, Orient, Nation. Edited by Vasant Kaiwar and Sucheta Mazumda. Durham: Duke UP, 2003.

Race, Orient, and nation represent three clusters of complicated histories of knowledge formation and political activisms, deeply entangled in the global processes of modernity initiated by western imperialist expansion. Modernity as such is experienced as a series of contradictions that operate on an axis of self-other differentiations as a set of cognitive structures that we came to call Orientalism. Although Edward Said has pointed out in his foundational work that Orientalism "as a system of citing works and authors" has no corresponding reality, Orientalism, nonetheless, has become a powerful tool by which the Orient-as geography, race, a body of knowledge, and postcolonial nation-states-is rendered knowable, appropriated, and re-invented for both universalist and particularist projects. Antinomies of Modernity is an attempt to engage with the history and karma of Orientalism in postcolonial milieu.

In a commendable form of collaboration, Antinomies of Modernity is both wide-ranging in scope and coherent in argument. It manages to grasp the self-contradictory logic of modernity as a global history of contestation and complication that manifested itself in the "conquest of space through time"-a central feature of capitalism, the editors argue-that constitutes modernity as tortuous and unsettled experiences of dislocation of mass population, consistent construction of self-other relations, and the constant crisis and struggles over the legitimation of rule. Locating their conceptual framework in the triangulated dynamic of racial thinking, colonial domination through power and knowledge, and anti-imperialist national formations, Vasant Kaiwar and Sucheta Mazumdar suggest that "the complexities of modernity are best understood by examining its antinomies, at the core of which lie a compact set of ideas about the nature of economics, cultures, nations, identity, and alterity" (2). In their view, "It is the uneven geography of capitalist modernization [...], together with the elaboration of secular modes of thought grounded in the academic disciplines of time and space, that crystallized the dialectical tension between the universal and the particular" (3). And it is in this intense interaction between the universal and the particular that Antinomies of Modernity invites us to capture and confront the lacunae and amnesia upon which discursive constructions of academic disciplines, colonial practices, and nationalisms are articulated into powerful regimes of identity and alterity. Orientalism, in this view, has turned itself from a provincial knowledge formation into a universalizing structure of self-other construction.

Antinomies of Modernity consists of eight fascinating case studies that provide an enlightening spectrum of antinomies of modernity, ranging from the Aryan model of history in India and Nigeria, through the genesis amnesia of British and French Orientalisms and the struggle over the coinage of technical languages in colonial Tamilnadu, to the articulation of an internationalist alliance of Indians in British Central Africa, the complexities of racial dynamic in post-Apartheid South Africa, and finally to careful analyses of Islamic fundamentalism in Iran and the appropriation of multiculturalist discourses by Hindu Indians in the US. These essays are finely framed by a concise introduction to the overall project as an intervention in the studies of Orientalism in both colonial and postcolonial moments, and concluded by an elaborate essay by the two editors to work through the complex issues raised in this volume. The essays are nicely paired up to accentuate the following issues: Orientalism as a practice of knowledge and a discourse of subject making in race/class formations; the amnesia and occlusion of Orientalism that are constitutive of disciplinary and national histories; the diasporic connections and transnational contexts of race, ethnicity, and nation in India, Africa, Iran, and Indian America.

For both Vasant Kaiwar and Andrew Barnes, the Aryan model of history signifies the lingering effects of Orientalism in India and Nigeria respectively. While Kaiwar's essay on the Aryan model of history reveals the embedded strength of romantic Orientalism in the construction of Indian nationalism that suggests self-Orientalization as the completion of colonialism, Barnes looks at the collaborators in Nigeria as performing a strange mode of colonial mimicry that unsettles and resettles colonial domination. What is illuminating in both essays is the double character of Orientalist knowledge that served the European metropoles on the one hand and the postcolonial state of India on the other. The appropriation of colonial knowledge in Hindu nationalism seems to be an offshoot of the colonial search for empathetic collaborators in Africa. After the colonizers left, the ruling class, ironically, becomes the inheritor of Orientalism, which was adapted into civilizational discourses serving right-wing nationalism. Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi traces the anterior history of Orientalism, and argues that a deliberate amnesia of intellectual contact before colonization was fundamental to the circulation of Orientalism as a knowledge formation specific to the West. By unearthing the contribution of indigenous scholars from India, Tavakoli-Targhi contends, "In its early phase, modern Oriental studies did not constitute a discourse of domination but a reciprocal relation between European and Indian scholars. But with European hegemony and the rise of a heroic model of science in the eighteenth century, the contribution of non-European scholars was increasingly marginalized and deemed nonobjective" (105-106). Such amnesia of the indigenous contribution and oblivion of the transformation of Oriental Studies from a two-way intellectual exchange to a one-way domination of non-western objects, Tavakoli-Targhi shows, are the constitutive lacuna of colonial operations. Orientalism, in this view, is not just a system of citation, but one of writing and over-writing, to which true criticism lies in the attempts to locate or retrieve the traces of erasure.

Michael West's essay on Indians in British Central Africa shifts the focus of discussion from specific local cases to diasporic connections and transnational contexts. In West's account, Indians, as in the US, were seen as undesired immigrants in colonial Nyasaland (now Malawi) and the two Rhodesias (now Zambia and Zimbabwe) and were politically dis-enfranchised during the moment of decolonization-due to an earlier antagonism between Indians and Africans, although both groups shared a similar opposition to the British rule. The independence of India since 1947, however, generated a different political dynamic for Indians in those colonies, for it served as an inspiration for African independence movement. As West notes, "by providing scholarships to African students, the Indian government helped to increase the pool of educated cadres who everywhere formed the core of the nationalist leadership" (166). Short-lived as it may be, this Indian-African connection marks an important phase of anti-colonial struggle in British Central Africa, and shed light on the vision of Third World internationalism in the 1950s and 1960s. If the internationalist articulation of independence movement indicates a hopeful vision of decolonizing resistance, Minoo Moallem and Sucheta Mazumdar's essays offer another reading of the international story. While Moallem unpacks the concept of fundamentalism and explains the construction of Islamism as a cultural nationalist project-rather than a religious fanaticism that the Bush II administration tends to believe-that operates on a set of binarisms, Mazumdar tracks the history of Indian immigration to the US and explicates how the multiculturalist discourse was appropriated by Indians in the US to shape a Hindu Indian identity and to define an Indian polity. For Moallem, Iranian cultural nationalism was both an anti-imperialist and a self-Orientalizing project, the aim of which, however, was for cultural, political, and religious governance in Iran as one singular community that demands political participation of both male and female subjects. The veil, for instance, is a powerful symbol of political activity and "functions as a signifier in the cultural war of representation" (213), despite the prevalent misreading of the veil as a sign of female submission in the West. Moallem's critical unpacking of fundamentalism, in other words, is an attempt to debunk the Orientalist myth of Islam in the West as well as to reveal the cultural logic of such nationalist formations. Mazumdar, on the other hand, looks at the identity politics of immigrants, not merely as conditioned by the American context of racial exclusion, but also significantly connected to a long-distance nationalism. Hence, Mazumdar argues that the equation of Hindu and Aryan with Indian occludes the religious and ethnic diversity of the Indian polity where Muslims and Sikhs were also important groups of its national constituency. As Mazumdar writes, the category Hindu "has been universalized to embrace both the exclusive ethnic identity of the original peoples of India and the authentic cultural essence of the nation. Political Hindutva, seeking to define the nation and its peoples in all aspects, has resurrected the Orientalist myth of India as the land of the Hindus" (241). Like an undying ghost, Orientalism keeps on returning from the ashes of colonial past and continues, as an oppressive mechanism, to haunt the postcolonial nation formations.

These essays together offer an impressive array of rhetorical and analytical tactics to demonstrate that postcolonial dilemma formed by modernity and colonial legacies-with die-hard Orientalism as its most salient feature-are not bygone past by any means, but are active contemporary situations that require our persistent and critical engagement with history, knowledge, and politics. They exemplify both the difficulty and necessity of overcoming Orientalism by revealing, examining, and critiquing the antinomies of modernity. However, as they are challenging the notion of "post" in postcolonialism with a bifocal operation of antinomies, the essays seem to have laid too much emphasis on discursive formations to be mindful of local agencies, particularly demonstrated by the people involved in various struggles. In other words, as one is intrigued by the longevity of Orientalist thinking, the reader is left with the ethnographic question of local response, perhaps in the form of "subaltern-speak." That is, in all those instances of discursive circulation, where are the voices of the people available, if not represented, or abducted, by the nationalist elites, and how would an excavation of colonial past possible, if not accessed through Orientalist scholarship? More significantly, the exposure of Orientalist legacy in postcolonial states demands a more careful scrutiny of the stakes of nationalism, and urges us to regurgitate the legacy of decolonization that have been instrumental in much of our postcolonial thinking today. What would our future be, if life forms are no longer limited and subject to the political imaginations of race, Orient, and nation? As Kaiwar and Mazumdar poignantly remark in their concluding essay, "Neither universalism nor particularism, or localism, are per se emancipatory. To understand why those exist in dialectical tension is a precondition for going beyond `conservative' universalism and `radical' particularism toward a transformation of both, and indeed therefore of modernity itself. The latter's antinomies must become part of a critical reevaluation of politics in our time" (287).

This is an important contribution to a growing body of scholarship about South African writing from apartheid times to the present day. South African writing is appearing on all sorts of english courses and books by J.M. Coetzee and Nadine Gordimer are very popular. This book is a collection of essays that looks at writing by those two,and writing by non-white South Africans as well. There is much that can be learned from the essays.Being a edited collection, not all the essays are the same standard-- some are more challenging than others. This book is aimed at students and general readers who may learn more about their favorite authors and be tempted to read books by others. I have just read abook called Call Me Not a Man after reading a fascinating essay in Apartheid narratives. I did not know this book before. The good essays include ones by judie Newman (she writes very good books on Gordimer)and Sole on Call me not a man. The introduction is good as well and three or four other essays. the disappointment is Wisker and reddy's chapters.

This is an excellent, fascinating book. I would highly recommend it to anyone interested in rural development in Africa, and not least in that most troubled part of the continent, Southern Africa.

This well-written book provides the reader with an indepth analysis of the underlying dynamics of two of the bloodiest and prolonged civil wars in Africa.

Minter's focus in on examining the impact of both internal and external factors on these conflict and what role, if any, they played in helping to escalated conflict in Angola and Mozambique. The book's multi-tiered approach is well-suited to this type of investigation and Minter makes a strong case that external actors played the major role in prolonging and intensifying both civil wars. In doing so, Minter lays the blame for much of the bloodshed and suffering on South Africa, the United States, and the Soviet Union as the death struggle of apartheid and the end of the Cold War came to play an integral part in these internal conflicts.

Although I disagree with some of the book's specific conclusions--such as RENAMO's lack of popular support in Mozambique--Minter makes a strong case overall and seeks to answer lingering questions over the role and degree of external support to insurgents in Angola and Mozambique. This book is a must for the student of southern African affairs who is seeking to better understand one of the most defining times in the region's history.

The book was written in the waning years of Apartheid. Though of course the author and the artists depicted did not know this. The best part of the book is the vivid colour and black and white photos of paintings made by black South Africans under the Afrikaner jackboot. There are also photos of the dusty townships, in which blacks and coloureds were relegated. Showing the enforced poverty and hardship that was the true face of Apartheid.

The paintings themselves, and the accompanying narrative, show quite expressive talent. The reader should keep in mind that much overt commentary was often banned under the government's security laws. So that paintings were one of the few social spaces in which people could, sometimes and not necessarily all the time, express dissent. You might think of the paintings as Apartheid's samizdat.

This book is a bit wordy but it is a nice story about life among a Zulu family. I recommend it for an Africa unit.

We bought 5 books when we went to SA ,and the book that we kept referring to is this Baedeker's guide. The map that came with the book was especially useful, because it included routes that were not shown on the bigger SA road map we had brought with us. We would have been lost without this map on the Garden Route. This Baedeker's guide is separated into major sights by alphabetical order. Under each sight(name of which is printed on the upper right hand side of each page) are major landmarks or information about the sight so referencing is really quick and easy. These references helped us decide what to see once we arrived there.I also loved the Baedeker Special articles that are interapersed within the landmark section. These articles provide highly interesting history and information from the occupation of Capetown to sharks in South Africa. The size of the book is also an advantage, at 4"X 7", it would easily fit into a woman's handbag. If you want lots of big glossy exciting pictures of South Africa this is definitely not the book to get. The pictures contained in this book give you a taste of the country but do not do it justice. However, if you are going to travel to SA this is the book you must buy.

No one can tell what the normal human sexual relations are. We are in a so wierd world where anything might happen. Now people are more tolerant than they were 20 years ago.We have gays, transexual people and many other forms of human sexual or nonsexual behaviors which are recognized by the main stream of the culture.Who knows what the future will hold? Perhaps we may go back to the premitive stage of human life where incest was highly approved of.