South Africa Books

This book has been in my collection for many years, as I buy alot of books before I eventually get around to reading them. I'd read "My Traitor's Heart" by Rian Malan, and "Move Your Shadow" by Joseph Lelyveld. This one is also an excellent account of the brutality and injustice of Apartheid in South Africa. The latter was written much earlier than the other two and is told by a South African born lawyer. The stories of the many cases he took and causes he upheld is exciting, suspenseful but at the same time tragic. The book had me spellbound until the end where his very life is so threatened that he is forced to leave his country. This book portrays much of what blacks had to endure, pass laws, detention, prison, brutal torture without any recourse. In reading "No Neutral Ground", one can really appreciate the fact that most of the evils of this government has been crushed. I say "most" because life is still no bed of roses for the blacks of the land. I highly recommend this book to anyone who has the least bit of curiousity about what life was like there at that time. I just wish I had not waited so long to finally take this wonderful book out of my bookcase and read it! Thank you Joel, for all your compassion and dedication to helping to make life better for all humanity.

There are now a number of critical studies of the Nobel laureate's fiction, but none replaces Clingman's authoritative guide. The book proves particularly useful to American readers, as Clingman provides cogent discussions of the historical and political setting of Gordimer's apartheid-era writing.

People gravitate towards rhetoric, forming their opinions based on snippets of information rather than after having a more exhaustive study of the issues. Luckily, Dr. Heribert Adam and Dr. Kogila Moodley don't fall under this category and offer us a well research perspective on the issues. The first three chapters "The Opening of the Apartheid Mind" sets the stage for what will be a more rational and composed examination of the issues in South Africa of the recent past. To be brutally honest, rhetoric is sexy. Rhetoric moves us and unfortunately that limits the scope of our examination and removes agency from the Other - the stereotyped. Leaving one's examination of South Africa on the level of biographies written by self serving individuals leaves one with a one sided view of the issues.

In conjunction with the issues I laid out above, I just want to reflect, for a moment on Nelson Mandela's rhetoric that what occurred in South Africa was a miracle. The common belief is that there is an ontological predisposition to violence in Africa in general and South Africa in particular - that is a very dangerous oversimplification. In as much as there is a propensity to violence anywhere, why should we privilege Africa as the hotbed of violence. Can we see things another way and formulate policies accordingly.

There was an interesting note made in the introduction that: "Reluctant reconciliation is taking shape in South Africa. The ambivalent alliance between the two major contenders for power, the National Party (NP) and the African national Congress (ANC), results from a balance of forces where neither side can defeat the other. It is their mutual weakness, rather than their equal strength, that makes both longtime adversaries embrace negotiations for power-sharing. Like a forced marriage, the working arrangement lacked love but nonetheless is consummated because any alternative course would lead to a worse fate for both sides."

Already this sets the tone that the myth of the South African miracle is false and that the rhetoric surrounding the violence as set up by Mandela is false. A deeper examination of the issues leads us to believe that is will be the realistic self assessments as opposed to slogans and threats of violence that will lead South Africa to a stable transition and to effect a sustained stability - to whatever extent that can be achieved. People, unfortunately, en masse, do not like to hear this, it detracts from the rhetoric that fills the empty chambers of their hearts - therein lies the problem. In this context, it is very difficult to make a distinction between what we can be done and what ought to be done.

It is also interesting to note that whites will be in control for along time to come. The "emancipation" rhetoric want to see the toppling of tyrannical regime and see black freedom. Unfortunately, it is this very type to drum beating that results in violence: "Though strong in symbolic support, the ANC is weak in bureaucratic resources, military capacity, and economic leverage. Real power will therefore remain in the hands of the present establishment; even if Nelson Mandela becomes president of South Africa, the economy, the civil service, and the army will have to rely on white skills, capital, and goodwill for along time to come."

Having outline this, it is clear that a more reasoned and negotiated approach would be prudent. A statement like this one certainly does not bode well for the activists or the communist. Both of their projects will not be eliminated by this realization. However, realpolitik is for the engineers, rhetoric is the fodder for the activist.

The problem of the unassailability was already laid out early in the book, what is now important to do is to deconstruct the notion of Nelson Mandela as messiah and that his political apparatus is beyond criticism. One of the possible cautions for doing so can be construed as paternalistic. An argument could be made that it might be well enough that the ANC has achieved what it has. In this light, it will be making baby steps and will need time to iron out its kinks and be allowed to make mistakes. However, more sinister is the notion that because of his charisma, Mandela and the ANC are beyond any form of criticism - as if to imply "you are either part of the problem or part of the solution."

This merely confirms empirically that a less than critical approach can lead to a less than accurate prediction. Dr. Adam and Dr. Moodley bring to light several angles that ignored by the press and public who wish to see South Africa in terms of black and white rather than shades of gray.

Miguel Llora

Ten years ago, I wrote South Africa's War against Capitalism. Inspiration for the title came from the kind of arguments I heard during my several trips to South Africa, comments made by blacks and their supporters in the struggle against apartheid. The essence of their argument was that apartheid was a by-product of laissez-faire capitalism. For these people, including many academics and politicians, some variant of socialism would provide the cure. My research and counterarguments would have been far more productive and persuasive if I had had the benefit of the insightful analysis set forth in Anton D. Lowenberg and William H. Kaempfer's new book, The Origins and Demise of South African Apartheid: A Public Choice Analysis.

Lowenberg and Kaempfer provide powerful evidence for the Public Choice argument that South Africa's apartheid "was essentially a massive bureaucracy whose raison d'etre was the production of market regulations designed to effect wealth redistribution away from blacks and white mining and industrial capital owners in favor of white workers and agricultural capital owners. These regulations reflected the preferences of the median voter in an electorate dominated by white labor and rural constituencies." (p. 39)

Many people attribute the demise of South Africa's apartheid to international sanctions. Lowenberg and Kaempfer arrive at a different conclusion: "The white South African Government abdicated power because of a recognition that apartheid policies were becoming too costly to maintain. The main costs associated with apartheid were self-imposed as a consequence of years of misguided development strategies on the part of the National Party government and its predecessors. Although external events such as the oil price shocks of the 1970s and international reaction to apartheid after the Soweto riots of 1976 contributed to the slow growth of the South African economy, even more significant was the fact that the economy had undergone changes which had turned the apartheid system, once an asset for important groups of the white population, into a liability." (p. 218)

Lowenberg and Kaempfer devote several chapters to the sanctions issue. They show that despite claims that the goal of sanctions is to make targeted countries change objectionable domestic policies, sanctions more likely serve the interests of pressure groups within the sanctioning countries....

Therefore, the Lowenberg and Kaempfer hypothesis suggests, for example, that the United States might impose sanctions on the importation of South African wine, textiles, and coal and not to create domestic resistance, because abundant substitutes exist for those goods. Moreover, domestic producers might cynically support embargoes on wine, textiles, and coal imports as a means of gaining monopoly power. The United States embargoed South African agricultural products, but European nations, which were heavy consumers of produce from South Africa in the winter, chose not to embargo that category of goods.

Our Story Magic is a collection of fantastic fables and magical fairytales steeped in ancient South African tradition, spun by author Gcina Mhlophe and vividly illustrated by artists from KwaZulu-Natal. Due to its preponderance of text, Our Story Magic is ideal for children who are just about ready to graduate from picturebooks to chapter books, yet still appreciate the beautiful touch of color artwork spreading across the book pages. Each individual magical tale is brief, usually less than ten pages; ten stories in all fill this wonderful collection highly recommended for folklore and children's library shelves.

South African Apartheid remains alive and well, as this study of brutal resettlement programs illustrates. Nelson Mandela's failure to protect the human and civil rights defenseless Cape Town minorities is nothing short of criminal. Author's focus is primarily on "Cape Coloureds", people of mixed race. Written from the unique perspective of a British social geographer, now on the faculty of a major American university.

I just picked this book up today and was amazed at its sensitivity and beauty. Not everyone will enjoy it or understand this book but it has a feeling of Diane Arbus and the easiness of early Mary Ellen Mark with a kick of Ralph Eugene Meatyard. The compositions are beautiful and the inclusion of the animals are perfect.

The watercolor illustrations are the best part of this book--they really enhance the simple story of a boy and his mother and baby sister going to visit his grandmother.

My assessment begins with Gibson's claim that his study has made an important contribution to the operationalization of the concept of reconciliation. I find little to disagree with in this claim. Reconciliation is conceptualized as a multidimensional variable involving at least four aspects: interracial reconciliation, political tolerance, support for the principles of human rights, and legitimacy. Gibson does not dispute that these dimensions do not provide an exhaustive definition of reconciliation, but he maintains that that they are central to its meaning. This is especially true in the study of South African reconciliation, because three of the measures-interracial reconciliation, political tolerance, support for the rule of law-are enumerated as part of the objectives of the truth and reconciliation process in the statute creating the TRC, while one-legitimacy-is mentioned in the commission's final report. Further, Gibson contends that these elements are the building-blocks of democracy. At a minimum, democratic consolidation requires interracial accommodation, tolerance of political foes, support for both abstract and applied principles of the rule of law, and willingness to accept the legitimacy of major political institutions even when they produce unfavorable policy outcomes. In fact, Gibson views reconciliation as a mini-theory of the process of democratization, with the logic of the theory proceeding as follows: amnesty leads to truth, truth leads to reconciliation, and reconciliation leads to democratization. His focus, however, is on the correlation or causal linkage between truth and reconciliation, although he devotes a section of the volume to an examination of the effect of amnesty on reconciliation in South Africa.

In OVERCOMING INTOLERANCE IN SOUTH AFRICA, Jim Gibson and Amanda Gouws have writen what is, in at least one respect, a courageous book. It is courageous because it is in many ways pessimistic about the prospects for political tolerance (and therefore, they argue, for democratic consolidation) in post-apartheid South Africa. While not a particularly surprising view -- contemporary South Africa, riven by racial tension, political strife, economic instability, and an epidemic of HIV/AIDS, is by nearly all objective criteria a most unlikely candidate for a successful transition to stable democratic rule -- it is nonetheless a position at odds with nearly all policy makers and commentators, who generally offer much rosier predictions for South Africa's political future.

Thus, when Gibson and Gouws' book begins with a somewhat bleak forecast about the possibility of tolerance there, I expected it to be a set-up for a dramatic concluding turnabout. What I found instead was a creative, meticulous, and thoroughly honest depiction of the condition of mass political tolerance in South Africa, albeit one which paints a somewhat more dismal picture of the future than others might have it. Their theoretical approach is psychological, drawing most heavily on the work of Paul Sniderman, John Sullivan, and George Marcus, as well as on Gibson's own prior work in the U.S., South Africa, and Russia. In this view, democratic political tolerance (in essence, a willingness to allow one's political opponents to act within the confines of a democratic system) is closely linked to the notion of threat, both real and perceived, which in turn are often a function of social (i.e., group) identity. They evaluate these theories' expectations with data from a two-wave panel survey of South Africans, conducted during 1996 and 1997. The details of this survey are painstakingly outlined in an Appendix, and the survey itself could be the subject of its own review; suffice it to say that, in addition to the care with which the sample was chosen, the instrument benefits from the incorporation of a number of experimental and quasi-experimental components with which to disentangle the myriad influences that shape tolerance in South Africa.

A brief overview of South Africa's recent political history in Chapter 2 sets the stage for the book's theoretical and empirical core. Part II, encompassing Chapters 3 through 5, might best be summarized by a line found much later in the text: "(T)olerant South Africans are a lonely few" (p. 173). Through analysis of a series of questions and vignettes, Gibson and Gouws reveal that not only is intolerance commonplace, but also that it is "pluralistic," occuring across the whole range of racial groups in South African society, and that it is relatively unresponsive to the nature of the particular situation in question (so, for example, such factors as the endorsement of a demonstration by community leaders failed to have any effect on individuals' willingness to tolerate that demonstration). But while their conclusions are at times depressing for those who desire to see a stable, democratic South Africa, the authors themselves nonetheless maintain a tempered optimism about that country's future.

That they manage to do so largely a function of Part III of the book, which focuses on the prospects for attitude change and which is, for my money, the most compelling part of the book. Once again, though, Gibson and Gouws paint a picture of tolerance which is, at best, mixed. While intolerant attitudes are somewhat malleable, tolerant ones are even more so; consistent with work in other countries, it is far easier to convince South Africans to be intolerant than to tolerate. Similarly, Chapter 8's exploitation of the panel structure of the survey finds that, while tolerance remained relatively stable in the aggregate over their two surveys, at the individual level substantial racial differences exist in the direction and causes of changes in toleration. Thus, in many respects, positive shifts in tolerance among colored South Africans (who benefited from apartheid) mirror the negative shifts among whites. Similarly, the absence of well-developed democratic norms among black South Africans -- undoubtedly the result of years of powerlessness and disenfranchisement -- contrasts with the strength of democratic committments among South Africans of Asian descent, many of whom trace their roots to democratic India.

Many of the readers of this review will be most interested in Chapter 7, which details the authors' experiments with the interplay of political tolerance and judicial institutions, most notably South Africa's Constitutional Court. Here again, the verdict is, on balance, grim: while South Africans can, under some circumstances, be convinced to tolerate their political foes by a decision of the Court, those in the black majority are the least likely to do so. Conversely, however, the ability of the Court to engender intolerance is immense by comparison, leading to real concerns over the Court's potential to act as a countermajoritarian force.

Of course, there are things about the book with which one can quibble. For example, throughout the book, the reader is barraged with tables of analyses, a necessary inclusion in this heavily empirical work but also a decidedly mixed blessing from a stylistic perspective. At the same time, the book contains remarkably few figures; a judicious use of graphical presentations might have ameliorated a bit of the inundation one feels in some of the later chapters. But while the tables can at times be bewildering, the book's saving grace is the text which accompanies them; in the hands of less gifted writers, much of the analyses therein would have been transformed from a careful exploration of a fascinating and important question into a powerful sleep aid. And while in its current form OVERCOMING INTOLERANCE may not satisfy some readers' desire for tales from places far away, its solid theoretical grounding, creative use of experimental designs in a survey context, and forthright (if a bit gloomy) conclusions are a model for research on such a simultaneously slippery and significant subject. And despite the authors generally acherontic outlook, the authors remain guardedly upbeat about the prospects for a tolerant, multiracial, democratic South Africa. One can but hope that their optimism is both warranted and realized.