HSRC Press

In light of president Jacob Zuma’s state of the nation address this week, HSRC Press invites you to the launch of a collection of essays from varying perspectives that rigorously engages with the challenges facing South Africa’s government.

The Zuma Administration: Critical Challenges seeks to stimulate debate and thinking, to challenge entrenched views and perceptions and to break new ground. Interpreting the dynamics since the birth of democracy in South Africa in1994, through the era of the Mbeki administration and the transition to the Zuma administration, it provides fresh perspectives on the questions of land reform, rural development, service delivery, intergovernmental relations, and poverty reduction in South Africa.

Steering clear of biography, the book deals with the micro-mechanics of governance. It is written for policy-makers, scholars in the field of administration and governance and everyone with an interest in the political economy and public administration of South Africa.

The issues that this book deals with are high on the research agenda of the Human Sciences Research Council’s Democracy and Governance research programme and are in line with its pursuit of informing policy development in South Africa.

We hope to see you at the launch:

Event Details

• Date: Friday, 12 February 2010
• Time: 12:00 PM for 12:30 PM
• Venue: Townhouse Conference Centre, 60 Corporation St
  Cape Town | Map
• RSVP: Shaun Stuart, publishing@hsrc.ac.za, 021 466 8002

Book Details

• The Zuma Administration: Critical Challenges edited by Kwandiwe Kondlo, Masuphye H Maserumule
  Book Homepage
  EAN: 9780796923165
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UCT, in conjunction with the 1860 Legacy Foundation (commemorating 150 years of Indian history in SA), invites you to a a public lecture by Professor Goolam Vahed of Department of Historical Studies at the University of KwaZulu-Natal on “Indentured Indian workers on the plantations of Natal and beyond: 1860-1911″.

Vahed is the co-editor of HSRC Press’ Inside Indian Indenture: A South African Story, 1860-1914.

There will be a book and photographic exhibition in the foyer, and refreshments will be served. We hope to see you there:

Event Details

• Date: Wednesday, 03 February 2010
• Time: 5:30 PM for 6:00 PM
• Venue: Lecture Theatre 2D, Robert Leslie Social Science Building, University Avenue
  Upper Campus, UCT
• RSVP: Meagan or Celeste, Meagan.Peters@uct.ac.za, 021- 650 2888

Book Details

• Inside Indian Indenture: A South African Story, 1860-1914 by Ashwin Desai, Goolam Vahed
  Book Homepage
  EAN: 9780796922441
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With the news that the Cape Town and Peter Mokaba 2010 stadia “passed their first tests” last week, questions around just how, exactly, these billion-rand-plus behemoths are to improve the lives of South Africans become all the more pressing.

In the following article by Ashwin Desai and Goolam Vahed on the 2010 FIFA World Cup, the authors take a close look at FIFA’s corporate game, evaluating the benefits - real and chimerical - that football’s biggest event brings to Africa.

The article first appeared in Soccer and Society, Volume 11, Issue 1 & 2 January 2010. Desai is the editor of The Race to Transform: Sport in post-apartheid South Africa, to which Vahed is a contributor.

FIFA has played a heavy hand in deciding on host cities and location of stadiums. The number of cities was reduced from the 13 listed in the Bid to nine, while several stadiums mooted by the LOC were rejected. The Moses Mabhida stadium in Durban will cost an estimated R2.5 billion when the existing rugby stadium across the road could have been upgraded for a fraction of the cost. Bid promoters wanted to refurbish Athlone Stadium, both to reduce cost and because it was located in a historically low income ‘Coloured’ township. A representative was quoted as saying: ‘A billion television viewers don’t want to see shacks and poverty on this scale’. The then ANC-led City and Provincial government capitulated. FIFA’s insistence that the stadium have Table Mountain as its backdrop will come at a cost of at least R2.5 billion.

Ordinary South Africans are being forced to make immediate personal sacrifices. The provincial government of Mpumalanga threatened to reverse a R63 million land claim settlement unless the Matsafeni community surrendered a prime portion of its ancestral land for R1 to build Mpumalanga’s flagship R1 billion stadium. In August 2008, the Pretoria High Court ordered that trustees of the Matsafeni Trust be replaced. Jimmy Mohlala, speaker of the Mpumalanga municipality of Mbombela, was murdered in January 2009, allegedly for exposing these tender irregularities. A report in the Mail and Guardian under the banner headline ‘Pupils burn tyres in protest at World Cup Stadium’ stated that over a thousand pupils demonstrated angrily at the stadium site in Nelspruit when the only two schools in the area were earmarked for demolition to make way for a parking lot.

• Complete article at Informaworld

Book details

• The Race to Transform: Sport in post-apartheid South Africa edited by Ashwin Desai
  Book homepage
  EAN: 9780796923196
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Image courtesy Cartan Tours

Forthcoming from HSRC PressInside Indian Indenture is a timely and monumental work which makes a significant contribution to our understanding of South African Indian history. It tells a story about the many beginnings and multiple journeys that made up the indentured experience. The authors seek to trespass directly into the lives of the indentured themselves. They explore the terrain of the everyday by focusing on religious and cultural expressions, leisure activities, power relations on the plantations, the weapons of resistance and forms of collaboration that were developed in conflicts with the colonial overlords. Fascinating accounts brimming with desire, skulduggery and tender mercies, as much as with oppression and exploitation, show that the indentured were as much agents as they were victims and silent witnesses.

To read this book is to enter their world, to meet real people in all their ambiguities and complexities as they danced the uncertain edge between improvisation and resignation, to know the dreams that fill the souls of wandering exiles. Not only does it substantially revise the contours of South African Indian historiography, it starts to weave these themes into the mainstream of Southern African studies. It also situates itself in comparative work on indenture especially in Fiji and Mauritius and extends this work by making the South African experience of indenture available to other scholars.

Many were filled with hopes as high as Mahjoub’s stars as they crossed the kala pani (the sea) making their way from India to Durban in southern Africa in the late 1800s. But dreams of a better life and the opportunity to save money and return to the village as ’success stories’ were not to be for many who returned ‘home’ with less than they had started out with, and found that home was no longer the place they had left. Neither were they the same people. Caste had been transgressed, parents had died and spaces for reintegration closed as colonialism tightened its grip. Home for these wandering exiles was no more.

About the editors

Ashwin Desai holds a Masters degree from Rhodes University and a doctorate from Michigan State University. He is currently a senior researcher at the Centre for Sociological Research at the University of Johannesburg. He was previously a Visiting Research Fellow in the Institute of Social and Economic Research at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, South Africa. One of South Africa’s foremost social commentators, Ashwin’s work is internationally celebrated for its courage and clarity of vision and for its focus on the lived experience of oppression and resistance. His previous books include We are the poors: Community struggles in post-apartheid South Africa.

Goolam Vahed is Associate Professor in the Department of Historical Studies at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa.

Book details

• Inside Indian Indenture: A South African Story, 1860-1914 by Ashwin Desai, Goolam Vahed
  Book homepage
  EAN: 9780796922441
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Land issues and conflicts occur all over, all the time on the African continent and continue to mushroom on a continuous basis. Although many of these issues are not new, they do continue to change and are extremely complex and embedded, which may lead to the inability to deal with them and to questioning the legitimacy of the forms of intervention and prevention of conflicts. The way in which these issues are dealt with often does not take into consideration their major - and thus potentially recurring - causes.

The Struggle over Land in Africa: Conflicts, Politics and Change is a compelling book which analyses the role of land as a place and source of conflict, especially with regard to policy development, crisis management and post-war/post-conflict reconstruction. The authors’ main aim is to gain insight into the nature of policy-making concerning land and to delve into the underlying causes of these land issues, not only at national level but also in terms of broader Africa.

The book covers land issues in Kenya, Rwanda, South Africa, northern Cameroon, Namibia, Mozambique, Angola, Democratic Republic of Congo, Tanzania and Zimbabwe. Some of the themes explored in this powerful volume include: Ethnic and indigenous land conflicts, Traditionalism versus modernity, renewed land interests, land use and conflict, state building, politics and land (for example Agricultural land reform); land policy development, planning, inclusiveness/non-inclusiveness; regional scopes of land conflicts and changing norms.

Contents

Introduction: The struggle over land in Africa: Conflicts, politics and change;
Ward Anseeuw and Chris Alden

Theme 1: Ethnic and indigenous land conflicts

1. ‘Indigenous’ land claims in Kenya: A case study of Chebyuk, Mount Elgon District
Claire Médard

2. Shades of grey: Post-conflict land policy reform in the Great Lakes Region
Chris Huggins

Theme 2: Between ‘traditionalism and modernity’: Insecurity, privatisation and marginalisation

3. The politics of communal tenure reform: A South African case study
Ben Cousins

4. Karal land: Family cultural patrimony or a commercialised product on the Diamaré Plain?
Bernard Gonné

Theme 3: Renewed land interests, land use, and conflicts

5. The conflicting distribution of tourism revenue as an example of insecure land tenure in Namibian communal lands
Renaud Lapeyre

6. Land rights and enclosures: Implementing the Mozambican Land Law in practice
Christopher Tanner

7. Biodiversity conservation against small-scale farming? Scientific evidences and emergence of new types of land crises
Catherine E Laurent

Theme 4: State building, politics and land

8. The role of land as a site and source of conflict in Angola
Jenny Clover

9. Two cycles of land policy in South Africa: Tracing the contours
Ruth Hall

10. A legal analysis of the Namibian commercial agricultural land reform process
Willem Adriaan Odendaal

Theme 5: Land policy development, planning and (non-)inclusiveness

11. The Ituri paradox: When armed groups have a land policy and peacemakers do not
Thierry Vircoulon

12. Understanding urban planning approaches in Tanzania: A historical transition analysis for urban sustainability
Wakuru Magigi

Theme 6: Regional scopes of land conflicts and changing norms

13. The Zimbabwe crisis, land reform and normalisation
Sam Moyo

14. Regionalisation of norms and the impact of narratives on southern African land policies
Chris Alden and Ward Anseeuw

About the authors

Dr Ward Anseeuw is a CIRAD Researcher in the Post Graduate School for Agriculture and Rural Development at the University of Pretoria. Dr Anseeuw is an Agro-Economist who holds a Doctorate degree in Economics from the Pierre Mendès University in France (Grenoble). He has previously worked with the Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique (INRA, Sciences Laboratory for Action and Development). He has mainly worked on agrarian and land policies in South Africa, but has also analysed the changing land policies within SADC and the broader African context from a more political point of view.

Dr Chris Alden is a reader in International Relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science, UK. He has conducted extensive field research across the Southern African region and has published widely on the international politics and conflict in Southern Africa as well as work on Asia-Africa relations.

Book details

• The Struggle over Land in Africa: Conflicts, Politics & Change edited by Ward Anseeuw and Chris Alden
  Book homepage
  EAN: 9780796923226
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Mahmood Mamdani, author of Saviours and Survivors was recently named one of the world’s 100 leading public intellectuals by Foreign Policy magazine. Earlier this year he delivered two seminal lectures, the first at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies and the second at the ICC in Kampala.

I am greatly honored to have been asked to give this lecture. I met the late Abu Mayanja in 1961. I was a student at Old Kampala Senior Secondary School, and Hon. Mayanja was the new Minister of Education in the Buganda Government. I was also the Secretary of the Do-it-Yourself Physics Club at the School. In 1961, we held a Science exhibition at the school, and invited Hon. Mayanja to officiate at the opening. He was gracious enough to accept our invitation. I remember it as the first time I got to shake the hand of a well-known political leader.

I subsequently met Hon. Mayanja at several workshops in the 1990s. We did not agree on everything. Nor did we disagree on everything. I became aware of him as a man possessed of acute intelligence, one who never shied away from controversial issues.

• Complete lecture at The Equatorian.com

SOAS Lecture

• Saviours and Survivors (mp3 download)

• Questions and Answers (mp3 download)

• Not loading? Listen at Pulse

Book details

• Saviours and Survivors: Darfur, Politics and the War on Terror by Mahmood Mamdani
  Book homepage
  EAN: 9780796922526
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Are false hopes about the 2010 FIFA World Cup South Africa’s own inconvenient truth? A timely HSRC Press publication, Development and Dreams, asks precisely this question - one that is reinforced by a new World Cup documentary recently in the news. Written and directed by Craig Tanner, Fahrenheit 2010 presents the advent of the world’s largest soccer spectacle in SA in an unflattering light:

South Africa has wasted resources on next year’s soccer World Cup and will be left with stadiums that are no more than white elephants, a critical new documentary says.

Continental economic powerhouse South Africa, the first African nation to stage the sports spectacle, has spent billions of dollars to build new stadiums and refurbish existing venues in 10 cities where games will be played.

But social activists and academics say the funds would have been better spent tackling poverty, housing shortages and a health system buckling under a major HIV/Aids epidemic.

“When you build enormous stadia, you (are) shifting those resources … from building schools or hospitals and then you have these huge structures standing empty and being used to a very limited extent. They become white elephants,” anti-apartheid veteran Dennis Brutus, who was jailed with Nelson Mandela on Robben Island in the 1960s, tells “Fahrenheit 2010″.

• Complete article at ESPN

“The film does not suggest that South Africa should not be hosting the World Cup. It asks why a third-world country could not have used its existing stadiums - as it did when it staged world cups in rugby and cricket - more in keeping with the country’s actual capacity.”

Issues addressed in Fahrenheit 2010, edited by Michael Cross of local company Rogue Productions,include the stadiums becoming white elephants, Bafana Bafana’s lack of on-field prowess, and the soccer stadium scandal that rocked the Mbombela Municipality in Mpumalanga.

• Complete article at TimesLive

Watch the Fahrenheit 2010 trailer:

Video: Fahrenheit 2010 trailer

• Not loading? Watch on LevitationRogue TV
• Click here for the flim’s blurb

For more on this sensitive topic, see Development and Dreams, a book that casts a critical eye on the management, costs and benefits associated with the 2010 World Cup, looking at the event’s uncertain economic and employment benefits, the venue selections, and the investment in infrastructure, tourism and fan parks, among other items. The contributors then explore the less tangible hopes, dreams and aspirations associated with the 2010 World Cup and interrogate what it means to talk about an African Cup, African culture and identity.

Book details

• Development and Dreams: The Urban Legacy of the 2010 Football World Cup edited by Udesh Pillay, Orli Bass, Richard Tomlinson
  Book homepage
  EAN: 9780796922502
  Find this book with BOOK Finder!

• The Race to Transform: Sport in post-apartheid South Africa edited by Ashwin Desai
  Book homepage
  EAN: 9780796923196
  Find this book with BOOK Finder!

Guernica Magazine interviews Mahmood Mamdani on his latest book, Saviours and Survivors: Darfur, Politics and the War on Terror:

In his latest book, Mamdani attacks the Save Darfur Coalition as ahistorical and dishonest, and argues that the conflict in Darfur is more about land, power, and the environment than it is directly about race.

“The Save Darfur movement claims to have learned from Rwanda,” writes Mahmood Mamdani in his new book, Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics, and the War on Terror. “But what is the lesson of Rwanda? For many of those mobilized to save Darfur, the lesson is to rescue before it is too late, to act before seeking to understand.” His book is an argument “against those who substitute moral certainty for knowledge, and who feel virtuous even when acting on the basis of total ignorance.” Americans think Darfur is a tragic genocide. Mamdani thinks the reality is more complex. His ideas should be taken seriously for a number of reasons, especially because he provides a road map to a workable peace settlement.

[...]

Guernica: Here in the United States, what is the story that has come down to the public about Darfur?

Mahmood Mamdani: I think the core of the argument is very ahistorical. It’s about Darfur as a site of evil; the narrative is structured around a documentation of atrocities, around a graphic description of atrocities, which you can see on the Save Darfur website—killings, rape, burnings of villages. I think the striking thing about the narrative is there is no attempt to explain what leads to these atrocities.

• Read the complete article

Book details

• Saviours and Survivors: Darfur, Politics and the War on Terror by Mahmood Mamdani
  Book homepage
  EAN: 9780796922526
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Mahmood Mamdani’s Saviours and Survivors is the first analysis of the crisis in Darfur to consider the events of the last few years within the context of Sudan’s history, and to critically examine the efficacy of the world’s response to the crisis.

Here is an HSRC Press podcast series recorded when Mamdani visited South Africa earlier this year.

Book details

• Saviours and Survivors: Darfur, Politics and the War on Terror by Mahmood Mamdani
  Book homepage
  EAN: 9780796922526
  Find this book with BOOK Finder!

Paula Gilbert talks to Ashwin Desai, editor of The Race to Transform: Sport in post-apartheid South Africa, about his views on 2010.

Soccer is supported fanatically by millions of people across the globe. This means that millions of eyes will be focused on South Africa when we host the upcoming soccer world cup in 2010. The lead up to 2010 has inspired contentious debate about what the world cup will really bring to South Africa – this was a topic of discussion at this year’s National Arts festival. Paula Gilbert reports from Grahamstown.

• Podcast: 2010 with Dr. Ashwin Desai
• Podcast: 2010 with Dr. Ashwin Desai (Afrikaans version)

Book details

• The Race to Transform: Sport in post-apartheid South Africa edited by Ashwin Desai
  Book homepage
  EAN: 9780796923196
  Find this book with BOOK Finder!

Image courtesy KZN Literary Tourism