Comrades in Alliance? The Communist Party in Post-apartheid South Africa PDF Download

Author: Iain William McInnes
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Author: Stephen Ellis
Publisher: London : J. Currey
ISBN:
Category : Anti-apartheid movements
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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This book is about the South African Communist Party and how it took over the leadership of the African National Congress between 1960 and 1990, during the time when both organisations were banned in South Africa and forced to establish their headquarters in exile. It also concerns Umkhonto we Sizwe, the Spear of the Nation, the guerrilla army set up jointly by both organisations in 1961 under the overall command of Nelson Mandela. The banning of the ANC left them no other means of political expression but to fight. Central to the book is Tsepo Sechaba's inside account of the interaction of the SACP and ANC. He was also witness to much of the espionage, counter-espionage and infiltration which was carried out by the South African government.

Author: Simon Adams
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Adams, who is not identified, discusses such topics as forging the nationalist/communist alliance; colonialism, armed struggle, and black workers; the path to power during the 1980s; towards a negotiated revolution, 1990-92; reconstructing the Communist Party; between the negotiated and unnegotiated revolution; and parliament and the national democratic revolution, 1994-95. c. Book News Inc.

Author: Alexander Roy Beresford
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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This thesis examines the trajectories of class politics in post-apartheid South Africa. It investigates whether we can witness South African politics entering into a post-nationalist era characterised by the increasing salience of class struggles rooted in the country's glaring socioeconomic inequalities. In particular, the thesis explores the political role of the organised working class with a focus on the Tripartite Alliance between the African Natinal Congress (ANC), the South African Communist Party (SACP) and the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU). Alliance politics has traditionally been studied with a focus on policy analysis and elite-level exchanges played out in the public domain (Bassett 2005; Buhlungu 2005; Lodge 1999; Webster 2001), or with a focus on workers' political attitudes that uses statistical survey data (Buhlungu et al 2006a; Pillay 2006). The unique contribution made by the thesis is that it offers a detailed ethnographic focus into class politics 'from below', with a focus on the political attitudes and activism of members of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), South Africa's largest and most politically influential trade union. The thesis explores how rank and file members of NUM have adapted to the radically altered social, political and institutional environment heralded by the transition to democracy in 1994. In particular, it analyses how and why union members are engaging in their trade union in changing ways, and what implications this has for those who advocate the trade unions becoming the driving force behind a radical class-based, post-nationalist political agenda (Bond 2000; 2010; Habib and Taylor 1999; 2001). The thesis also explores workers' relationships with the post-apartheid state and their experience of economic transformation under the ANC government. The case study evidence offers an important insight into how workers understand post-liberation politics and how they construct their political identities in relation to both their class and also the nationalist movement. In doing so, the thesis does not attempt to offer normative prescriptions as to what COSATU 'should' (or 'should not') do. Instead, it challenges mechanical, deterministic analyses of the relationship between class and nationalist politics, particularly those that stress that underlying class divisions in South African society will inevitably, in some form or another, produce a new class-based politics that will not only challenge, but potentially supersede, nationalist politics.

Author: Leon de Kock
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 186814965X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 395

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In Losing the Plot, well-known scholar and writer Leon de Kock offers a lively and wide-ranging analysis of postapartheid South African writing which, he contends, has morphed into a far more flexible and multifaceted entity than its predecessor. If postapartheid literature’s founding moment was the ‘transition’ to democracy, writing over the ensuing years has viewed the Mandelan project with increasing doubt. Instead, authors from all quarters are seen to be reporting, in different ways and from divergent points of view, on what is perceived to be a pathological public sphere in which the plot – the mapping and making of social betterment – appears to have been lost. The compulsion to detect forensically the actual causes of such loss of direction has resulted in the prominence of creative nonfiction. A significant adjunct in the rise of this is the new media, which sets up a ‘wounded’ space within which a ‘cult of commiseration’ compulsively and repeatedly plays out the facts of the day on people’s screens. This, De Kock argues, is reproduced in much postapartheid writing. And, although fictional forms persist in genres such as crime fiction, with their tendency to overplot, more serious fiction underplots, yielding to the imprint of real conditions to determine the narrative construction.

Author: G. Adler
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230596207
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 270

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In the 1980s South Africa's urban townships exploded into insurrection led by youth and residents' organisations that collectively became known as the civics movement. Ironically the movement has been unable to adapt to the role of a voluntary association in the liberal polity it helped create, and has great difficulty defining any alternative role. This volume charts the rise and fall of the movement in the transition to and consolidation of democracy in South Africa.

Author: Stephen Ellis
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199365296
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 397

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Nelson Mandela's release from prison in February 1990 was one of the most memorable moments of recent decades. It came a few days after the removal of the ban on the African National Congress; founded a century ago and outlawed in 1960, it had transferred its headquarters abroad and opened what it termed an External Mission. For the thirty years following its banning, the ANC had fought relentlessly against the apartheid state. Finally voted into office in 1994, the ANC today regards its armed struggle as the central plank of its legitimacy. External Mission is the first study of the ANC's period in exile, based on a full range of sources in southern Africa and Europe. These include the ANC's own archives and also those of the Stasi, the East German ministry that trained the ANC's security personnel. It reveals that the decision to create the Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation) -- guerrilla army which later became the ANC's armed wing -- as made not by the ANC but by its allies in the South African Communist Party after negotiations with Chinese leader Mao Zedong. In this impressive work, Ellis shows that many of the strategic decisions made, and many of the political issues that arose during the course of that protracted armed struggle, had a lasting effect on South Africa, shaping its society even up to the present day.

Author: Alan Wieder
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1583673563
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 391

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Ruth First and Joe Slovo, husband and wife, were leaders of the war to end apartheid in South Africa. Communists, scholars, parents, and uncompromising militants, they were the perfect enemies for the white police state. Together they were swept up in the growing resistance to apartheid, and together they experienced repression and exile. Their contributions to the liberation struggle, as individuals and as a couple, are undeniable. Ruth agitated tirelessly for the overthrow of apartheid, first in South Africa and then from abroad, and Joe directed much of the armed struggle carried out by the famous Umkhonto we Sizwe. Only one of them, however, would survive to see the fall of the old regime and the founding of a new, democratic South Africa. This book, the first extended biography of Ruth First and Joe Slovo, is a remarkable account of one couple and the revolutionary moment in which they lived. Alan Wieder’s deeply researched work draws on the usual primary and secondary sources but also an extensive oral history that he has collected over many years. By weaving the documentary record together with personal interviews, Wieder portrays the complexities and contradictions of this extraordinary couple and their efforts to navigate a time of great tension, upheaval, and revolutionary hope.

Author: Heribert Adam
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Author: George M. Fredrickson
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198022352
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 401

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When George M. Fredrickson published White Supremacy: A Comparative Study in American and South African History, he met universal acclaim. David Brion Davis, writing in The New York Times Book Review, called it "one of the most brilliant and successful studies in comparative history ever written." The book was honored with the Ralph Waldo Emerson Prize, the Merle Curti Award, and a jury nomination for the Pulitzer Prize. Now comes the sequel to that acclaimed work. In Black Liberation, George Fredrickson offers a fascinating account of how blacks in the United States and South Africa came to grips with the challenge of white supremacy. He reveals a rich history--not merely of parallel developments, but of an intricate, transatlantic web of influences and cross-fertilization. He begins with early moments of hope in both countries--Reconstruction in the United States, and the liberal colonialism of British Cape Colony--when the promise of suffrage led educated black elites to fight for color-blind equality. A rising tide of racism and discrimination at the turn of the century, however, blunted their hopes and encouraged nationalist movements in both countries. Fredrickson teases out the connections between movements and nations, examining the transatlantic appeal of black religious nationalism (known as Ethiopianism), and the pan-Africanism of Du Bois and Garvey. He brings to vivid life the decades of struggle, organizing, and debate, as blacks in the United States looked to Africa for identity and South Africans looked to America for new ideas and hope. The book traces the rise of Communist influence in black movements in the two nations in the 1920s and '30s, and the adoption of Gandhian nonviolent protest after World War II. The story of India's struggle, however, was not to be repeated in either America or South Africa: in one nation, nonviolence revealed its limitations, encouraging splits in the civil rights movement; in the other, it failed, fostering an armed struggle against white supremacy. Fredrickson brings the story up through the present, exploring the divergence between African-American identity politics and the nonracialism that has triumphed in South Africa. In a career spanning thirty years, George Fredrickson has won recognition as the leading scholar of the struggle over racial domination in the United States and South Africa. In Black Liberation, he provides the essential companion volume to his award-winning White Supremacy, telling the story of how blacks fought back on both sides of the Atlantic.