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Public Culture, Sociality, and Listening to Jazz: Aural Memorialisation in the Time of COVID
Get PDFTaking its cue from two instances of hyper-local jazz sociability along one street in Mamelodi, five years apart, the focus of this article is on three instances of public memorialisation and, through them, on how listening can be socialised and enculturated. It is an exploration both of how sociality is co-constituted through listening, and of how listening is socially constructed, attending to how people become members of aural collectives in distinctive ways. It foregrounds how mostly working-class people living under conditions seldom of their own making continue, in the avowedly postapartheid context, at least partially to remake their worlds sonically, foregrounding the public cultures that they thereby aurally co-create as a notable cultural expression in and of themselves. Methodologically, it considers how recourse to non-elite aesthetics, viewed as repertoires of living, offer alternatives to the claims of both ethnographies and social histories ‘from below’ to present ‘the word’ of the community’ in an authoritative sense
The Hijab: Islam, Women and the Politics of Clothing
Get PDFIntroduction: Dedicated to the ‘Muslim girls and women protesting for their rights in India and Iran’, historians P. K. Yasser Arafath and G. Arunima have compiled a deeply engaging collection of essays that explore the wearing of the hijab from a multitude of perspectives. The contributions traverse different national contexts and explore multiple and entangled strands of the debates around the hijab, underscoring its breadth and complexity. And as the essays in The Hijab: Islam, Women and the Politics of Clothing demonstrate, not only is this is a complex debate, but also one on very rugged terrain
In Patagonia
Get PDFThere is a sentence that has stirred the imagination of Europe as powerfully as any call to arms. I’ve seen it written a hundred times, and have always felt a pang of envy for its lucky author. It is so jaunty, so unreasonably larger than life. It promises to deliver the unexpected –some fantastic reversal of fortune, some miraculous transformation in the character of the writer. It deserves a paragraph to itself, and should be printed in ceremonious italics
Headstall
Get PDFMy father is the healthiest I have ever seen him. He is brown again. His liver is healing. His eyes are glistening becausethey are happy to see me not because he is too intoxicated to talk. His beard is shaven, white stubble sitting quietly on his skin. Hishair is shaven with a no.2 blade. He is spick ’n span. The last time he was sober he was attending my book launch with my mother (legally blind), aunt, uncle (who is blind now). My father was agitated in the bookshop and found every utterance and the fidgeting of my mother a disturbance to his church. My mother was the same. They argued like crumpled up paper. I hugged him sort of reluctantly since he always reeked of alcohol. It would sweat out of his pores. He was shaking and smoking, leaning against the bookshelf, completely out of place in his funeral best
Patrick
Get PDFPatrick had to go. I decreed it. I had allowed him to move into my garage one winter but then I evicted him. Not immediately, but after his tobacco and other noxious habits had begun to unsettle my equilibrium. Also, it was becoming unsanitary for reasons I’m sure I need not explain. I granted him refuge and then I ejected him. I sent him back to the streets, towards a world of bandits with no suburban carport for safe harbour. However, when I stood outside my house, arms akimbo for courage, I said nothing of my personal discomfort. In truth I said that I was worried about the way he struck matches and smoked while lying beneath my car. I recall no resistance, only mute acceptance. He left a bag of things – aging plastic packets, a woman’s wide-brimmed straw hat now lopsided andlimp, food I’d given him days before. He’d return periodically to tell me he would be back the next day to remove it. Every ‘next day’ I circled his midden, noting how its contents had expanded: a shoe, a few more plastic bundles, food I’d given him the day before, an empty matchbox. Then quickly I walked away from its smell of Patrick. I was walking away from my own shame but, being the one more mute, knew not how to say it
PRIVATE PROSECUTION AS A MEANS OF VINDICATING FUNDAMENTAL RIGHTS AND REINFORCING ACCOUNTABILITY IN A NASCENT CONSTITUTIONAL DEMOCRACY
Get PDFThe dawn of democracy had not only heralded respect and protection of human and fundamental rights, but also grand scale corruption committed among others by politicians and civil servants. Notwithstanding the highest rate of corruption by representatives of the public in almost all spheres of government, state owned enterprises and government departments, the rate of prosecution is truncated. Corruption inhibits the state from providing basic services such as water, electricity, access to healthcare, access to housing, infrastructure, and sanitation. The scourge of corruption affects every aspect of human life and has heightened even with the emergence of the corona virus pandemic.
Corruption need not be grand scale to be reported and or prosecuted. Instances of corruption may include a councillor selling food parcels intended to benefit flood victims, a public officer being paid to employ civilians in the Extended Public Works Program, a traffic officer accepting a bribe from a motorist in return for not issuing a ticket for skipping a stop sign, a magistrate accepting sexual favour from a litigant in a case he presides over. In the event the National Prosecuting Authority declines to prosecute corruption, private prosecution remains the only recourse that civilians may resort to vindicate fundamental rights in a nascent democracy
Journal of Anti-Corruption Law: Editorial
No full textWelcome to the 2020 edition, Volume 4, of the Journal of Anti-Corruption Law. This edition contains four academic articles focusing on economic crimes in selected countries and under the African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child
MAKING SENSE OF THE LABOUR MOVEMENT AS WE CONFRONT THE BURDEN OF THE FUTURE
No full textWhile celebrating the ‘Durban Moment’ we shoudl also reflect on new challenges and opportunities facing the labour movement in South Africa presently. This requires a blunt honesty and a perspective that does not rely on nostalgia. To do this we need to step out of dominant narratives and political correctness, and demystify where South African youth find themselves in present day South Africa. This article is written as a provocation for those in the labour movement and the allies of labour. This paper reflects on the changed landscape of youth politics in South Africa – from apartheid to close to thirty years post-apartheid. This provides a lens for sense making how the labour movement should be responding to the multiple crises facing young peple in contemporary South Africa. I use the term \u27burden of the future\u27 to describe and analysse the state that young people find themselves in - one with little hope of access to social institutions or a decent life. Conventional labour strategies are ill-equiped to deal with this social reality in their present form.
This paper was presented at the final session of the 1973 Durban Strikes 50th Remembrance held at the Durban University of Technolog