Critical Afrikaner Intellectuals and Apartheid, 1943–1958

Apartheid dominated the political thinking of two generations of Afrikaner intellectuals from its first conceptualizations in the early 1940s to its disintegration as an ideology during the 1980s. Western Cape politicians, academics, journalists and church leaders were the main contributors to the Sauer Report, which was the greatest influence on the apartheid plank of the National Party's 1948 platform. Although apartheid as a policy did not clinch the NP victory, it won steady support in the course of the 1950s. The article discusses the work of four Afrikaner critics of apartheid as it was conceptualized and implemented in the first decade of NP rule. The most striking observations were those of the ambivalent figure of the poet and essayist N.P. van Wyk Louw, who has remained an important moral voice in the Afrikaner political tradition. André du Toit's Die Sondes van die Vaders (1983) built on some key arguments of Louw in arguing for the abandonment of apartheid as a way of securing Afrikaner survival.     

Obsessional Whiteness and the Unpaid Debt of Apartheid

This paper considers post‐apartheid South African Whiteness from a psychoanalytic perspective. A point of focus is Samantha Vice's controversial and much debated recent article on the ethical quandaries of post‐apartheid White privilege, “How Do I Live in this Strange Place?”, which is read alongside J.M. Coetzee's essay, “The Mind of Apartheid”, written in the early 1990s on the brink of South Africa's transition. Coetzee used a Freudian framework of obsessional neurosis to highlight what he saw as the libidinal economy of apartheid, suggesting that apartheid policies were not only or even primarily aimed at consolidating White material privilege; they were, rather, in Coetzee's view, a set of measures designed to preserve the purity of the White social body from contamination. What the juxtaposition of Coetzee and Vice suggests is that, while the stain of South African Whiteness has shifted or been displaced, post‐apartheid White antiracism, exemplified in the critical discourse Vice elaborates, remains as obsessional, as concerned with keeping the White social body clean, pure, as apartheid thinking. The paper then concludes by considering the usefulness, but also, crucially, the limits of psychoanalysis as a critical frame for interrogating the continuities between apartheid and the new South Africa.     

Woman,Women, and the Priesthood in the Trinitarian Theology of Elisabeth Behr-Sigel

Abstract

This article arises from a critical examination of the way the human sexuality debate developed at national level within the United Reformed Church (URC) between 1997 and 2000. Documents that reflected the thinking of members of the Church were carefully examined in order to identify the issues that members of the URC considered fundamental to the debate. From this analysis three closely linked themes, which, it will be argued here form a circular argument, are reflected on theologically: homophobia, sexuality and changing traditional interpretations of the Bible. There can only be an end to the debate when the URC and other Churches are able to escape this circular argument. Taking the experience of South Africa after the apartheid years as a guide, the discussion concludes by exploring ways by which the Church might end the debate and move forward.     

African American cultural history and reflections on Jung in the African Diaspora

Racism is defined as a psychopathology and the ground in which the covenant of whiteness is rooted and mirrored in the system of apartheid structured by American Constitutional Jurisprudence between 1857 and 1954. This historical period overshadowed Carl Jung's visit to America between 1909 and 1937. The spirit of the times and practices of racism coloured Jung's views, attitudes, and theories about African Americans, just as colonialism coloured his attitudes toward Africa and Africans. Consequently Jung failed to see the African Diaspora and the extraordinary intellectual and artistic period of the Harlem Renaissance (1919‐1929). Its introduction here foregrounds the exceptionalism of African Americans and the cultural continuity of African ancestry. This exceptionalism was not seen by Jung and there have been no attempts to redress its omission from analytical psychology and other sub‐disciplines of Western psychology. Jung's theories of personality and psychoanalysis and his negative projections about primitivism among Africans and African American ‘Negroes’ would have been mediated by knowledge of a legislated American apartheid and the Harlem Renaissance which occurred within the barriers of apartheid. In this paper I posit that culture, kinship libido, and the African principle of Ubuntu are healing modalities that play a critical role in instinct and the relational ground of human psychology and biology, from which culture as an environmental expression constellates around common goals of the human species. Cultural equivalencies and expressions within the wisdom traditions and mythologies of the Africa Diaspora are considered. Specifically, the Bantu principle of Ubuntu or ‘humanity’ is identified as the relational ground in African cultures, while the Kemetic‐Egyptian deity Maat, as an archetypal anima figure and the religio‐mythology offer a transcendent position from which to critique the inequities and constitutional jurisprudence that structured American apartheid. Maat is the personification of truth, justice, balance and weighing of the heart in orderly judicial processes. In her we find the alignment of the spirit and matter in the law and judgement. The paper concludes with reflections on pathways toward healing the psychopathology of racism and recommendations to enhance clinical training and practice.     

The professionalization of psychology within the apartheid state 1948-1978

When the National Party came to power in South Africa in 1948 it inherited an ageing colonial psychiatric system underpinned by British-based mental health legislation promulgated in 1916. This situation remained substantially unchanged until the late 1960s, despite the apartheid government's far-reaching attempts to restructure other aspects of the social landscape. The 1966 assassination of South Africa's prime minister by a schizophrenic parliamentary messenger led directly to a series of commissions of enquiry into the management of mental health services, followed by new mental health legislation in 1973 and the compulsory registration of clinical psychologists. The increasing professionalization of psychology, and the apartheid state's policy in relation to the profession, are considered in the light of local and international influences. Unlike the Nazi and Soviet governments, the apartheid state did not seek to create a new psychology and psychiatry in its own image but was instead motivated by a desire to emulate Western models and to identify and control the dangerous individual.     

“You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught”: How Apartheid Was Lived and Learned on a South African Farm

After apartheid ended, many White South Africans asked themselves, over and over, “Who was I during apartheid?” and “How did I learn to live in that way?” This article is an attempt to address those questions. In the first part, a personal example is used to illustrate a life lived during the heyday of apartheid. There was a great silence between the races about race. In the second part, I discuss that life and the nature of embeddedness from a relational, hermeneutic perspective with a self psychological flavor. My doctoral dissertation, titled Race, Place and Self (Philips, 2007), was an attempt to examine the nature and influences over the years of different countries and contexts, and disentangle myself from the particular racialized beginnings that were uniquely mine. This article is one part of that journey.     

Making findings for the future: representational order and redemption in the work of the TRC

The following paper examines the ways in which the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission provided redemption to both individual perpetrators and to political organisations responsible for Gross Human Rights Violations by virtue of the particular representational ordering that was adopted. While the genealogy of this representational ordering can be traced back to the Information Management System, a database used for capturing data about perpetrators and victims, this ordering is ultimately apparent in the Final Report. Here we find evidence of the TRC’s use of a particular representational ordering to reconcile the dual imperative to be impartial on the one hand, while on the other hand trying not to equate the violations of human rights perpetrated by the ANC with those perpetrated by the apartheid state. The representation of the apartheid state as a unified and homogenous entity is discussed as central to this strategy.     

PHILOSOPHERS,THEIR CONTEXT,AND THEIR RESPONSIBILITIES

Abstract: It has at various times been said, both before and since the fall of apartheid, that philosophers in South Africa are neglecting to do certain sorts of work. Behind this accusation lies a general claim that philosophers have responsibilities to their contexts. This essay is dedicated to (i) defending this claim against objections, and (ii) offering a positive argument for there being moral pressure on philosophers to increase understanding. My aim is not to accuse any philosopher or community of philosophers of neglect. It is rather to defend an understanding of both philosophy and ethical responsibilities that makes room for philosophers to have moral responsibilities. Whether or not it has ever in fact been appropriate to accuse philosophers in South Africa, or indeed anywhere else, of neglect, philosophers do indeed have responsibilities to their contexts.     

Revisiting the Message to the People of South Africa: 1968–2018

The year 2018 marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of the Message to the People of South Africa in 1968, the same year in which the 4th Assembly of the World Council of Churches was held in Uppsala. The Message was the first major South African ecumenical statement that rejected apartheid as unbiblical and unchristian, a “false gospel.” At the time it was likened to the Barmen Declaration of the Confessing Church in Germany (1934). It also set in motion a process of ecumenical opposition to apartheid that prepared the way for declaring its theological justification a heresy and its practice a sin that had to be rejected and resisted. This article sets out the background to the Message, describes the process which led to its publication, outlines its content, and considers its significance looking back after 50 years.     

Organizing Muslim Virtue: Community Organizing,Comparative Religious Ethics,and the South African Muslim Struggle Against Apartheid

While offering valuable comparative insights into models of the self and ethical formation across religious traditions, studies of virtue ethics have been critiqued for putting forward accounts which are elite-focused. Some comparative ethicists have pointed to work in religious ethics and political theology on faith-based community organizing as offering compelling case studies of non-elite ethical formation. I seek to add to this literature by performing an analysis of the theories and practices of ethical formation in the South African Muslim anti-apartheid grassroots organization known as the “Call of Islam.” The “Call of Islam” emphasized a liberation-oriented praxis and active solidarity with non-Muslim organizations for the purposes of protesting apartheid and employed a range of social practices including study circles (halaqat) and political funeral processions to prepare and equip its members for such work. As such, it not only sheds light on non-elite ethical formation, but in its cultivation of the habits and dispositions of democratic solidarity, it also serves as an Islamic example of broad-based community organizing.     

Boycotting South Africa

ABSTRACT This essay explores the question of what sorts of relations morality permits, requires, or forbids nations, businesses, and individuals to have with South Africa and South Africans. After reflecting on the immorality of apartheid and rebutting several defences of it, the essay turns its attention to several questions that bear on the assessment of foreign policy toward South Africa. The final sections discuss how individuals ought to respond to South African apartheid, focusing on collective boycotts and personal abstentions. The essay critically assesses various proposed boycotts and weighs the significance of symbolic protests of apartheid.     

KNOWLEDGE,VALUES, AND BELIEFS IN THE SOUTH AFRICAN CONTEXT SINCE 1948: AN OVERVIEW

In this contribution, an overview of the distinct ways in which the interplay between knowledge, values, and beliefs took shape in the South African context since 1948 is offered. This is framed against the background of the paleontological significance of South Africa and an appreciation of indigenous knowledge systems, but also of the ideological distortion of knowledge and education during the apartheid era through the legacy of neo‐Calvinism. The overview includes references to discourse on human rationality (as an implicit critique against ideology), on the use of social sciences in theological reflection, on the teaching of evolution in public schools, on science and religion, and on religion and ecology. The essay concludes with a survey of some of the major voices regarding the interface between religion and science in South Africa.     

1968 – Year of Shame,Year of Grace

They year 1968 was the year of the student protests; the year when the Vietnam War and the Chinese cultural revolution were at their height; the year of the Prague spring and Christian–Marxist dialogue before these movements were suppressed by the Soviet invasion; the year in which Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated; the year in which Latin American Catholic bishops met in Medellín and broke new theological ground; the year in which the South African Council of Churches issued an anti‐apartheid message to the people of South Africa. Looking back at this patchwork of events 50 years later, so much has changed since then, but so much that was augured in 1968 still remains to be changed.     

A Group of Black South Africans' Experience of Telling their Untold Stories about the Apartheid Era

The aim of this research was to explore a group of black South Africans' experiences of telling their untold stories of survival about the apartheid era. The expectation was that if they did become more aware of these alternative stories, it could have a far-reaching effect on their lives. A qualitative study was conducted with a group of seven black South African survivors of the apartheid era, ranging in age from 42–62 years (males =5, females =2). These participants formed part of an earlier study investigating their perceptions regarding factors that helped them to survive the apartheid era. For the present study, unstructured interviews were conducted focusing on their subjective experiences after the initial study. Analysis of the data yielded seven prevalent themes, namely a positive experience that made a difference, gaining of a positive attitude, not all white people are bad, transgressing the past and moving on, awareness of personal strengths, forgiveness and starting to talk to family and friends. The participants became aware of their untold stories of survival and experienced a positive change within themselves, towards others, the past and the future.     

The response of counsellors to apartheid: A reply to Dryden (1990) and De Jager (1992)

This reply to Dryden (1990) and De Jager (1992) explores the role of organised counselling psychology in challenging, maintaining or promoting apartheid. Counsellors have an important role to play in newly racially integrated tertiary institutions. This role should be informed by an acknowledgement of the central involvement of race and politics within counselling psychology so that appropriate politically contextualised organisational interventions can be implemented.     

Predicting support for racial transformation policies: Intergroup threat,racial prejudice,sense of group entitlement and strength of identification

Policies and programs designed to challenge the effects of racial discrimination (such as affirmative action) are hotly contested. Factors which have been proposed to explain opposition to these policies include racial prejudice, group threat and self‐interest, and perceptions of intergroup justice. We report the results of two random national telephone surveys which tested a theoretically based model of the predictors of policy support in post‐apartheid South Africa. The results provided limited support for Blumer's group position model. Compensatory and preferential treatment policies had different underlying predictors: Violated entitlement featured in the models of compensatory policy attitudes, but not preferential treatment policy attitudes, where threat was the strongest predictor. In addition to threat and violated entitlement, policy attitudes among the black sample were related to ingroup identification but those of the white sample were related to prejudice. The effects of these variables were in the opposite directions for the two samples: Policy support was associated with strong ingroup identification and high levels of threat among the black sample (i.e. prospective beneficiaries of the transformation policies), but with low levels of prejudice and threat among the white sample. We conclude by considering the implications that these findings have for social change programs. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Redeeming Apartheid's Legacy: Collective Guilt, Political Ideology, and Compensation

This paper reports two studies among white South African students on feelings of collective guilt about apartheid and attitudes to affirmative action. Study 1 reports on 21 in-depth interviews, Study 2 on results from 180 survey questionnaires. Substantial proportions of the participants in both studies displayed feelings of collective guilt. Among participants in both studies who identified strongly with white South Africans, some displayed strong feelings of collective guilt while others displayed no such feelings. Our survey data suggest that political ideology functions as a moderator. Strong feelings of guilt were found among students who identified strongly with white South Africans and defined themselves as liberals. If they defined themselves as conservatives then no feelings of collective guilt were observed. Strong feelings of collective guilt were accompanied by positive attitudes toward affirmative action. The influence of political ideology on attitudes toward affirmative action was mediated by collective guilt.     

Reconciliation and Forgiveness in an Unjust Society

Justification by faith necessarily leads to justice in society. IN post–apartheid South Africa, reconciliation has required truth telling plus confession and, most importantly, land redistribution. Failure at land redistribution in Zimbabwe has reduced the effectiveness of the post–colonial reconciliation program and perpetuated previous injustice.     

Relationships among the theory of planned behavior,stages of change,and exercise behavior in older persons over a three year period

Abstract

The present study examined the relationships among the theory of planned behavior (TPB), stages of change, and exercise behavior in 131 older persons over a three year period. Participants completed a baseline questionnaire by mail that assessed attitude, perceived control, subjective norm, intention, and stage and then received a telephone call three years later in which current exercise stage and behavior were assessed. Path analyses showed that (a) TPB constructs were significant predictors of exercise stage, (b) intention mediated the effects of TPB constructs on exercise stage, and (c) exercise behavior was best predicted by intention rather than stage. Results were interpreted as providing evidence for the long term predictive validity of TPB in the exercise domain and as questioning the necessity of combining both intention and stage in a single predictive model.