Apartheid's Festival highlights the conflicts and debates that surrounded the 1952 celebration of the 300th anniversary of the landing of Jan Van Riebeeck and the founding of Cape Town, South Africa. Taking place at the height of the apartheid era, the festival was viewed by many as an opportunity for the government to promote its nationalist, separatist agenda in grand fashion. Leslie Witz's fine-grained examination of newspapers, brochures, pamphlets, and advertising materials reveals th...

South African cities are marked by the legacies of racialized dispossession that were inscribed in colonial and apartheid spatial patterns. From the late 1970s, the “urban” has been presented as both a key scene for visions of the reform of apartheid and as a site for the potentially revolutionary transformation of South African society. Cities therefore play a pivotal role in shaping the possibilities and limits of changing imperatives of transition, transformation, development, and susta...

Unsettled History examines South African society and the construction and presentation of its public pasts, from Nelson Mandela’s release from prison in 1990 to South Africa’s hosting of the 2010 FIFA World Cup ®. Conventionally represented as a time of rectifying the silences and distortions of settler history through inclusion and recovery, the focus here instead is on the shifts in processes and locations of historicizing and the unsettled state of categories of framing history...

Museums flourished in post-apartheid South Africa. In older museums, there were renovations on the go, and at least fifty new museums opened. Most sought to depict violence and suffering under apartheid and the growth of resistance. These unlikely journeys are tracked as museums became a primary setting for contesting histories. From the renowned Robben Island Museum to the almost unknown Lwandle Migrant Labour Museum, the author demonstrates how an institution concerned with the conservat...

Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis is a pioneering effort to insert South Africa’s largest city into urban theory, on its own terms. Johannesburg is Africa’s premier metropolis. Yet theories of urbanization have cast it as an emblem of irresolvable crisis, the spatial embodiment of unequal economic relations and segregationist policies, and a city that responds to but does not contribute to modernity on the global scale. Complicating and contesting such characterizations, the co...

The democratic election of Nelson Mandela as president of South Africa in 1994 marked the demise of apartheid and the beginning of a new struggle to define the nation’s past. History after Apartheid analyzes how, in the midst of the momentous shift to an inclusive democracy, South Africa’s visual and material culture represented the past while at the same time contributing to the process of social transformation. Considering attempts to invent and recover historical icons and narr...

Through a specific architectural lens, this book exposes the role the British Empire played in the development of apartheid. Through reference to previously unexamined archival material, the book uncovers a myriad of mechanisms through which Empire laid the foundations onto which the edifice of apartheid was built. It unearths the significant role British architects and British architectural ideas played in facilitating white dominance and racial segregation in pre-apartheid Cape Town. To ...

Mzo Sirayi has embarked on a highly impressive and daring enterprise with theunfl inching boldness of a scholar who is driven by a passionate pursuit to set therecord straight. He manages to pull no punches and make no apologies by being trueto his convictions, especially within the context of a new South Africa. The bookadopts a largely historicized, critical and analytical perspective, which strikinglyapproximates that of postcolonial theory.Owen...

An investigation into the spatial politics of separation and division in South Africa, principally during the apartheid years, and the effects of these physical and conceptual barriers on the land. In contrast to the weight of literature focusing on post-apartheid South Africa, the focus of this book includes the spatial, political and cultural landscape practices of the apartheid government and also refers to contemporary work done in Australia, England and the US. It probes the uncertain...

In this new and revised edition, Knowles explores new materials relating to multiculturalism and immigration.Immigrants and immigration have always been central to Canadians’ perception of themselves as a country and a society. In this crisply written history, Valerie Knowles describes the different kinds of immigrants who have settled in Canada, and the immigration policies that have helped define the character of Canadian immigrants over the centuries. Key policy...

A leading scholar of South Africa provides a fresh and penetrating exploration of that country’s history, from the earliest known human inhabitation of the region to the present. Focusing primarily on the experiences of its black inhabitants, this richly illustrated book is essential reading for anyone wishing to understand the historical patterns behind the conflicts that rage in this troubled land.

This book was first published in 1987 when South African Apartheid policy generated much public discussion all over the world. This book, “Apartheid in South Africa: Origins and Impact", is a book which can serve the dual purpose of informing the general reader, of the historical background to Apartheid; and of placing a textbook at the disposal of students preparing for various examinations on the history of South Africa.