The Mail Guardian A Z Of South African Politics

The A-Z of South African Politics 2004 is an essential and entertaining guide for navigating the corridors of power in South Africa today. Written by Mail & Guardian reporters and other experts associated with the award-winning newspaper, the book will give readers an under-the-skin look at the country's political movers and shakers. Three previous editions of the A-Z of SA Politics have been best sellers. The M&G decided to compile a fourth edition after continual requests by readers and booksellers for another edition looking at who's in, who's out and who's important in South African political life - and what it means for the rest of us. This lively reference work covers national government, judges, priests and premiers -- and those people, out of government, whom it would be folly to ignore.

When Nelson Mandela emerged from decades in jail to preach reconciliation, South Africans truly appeared a people reborn as the Rainbow Nation. Yet, a quarter of a century later, the country sank into bitter recriminations and rampant corruption under Jacob Zuma. Why did this happen, and how was hope betrayed? President Cyril Ramaphosa, who is seeking to heal these wounds, is due to lead the African National Congress into an election by May 2019. The ANC is hoping to claw back support lost to the opposition in the Zuma era. This book will shed light on voters' choices and analyze the election outcome as the results emerge. With chapters on all the major issues at stake--from education to land redistribution-- Understanding South Africa offers insights into Africa's largest and most diversified economy, closely tied to its neighbors' fortunes.

International relations are what a government does when nobody s looking. While this may well once have been true, the conduct of international relations in South Africa and elsewhere has come under increasing scrutiny by the public. This is partially the result of specialist expertise around the formal study of international relations and the making of foreign policy, enhanced by the development of International Relations as a separate academic field. Like the growth of institutes of international affairs (or the Council on Foreign Relations, in the case of America), the study of international relations commenced at the end of the First World War (1914 18) with the establishment at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, of the first academic chair in International Relations. It was called for Woodrow Wilson, America s twenty-eighth president, and funded by Welsh businessman and pacifist David Davis. In South Africa, the study of international relations commenced with the establishment of the South African Institute of International Affairs (SAIIA), which met for the first time in the Senate Chamber of the University of Cape Town on 12 May 1934. Until then International Relations had been taught in various guises within History, Law, Economics and Politics courses, but it lacked a firm institutional base. In South Africa, International Relations was first taught as a separate academic discipline at the University of the Witwatersrand in 1963 although a professorship, called for Jan Smuts, was first filled in 1961. Long before this institutional setting, however, a more subversive and certainly more spicy variety of international relations understanding and critique was at work: this was, of course, the sharp eye on foreign policy and international relations, drawn in jest and sometimes in anger by cartoonists. Their interest in international relations predates the emergence of the powerful critical perspectives that have changed and almost redirected the field since the ending of the Cold War. This book is about how these other experts have looked at and commented on South Africa s relations with the world over the past century. It examines their interpretations of unfolding events and considers how these commentators and their work interacted with the more formal understandings of foreign policy and international relations that came to pass long after cartoons first appeared. A century of South Africa s engagement with the world is, understandably, a long and complex story. Cartoons on the country were done years before the 1910 Act of Union, as some well-known cartoons of the Anglo-Boer War suggest. However, by confining my choices to a hundred years of the South African state, I have chosen firm bookends for the collection. The choice of cartoons itself requires further clarification. There is a rather worrying recent notion in South Africa that nothing that happened in the country before the historic election of 1994 matters. In April 2009, at a conference, I heard an academic colleague say that what happened in the 1930s was illegitimate and of no real relevance to the present. This lack of interest in history is both short-sighted and intellectually lazy. South Africa s international relations today are determined as much by the cartoons drawn by Boonzaier in 1910 as they are by the cartoons drawn by Zapiro in 2010. I choose these two names not only because they conveniently cover almost the full range of the alphabet, but because they run from the founding of the South African state in 1910 to the present. Their names signal something else, too. I have only chosen drawings by cartoonists who worked in South Africa. As will be clear, many cartoonists were not South African born but brought the cartoonist s trade with them to this country. As such, they brought interpretations and understandings of the world that helped to shape South Africa s perspectives on international relations. Most of the artists in this boo

An investigation of post-apartheid South Africa, which is notable for a history of politicized ethnicity, a complicated network of ethnic groups and for an expectation that ethnic violence would follow the 1994 political transition that did not occur following democratization.

In his book, The Jo'Burg Gazette, Louis A. Dezelan captures a snapshot in time that chronicles what it was like to live in South Africa during the demise of Apartheid. Dezelan offers a first-hand account of eclectic experiences in one of the world's most fascinating countries; from the antics of such simple creatures as the dung beetle, to the thrill of personally seeing the 2.5-million-year-old skull of one of the earliest hominoids, to the battlegrounds of the Zulu Wars, to the hatred that still lingered in some citizens who lost privileges with the collapse of Apartheid. The Jo'Burg Gazette is a quick and easy read that will allow you to feel as though you lived through a complicated and captivating time. Keywords: Dezelan, South Africa, Apartheid, Jo'Burg, Zulu Wars, Dugga Boys, Botwsana, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Cape Town

Ten years into the 'new' South Africa, how does democracy function? This volume provides a retrospective on a decade of elections and democracy in South Africa. The book analyzes the evolution of the party system and electoral campaigns; tracks changes in public opinion and voter motivations; assesses the political implications of socioeconomic change; depicts the evolution of parliament and the electoral system; probes the often-tense relationship between media and government; analyzes the institutionalization the Independent Electoral Commission; and, finally, argues that South Africa is witnessing a 'normalization' of politics. The book speaks to a broad range of topics, all linked through the electoral theme, which get to the heart of many issues in contemporary South African politics.