Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Anti-Apartheid Movement'

This paper is intended to analyze the contributions of Contextual Theology and Contextual theologians to dismantling the South African apartheid system. It is intended to demonstrate that the South African churches failed to effectively politicize and radicalize to confront the government until the advent of Contextual Theology in South Africa. Contextual Theology provided the Christian clergy the theological justification to unite with anti-apartheid organizations. Its very concept of working with the poor and oppressed helped the churches gain favor with the black masses that were mostly Christian. Its borrowing from Marxist philosophy appealed to anti-apartheid organizations. Additionally, Contextual theologians, who were primarily black, began filling prominent leadership roles in their churches and within the ecumenical organizations. They were mainly responsible for radicalizing the churches and the ecumenical organizations. They also filled an important anti-apartheid political leadership vacuum when most political leaders were banned, jailed, or killed.<br>ID: 031001426; System requirements: World Wide Web browser and PDF reader.; Mode of access: World Wide Web.; Adviser: Ezekiel Walker.; Title from PDF title page (viewed June 19, 2013).; Thesis (M.A.)--University of Central Florida, 2012.; Includes bibliographical references (p. 142-149).<br>M.A.<br>Masters<br>History<br>Arts and Humanities<br>History

Thesis (Honors)--Ohio State University, 2007.<br>Title from first page of PDF file. Document formatted into pages: contains 30 p. Includes bibliographical references (p. 29-30). Available online via Ohio State University's Knowledge Bank.

This study examines anti-apartheid documentary production in South Africa between 1977 and 1987. These documentaries were produced by a variety of producers in order to record aspects of South Africa's contemporary social history, and as a means of contributing - in some way - to changing the conditions described. While the 'content' of the documentaries is historical and social, and their intention political, this study is aimed at elucidating how a documentary, as a representational system, produces meaning. The study is therefore located within the discourse of film studies. My study is based on the theory that a documentary is the embodiment of several relationships: the relationship between social reality and documentary producers; the social relationships engaged in, in the production of the text; the relationship between the text and its audience 1, and the relationship between the audience and its social context. This informs my methodological approach in which analysis appropriate to each area of study is used. Using secondary sources obtained through standard library research, I pursue social and historical analysis of the 1970s and 1980s in order to contextualise both the producers of the documentaries, and their audience. The social relations of production of a text are examined using material gathered through extensive interviews with the producers and published secondary material. How this impinges on the documentary is ascertained through detailed textual analysis of 30 documentaries. For analytical clarity each chapter focuses on a specific aspect of documentary - although I do show how the various relationships impinge on each other. This research finds that the documentaries faithfully reflect the anti-apartheid ideology dominant in the extra-parliamentary opposition in the period under discussion - to the extent that all forms of consciousness are framed by this discourse. An examination of the textual strategies used shows that they are bound by the conventions of broadcast television. They therefore construct a spectator-text relationship which is not consistent with the political concern that democratic relationships be established as the basis of a post-apartheid society. In other words, there is an inconsistency between the ideology espoused, and the way in which film- and videomakers, in their specialised field of production, practise their politics. This can be attributed to the over-riding political intention of the documentarists 'to record' what is happening, and to establish a popular archive which can be used by extra-parliamentary opposition groups in their struggle against apartheid.

Months were spent researching and preparing this four-part series on the dramatic events surrounding NELSON MANDELA, the life-term prisoner who has cast a larger than life shadow on South African politics. Staff writer DENNIS CRUYWAGEN travelled extensively to interview at first hand — or by other means, where necessary — those stalwart ANC veterans who were convicted in the Rivonia Treason Trial and jailed with Mandela. He talked, too, to members of the Mandela family, politicians, lawyers and many others who were close to or knowledgeable about the ANC leader. Official records and other sources on the life and times of Nelson Mandela were also consulted. Compiling the vast amount of information sometimes led to unusual situations. For instance, Mrs Winnie Mandela, always pressed for time, was interviewed — not in her home in Diepkloof, Soweto, as arranged but in a hired car in a Johannesburg traffic jam while following a vehicle driven by her driver. She was late for another appointment. Drawn from various sources this series sets out to reconstruct an overview of 25 years and more of political and personal drama, passion and poignancy.<br>Supplement to The Argus, Tuesday February 6 1990<br>Exclusive Part 1

This booklet is intended to serve as a report-back to those organisations which were party to the Conference for a Democratic Future (CDF) and to those who were unable to be present. It is also intended to act as a guide to action for 1990 and beyond. The CDF was a historic gathering of the forces for change represented by 4600 delegates from over 2100 organisations. These range form Bantustan parties on the one end of the political spectrum to ultra leftist groups on the other end. But perhaps the most significant presence was from organisations like Five Freedoms Forum, NAFCOC, the Hindu Seva Samaj, that of traditional leaders and the hundreds of other community organisations which are rapidly becoming an active component of the mass struggle for change. Also significant was the strong worker representation from a range of trade unions, including eight affiliates of NACTU whose leadership had turned down the invitation to be part of the Conference. The Conference for a Democratic Future was a major step in the overall process of building unity in action and maximising the isolation of the regime. It was, in this sense, not an isolated event. The year 1989 had taken unity in action to new heights with the Defiance Campaign and the mass marches. The process leading up to the CDF was intended td be more important then the Conference itself. Likewise, in the post-Conference period, the follow-up process should be given the importance it deserves. At the end of the day, it is this follow-up process which would determine the actual success or failure of the CDF exercise. The Declaration adopted at the Conference represents the strategic orientation of the broad forces for change. It calls for the intensification of the struggle and for the placing of the question of political power on the agenda of our united mass action. The Conference resolutions collectively contain the elements of a programme of action. Without exception, each resolution is a call to action. The task of all participants of the Conference is to translate these resolutions into Mass United Action. The adoption of the Harare Declaration should act as the starting point of a process which takes its content to the masses of our people in all comers of the country. The demand for the Constituent Assembly should become a popular demand of the people. By adopting the resolution on international pressure, the Conference sends an unambiguous signal to the world community on how the people of South Africa view their role in the struggle to end apartheid. The follow-up to the Conference should also be a continuing search for whatever common ground exists between the broad forces for change. This search must take place not only at a national level, but mere importantly at a regional and local level. Let us bear in mind the words of the Declaration: “The moral appeal of the Democratic Movement has never been greater”. by an MDM delegate on the CDF Convening Committee.<br>Includes the Harare Declaration: declaration of the OAU Ad-hoc Committee on Southern Africa on the Question of South Africa (Harare, Zimbabwe, August 21, 1989)

Ruth First was an activist, journalist and sociologist trained by experience and credentialed by her numerous publications. Having lived most of her adult life as an intellectual and activist, First died in August 1982 at the hands of a regime and its supporters who intensely detested all these pursuits. This research project sketches the intellectual contributions made by the South African sociologist during her time at the Centre of African Studies at Eduardo Mondlane University, Mozambique. Her life like the newspaper she edited in the early 1970s was a Fighting Talk and this research project is about celebrating that life and valorising some of the life’s work that she left behind. Making use of qualitative research methods such as archiving, semi-structured interviews and contents analysis, this thesis sought to document Ruth First’s intellectual interventions while at the Centre of African Studies. Engaging with her work while she was in Mozambique and inserting her intellectual contributions, which like those of many African scholars have given way to debates from the global North, into our curriculum would perhaps be the real refutation of the assassin's bomb. This engagement is also crucial as it extends much further than the striking accolades which take the form of buildings and lectures established in her honour.

Student Number : 0419886N - MA research report - School of Politics - Faculty of Arts<br>“The longing for a better world will need to arise at the imagined meeting place of many movements of resistance, as many as there are sites of enclosure and exclusion. The resistance will be as transnational as capital. Because enclosure takes myriad forms, so shall resistance to it.” - Iain A Boal, First World, Ha Ha Ha!, City Lights, 1995 Boal’s description captures the exuberance, hope and confidence of today’s social movements. That there is something irresistible about autonomous, grassroots and subaltern movements in their anti-systemic alternatives to capitalism has become a notion which has gained considerable currency in recent years.1 Formations of these groups (the Zapatistas being the oft cited example) are seen to mirror theories of the most utopian and radical forms of democracy. In Part 1 we seek to examine a range of critical historiography in exploring the features of what is ‘new’ in today’s social movements, using Zapatista style organization and discourse as the prototype. This definition will be moulded with the elements of critical theory which have at their core a radical transformative function of social movements. For example Castells’ work on urban movements pictures: “collective conscious action aimed at the transformation of the institutionalized urban meaning against the logic, interest and values of the dominant class.”2 We will draw from Murray’s assumption that such movements “actively contest the prevailing forms of political representation and the legitimacy of political rule.”3 New social movements (NSM) will be seen within the context of anti-normative approaches to democracy. An alternative pole of reference will emerge in contrast to what we will term low intensity, liberal, parliamentary or bourgeois forms of democracy. All this will be lodged in an understanding of old social movements. We hold these to be single issue movements that fail to forge links to other sites of oppression and exploitation, or movements which take on a narrow class composition and understanding of change. Implicit in moving on from narrow, and or,Marxist-Leninist positions over class, is the multiplicity of relations humans have within the social body. This refutes crude economism conceptions regarding the make-up of the working class.4 However, capitalism and our relations to production, still remain central in understanding the relationship of the subject to the social body. We suggest recent crisis points and weaknesses in capitalism (detected as neo-liberal trends) provide plenty of scope for weaving an historical dialectic back in. Evidence for this comes from critical theory which claims, perhaps falsely, to be founded on anti-essentialism.5 We argue that it is commodification which breeds this resistance against the totalizing effect of capitalism at every level of the structure. Thus neo-liberalism embodies for much of this critical thought the subject of a “Fourth World War” fought by the multitude. 6 The mobile nature of contemporary capital and the immaterial essence of its production to define the multitude – essentially disenfranchised and disaffected subjects – has led to an expanded definition of the old working class.7 The multitude is the reinvention of some social subject invested in an historical project. This multitude has taken on a particular guise, moving away from traditional conceptions of a revolutionary class. As Negri and Hardt note: “The closer we look at the lives and activity of the poor, the more we see how enormously creative and powerful they are”.8 The poor embody the ontological condition not only of resistance but also of productive life itself.9 However, we will also attempt to locate moments within the subject that go beyond the indeterminacies and moments of rupture within the structure. Careful attention will be paid to Zizek’s subject of lack, in assessing the carnivalesque and irrational moments of today’s movements and the role of what we will view as a renewed sense of voluntarism. We remain conscious that we are forging a vision of new social movements which forges an at times uneasy alliance across a variety of groups who challenge dominant structures at different times, spaces and ways. It is sometimes tempting to lump various “anti-globalisation” groups together, without grasping the intricacies and nuances that bind as well as divide them. Ultimately, we accept some of the essentialist critique that can be levelled at NSM theory, recognizing a trope of romanticism around struggle is deliberately and necessarily invented. This will be fully discussed in the controversial claim that some movements and elements of civil society have more validity than others. It will be considered in claiming that moments of oppression, subordination and exploitation require articulation and don’t erupt into historical trajectories of struggle. This requires the development and expression of relative rather than fixed universals (e.g. around democracy, right to water, right to land). It is commodification and neo-liberalism that provides the stimulus for such relative universals. We shall see that they revolve around issues that are real to subjects in the narratives of their struggles and lives.11 Finding some fixity of meaning and experience ensures our analysis is not post-structuralist. Post-structuralism has fostered awkward relationships with truths which have, as Mamdani has noted, not always led to a basis of a “healthy humanism”.12 It leads to a universalized aestheticization whereby truth, reduced to merely a style effect of discursive articulation, forges an endless spectrum of interpretation/re-interpretation. 13 Moreover, it can be utilized to create legitimacy for fascist, colonialist and imperialist discourses. Part 1 attempts to provide the basis for the rest of the work by developing an understanding of the historicity of new social movements and what makes them different to other forms of political and social organisation. This is critical for later discussion which will draw upon the experiences of South Africa. In Part 2 we seek to build from the radical civil society theory and tease out features and characteristics of it within anti-apartheid social movements. This will involve an exploration around township civics which were and are often bundled under the umbrella of the United Democratic Front (UDF). Many of these were built around notions of People’s Power, economic transformation and social justice. We will consider the ideology present in these movements and how it played out in realities, acknowledging the highly repressive scenario of the apartheid state. Within these movements we will flesh out radical spaces and visions which appeared to have dissipated in the ANC hegemony over the decolonisation process and subsequent “transformation” project. We will not shy away from advocating that there were features within such radical spaces, such as Charterist, and or, unity projects, which emerged at various times to create implicitly anti-democratic politics. 14 Such problems as we will see went to the core of the UDF and also into the geo-polities of South Africa which became “ungovernable” in the 1980s. Depoliticization was not just a performative effect of ANC strength or “Stalinism” as often narrated by the left, but a weakness in the structure and formation of civil society. 15 We explore whether it was not just the ANC that “demobilized” the grassroots, but that the form and functioning of civil society that contributed to the conditions in which movements’ own radical notions of People’s Power and direct democracy dissipated. Part 3 will look at this demobilization within the context of the transition to democracy during the negotiated settlement.16 We scrutinize the nature of the period from apartheid to liberal democracy, noting trajectories of struggle which mark both eras. We argue that elements and goals in the struggle that sought a very different democracy to that gained at the CODESA talks have re-emerged in the deepening disillusionment of the ANC project after ten years of governance. This has within some discourse included the ability of the nation-state generally, within neo-liberalism, to bring about social justice. Yet, the suggestion that this is the period of “economic” rather than “racial” apartheid will need to be carefully explored in the context of Fanon’s characterization of national liberation elites.17 While noting the benefit an economic approach has in distinguishing the role of dominant classes, we suggest it can overshadow explicit structures of racism that penetrate to the core of South African society. They are brought out for example by grassroots movements such as the Landless People’s Movement (LPM), in their campaign that equated landlessness with racism. Finally Part 4 examines the extent characteristics we ascribe to the new social movements of South Africa correspond with the features of anti-apartheid struggles of the 1980s. Moreover, it requires us to assess the critical theory developed in Part 1 in terms of realities in post-Apartheid South Africa. We note the apprehension in considering parallels between anti-apartheid struggles and current rights based struggles. While there have been a few attempts to make links within a continuation of struggle from apartheid to neo-liberalism18, all too often, the anti-apartheid struggles that invoked notions of People’s Power have been dismissed as undemocratic, authoritarian and reactionary.19 While an attempt to wipe the slate clean might be useful in carving out a fresh and dynamic image for contemporary social movements, it perhaps ignores that there are similar issues, rhetoric and ideologies being played out today. We will explore whether the historiography simply seeks to justify and re-create contemporary social movements to create ammunition for particular strands of political theory judged to be liberationist and correct within the current historical juncture. Are we carving out a fictional historicity within the identity of struggle that doesn’t exist? Are narratives created more for attachments to a belief in certain “historical” processes than less sharply defined realities? Is the multitude, merely Marx’s 19th century industrial working class, vested with an imaginary historical project? Noting the background of many individuals involved within the APF (trade union, SACP), we need to discuss how they have been placed on a new trajectory of thought given the features which define today’s subjects in NSM compared to orthodox Marxist-Leninist thought around the revolutionary subject. We hope a sketch of the past and an analysis of the present may contribute in the current debates within the social movements during a critical time for anti-capitalist struggles in South Africa. This work is not concerned with producing exhaustive lists of repressive acts conducted by the state, the brutality of private security firms, or broken election promises, but in uncovering the structure of the post-apartheid state and how social movements respond and re-create themselves. Despite their youth, they represent the first serious contestation of ANC hegemony in terms of an alternative discourse around democracy, social justice and transformation. This work has been made possible through regular contact with social movements in Gauteng. Informal participatory discussions with various activists and communities within these struggles have been invaluable and enlightening. Such first hand experience has provided an insight into the operative nature and democratic functioning of a variety of movements including the role of vanguards and leadership. My attendance at various forums and discussions, such as the Social Movements Indaba (SMI), has also been vital. Fundamentally, the work hinges upon a critical exploration from three areas. Firstly, in the discussion necessary to establish a historicity of new social movements which will point to their methodological and epistemic construction. Secondly, upon an understanding of the South African experience that can cover an immense ground from apartheid into liberal-democracy which is aware and responsive to a wide range of historiography. Thirdly, a series of interviews and personal reflections from discussions with various activists across South Africa. Some are well known leaders. Others form part of the collective multitudes beginning to emerge and speak through the fissures of South African society. Relationships that I have made, as well as recent political events, culminated in the choices of the Khayelitsha township of Cape Town, Alexandra in Johannesburg and Harrismith in the Free State as the sites for this part of the research.21 The methodology hinges upon an accurate reflection and assessment of contemporary social movements from the people who participate and function within them, together with an historiographical account of social movements in the South African experience. Limitations here are perhaps obvious. Interviewees may have the tendency to be modest or emphasize their own personal role in struggles. Attendance of community meetings and forums is hoped to counter-balance this together with the use of contemporary subject work. However, there can be no objective yardstick by which to judge the contributions found in this paper. Furthermore, the lack of rigour within the methodology would alarm the majority of modernist and positivist historians and commentators. Yet, it is with this aim that the work attempts to accept the criticisms of romanticism, myth, euphoria and narratives in seeking to forge the very conditions outlined by Boal in which we might find the same “imagined meeting place” and discussion of freedom.

This research challenges the hypothesis that Biko was anti-liberal and anti-white. Biko's clearly defined condemnation of traditional South African white liberals such as Alan Paton is hypothesised as a strategic move in the liberation struggle designed to neutralise the "gradualism" of traditional white liberalism which believe that racism could be ultimately superseded by continually improving education for blacks. Biko neutralised apartheid racism and traditional white liberalism by affirming all aspects of blackness as positive values in themselves, and by locating racism as a white construct with deep roots in European colonialism and pseudoDarwinian beliefs in white superiority. The research shows that Biko was neither anti-liberal nor anti-white. His own attitudes to the universal rights, dignity, freedom and self-determination of all human beings situate him continuously with all major human rights theorists and activists since the Enlightenment. His unique Africanist contribution was to define racist oppression in South Africa as a product of the historical conditioning of blacks to accept their own alleged inferiority. Biko's genius resided in his ability to synthesize his reading of Marxist, Africanist, European and African American into a truly original charter for racial emancipation. Biko' s methodology encouraged blacks to reclaim their rights and pride as a prelude to total emancipation. The following transactions are described in detail: Biko's role in the founding of SASO and Black Consciousness; the paradoxical relations between white liberal theologians, Black Consciousness and Black Theology; the influence on BC of USA Black Power and Black Theology; the role of Black Theologians in South African churches, SACC and WCC; synergic complexities ofNUSAS-SASO relations; relations between BC, ANC and PAC; the early involvement of women in BCM; feminist issues in the liberation struggle; Biko's death in detention; world-wide and South African liberal involvement in the inquest and anti-apartheid organisations.<br>History<br>D. Litt. et Phil. (History)

This dissertation analyzes the role of various kinds of boycotts and sanctions in the strategies and tactics of those active in the struggle against apartheid in South Africa. What was unprecedented about the efforts of members of the global anti-apartheid movement was that they experimented with so many ways of severing so many forms of interaction with South Africa, and that boycotts ultimately came to be seen as such a central element of their struggle. But it was not inevitable that international boycotts would become indelibly associated with the struggle against apartheid. Calling for boycotts and sanctions was a political choice. In the years before 1959, most leading opponents of apartheid both inside and outside South Africa showed little interest in the idea of international boycotts of South Africa. This dissertation identifies the conjuncture of circumstances that caused this to change, and explains the subsequent shifts in the kinds of boycotts that opponents of apartheid prioritized. It shows that the various advocates of boycotts and sanctions expected them to contribute to ending apartheid by a range of different mechanisms, from bringing about an evolutionary change in white attitudes through promoting the desegregation of sport, to weakening the state’s ability to resist the efforts of the liberation movements to seize power through guerrilla warfare. But though the purpose of anti-apartheid boycotts continued to be contested, boycott had, by 1970, become established as the defining principle of the self-identified anti-apartheid movement.

Thesis (M.A.) -- University of Limpopo, 2008.<br>The Black youth struggled against the apartheid regime as the title indicates because as Blacks the policy made them to suffer. They were oppressed in the country of their birth. Before the militant youth involvement in the liberation struggle in the 1970s there were a few Black youths who tried to force the government to relinquish its policy. They were unsuccessful. This was because they were opposed to the government as members of the various Black organisations. They were not united. SASO with its Black Consciousness philosophy brought unity amongst all the Black youth and put them on the vanguard of the struggle. These youth did not just mobilize and unite Blacks (organisation and non organisation members) through public criticism of the apartheid system. They also mounted physical attacks on enemy targets such as police stations etc. South Africa became ungovernable. This resistance compelled the government to release political prisoners and to relinquish power in 1994.

This thesis focuses on strategies of representation in South African anti-apartheid documentary film and video from the late 1970s to 1995. It identifies and analyses two broad trends within this movement: the first developed by the organisation called Video News Services; the second developed in the Mail and Guardian Television series called Ordinary People. Two history series are analysed against the backdrop of transformations in the television broadcasting sector in the early 1990s. South African documentary film and video is located within a theoretical framework that interweaves documentary film theory, theories of Third cinema and of identity, rid working class cinema of the 1920s and 1930s. The concepts of ‘voice’ and the ‘speaking subject’ are the two key concepts that focus the discussion of strategies of representation in detailed textual analyses of selected documentaries. The analysis of three documentaries that typify the output of Video News Services reveals how these documentary texts establish a symbiosis between representations of the working class as black, male, and allied to COSATU, and the liberation struggle. The analysis of selected documentaries from the Ordinary People series highlights those strategies of representation that facilitate perceptions of the multiplicities of identities in South Africa. This focus on representations of identity is extended in analysing and comparing two television series. The strategies of representation evident in the Video News Services documentaries and the meanings they produce about identify are repeated in the series called Ulibambe Lingashoni: Hold Up the Sun. In Soweto: A History, strategies of representation that follow the trend towards representing identity as multiple are used to present history as if from the perspective of ‘ordinary’ people. The thesis creates an argument for South African documentary film and video to move towards strategies of representation that break down the fixed categories of identity developed under apartheid. With policy moves for creating more ‘local content’ films and television productions there is opportunity to re-shape the documentary film and video movement in South Africa using representational strategies that blur the boundaries between documentary and fiction, and between individualised, discrete categories of identity.

This thesis examines crowds and resistance politics in Pietermaritzburg, focusing particularly on the 1950s and the 1980s. These two decades were characterised by heightened anti-apartheid political activity in South Africa. It is against that background that this thesis explores mass mobilisation and resistance in Pietermaritzburg. The 1960s and the 1970s have not been ignored, however, in this comparative analysis. It appears that there was not so much overt mass mobilisation that was taking place in South Africa during this period, on the same scale as that of the 1950s and the 1980s. This thesis analyses selected case studies of events such as protest marches, popular riots and stayaways. It examines the similarities and differences in the socioeconomic and political contexts in which such events occurred. The key aspect is that of resistance crowds. This thesis examines how, when and why resistance crowds formed in Pietermaritzburg during the two periods. It begins with a literature survey, which sets out the framework for comparison. Aspects such as the kinds of constituencies, the roles of political organisations, trade unions, church groups, youth organisations, government policies and the nature of the campaigns are raised in the literature. Drawing from that framework this study explores the socio-economic contexts in which the selected case studies took place. The way in which the changes in the socio-economic and political contexts influenced mass mobilisation forms a central theme of this dissertation. The four case studies explore crowd events in anti-apartheid politics in Pietermaritzburg. The thesis concludes with a comparative evaluation of the case studies of resistance crowds in their differing contexts.<br>Thesis (M.A.)-University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 1998.

Over the last four centuries, South Africa has been shaped by the twinned, dialectical histories of violence and resistance to violence. However, because both violence and resistance encompass myriad formations and are underlain with a plethora of ideologies and hermeneutics, studying each - particularly from within critical community psychology - is oftentimes necessarily didactic and reductive. Yet, if this kind of research is to retain emancipatory potential, I contend, it should be both community-oriented and politically committed. In an attempt to understand how violence moves through Thembelihle, a low income community in South Africa, an expansive lens for conceptualising violence and resistance is advanced across this research’s four studies. In Study I, I use discursive psychology to examine how Thembelihle has been constructed in dominant discourse by analysing newspaper reporting on the community. Following this, in Study II and Study III, I draw on multimodal discourse analysis to study representations of quotidian life and political resistance in a participatory documentary film entitled Thembelihle: Place of Hope, which was collaboratively produced by residents of Thembelihle, professional filmmakers and myself. Lastly, in Study IV, I harness the narrative-discursive approach to explore how residents of Thembelihle build community in response to Thembelihle: Place of Hope. It was found that within dominant constructions, Thembelihle was personified as a monolithic and an essentially Other geo-cultural space, made newsworthy principally through its engagement with a broad, often vaguely-conceived, notion of violence. In response to dominant discursive constructions of this kind, community members who featured in and produced the documentary advanced a humanistic conception of Thembelihle which did not accept the different violences to which the community is subject. Following this, audiences of the documentary engaged the affective and political dimensions of community-building in order to advance a democratically conceived notion of collective will. These findings present critical community psychologists and violence scholars with a number of considerations around representation; the multitudinous nature of violence and resistance; psycho-politics; and radical hope. Ultimately, I argue, if such research is to be meaningful, it must be guided by and subordinated to the emancipatory requirements articulated by community members.<br>Psychology<br>D. Litt et Phil (Psychology)

This study focuses on Steve Biko’s Africana existential phenomenology, with particular emphasis on the themes of blackness, black solidarity and liberation. The theoretical foundation of this thesis is Africana existential phenomenology, which is used as a lens to understand Biko’s political thought. The study argues that thematic areas of blackness, black solidarity, and liberation are inherent in Africana existential phenomenology. These thematic areas give a better understanding of existential questions of being black in the antiblack world. What is highlighted is the importance and the relevance of the revival of Biko’s thinking towards creating other modes of being that are necessary for the actualisation of blacks as full human subjects.<br>Political Sciences<br>M.A. (Politics)