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The rise and fall of apartheid is one of the most compelling stories of twentieth century politics. The moral simplicity and practical complexity of the South African problem captured the imagination of individuals around the world, making apartheid a global issue. When social change came through largely peaceful negotiations rather than the cataclysmic violence that even the most optimistic analysts considered likely, the quest to understand South Africa’s politics became even more earnest. The case studies that make up the heart of this analysis frame the process by which apartheid was dismantled and an alternative social order laid out as a series of conflicts. I argue that these conflicts, which represent different stages in the transition, provide an excellent opportunity to apply the theories of constructivist political identity to the process of social change. The project, therefore, examines how the ideas that South Africans have used to make sense of who they are in relation to each other can help us understand the transformation of their society. The purpose of this chapter is to provide the reader with some of the historical, analytical , and methodological context for the events and processes on which I have chosen to focus. It is organized into three sections that introduce the reader to South Africa and apartheid through a necessarily simplified historical overview, explore some of the ways that South African politics and identity have been analyzed in the past, and present my own approach to studying the transition. APARTHEID AND ITS HISTORICAL CONTEXT A Brief Political History of South Africa The land that is now the Republic of South Africa has a long history of the same types of conflict that were indicative of the spread of capitalism elsewhere in the 39 Chapter Three South Africa and Identity non-Western world. Colonialism, however, did not overpower all contexts uniformly . What has made the South African case interesting is the particular racial adaptations that capitalism made as it confronted the circumstances of the South African context, and the tenacity with which the ruling elites held on to their distinctive institutional inventions as the dominant tenor of global social and cultural norms turned against them. Understanding the process by which race became institutionalized as the governing divisions of society demands an examination of South Africa’s political history. What we might today call racial diversity was prevalent even before 1652 when Europeans, in the persons of Jan van Reibeeck and the Dutch East India Company, began a colonizing mission and inserted themselves into the South African mix on a permanent basis. Anthropologists identify the hunter-gatherer San, the herder Khoikhoi, and the farming Bantu as distinct groups occupying southern Africa during the Iron Age. Colonization by Europeans stands out as a watershed because it forced the area into a global political economy, making the relationships of similarity and difference that formed the basis for identity global in scope.1 Clashes between European settlers and indigenous groups dominated the region’s history as Europeans edged inland and continued after 1806, when the area known as the Cape became a colony of the British Empire. In the first half of the nineteenth century, a major disruption in the traditional governance patterns of the Bantu peoples, brought on by the imperial aspirations of Shaka Zulu and referred to as the mfecane, coincided with a precipitous invasion of the interior (the Great Trek) by Dutch and other settlers unhappy with British rule. Meanwhile, British imperial expansion to the north and east in search of both land and labor resulted in a series of wars against both the Xhosa in the eastern Cape and the Zulu in Natal.2 All of these events slowly solidified European dominance. As diamonds (1867) and gold (1886) were discovered in the interior, British colonialists moved to take control of the land, the mines, and the people. These expansive drives also sparked two “inter-European” wars between the British and the two Boer Republics, entities established after the Great Trek by Whites whose national identity was based mostly on animosity toward the British, a rejection of the Enlightenment ’s early liberalism, and a fiercely independent attitude often justified by a strict Calvinism.3 The British conquest of the Transvaal and Orange Free State republics resulted in the 1910 Union of South Africa and the consolidation of discriminatory White rule.4 Three years later, one of the most important foundations of institutionalized racism and the exploitation of Africans as laborers, the 1913 Land Act, was...

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