Journal

This is a special issue on social cohesion in post-conflict societies. This includes an article on social cohesion, sexuality, homophobia and women’s sports in South Africa proposing that to realise […]

This magazine is published by HURIFO. Articles cover education of the girl child; harmonising education with digital media; human rights education in schools; early childhood education as a human right in Uganda today.

Issue 54 of Arise places the spotlight on institutions and their specific role in the development of women. It contains articles on girl child education, modernising the face of Uganda’s economics and religion, the backbone of women’s development. There is also a section on leading women in Uganda and internationally. There is also an important article on empowering women economically through access to property rights in Uganda.

Advising, empowering and inspiring trade.

The special issue of Agenda arises from the exhibition intervention called queer and trans art-iculations. A colloquium held alongside the exhibition drew out the importance of art activism as a means to engage action around sexual orientation and gender identity. The issue contains visual essays and there are articles which interface with theoretical engagement with the art and articles that engage with art activism as a political practice. We are confronted with the need to expose the brutal violence of coerced sexual and gender identity.

Agenda: Empowering women for gender equity: the Agenda journal has been at the forefront of women’s publishing in South Africa for more than 23 years. The journal raises debates, probes questions and challenges and critiques understandings of gender and feminism. It prides itself on being at the cutting edge of gender analysis and feminist debates and provides readers with a thoughtÀ“provoking read. This issue is entitled ‘Marriage: A risky business or a safe place?’ This special issue seeks to explore the gendered dynamics of contemporary marital relationships. The institution of marriage as a gendered site has a long history and the authors in this issue raise vital new questions, issues and practices that require further examination and debate.

Feminists have long argued that the emotional ties that bind men and women in romantic love is a critical site for the reproduction of unequal relations of power, making the focus of love and feminism uneasy (Holland et al, 1992). It is argued that romantic love subjects women into a realm of fantasy in the service of male sexual prerogatives and power. In critiquing the reduction of love to inequality, Thomas and Cole (2009: 25) ask:

“if … love is as detrimental to women’s interests as these feminists claim, then why have so many women embraced its ideals …?À

In reconfiguring the sexual landscape, however, research has demonstrated that the exercise of power within intimate relations are highly contested domains where gender relations are negotiated, resisted, struggled over as they are reproduced, making the focus on love important to consider (Hirsch and Wardlow, 2006). Thus, the issue seeks to open up the category of love as an analytical problem. The intent here is not simply to show how love is worked upon by men and women, but to demonstrate how love is given meaning; the value attached to it and the gendered experiences in relation to broader social and material circumstances. Like Hirsch (2003), to think of relations only in terms of the exercise of male power is to miss the fact that both men and women, as gendered persons, also express love, invest heavily in it whilst simultaneously involved in daily battles over power. As Hunter (2010) and others (Cole and Thomas, 2009) have argued, the discourses and practices of love are highly charged emotional arenas, shaped not only by cultural contexts but by material structures of power.

In addressing both power and affect, the issue seeks to arrive at a way of rendering love knowable that will make us mindful of its critical value in building a fuller account of gender and sexual relations on the continent, of inequalities, of contestations, and ‘higher than hope’ the possibility of egalitarian gender relations. Thus this issue asks: What constitutes love in Africa? Where do our ideas of love come from? How is gender manifest in the expressions of love and desire? How is power embedded? How is love used as a tool, a strategy to contest and resist gender roles? What are the particular cultural and social forces that shape love and through which love is expressed?

In conceptualising this issue of Agenda we sought to explore this question from a range of vantage points and called “for theory-driven research and case studies that sharpen, enrich and nuance our understanding of different forms of men’s violence against women, children, and other menÀ (Vetten and Ratele, 2012). While violence is caused by a multiplicity of factors and cannot be explained by any single determinant we nonetheless hoped for “articles that would critically examine interventions that address this nexus of masculinity and violence, whether at the level of programme or policyÀ (ibid). Above all, we wanted work that sought “to promote critical thinking and programming around the relationship between men and violence that will move South Africa forward in drastically reducing its levels of violenceÀ (ibid). As is generally the case in life, we did not quite get what we wanted and, as a result, the journal is largely silent on homophobic violence and does not engage significantly with policy addressing men and violence. The programming highlighted in this issue is also not without its limitations and we engage with it accordingly. These efforts to prevent violence are however, still very much in their infancy in South Africa so we hope this volume will be read as an invitation to continue and extend existing debates.

Ageing and intergenerationality in the South (African context) remains remarkably under-studied except for a few texts that speak to the issue (and many ungendered) from a social policy perspective in South Africa’s Eastern Cape (Sagner, 2000), the development agenda and ageing in sub-Saharan Africa (Aboderin and Ferreira, 2008), demographic (Van Dullemen, 2006), housing in South Africa (Kotze, 2006), as a pathology in respect of the institutional production of care (Myburgh, 2010), linguistics perspectives (Makoni and Stroecken, 2002), anthropological considerations on famine in rural Africa (Cligget, 2005), poverty and ageing in Uganda (Williams, 2003), intergenerational solidarity in the social security system for unemployed youth (MÁ¸ller, 2010), a postmodern exploration of intergenerational practices in Africa (Hoffman, 2004), and the impact of urbanisation, impoverishment and AIDS in intergenerational relations (Geissler, Alber and Whyte, 2007). Ironically there exists a plethora of texts in northern scholarship that straddles a rich breadth of topics, issues and concepts and indeed, not without its controversy too. Remarkably it was especially some ageing northern feminists who took up the cudgels about the absence of ageing in discussions within the feminist project (notably Cruikshank, 2009; MacDonald and Rich, 2001; Copper, 1988). There is, however, a growing interest in ageing and intergenerationality, also as a feminist and a gender issue (Bernard, Phillips, Machin, Davies, 2000; Bengtson and Achenbaum, 1993; Izahura, 2010). Ageing and intergenerationality directs attention to relations and life course matters that rely not just on chronology or biology, but are part of a complex interaction between individual, society, culture and history (Sokolovsky, 2009; Andersson, 2002). The gender dimension of ageing, for example, is not simply confined to the “elderlyÀ in a population, but clearly has differential implications on the life course of men and women within the broader context of class, disability, ethnicity, race and sexuality (United Nations, 2000).

One article in this publication examines two contrasting and complementary negotiation styles employed by the African National Congress (ANC) during the negotiation process that ended apartheid in South Africa. Taking its cue from the work of negotiation theorists who have distinguished between ‘cooperative’ and ‘adversarial’ negotiation styles, it presents the August 1991 replacement of Thabo Mbeki as chief ANC negotiator with Cyril Ramaphosa as a pivotal turning point in the ANC’s drive to secure agreement on a majoritarian constitutional settlement. Through a historical analysis of Mbeki’s efforts to build trust and alleviate ‘other-anxiety’ and Ramaphosa’s subsequent use of brinksmanship and other ‘hardball’ tactics to enhance the ANC’s bargaining position, the article suggests that the success of Ramaphosa’s ‘adversarial’ approach was largely dependent on Mbeki’s earlier success in cultivating sufficient trust and confidence between the two main parties as to enable them to come to an ultimately ‘irreversible’ understanding of their mutual interest in making peace.

Another article looks at divorce and family mediation in South Africa. This article explores the principles and processes of Western-style divorce and family mediation, as well as the principles and processes of African humanistic mediation, as they are applied in South Africa. Critique, as well as the advantages of both approaches, is dealt with. Similarities between the principles are explored. This strategy is informed by holistic knowledge. The knowledge relied upon sometimes demonstrates conflicting worldviews and is in a specific cultural context. The challenge is to find a holistic way of mediation in South Africa. This article proposes ways in which humanistic mediation can be used to positively influence and change the current family mediation practice in South Africa.