front cover of Katutura
Katutura
A Place Where We Stay: Life in a Post-Apartheid Township in Namibia
Wade C. Pendleton
Ohio University Press, 1995
Katutura, located in Namibia’s major urban center and capital, Windhoek, was a township created by apartheid, and administered in the past by the most rigid machinery of the apartheid era. Namibia became a sovereign state in 1990, and Katutura reflects many of the changes that have taken place. No longer part of a rigidly bounded social system, people in Katutura today have the opportunity to enter and leave as their personal circumstances dictate. Influenced in recent years by significant urban migration and the changing political and economic situation in the new South Africa, as well as a myriad of other factors, this diverse community has held special interest for the author who did fieldwork there for several years prior to 1975. Pendleton’s recent visits provide a rich comparison of life in Katutura township during the peak of the apartheid years and in the post-independence period. In his systematic look at urbanization, poverty, stratification, ethnicity, social structure, and social history, he provides a compassionate view of the survivors of the unstable years of apartheid.
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front cover of Kingdom Come
Kingdom Come
The Politics of Faith and Freedom in Segregationist South Africa and Beyond
Tshepo Masango Chéry
Duke University Press, 2023
In Kingdom Come, Tshepo Masango Chéry charts a new genealogy of early twentieth-century Black Christian activists who challenged racism in South Africa before the solidification of apartheid by using faith as a strategy against global racism. Masango Chéry traces this Black freedom struggle and the ways that South African church leaders defied colonial domination by creating, in solidarity with Black Christians worldwide, Black-controlled religious institutions that were geared toward their liberation. She demonstrates how Black Christians positioned the church as a site of political resistance and centered specifically African visions of freedom in their organizing. Drawing on archival research spanning South Africa, Zimbabwe, Kenya, the United Kingdom, and the United States, Masango Chéry tells a global story of the twentieth century that illuminates the formations of racial identity, state control, and religious belief. Masango Chéry’s recentering of South Africa in the history of worldwide Black liberation changes understandings of spiritual and intellectual routes of dissemination throughout the diaspora.
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