The Namibian Review: A Journal of Contemporary South West African Affairs was published between 1976-1987. Initially it was produced by the Namibian Review Group (later known as the Swedish Namibian Association) and 14 editions were printed by Namibian political exiles in Sweden between 1976-1978. In 1979 the journal was translocated from Stockholm to Windhoek where another 18 editions were published in a context of intensifying southern African liberation struggle. For example, Kenneth and Ottilie Abrahams were the longest standing founding members of the Namibian Review Group, organized as an organization. They spent nine years in exile in Sweden, after escape from South Africa and South West Africa (colonial Namibia) to Zambia and then Tanzania after the infiltration of the Yu Chi Chan Club’s National Liberation Front, where all members were either incarcerated, killed, or escaped into exile.

The goal of the Namibian Review was to provide a platform for the discussion of all aspects of life in Namibia with particular emphasis on the problems of the long hard struggle towards independence. The journal encouraged a free flow of ideas “so that the leaders of tomorrow can prepare themselves, intellectually, for the tasks which will face them when they eventually take over the reins of power.”(((“Preface,” The Namibian Review Publication, No.1 “Three Essays on Namibian History by Neville Alexander,” June 1983, p.1.)))  The journal was used as a place to  campaign for democracy in its reporting on, analysis of, and arguments about the road to liberation, and the transition to independence.

These items of liberatory press in the form of the newspapers, journals and papers such as Inqaba ya basebenzi gave space for publicised and collective expression of dissent against the injustice of the dominant social order. Periodicals which highlight key engagements of critiques of current socio-economic and political ills, but also resolutions and active movements within the organisation. Inqaba ya basebenzi was produced by the underground movement in exile in English and local African languages. After 1989 the journal was transformed into a supplement and gave way for the Congress Militant, by 1990 Inqaba ya basebenzi had reached 28 issues in English and 4 other local languages with topics ranging from the political status within Southern Africa as well as international coverage.

Between 1984 and 1992, the network also produced a number of calendars with political messages and calls to action. Printed on inexpensive newsprint at Esquire Press in Athlone, where community newspapers such as Grassroots, Saamstaan, New Era, and Living Roots went to press, these now hard-to-find calendars were smuggled under t-shirts and distributed amongst the Flats community. According to “struggle printer” Prakesh Patel, this was risky, and marked by security police harassment, happening from four to five times a week, with the firm having more than 2000 printing plates seized and more than 100 criminal cases lodged against the company (Morris, 2004). The network produced its last calendar, dedicated to the then-recently deceased Dumile Feni, in 1992… read more

The Journal of Black Theology in South Africa was a bi-annual academic journal which ran from May 1987 until November 1998. In a context of legislated (at least initially) anti-black racism and repression, it sought to be “a vehicle of communication and a forum for exchange of ideas… (to) hasten the dawning of a new day of freedom” through stimulating “creative thought, lively theological discussion and… (reorienting) the social life and political action of the black community” (Mofokeng, 1987).

This paper will firstly situate the journal within the historical and political context out of which it emerged, mapping and positioning it within the history of black theology in South Africa. Next, the paper will go on to detail some of the journal’s particularities with regard to (among other things) how the journal began, who was involved, what it aimed to do, the role that it played, how it was distributed, its readership, why it ended and how it was structured. The paper will then engage with some aspects of the journal’s content. This of course cannot be covered comprehensively, as such, I have broken it down into the following four sections which will be covered in brief:

1. How the journal develops a hermeneutics/framework/lens of black theology through bringing scripture into conversation with the black experience.
2. How the journal uses a hermeneutics/framework/lens of black theology to explore topical issues such as land, gender, economic justice, colonialism, black identity, racism, labour, negotiations, culture, etc.
3. How the journal brings South African black theology into conversation with other historical and contemporary global expressions of liberative praxis.
4. How the journal uses a hermeneutics/framework/lens of black theology to critique and challenge dominant theology and ideas within in that perpetuate the unjust status quo.

Finally, the paper will look at how the journal imagined the future of black theology in South Africa and put this in dialogue with the actual landscape of black theology in South Africa today, concluding with some tentative thoughts about a way forward.

Izwi Labantwana, Die Kinderstem, Voice of the Children is the official newsletter of the national organisation the Children’s Movement, which had been produced between 1986 and 2017. The newsletter released issues annually in the early 90s, increasing up to five issues per annum in the later years. The production team largely consisted of child and youth members, who curated and wrote most of the pieces, which are conveyed in three languages interchangeably, i.e., Xhosa, Afrikaans, and largely English.

The newsletter offers an insightful contribution towards a better understanding of what the perspective of young South Africans might look like within the social activist arena. The Children’s Movement is unique in its approach in addressing the challenges faced in the home and community life of the children through focusing on self-organisation. The members formulate their own group structure and itinerary with materials, trainings, programmes, and advice provided by the movement. The groups engage in fun, educational activities and discuss the socio-economic issues, at times conducting surveys to pinpoint what is happening around them. A strong emphasis is placed on acknowledging and implementing possible interventions for change.

The newsletter reflects an array of these events and gatherings, with personal narratives of the children’s experiences in virtually every issue. The movement’s emphasis on realizing the agency of children, driven by the core belief that children have the potential to create change, contradicts traditional notions of children’s passive role within social spheres. Through Izwi Labantwana we see children taking responsibility for their own needs and that of other children. In the images of children cutting the nails of their peers and attending to vegetable gardens at the health centres, set up mostly in empty classrooms at local schools. To capturing their voices on podiums at the movement’s national conferences, where representatives share the challenges and inspirations they perceive in life.

The literary production is largely curated and edited by child members of the movement. It draws special attention to the inclusion of artistic creativity, many editions are filled with poetry sent in from children’s groups all around South Africa, mostly in the Western Cape. In addition to many instances of song, dance and celebration in the newsletter, there are many how-to moments. Articles with easy instructions, on how to make boardgames, ty-dyes, but more importantly how to substitute things like toothpaste with everyday items.

The newsletter was initially produced for print, with an archive available in large colour format. The letters were distributed among the groups where resources were readily available, and upon request where it had to be sourced. Some time around 2009 the editions were released online on the movement’s official website, where the full collection of the newsletter is available and freely downloadable. In the change, an extension was made where the editions became richer with text and content of the editorial teams. What is not left behind is the opinion of the children, with flowing inserts of their experiences being part of Children’s Movement of South Africa.

The movement began in the 1980s formed from children’s groups on the Cape Flats led by anti-apartheid organisers. The organisation chooses to focus its work within impoverished or isolated areas, those most affected by the economic inequalities of apartheid. A few years later, in 1985 the movement created the Children’s Resource Centre to assist in providing trainings and distributing materials to those in need. Since then, over 100 children’s groups, with over 5000 members have been involved in the organisation’s health, environment, culture, media, youth, and values programmes. In between there has been feeding schemes, skills training, cv workshops, and the like. The movement has received various levels of funding over the decades with capital fluctuations changing dynamics, decentralizing, but never extinguishing the spirit of those on the ground.

The shutting down of autonomous Black educational spaces that were started by students at universities, and the mass-popular nature of the uprisings had led to a situation where the movement wasn’t engaged in the type of critical education work that had initially been its basis. Furthermore, despite some isolated attempts by Black students to build relationships with progressive organisations beyond the academy, #feesmustfall and #outsourcingmustfall remained primarily centred on universities.

As a response to this combination of circumstances, Pathways converged as a group of people who wanted to continue the work to which we had been participating on campus; collectively discussing and planning the non-partisan movement and struggles for free education. We wanted to create a space to learn about, participate in, and contribute to the debates around free education, and through that, build relationships with people and collectives working in different sectors who were interested and committed to the project of free education. We had the position that education is something that implicates and affects everyone, and is connected to struggles around wages, disability, land, patriarchy, sexuality, housing, etc.

Pathways’ work has been based on a ‘community-building’ approach to publishing. By this, we mean gathering people and getting perspectives on free education – the movement ,histories, and debates – from people working and organising in different fields and different places. This includes students from different institutions and levels, workers and organisers from trade unions, progressive academics, social movement activists and others.

This study examines how the Early South African Black Press can be used to apply notions of decoloniality and multilinguals to the teaching of journalism and society in the South African context.  The study will be exploratory, and will use the three metaphors of coloniality, namely power, knowledge and being, to expose the ways in which journalism, a discipline which was once a disruptor, now needs to be disrupted due to the ways in which it has been co-opted into a neoliberal agenda that sees news as a commodity to be sold, rather than a public good.  The content, context and authors of material from the Early Indigenous South African Black Press, turn the notions explored in the journalism and society module on their heads and expose ways in which the discipline espouses coloniality, and they also provide an example of what is possible if one takes a decolonial approach. It also provides a model of how local media can employ multilingualism in ways that are successful.   The chapter will show how, by drawing on texts from the resistant black press, which was instrumental in keeping African people’s voice alive during the many decades of oppression, journalism can be taught differently in order to re-center the voices of the marginalised, and speak to people in their own languages. The key texts to be considered are from the newspaper Abantu-Batho (The People) which was published in English, isiXhosa, isiZulu, seTswana and seSotho between 1912 and 1931.  It was Founded in Johannesburg with a grant from the queen regent Nabotsibeni of Swaziland on the advice of Pixley ka Izaka Seme, a solicitor to the Swazi monarchy at the time.

Publica[c]tion is a Black student-driven publication – a collective process that includes but also transcends and goes beyond the independently, self-published product. Initiated in conversations at the end of 2015 as an attempt to extend and continue the work of the student movement, the publication was printed and launched in August and September 2017. In this paper we reflect on the collaborative, experimental process of public action in order to highlight our learnings and perspectives on publication and relations of knowledge production more broadly. We consider the generative dialectic of critique and creation and how our creative process emerged partly from critiques of academic production and publication. Academic production we understand as largely subordinated to the neoliberal university’s individualism and its undervaluing and undermining of practices of collective knowledge production. From our critique of capitalist publication’s fixation on the product, we fixated on process – wanting to do something collectively and collaboratively. Publica[c]tion’s process emerged as an attempt to archive the particular mo(ve)ments of intense campus struggle, to connect and think and write together as Black student activists across different campuses, and as a critical response to the mainstream media where student struggles were represented in problematic and limited ways. The paper closes by looking at some of the possibilities that the process opened up – how collective reading constitutes a generative alternative to ‘peer review’, how a refusal of the authoritative power of the editor can liberate the creativity of contributors, and how publication can be used as a process of building community.

The digital version of Publica[c]tion can be downloaded as a PDF here [file size: 11MB].