NALSU NEWS: online book launch of Danelle van Zyl-Hermann, 2023, "Privileged Precariat: White Workers and South Africa's Long Transition to Majority Rule."
UKZN Press, in collaboration with the Neil Aggett Labour Studies Unit (NALSU) at Rhodes University, the University of the Free State (UFS), and the University of Basel in Switzerland, invite you to celebrate the publication of the Southern African edition of this important book by the University of KwaZulu Natal (UKZN). Danelle will be in conversation with Jantjie Xaba (Stellenbosch University), Lucien van der Walt (NALSU) and Lindie Koorts (UFS).
BOOK LAUNCH WEBINAR DETAILS: Thursday, 19 October 2022 5pm SAST, online: register in advance at https://rb.gy/qewu1
THE BOOK: White workers occupied a unique social position in apartheid-era South Africa. Shielded from black labour competition in exchange for support for the white minority regime, their race-based status concealed their class-based vulnerability. Examining this entanglement of race and class, "Privileged Precariat" examines how South Africa’s white workers experienced the dismantling of the racial state and the establishment of black majority rule. Starting from the 1970s, it shows how apartheid reforms amounted to the withdrawal of state support for working-class whites, sending these workers in search of new ways to safeguard their interests in a rapidly changing world. It tracks the shifting strategies of the blue-collar SA Mineworkers’ Union (MWU), and its eventual reinvention by the 2010s as the Solidarity Movement (Solidariteit), an influential social movement appealing to cultural nationalism. The book offers a chronological and interpretative rethinking of South Africa’s recent past and contributes new insights from the Global South to debates on race and class in the era of neoliberalism.
IN DISCUSSION:
Danelle van Zyl-Hermann (author) is Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of History at the University of Basel, Switzerland, and Research Associate with the International Studies Group at the University of the Free State, South Africa. She also edited "Rethinking White Societies in Southern Africa, 1930s-1990s" (Routledge, 2020, w. Duncan Money).
Lucien van der Walt is director of the Neil Aggett Labour Studies Unit (NALSU) at Rhodes University, and a labour educator. His books include "Anarchism and Syndicalism in the Colonial and Postcolonial World, 1880-1940" (2010, Brill, w. Steve Hirsch), "Politics at a Distance from the State: Radical and African Perspectives" (Routledge, 2018/ 2022, w. Kirk Helliker) and "Labour Struggles in Southern Africa, 1919-1939: New Perspectives on the Industrial and Commercial Workers' Union (ICU)" (HSRC, 2022, w. David Johnson & Noor Nieftagodien).
Jantjie Xaba is a lecturer in the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology at Stellenbosch University. He holds a PhD in Sociology at Stellenbosch University. He has a Masters' degree in Comparative Labour Studies from the University of Johannesburg. He authored "South Africa in the Global Economy" (TURP, 2002, with Shafika Isaacs).
Lindie Koorts (facilitator) is a historian, author and media commentator, UFS. She is the author of the award-winning "DF Malan and the Rise of Afrikaner Nationalism" (Tafelberg, 2014).
ABOUT NALSU: Based in the Eastern Cape, South Africa, NALSU is engaged in policy, research and workers' education. Built around a vibrant team, including from the disciplines of Sociology and Economics, NALSU has a democratic, non-sectarian, non-aligned and pluralist practice, and active relations with a range of advocacy, labour and research organisations. We draw strength from our location in a province where the legacy of apartheid and the cheap labour system, and post-apartheid contradictions, are keenly felt. NALSU is named in honour of Neil Hudson Aggett, union organiser and medical doctor who died in an apartheid jail in 1982 following brutality and torture.