In this article, we demystify the South African Defence Force’s 32 Battalion and de-exceptionalize the apartheid military by connecting it to other colonial military communities, and apartheid governance more broadly. Drawing on oral history, autoethnography, and archival documents, we demonstrate the highly unequal, yet mutual, reliance of white authorities and elite Black women in the haphazard and improvised nature of apartheid military rule. Most women arrived at the unit's base, Buffalo, as Angolan refugees, where white military authorities fixated on their domestic and family lives. We examine the practical workings of military rule by considering three nodes of social surveillance and control. Elite Black women, known as “block leaders,” served as intermediaries, actively participating in the mechanics of military rule while also using their position to advocate for their community. Finally, we consider the ingrained violent patriarchal nature of life in the community by highlighting the nature of women's precariousness and labor.

Adolescence is a critical developmental period marked by significant changes, increasing the risk of mental health problems such as anxiety and depression. Understanding how youth engage with mental health resources is essential. This study explored the role of interpersonal relationships—including peer-to-peer, adult-youth, parent, teacher and mentor relationships, and interactions with mental health professionals—in shaping youth mental health engagement and identified factors influencing these relationships. Using a phenomenological qualitative design, youth researchers (YRs) and youth advisors (YAs) were engaged throughout the research process. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with South African youth aged 14–24 years. The study highlighted the significance of peer relationships, particularly relatability, as key in youth mental health support. Family relationships had a mixed role, with factors like lack of mental health literacy, age differences, and cultural norms hindering effective communication and support. By understanding the dynamics of these relationships, this study emphasizes the need for targeted interventions that harness social support. Enhancing the quality of relationships and promoting positive social bonds can protect against mental health problems. Addressing gaps in support by recognizing and supporting peer-to-peer engagement is essential. Findings provide valuable insights for designing strategies to promote mental well-being among youth, particularly in resource-constrained settings.

Scholars of various backgrounds have noted how societies across the globe have come to rely on more and more policing and incarceration since the late 1970s. To date, however, detailed analyses of the causes and consequences of this “punitive turn” have been limited to the Global North, with the vast majority of studies focused on the expansion of states’ capacity for violence. This article offers a corrective to the global study of the punitive turn by tracing the rise of South Africa’s private security industry from its inception in the late apartheid period to its current position as one of the largest of its kind in the world. Using newspaper reports, archival material from the apartheid state’s security apparatus, and ethnographic interviews of former and current members of the security industry, it shows how counterinsurgency doctrine, civil war, and deindustrialization shaped South Africa’s punitive turn, precipitating a process where violence was devolved from the state to private actors, including local militias, vigilante groups, and private security firms. This process, it is argued, is far from anomalous, and should be seen as a paradigm for the way the post-1970s punitive turn has unfolded in the majority of the world.

The anti-apartheid movement and Save Darfur campaign were important moments of African American activism towards Africa. Howard University played a central role by divesting from both South Africa and Sudan. This article examines each divestment within Howard University’s history of engagement with Africa. While each divestment was linked by a concern to support oppressed African peoples, the roles of race and racism operated differently in each action. Such an analytic provides space to reconsider the role of US higher education in African-facing human rights activism during the age of Black Lives Matter.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the terrain of the diplomatic and security landscape of Southern Africa shifted dramatically. South Africa declared various Bantustans “independent,” but they were not recognized by other countries. Small regional states like Lesotho increasingly took more combative diplomatic stances, aided by Cold War connections and, in this case, a local border dispute. This article examines a proposed ski resort that South Africa wanted to build in the QwaQwa Bantustan on Lesotho's border starting in 1975. Because of Lesotho's diplomatic and military escalation, the Khoptjoane resort was never built, but the lengthy dispute contributed to the sidelining of the apartheid regime's diplomats in favor of its securocrats. Thus, we argue the failed ski resort contributed to the atmosphere in which Pretoria greenlit the Maseru Massacre of 1982, presaging the apartheid regime's increased 1980s willingness to use its military superiority against township residents and Southern African neighbors alike.

This article compares and connects two episodes of political violence in the late nineteenth century: the Haymarket Affair in Chicago in 1886 and the bombing of the offices of the De Beers Company, chaired by Cecil Rhodes, at Kimberley on the South African diamond fields in 1891. These episodes were connected by the existence in both countries of an American and then global movement, the Knights of Labor/Labour. The Knights’ American history was shaped by Haymarket. Their South African history was radically altered by the De Beers explosion, which both the Knights and their enemies interpreted through the prism of Haymarket. They drew lessons from it that determined their own conduct and may have contributed to the demise of the South African Knights less than two years later. This article charts those connections and the context to the De Beers explosion, the trial that followed, and the lessons that South African Knights drew from the experiences of their American brothers and sisters.

Attempts to measure social mobility before the twentieth century are frequently hampered by limited data. In this paper, we use a new source – annual, matched tax censuses over more than 70 years – to calculate intragenerational income mobility within a preindustrial, settler society, the Dutch and British Cape Colony at the southern tip of Africa. Our unique source allows us to measure income mobility along several dimensions, helping to disentangle reasons for the high levels of persistence we find.