PLACES AND FORMS OF POWER

I am going to talk about the notion places and forms of power. First of all I would like to give a definition of «Power». It’s the ability or official capacity to exercise control or authority over others. It can be a person, a group, or a nation having great influence over people. There can be good or bad types of power. Power can exist in different place, at the different levels. We can also evoke the power of a men or the power of men over women, that is to say, machism. The place about which we are going to speak is South Africa. The concept «Places and forms of power» includes the different forms of power, the submission or the opposition over the power. How can we differentiate the different forms of power, in various places? We are going to study the segregation between the Whites and the Blacks.

Firstly, in the twenty century, the whites and the blacks were segregated by a set of laws of South Africa from 1948 at 1991. Indeed, they were segregated by Apartheid which is a regime of racial segregation in South Africa. These laws made that the whites and the blacks had no same rights and didn’t live in the same areas. Indeed, the blacks lived in townships, in squalid places. So, they didn’t have the same rights as the whites. They were second-class citizens like all the couloured people, they were segregated, the non-whites were forbidden to organize unions or political parties and to vote. They were not allowed to go to same publics place, for example: a restaurant, schools… They were not allowed to sit next to each other, for example on benches, on buses. If they don’t respect the rules, they can die, the guars can shoot them down, and the dogs can chase them away.

Most personalities fought against the racism like Nelson Mandela was born in 1918 is a black man, it is also the first President of the Republic of South Africa. But before obtaining this title, he lived many things. Indeed, it was one of the historic leaders of the fight against the institutional political system of racial segregation; he was arrested and convicted of terrorism in 1964 because he fought against the Apartheid. Mandela was released from prison after twenty-seven years in Robben Island and following the first not segregationist national elections of the history of the country, he becomes a President of the Republic of South Africa in 1994 and he managed to obtain a nation welded between whites and blacks. Mandela worked hard for this prestigious competition. It was a sign of reconciliation after racial segregation.

To conclude, to illustrate this notion of places and forms of powers we spoke about the segregation and the revolts of certain great men which helped to abolish the segregation as Nelson Mandela. For me it is very brave people who dared to put their life in danger to be able to fight for a whole denigrated population. This notion we can bring it towards the notion of idea of progress, because we go more and more towards the end of the racism.

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