Places and forms power: how can people from different cultures live together in harmony such as the South African population?

PLACES AND FORMS OF POWER

        Hello so today, I will talk to you about South Africa who is a theme that we studied in class and wich illustrates very well the notion of “Places and Forms of power”. But before entering in the subject, there is a key question we can ask ourselves in order to better understand: what does this notion mean ? Well, power is for me the ability to act in order to achieve a set goal and also influence people's behavior. It is both a source of integration and a creator of conflicts in a society. Thus, the very idea of power implies that of a counter-power, which makes it possible to limit, even to resist, the power in place, even when authority seems absolute. Confronted with this, we may wonder how can people from different cultures live together in harmony such as the South African population? To answer this question first I will show how apartheid was put in place and I will highlight the opposition of this form of power. Eventually, I will relate the burying of apartheid and the difficult creation of a harmonious nation in spite of different cultures.

        Let us begin by studying the establishment of Apartheid in South Africa wich is white opression against the black community. It was set by the white-wing national party, which won the election in 1948. One of the first measures taken was to make the apartheid official, in other worlds, legal racial segregation was established. This leads to a brutally codified segregation between Blacks, Asians, Colored people and Whites who took advantage of the formers. The governement enforced two acts called The group areas acts in 1950 and 1936, which forced about 1.5 million black people to move from cities to rural township where they lived in abject poverty and underwent very repressive laws. Many Afrikans, who did not work for white people where packed in Bantustans, which were poorly equipped and were far away from the major cities ; while those who worked for Whites had to leave in townships such as Soweto and needed passbooks to get into “white cities”. This law aimed at creating a separate nationhood. But black peoples still resisted and rebelled against the apartheid thanks to political activities such as the ANC and thanks to Nelson Mandela who was the leader of this struggle.

Moreover we studied a documentary on massacre of the Sharpeville where people protested against passbooks and for an increase of their incomes, who turned into a slaughter. This documentarey explains that on that day, 3000 black people protested against one of the most despised restriction against the nation's black majority wich forced them to always have passbooks with thme so as to control all their movements. On March 21st, Sharpeville residents gathered peacefully in front of the police station without those passbooks. Theirgoal was to be arrested and to overwhelm the police force but instead the police opened fire on the group.In two minutes they shot one hundred bullets on their backs and killed 69 of them. Indeed 69 black persons were killed so that Sharpeville became a symbol of the unfair white power. Nelson Mandela, which represented a counter power because he struggled tirelessly for egalitarianism, was put in jail and regarded as a political prisoner.

When Mandela walked out of jail after 27 years and became the first democratically elected black president, he chose to sign the new constitution in Sharpeville in 1994 and he aimed at building a new South Africa that would be democratic, non-racist and non-sexist. As well as writing a new constitution which proclaims the recognition of black people’s rights, he and set Truth and Reconciliation Commission. He fostered forgiveness over vengeance and his will to create a unified and harmonious Rainbow Nation.

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