power

« Unit 2: South Africa I am going to talk about the notion of Places and Forms of Power. “I am no racialist and detest racialism, because I regard it as a barbaric thing, whether it comes from a black man or white man,” Nelson Mandela. This quote represents the notion of “Places and forms of power” very well. In this notion we will speak about South Africa and its history with the Apartheid and the action of Nelson Mandela.

In politics and social science, power is the ability to influence people's behavior.

In order to live together members of a community accept rules, regulations, and laws.

This helps to create social cohesion but can also lead to conflicts and tensions.

Even when authority seems absolute, there are always counter-powers which question it, aim at limiting its excesses and resist it.

To illustrate this notion, I have chosen to focus on South African places and forms of power.

We can ask ourselves how can people from different cultures live together in harmony? 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. The South Africa, has a very rich culture with a very diverse population constituting blacks and white people of different languages; there are eleven languages; Afrikaans, English, Northern Sotho.

This incredible diversity of culture gave birth to many racial conflicts an example being the white rebellion that we studied in class in an oral comprehension; and the birth of the Apartheid. This politics is the consequence of the historic anxiety of the Afrikaners, to be submerged by the multitude of the surrounding black population.

We began by studying the establishment of Apartheid in South Africa.

It was set by the National Party, which won the election in nineteen forty-Eight (1948).

It was a system of racial segregation enforced by The National Party government of South Africa.

Under with the rights of majority ‘non-white’ inhabitants of South Africa were minimized and white supremacy and Afrikaner minority rules were maintained.

The Afrikaner-dominated National Party developed Apartheid after the World War II.

Many Africans, 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 live in townships such as Soweto and needed passbooks to get into the “white cities”.

This law aimed at creating a separate nationhood.

The white domination had control on blacks; they banned mixed marriages, black freedom of circulation and removed the black right vote.

The country was representing by social inequality, domination and submission.

We saw the opening scene of “Invictus” it shows the opposition between white and black teenagers during apartheid.

The white are playing rugby on a green grass contrary to the black that are playing in wasteland.. »