CODESRIA’s 30th Anniversary Celebrations
Southern Africa Sub-Regional Conference
Gaborone, 18 – 19 October, 2003
Call for Abstracts

The Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa
(CODESRIA) is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year. It will be
recalled that the Council was established in 1973 out of the collective
will of African social researchers to create a viable forum in Africa
through which they could strive to transcend all barriers to knowledge
production and, in so doing, play a critical role in the democratic
development of the continent. As part of the series of events planned to
mark the anniversary, five sub-regional conferences are being organised
in Central, East, North, Southern and West Africa. These sub-regional
conferences will be followed
by a grand finale conference to be held at the Council’s headquarters in
Dakar, Senegal, in December 2003. The Southern Africa sub-regional
conference is scheduled for Gaborone, Botswana, on 18 and 19 October,
2003.
Its theme will be: Southern Africa: From National Liberation to
Democratic Renaissance.

Southern Africa as a region has known some of the most interesting
political developments in the history of Africa. In the period prior to
the onset of formal colonial domination, the area was host to major
projects of state formation, dissolution and recomposition characterised
by interesting and well-documented experiments in statecraft. Home to
some of the most prolonged and vicious forms of settler colonial rule,
the sub-region was also the site for the most systematic,
institutionalised system of racism, racial domination, and
racially-based exclusion known in recent human history. Partly on
account of the racial structuring of opportunities integral to the
establishment and consolidation of colonial domination, the sub-region
witnessed an intense intra-regional flow of labour to the key mining and
agro-business centres mainly located in South Africa. The demographic
outcomes associated with widespread labour migration and the
racially-based systems of labour control established in the colonial
mines and plantations had consequences not only on the organisation of
state power and rural society but also on that of the family and
citizenship; furthermore, they established the foundations for the
pattern of urbanisation that developed, including the violence
associated with it.

Given the violent history of the establishment of colonial rule and
white racial domination in the sub-region, it is not surprising that
Southern Africa was also one of the earliest sites of resistance to
foreign and minority rule in Africa. The African National Congress (ANC)
has the distinction of being the oldest liberation political party in
Africa; once adopted, its Freedom Charter fed into the pan-African quest
for the liberation of the continent from colonial oppression. The
example of the ANC and its Freedom Charter was to inspire virtually all
the other key nationalist politicians of the sub-region in their
campaign for national liberation. Several of these countries, such as
Zambia, Botswana, and Malawi, were able to achieve independence
relatively earlier than others; for most of the others, the struggle for
liberation became a long-drawn-out and increasingly violent affair which
the East-West Cold War did a great deal to complicate in the light of
the strategic geo-political advantages and mineral resources which the
sub-region holds. Not surprisingly, armed struggle became an important
and almost ubiquitous instrument in the quest for the termination of
settler colonialism and institutionalised racism; it was to play a major
role in delivering liberation first to the former Portuguese colonies of
Angola and Mozambique and then to Zimbabwe and Namibia, and finally to
South Africa, with the inauguration of Nelson Mandela in 1994 as the
first president to be elected by South Africans of all races and the
first person from among the black majority to rule the country.

The achievement of national liberation and installation of majority rule
in Southern Africa was always considered as an important project of the
pan-African movement within the continent and in the Diaspora. Not only
were the key leaders of the sub-region active participants in the
pan-African meetings convened to discuss the future of the continent and
the black race from 1945 onwards; the first set of African countries to
attain their independence and all the others that subsequently joined
them were to offer solidarity and material support to the Southern
Africa liberation project. Indeed, the mandate of the Organization of
African Unity, at its foundation, consisted in promoting continental
unity and liberation; for the latter purpose, the OAU set up a
Liberation Committee which was a key player in the struggle for
independence and majority rule in Southern Africa. Following the end of
apartheid in South Africa and the installation of a black majority
government, Southern Africa has been pre-occupied with efforts at
democratisation, regional co-operation and integration, and continental
renaissance. The processes of democratisation, regionalism and
renaissance point to a determination to create more open, inclusive and
fair societies built on representative governance, the inventive
energies of the peoples and a shared pan-African community. But it is a
project confronted by a host of historical and contemporary
difficulties, including the challenges of managing the complex equation
of race, rights and justice; the problem of post-liberation xenophobia;
the persistent, ever deepening problems of social exclusion; unresolved
problems of historical dispossession and present-day challenges of
representation; the structure of labour migration in the sub-region and
the unidirectional conquest of new economic terrains in the sub-region
by South African capital.

Participants in the proposed conference are invited to re-open
reflections on the Southern African component of the pan-African ideal
through the entry points offered by the sub-region’s struggle for
national liberation and the on-going quest for a democratic renaissance
which includes a greater investment of efforts in regional co-operation
and integration. In this connection, papers are invited from scholars
interested in re-visiting the theories, historiographies and experiences
of national liberation; the various ideological currents and
contestations which underpinned the struggle for liberation in the
period before and after the publication of the Freedom Charter,
including the Black Consciousness Movement; the key actors and factors
in the Southern African liberation project; the labour processes that
defined the colonial labour economy, the political policies and
responses which they elicited, and the consequences which they had; the
dynamics of post-liberation statecraft, including the pursuit of truth
and reconciliation, affirmative action, black economic empowerment, and
various policies of social inclusion; the negotiation of post-liberation
identity and citizenship; the place of land in the political economy of
national liberation; the rise of post-liberation xenophobic tendencies,
the forces and factors that account for them and the responses they have
elicited; the problems and prospects of democratic renewal in Southern
Africa, including the change and renewal in Southern African civil
society; post-liberation economics and economic policy-making as read
from the point of view of a national liberation project; the search for
regional co-operation and integration; the quest for an African
renaissance project and its connections to the pan-African ideal;
Southern Africa and the NEPAD initiative; Africa in the foreign policies
of the countries of Southern Africa; and Southern Africa’s Diaspora
linkages.

Researchers interested in participating in the conference are invited to
submit abstracts of their papers to the CODESRIA Secretariat by
15 August, 2003. The authors of abstracts selected will be notified by
22 August, 2003 and they will be expected to send in their full papers
by 15 September, 2003. All abstracts and full papers should be addressed
by post, e-mail or fax to:
Ms. Chifaou Amzat,
CODESRIA 30th Anniversary
Southern Africa Conference,
P.O. Box 3304, Dakar, Senegal.
Tel: +221-8259822/23
Fax: +221-8241289
E-mail: [email protected] [2]