Empire development and colonialism: The past in the present

Working Class Homosexuality in South African History provides the first scholarly outline for the development of a narrative of same-sex working class African men. The book’s core analytic thrust centres around a previously unpublished primary source from the early twentieth century as well as unique oral history interviews with men remembering their lives in the gay settlement of Mkhumbane.

The author takes as his starting point events that shock us in their extreme violence, such as the burning of the Mozambican man Ernesto Alfabeto Nhamuave and the Marikana shootings. He notes how the language of the commentary on these events evokes a complex continuation of apartheid�s historical legacy. Using both psychoanalytic and social theory, he then proceeds to craft a theoretical framework within which to trace a sustained analysis of the psychic life of power in (post)apartheid South Africa: an awareness of how social structure and psychical or affective forces jointly produce material reality. Power itself has its psychological facets and social formations may themselves exhibit patterns of psychical causality.

This co-authored book re-lives the experiences of young South African exiles at the Solomon Mahlangu Freedom College (SOMAFCO) in Tanzania. South Africans from all backgrounds and solidarity workers from many parts of the world showed what new ways of thinking about teaching and learning could achieve.