Students engaged in the spring 2015 protests on the University of Cape Town campus demanded the removal of the statue of Cecil John Rhodes, prompting renewed debate over the appropriate treatment of colonial and apartheid-era statuary in contemporary South African public spaces. While the students' protests were often dismissed in public discourse and media coverage as misguided or misinformed, this article situates them in the broader context of symbolic reparations central to the transition to multiracial democracy. We introduce the terms 'monologic commemoration' and 'multiplicative commemoration' to describe the two dominant phases of South African public memory initiatives during and after apartheid. Monologic commemoration promotes a singular historical narrative of national identity and heroic leadership, whereas multiplicative commemoration requires the representation of as many diverse experiences and viewpoints as possible. We examine the #RhodesMustFall campaign as an eruption of discontent with both the monologic and multiplicative approaches, potentially signalling a new 'post-transitional' phase of South African public culture.

This article explores the ethical difficulties that arise because of the interaction between fieldwork practitioners and their sites, in terms of the positionality of the researcher. What are the ethics of blending in or of standing out? This question stems from my experience of 12 months of fieldwork in South Africa in two distinct locales and among two different populations, one in which I could “pass” and another in which I was marked as various degrees of “outsider.” Drawing on this fieldwork, as well as an overview of the literature in political science on positionality, I argue that our discipline—because of the way it shapes interactions and research outcomes—must take positionality seriously in ethical training and practice.

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This article attempts to understand how different print cultures that service different language communities fuel nationalisms that are not co-terminus with a nation-state. In the tradition of scholars like Benedict Anderson, it examines the connections between nationalism and print culture, but with reference to a single important event: violence at the Marikana mine. These events constituted the largest act of lethal force against civilians in the post-apartheid era. The South African press in all three languagesAfrikaans, isiZulu, and English -covered the violence that erupted at the Lonmin mine in Marikana in mid-August 2012. Using original translations of daily newspapers and quantitative content analysis, the article assesses the differences among the various language media outlets covering the event. It finds that news coverage varied significantly according to the language medium in three ways: attribution of action, portrayal of sympathy and blame, and inclusion of political and economic coverage in the aftermath of the violence. These variations in coverage coincided with differences between reading publics divided by race, class, and location. The article argues that the English-language bias of most media analysis misses key points of contestation that occur in different media, both within South Africa, and throughout the post-colonial world.