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Christian Missions and the State in 19th and 20th Century Angola and Mozambique  

Teresa Cruz e Silva

Christian missionary work in Angola and Mozambique during the colonial and postcolonial eras was shaped by a complex of factors related to religion, education, and politics. Missionaries’ networks of local support played an outstanding role in their humanitarian work, particularly in the 20th and 21st centuries. By the end of the 19th century, Catholic and Protestant missions had established themselves in Angola and Mozambique. Until 1974, Protestants had a tense relationship with the Portuguese authorities, as they were suspected of serving the political interests of some European countries against Portugal, and later of supporting African opposition to colonial domination. Unlike the Protestants, the Catholic Church enjoyed a close collaboration with the ruling regime. Under the Concordat and the Missionary Accord of 1940 and the Missionary Statute of 1941, which were agreed between the Vatican and Portugal, Catholic missions enjoyed a privileged position to the detriment of Protestants, whose activities were severely restricted. The years that followed the independences of Angola and Mozambique in 1975 were characterized by open hostility to religion, aggravated by the nationalization of missions’ assets and properties in both countries. Mission activities related to education and health became hard to carry out. With the civil wars in Angola and Mozambique, warfare and dislocation gave a new social role to the churches. Between the mid-1980s and 1990 the first signs of new policies emerged. While in Angola the relationship between church and state was marked by ambiguity and mistrust, cooperation and collaboration prevailed in Mozambique, where the 1980s saw a rapprochement and constructive dialogue between the two institutions. This was sealed by the roles both Protestants and Catholics played in the peace and democratization processes. The political opening that characterized the 1990s and 2000s brought significant changes for both countries including the presence in the public space of new churches, especially those of Pentecostal denominations. The new sociopolitical contexts in Angola and Mozambique between the late 20th and early 21st centuries shaped the new roles of the missions, which remain more focused on social, rather than political, activities.

Article

HIV/AIDS in South Africa  

Rebecca Hodes

Approximately 36.7 million people worldwide are living with the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV). Almost 20 percent of South Africa’s adult population (aged fifteen to forty-nine) is HIV-positive, and about one in every five people living with HIV worldwide is in South Africa. The pandemic, and the political controversies it elicited, have come to define both local and global understandings of the post-apartheid nation. The history of HIV in South Africa begins in the 1980s during an era of heightened repression by the apartheid state, in which discriminatory laws and fearful public responses tapped into broader prejudices relating to race and sexuality. During the 1990s, as South Africa transitioned to democracy and as rates of HIV reached pandemic levels, partnerships were built between civil society and state actors to confront the many challenges that the HIV epidemic presented. However, from the late 1990s, corruption and the abuse of political power within the Department of Health, together with the government’s refusal to provide life-saving antiretroviral treatment (ART), ignited a new era in health advocacy. While the HIV-treatment activist movement won the struggle for public access to treatment, Jacob Zuma’s succession to President Thabo Mbeki heralded a new era of political controversies in the state’s HIV response. A copious historiography on the HIV epidemic in South Africa maps the contemporary chronology and evolution of the disease, including a focus on changing public understandings and responses

Article

Medico-Legal History of Infanticide in South Africa, Late 19th to the Early 20th Century  

Prinisha Badassy

By early 20th-century South Africa, discourses around the definition and designation of infanticide as a criminal act developed with three main foci: medical, moral, and legal. State and official concerns about this crime were part of a larger preoccupation with moral reform specifically related to sexual morality, legitimacy, good parenting, and racial purity. Within the medical and legal fraternities, debates at the time were fixated on nebulous understandings of illicit sex and illegitimacy. The narratives of these criminal cases pry open the social dynamics of private and intimate spaces where love, lust, incest, ignorance, poverty, seduction, and rape sometimes resulted in undesirable and “illegitimate” pregnancies. In the early years of the Union, state interventions (medical and legal) in this realm were crucial to the constitution of whiteness and the consolidation of racial boundaries. The codes of shame, honor, and good conduct that operated during this time reveal that assumptions about dangerous or bad parenting, bastardy, and miscegenation served as indices from which the state regulated and created malleable categories of respectability, further mythologized the concept of motherhood, and increasingly cast women as social causalities and inescapable victims of their biological make up. However, cases of infanticide as a deliberate act also reveal that for some women and men, this implied a life saved from economic ruin or material and moral poverty. Throughout the late 19th and first half of the 20th centuries, men and women who wished to terminate and conceal unpropitious pregnancies were not only responding to socioeconomic and religious pressures but more so to the lack of effective alternatives: reliable and accessible contraception or recourse to foster care and adoption. The layers of pathos, desperation, prejudices, and pity reflected in incidences of infanticide are not only illustrative of the socioeconomic and political context in which they are located, but this also reveals the deep emotional entanglements of love, affect, and emotional currencies that were constantly under state surveillance.

Article

Mental Illness, Psychiatry, and the South African State, 1800s to 2018  

Julie Parle

Definitions of and explanations for mental illness differ between societies and have changed over time. Current use of the term arises from secular and materialist epistemologies of the body and mind, influential from the 18th century, which rejected the spiritual or supernatural as causes of illness. Since the 19th century, a specialist body of study, of law, practices, professionals, and institutions developed to investigate, define, diagnose, and treat disorders and illnesses of the mind. This was the emergence of psychiatry and of a professional psychiatric sector. With origins in the West, at a time of capitalism and imperialism, psychiatry was brought to South Africa through colonialism, and its development has been strongly influenced by the country’s economic, political, ideological, and medico-scientific histories. There have been significant continuities: the sector has always been small, underfunded, and prioritized white men. Black patients were largely neglected. Discrimination and segregation were constant features, but it is helpful to identify three broad phases of the history of the psychiatric sector in South Africa. First, its most formative period was during colonial rule, notably from the mid-1800s to c. 1918, with an institutional base in asylums. The second broad phase lasted from the 1920s to the 1990s. A national network of mental hospitals was created and changes in the ways in which mental illnesses were classified occurred at the beginning of this period. Some new treatments were introduced in the 1930s and 1950s. Law and the profession’s theoretical orientations also changed somewhat in the 1940s, 1960s, and 1970s. Institutional practice remained largely unchanged, however. A third phase began in the 1980s when there were gradual shifts toward democratic governance and the progressive Mental Health Act of 2002, yet continued human rights violations in the case of the state duty of care toward the mentally ill and vulnerable.