Places and forms of power : How does South Africa represent this notion?

Places and forms of power

I am going to talk about the notion “places and forms of power”. First of all I'd like to give a definition of the notion. The term “Places” denotes important buildings or institutions. Power is the ability to control others, events or resources; the ability to make things happen despite obstacles, opposition. In class, we have studied this notion with the help of the history of South Africa. How does South Africa represent this notion? First, I will speak about the apartheid, then about Nelson Mandela and finally about the reconciliation.

In class we have seen a document about the apartheid, it is a black and white photo on which we can see two children and two adults, the adults are sitting on a bench on which two worlds are written « Europeans, Blankes ». They both refer to segregation in South Africa: this places is reserved to white people only, other examples show the segregation in South Africa like the places in the buses where blacks were forced to go to the back. This segregation in South Africa has been called apartheid.

To end this segregation, the blacks started a fight against the white’s domination, one of the most famous character in this fight is Nelson Mandela, and this one is part of the ANC which is the African National Congress: it’s a political party in South Africa that for many years fought against the system of apartheid. We saw a movie that recounts his life which is called Mandela: long walk to freedom. In this movie, we learned that Nelson Mandela did some sabotage. Because of that he was imprisoned for over 27 years, during this time, he continued his fight in a different way. Finally, he was released in order to calm the tensions that take place in the country. The blacks wanted to inflict on the whites what they lived, Mandela doesn’t want this, he wants peace and even if the whites spoiled his life, he forgave them. He want peace between blacks and whites. Sometime after being released from prison he was elected president, he continued to fight for peace in the country.

Then, we studied a text called Truth and reconciliation, it deals with the post-apartheid period, we learned that the main goal of post-apartheid South Africa is to make it possible for all people to live together and is to be recognized as a new democratic country by foreign countries. Different facts oppose this like the unemployment, the economic inequalities between people, a dysfunctional educational system and so on … However some things have been accomplished with a certain social peace and stability and now the country is respected in the world for what it did. With the text there was cartoon which reveals how difficult it has been for the TRC (Truth and Reconciliation Commission) to operate.

Thus, in this sequence, we see many part of the history of South Africa, the country was first hit by the segregation, then thanks to Nelson Mandela, peace was restored, and now they try to forget the past and rebuild themselves. Segregation is a plague that has occurred in many countries like South Africa but also United States or Germany. It's a painful part of the story that shows the bad times of the humanity

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