Across sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and the Caribbean, the English-language essay engages with colonialism and postcolonial reality to embody forms of life writing that grapple with the provocative confluences of English education, local context, and migrant desire. While conflicts between colonial legacy, postcolonial liberation, and creative imagination assume urgency with pioneers such as V.S. Naipaul and Chinua Achebe, linguistic limits on ethical and political values emerge as defining concerns for apartheid-riven writers such as Nadine Gordimer and Zoë Wicomb, while the scope and constraints of postcolonial representation energise the essays of Shashi Deshpande and Amit Chaudhuri. The fluid and constantly changeable identity of the postcolonial subject that drives the aspirations of the postcolonial essay finds language in its promiscuous texture and heterogeneous structure, its dalliance with analysis, narrative, and image, and its perpetually wandering and unfinished form.

During his visit to Ethiopia in 1968, the shah spoke to representatives of the Organisation of African Unity about his commitment to combatting colonialism and racial discrimination. It is surprising, therefore, that not long after the shah had returned to Iran, his diplomats began to discuss with South African diplomats the establishment of political relations between the two countries. The chapter explores the origins of this engagement and examines what drove the two sides together in this period. At the United Nations and other international forums, the shah and his diplomats spoke out in harsh terms against discrimination, racism and human rights violations in Southern Africa. But in spite of this public condemnation, the shah developed and maintained strong security and economic ties with apartheid South Africa. The chapter questions to what extent the shah was able to maintain his position as a champion of independence and human dignity, while enjoying such friendly ties with the apartheid regime.

Returning to some of the themes addressed in Chapter 3, this final chapter considers the wider social responsibilities of archaeologists working in southern Africa in the twenty-first century. Matters discussed include gender and racial equity within the discipline itself (especially with respect to South Africa), how best to relate the work done by archaeologists to the wider public, heritage management and conflicts over this (including the restitution of cultural sites, property, and human remains), the roles of contract archaeology, university teaching departments, and museums, the importance of publication, and the potential for developing post-colonial approaches to the interpretation of archaeological evidence. In highlighting possible future research trends, the chapter concludes by emphasising the need for work that is both intellectually sound and socially engaged and by reiterating the global significance of southern Africa’s immensely long and varied archaeological record.

Three decades after South Africa’s first democratic election, the country remains the most unequal society on earth. This reflects in part the continuing legacies of apartheid, from access to land, education and employment opportunities to the inability to address the spatial design of apartheid cities and towns. While most agree that this reality continues to detrimentally shape the life opportunities of the majority of South Africans, there is increasing evidence that it is also undermining the post-apartheid settlement – whether in the form of public protests, corruption or simply increasing disillusionment with the political and constitutional order. Since market-led reform policies have clearly failed to produce the necessary redistributive justice required to address apartheid’s legacies, it is time to explore more interventionist options. This chapter proposes a transformational tax to address the legacies of apartheid and to provide the basis for a new social contract that will further the promise of South Africa’s 1996 constitutional order. In exploring this proposal, it employs a comparative analysis of global wealth taxes to reflect on the forms and purposes of a proposed transformational tax.

The chapter begins with a paradox, namely that the liquor laws were liberalised in the early 1960s at precisely the moment when the apartheid regime was becoming distinctly illiberal. It argues that part of the reason was that the temperance movement had failed to reproduce itself generationally while its influence on the National Party government was marginal. Moreover, Afrikaner nationalists hitched wine to the bandwaggon of cultural nationalism. Successive commissions of enquiry targeted excessive drinking amongst the Coloured population, but attempts to extend the reach of racialised prohibition stalled. Indeed, the racial provisions of the 1928 Liquor Act were repealed in 1962, following the Malan Commission which maintained that the law was being routinely flouted. After a heated parliamentary debate the law was amended such that that wine could be purchased by all South Africans. Moreover, the distribution became freer with the creation of grocers’ licences for wine and promises of intervention to reverse vertical integration in the liquor industry. This outcome signalled a defeat for temperance interests and pointed to the greater influence wielded by the wine lobby.

The historical apartheid dichotomy and its present-day effects in South Africa remain characterised by exclusion and inequality along racial lines, with specific reference to land access. While land redistribution efforts have sought to foster inclusion and equity, the narratives on landownership remain multi-dimensional. This study aimed to determine the underlining narrative themes and potential gaps in research regarding the landownership struggle in South Africa. The methodology includes a bibliometric review to identify keywords, clusters and research trends in relevant publications through VOSviewer (v1.6.17) software. Furthermore, a thematic analysis using NVivo 12 was applied to achieve the research aim. Four clusters were identified, including agricultural production, land reform, the rural economy and poverty reduction, with recent research focused on agricultural land, livelihoods and poverty alleviation. The findings highlighted the continuing inequality in landownership and a gap in research regarding the post-redistribution use of land. The chapter proposes a reimagining of urban planning in South Africa, Africa and the global south through identifying future research avenues in land redistribution to catalyse the equitable and productive utilisation of land. This includes research on the role of financial support mechanisms and political capacity in land redistribution interventions.

Under international law, occupation is meant to be temporary and occupying powers cannot be sovereign in the territory they occupy. In contrast, since 1967 Israel has systematically altered the status of the OPT with the aim of annexing it, de facto or de jure. During this time, though the UN has focused on documenting the legality of a range of individual violations of international law by the occupying power, scant attention has been paid by the Organization to the legality of the occupation regime as a whole. Emphasis has instead been placed on encouraging the parties to bring the occupation to an end through continued, though widely discredited, bilateral negotiations. By what rationale can it be said that Israels occupation remains either legal or legitimate in the absence of good faith on its part in negotiating the occupation’s end? How can its end reasonably be made contingent on negotiations between occupier and occupied? This chapter argues that the UN’s failure to take a more principled position on the very legality of Israel’s half-century ‘temporary’ occupation of the self-determination unit of the Palestinian people is demonstrative of the maintenance of Palestine’s legal subalternity in the UN system, under a different guise.

The postscript concludes with a discussion of General Assembly resolution 77/246 of 30 December 2022, passed while this book was entering production. The resolution requests the International Court of Justice for an advisory opinion on the legal status of Israel’s continued presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory in line with the research presented in Chapter 5. As the opinion of the Court is to be given after the publication of the book, this update looks to this recent development as the latest attempt by Palestine to resort to the counter-hegemonic potential of international law with results as yet unknown

Iran engaged with global decolonization movements on two levels: state-to-state and non-elite contexts. As Iranians observed global crises such as apartheid and race riots unfold in South Africa and the United States, they sharpened their understanding of racial politics. At the same time, Iran tried to assume a prominent role in these debates by hosting the UN Human Rights Conference in 1968. The shah faced a quandary: on the one hand he saw Iran as aligned with other Third World countries that had suffered from imperial politics. On the other hand, he wanted Iran aligned with the United States and the West in a partnership of equals. Moreover, although the king supported global human rights, he was unable to facilitate democratic political participation in Iran.