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Introduction: The Politics of Inequality: South Africa then and now [*].

Article Excerpt
Each year for nearly a quarter century, the University of Florida Center for African studies has honored Gwendolen M. Carter's association with the Center in her latter years as a scholar through holding a conference or set of lectures named after her on a topic of critical importance to the study of Africa. [1] Gwen, as she was known to her friends and colleagues, delivered the first set of Carter Lectures on Africa in fall 1984. [2] It was a time of great turmoil and strife in South Africa, with then President Botha thereafter declaring a "state of emergency" on July 20, 1985. Given her broad and detailed knowledge of South Africa based on nearly four decades of research and writing about the country and broader region, Gwen chose to inaugurate the Carter Lectures with presentations on "United States Policies toward South Africa and Namibia" and "Can SADCC Succeed?" [3]

Although Gwen spent only a few years at the University of Florida, her interactions with both faculty and students left an indelible mark on its community of Africanist scholars. [4] Since she was born in 1906 (July 17; she died on February 20, 1991), the faculty of the Center thought that in the centenary year of her birth the Carter Lectures on Africa for 2006 should return to her central scholarly and personal concern with South Africa. She had first become acquainted with South Africa when, during a thirteen-month trip around the British Commonwealth in 1948-1949, she spent three months in South Africa. Gwen wrote that she was "utterly fascinated by South Africa," and was "particularly fascinated by its contrast with what I had seen of emerging African nationalism" elsewhere on the continent. [5] In 1952, she returned to South Africa for a year's research that led to the publication of what is arguably her most significant work: The Politics of Inequality: South Africa Since 1948, which appeared in 1958. As she noted in her introduction:

Few countries have been so subject to publicity and criticism since World War II as has South Africa. It is a rare year in which no writer uses that colorful country as a subject. And yet, for all this publicity, there is remarkably little understanding in other countries either of the complexity of the problems which South Africa confronts or of the character of...