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The Department of History is one of the leading History departments in South Africa. Areas of specialization in the Department are women and gender studies, public history, visual history, land and agrarian history, liberation history, urban history, African history, and teacher education.

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Kronos: Southern African Histories

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Research Articles (History)

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Santu Mofokeng, photographs: 'the violence is in the knowing'

Hayes, Patricia (Wiley - Blackwell Publishing, 2009)

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Abstract:

Born in 1956, Santu Mofokeng formed part of the Afrapix Collective that engaged in exposé and documentary photography of anti-apartheid resistance and social conditions during the 1980s in South Africa. However, Mofokeng was an increasingly important internal critic of mainstream photojournalism, and of the ways black South Africans were represented in the bigger international picture economy during the political struggle. Eschewing scenes of violence and the third-party view of white-on-black brutality in particular, he began his profound explorations of the everyday and spiritual dimensions of African life, both in the city and in the countryside. His formal techniques favor “fictions” that contain smoke, mist, and other matters and techniques that occlude rather than expose. Using angularity and ambivalence, he also ruptures realist expectations and allows space for the uncanny and the supernatural. He works with the notion of seriti (a northern seSotho term encompassing aura, shadow, power, essence, and many other things). The essay follows strands in Mofokeng’s writings and statements in relation to certain of his photographs, most recently repositioned in the substantial 2007 exhibition Invoice, to argue that he has pushed for a desecularization and Africanization of photography from the 1980s to the present. In more recent work the scourge of apartheid has been replaced by the HIV/AIDS virus, a mutation of nature, exacerbating the spiritual insecurities of many people in postapartheid South Africa. The essay concludes that Mofokeng’s work poses a critique of the parallel paradigms of Marxist-influenced social history and documentary photography in 1980s South Africa, both still highly influential, by attempting to reinsert aura (seriti) into photography and by highlighting what secular Marxism has concealed and proscribed.

URI:

http://hdl.handle.net/10566/559

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HayesSantuMofokeng2009.pdf (660.2Kb)

Laughing with Sam Sly: The cultural politics of satire and colonial British identity in the Cape Colony, c. 1840-1850

Holdridge, Christopher (University of Cape Town) (Published by History Department, University of the Western Cape, 2010)

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This article examines Sam Sly’s African Journal (1843–51), a literary and satirical newspaper published by William Layton Sammons in Cape Town. It contends that the newspaper utilised satire to forge British cultural affinity in the colony, as well as to encourage and preserve the conservative social boundaries of propriety and family values espoused by white middle-class colonists. This differed from the more widely studied position of satire as a subversive challenge to the established order, with Sammons avoiding sexually explicit, scandalous humour or overt attacks on personal character. In a period of growing white consensus, the African Journal’s use of satire in the 1840s formed part of the cultural politics of establishing bourgeois values through the medium of appreciation of British literature and popular culture. Satire in Sam Sly’s African Journal thus functioned ideologically to extend British cultural dominance and affinities, and to preserve and instil white bourgeois moral codes. Although much satire was shorn of the racial reality of the Cape Colony, seeking to replicate an impression of metropolitan whiteness, those satires that focused on race derided the Khoikhoi and Xhosa as incapable of achieving equality with whites, drawing on growing anti-humanitarian sentiment in the Cape. The African Journal’s popularity, however, diminished in the face of the anti-convict agitation of 1848–50, when colonists opposed the landing of ticket-of-leave convicts from Ireland as an impediment to the goal of representative government, through petitions and boycotting supplying to the government. Satirising these measures as a radical betrayal of British loyalty, Sammons’s support dwindled owing to his criticism of popular feeling.

URI:

http://hdl.handle.net/10566/206

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HoldridgeLaughing2010.pdf (4.079Mb)

Family law and "the great moral public interests" in Victorian Cape Town

Malherbe, Vertrees C.(University of Cape Town) (Published by History Department, University of the Western Cape, 2010)

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Abstract:

In the wake of the mineral revolution, and the Cape Colony’s attainment of responsible government, Cape Town’s population doubled in the nineteenth century’s latter years. Its largely British ruling class, seeing opportunities for wealth and a greater significance in empire and world, sought to construct a social order conducive to those goals. Faced with increasing ethnic heterogeneity, gender imbalance due to the numbers of male immigrants, and frustration in combating the endemic poverty and slums, city fathers and their closest colleagues – doctors, clergy – perceived the way forward in terms not of extending rights but of moral reform. This article carries the ongoing investigation of family life and law in Cape Town through the Victorian period. It examines legal enactments and social developments where they impacted on marriage, divorce, concubinage and related matters, with particular reference to the welfare of children and those born out of wedlock.

URI:

http://hdl.handle.net/10566/205

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MalherbeFamilyLaw2010.pdf (257.8Kb)

Not quite fair play, old chap: The complexion of cricket and sport in South Africa

Nasson, Bill (Stellenbosch University) (Published by History Dept, University of the Western Cape, 2009)

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Abstract: This review essay explores the racial and social divides that have permeated cricket in South Africa.

URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10566/105

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NassonCricket2009.pdf (131.5Kb)

Contestations over knowledge production or ideological bullying? A response to Legassick on the workers' movement

Sithole, Jabulani (Univ. of KwaZulu-Natal) (Published by History Dept, University of the Western Cape, 2009)

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Abstract:

The key characteristic of the vast amount of literature on the South African workers ʼ movement in the post-1973 period is the denial that the class and national struggles were closely intertwined. This denial is underpinned by a strong ʻantinationalist currentʼ which dismisses the national liberation struggle as ʻpopulist and nationalistʼ and therefore antithetical to socialism. This article cautions against uncritical endorsement of these views. It argues that they are the work of partisan and intolerant commentators who have dominated the South African academy since the 1970s and who have a tendency to suppress all versions of labour history which highlight these linkages in favour of those which portray national liberation and socialism as antinomies. The article also points out that these commentators use history to mobilise support for their rigidly held ideological positions and to wage current political struggles under the pretext of advancing objective academic arguments.

URI:

http://hdl.handle.net/10566/104

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SitholeContestations2009.pdf (184.4Kb)

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