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Now showing items 6-10 of 10
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Wotshela, Luvoyo (Univ. of Fort Hare) (Published by History Dept, University of the Western Cape, 2009)[more][less]
Abstract: Since its initiation, South Africaʼs post-apartheid land reform programme has generated extensive analysis and critique that in turn has yielded a body of scholarship. Discussion revolves around the official policy of the programme, the challenges associated with its implementation and its reception at local levels. It cannot be overstated that much of the discourse on the formulation of the programme itself commenced in the dying years of apartheid, through a series of workshops, policy conferences, research projects and publications. Prompted by glaring disparities in the countryʼs social and living conditions and primarily by entrenched imbalanced landownership, contemporary land reform dialogue has a well-built backdrop. What, however, is our understanding of local community politics that played perceptible roles in triggering land redistribution and facilitating patterns of settlement? This article gives some insight into a veiled history of interplay between community mobilisation politics, governance and official land reform policy in the Lukhanji municipality of the Eastern Cape during South Africaʼs transitional years of 1995 to 2006. After outlining how land redistribution was initially driven by forces operating outside government action, the article proceeds to illustrate the frailty of the government land redistribution accomplishment. Moreover, it demonstrates the complex nature of a rural setting that has arisen from community-facilitated and incipient government land redistribution achievements in the area. URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10566/103 Files in this item: 1
WotshelaLand2009.pdf (520.8Kb) -
Holdridge, Christopher (University of Cape Town) (Published by History Department, University of the Western Cape, 2010)[more][less]
Abstract: 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 Files in this item: 1
HoldridgeLaughing2010.pdf (4.079Mb) -
Nasson, Bill (Stellenbosch University) (Published by History Dept, University of the Western Cape, 2009)[more][less]
Abstract: This review essay explores the racial and social divides that have permeated cricket in South Africa. URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10566/105 Files in this item: 1
NassonCricket2009.pdf (131.5Kb) -
Hayes, Patricia (Wiley - Blackwell Publishing, 2009)[more][less]
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 Files in this item: 1
HayesSantuMofokeng2009.pdf (660.2Kb) -
Israel, Paolo (History Department, University of the Western Cape, 2009)[more][less]
Abstract: This article engages a historical reconstruction of the formation of Makonde revolutionary singing in the process of the Mozambican liberation struggle. The history of ʻUtopia liveʼ is here entrusted to wartime genres, marked by heteroglossia and the use of metaphor, and referring to moments when the ʻspace of experienceʼ and the ʻhorizon of expectationʼ of the Struggle were still filled with uncertainty and the sense of possibility. Progressively, however, singing expressions were reorganised around socialismʼs nodes of meaning. Ideological tropes, elaborated by Frelimoʼs ʻcourtlyʼ composers, were appropriated in popular singing. The relations between the ʻpeopleʼ and their leaders were made apparent through the organization of the performance space. The main contention of the article is that unofficiality, heteroglossia, metaphor and poetic license, although they feature in genres that have been marked out as ʻpopularʼ in academic discourse, are by no means intrinsically ʻpopularʼ. Much on the contrary, they are the first victims of populist modes of political actions, that is, of a politics grounded on a concept of ʻpeopleʼ. URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10566/102 Files in this item: 1
IsraelUtopia2009.pdf (3.176Mb)
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