Browsing by Subject "South Africa"

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Arguing Biko: evidence of the body in the politics of history, 1977 to the Present.
(2010-09) Bucher, Jesse Walter
On September 12, 1977 Steve Biko - South Africa's most prominent anti-apartheid activist, intellectual, and leader of student politics - died in the custody of the apartheid government's security police. Both the security police and the apartheid state immediately denied any responsibility for Biko's death, and within weeks they had issued three different prepared accounts of how he died, claiming that Biko died from a hunger strike, had injured his own head, and had attacked the police and stumbled into a wall. A government sponsored inquest held in November of 1977 listened to further testimony from the security police who continued to deny that they had broken official protocol and harmed Biko. Despite an abundance of evidence showing that Biko was tortured and severely beaten, the legal system under apartheid never held the security police formally accountable for their actions. Over the last thirty years, the contested details of Biko's death have reemerged again and again in a broad variety of political contexts and historical moments, making Biko as famous and controversial a figure in death as he was in life. Despite his importance, there has been little variety to the academic study of Steve Biko, and scholarly examinations largely place any discussion of Biko within broader political and social histories of the 1970s. In these accounts, Biko is seen as the founding intellectual behind the Black Consciousness Movement that developed and came to prominence in the late 1960s and 1970s, and his death has often stood as a closing moment for this period in which Black Consciousness thrived. My dissertation argues that it is possible to continue a study of Biko beyond the moments of his death and to take seriously the ways in which Biko continued to provoke significant political and social debate in the aftermath of his death. Instead of focusing on Biko's death as a passing moment on a timeline of events, I look at how the meaning of the event played out across multiple time periods, and figured into broader debates about apartheid's systems of power and repression over the last thirty years. My dissertation explores how differently positioned people - police officers, government employees, politicians, journalists, biographers, medical doctors, playwrights, religious leaders, political activists, museum curators, and many others - have revisited and detailed the event of Biko's death. For those commentators who took an interest in reconstructing, interpreting, and speculating about the conditions of Biko's death, the lack of trusted facts provided a critical space to formulate lasting critiques of the past and to imagine a new future - not only by shedding light on what the security police likely did to Biko, but also in using their reconstructions to make larger political and moral arguments about the apartheid project. The study makes two related arguments. The first argument is that the ways in which members of the apartheid state clung to the details of Biko's death was fundamentally linked to a unique historical context in the late-1970s when the apartheid state increasingly utilized detention, torture, and the concealment of information about the fates of detainees to suppress dissent. This combination of practices came as the apartheid state gave increased power to the security police forces in order to respond to new forms of political dissent and resistance. The second argument is that despite the apartheid state's best attempts to control knowledge of Biko's death, critics of many sorts closely combed over the available details to compose historical arguments that challenged the apartheid state's claims, histories that in turn opened up new avenues of political thought and action.
Constructing and Contesting “the Girlhood of Our Empire”: Girls’ Culture, Labor, and Mobility in Britain, South Africa, and New Zealand, c. 1830-1930
(2019-04) Dillenburg, Elizabeth
This dissertation studies girls’ complex, often paradoxical roles in the British Empire and analyzes how discussions about the education, employment, and emigration of girls both reflected and shaped broader political, economic, and social debates. Although girls are marginalized in studies of colonialism, concerted efforts to educate and emigrate girls reveal how the project of empire building depended on the mobility and labor of girls and young women. This dissertation begins by considering the ways in which youth organizations sought to transform girls into “empire builders” and girls’ roles as migrants, settlers, laborers, and creators and transmitters of colonial knowledge. Girls supported the empire, but they also challenged systems of colonial power and resisted prescribed roles in various ways, from penning criticisms of false imperial propaganda to absconding from exploitative situations. While most histories of childhood focus on one region, “Constructing and Contesting ‘the Girlhood of Our Empire’” employs a multi-sited framework that examines girlhood in different areas of the empire—concentrating specifically on Britain, New Zealand, and South Africa—to elucidate variations within broader colonial processes. As explored in the second part of the dissertation, emigration programs for British girls to New Zealand and South Africa faced innumerable obstacles, and their limited success exposed fault lines within the colonial project. The third part of the dissertation focuses debates over the employment of African and Māori girls as domestic servants in British colonial households and how these debates reveal the ways in which ideas of girlhood and girls’ lives were intertwined with conceptualizations of the nation, empire, and race. The nature of the colonial archive means that girls’ experiences rarely appear in the traditional sources, but their voices do emerge in letters they wrote to family and friends, articles they composed for children’s periodicals, scrapbooks they crafted, and photographs and artwork they created. Utilizing these myriad sources, “Constructing and Contesting ‘the Girlhood of Our Empire’” provides new insights into girls’ roles in the empire and more nuanced understandings of how class, race, and geography mediated girls’ experiences of and engagement with colonialism.
Experiments on identity, theft and mitigation strategies.
(2011-06) Pecenka, Clinton Joseph
This dissertation uses a series of taking games to examine theft, identity and mitigation strategies.
Hunters and After Riders: A History of Hunting and the Making of Race in the Waterberg, 1840s-Present
(2018-10) Vig, Paul
This dissertation investigates the historical constitution of race through hunting, particularly the role of the unequal power of English and Afrikaner settler farmer archives in constituting the contested historical experiences and representations of black Africans in the complex ongoing struggles over the scarce resources (land, animals, cultural capital) of hunting in South Africa. It examines the historical problem of tenacious racial formations that have continued to pose challenges in the post-apartheid era and that have been reconstituted as development claims. Spanning a ‘long 20th century,’ this dissertation analyzes hunting narratives and policies from the 1840s into the post-apartheid present to show how they discursively produced social difference as racial through ordering hunting practices between black African/English/Afrikaner and their narration and representation. Identified early in the 19th century with conquest and exploration, and the gathering and construction of knowledge of Africa, hunting is one of the key spaces in which a white colonial imaginary was created. This was, and remains, an imaginary of heroism, superiority, and the ‘civilizing mission’, to which the narrative and imagery of hunting made a substantial contribution. Additionally, hunting serves as a barometer of African displacement, dispossession, and conscription through its association with control of land and resources. The concern here is with the consequences of accumulating discourses of hunting that figure black African practices, colonial and apartheid legacies, and modern/technologized developments in an increasingly globalized world determined by unequal relationships of social, economic, and political power. By interrogating the processes of (re)telling hunting’s histories in the Waterberg District, this dissertation gets at how hunting is intricately tied to the hierarchies and politics of South Africa’s colonial and apartheid past, as well as present attempts to overcome, or in some cases perpetuate, those legacies. Hunting serves as the opening through which to trace the complex consequences and negotiations of the ambiguity in the writing of history and in the writing and (de)construction of a history of hunting, in an attempt to figure answers to the social questions and problems posed to colonial and post-colonial governance by and through the making and persistence of race.
Integrated land use and transportation modelling and planning: A South African journey
(Journal of Transport and Land Use, 2020) Waldeck, Louis; van Heerden, Quintin; Holloway, Jenny
Confronted by poverty, income disparities and mounting demands for basic services such as clean water, sanitation and health care, urban planners in developing countries like South Africa, face daunting challenges. This paper explores the role of Integrated land use and transportation modelling in metropolitan planning processes aimed at improving the spatial efficiency of urban form and ensuring that public sector investments in social and economic infrastructure contribute to economic growth and the reduction of persistent poverty and inequality. The value of such models is not in accurately predicting the future but in providing participants in the (often adversarial) planning process with a better understanding of cause and effect between different components of the urban system and in discovering common ground that could lead to compromise. This paper describes how an Urban Simulation Model was developed by adapting one of the leading microsimulation models (UrbanSim) originating from the developed world to South African conditions and how the requirements for microscopic data about the base year of a simulation were satisfied in a sparse data environment by introducing various typologies. A sample of results from three case studies in the cities of Tshwane, Ekurhuleni and Nelson Mandela Bay between 2013 and 2017 are then presented to illustrate how modelling supports the planning process by adding elements of rational analysis and hypothesis testing to the evaluation of proposed policies.
The Intimacies of Racial Capitalism: Chinese Capital and Migration In South Africa
(2018-06) Huang, Mingwei
In light of the People’s Republic of China’s reemergence on the African continent since 2000, my dissertation, The Intimacies of Racial Capitalism: Chinese Migration and Capital in South Africa, explores the social, cultural, political, and economic dimensions of contemporary Chinese migration and capital in South Africa from an interdisciplinary approach grounded in feminist and critical race studies. Based on the analysis of media and cultural texts, in-depth interviews, and extensive participant-observation fieldwork primarily sited at a “China Mall,” a wholesale shopping center for Chinese goods, and Chinatown in Johannesburg, my dissertation theorizes the “south-south” dynamics of the “Rise of China.” It argues that Chinese capital in South Africa is an emergent form of 21st century racial capitalism and empire that functions through neoliberal modes of flexibility, mobility, and risk-taking and the production of racial difference. My dissertation tells a novel story about aspiring Chinese entrepreneurs who chase economic ambitions unattainable to them in neoliberalizing China in the emerging markets for low-cost Chinese goods in South Africa and across Africa and Latin America, while reproducing the enduring social inequalities and power relations foundational to South Africa’s history of racial capitalism and colonialism. The dissertation chronicles not only transnational Chinese livelihoods in South Africa, but also the fraught intimate and non-intimate encounters between Chinese and Africans, and the experiences of precarious Southern Africans migrant workers at the mall. It emphasizes the multiplicity of economic forms, affective economies, socialities, and historical contingencies. A feminist ethnography of racial capitalism, it tracks practices of capital accumulation, transnational capital flows, and labor relations alongside the production of racial, gender, and sexual difference necessary for the maximization of profit. The Intimacies of Racial Capitalism theorizes contemporary processes of racialization and neoliberal global capitalism across seldom examined yet increasingly important south-south geographies, while engaging racial capitalism scholarship with often elided analysis of gender and sexuality.
Investigating policy transfer from both sides: case study of a technical and vocational education and training model in South Africa
(2013-10) Stuart, Jonathan David
A manufacturing TVET program, known as M-Powered, was developed in the United States and successfully transferred to twelve sites in South Africa. This process took several years to complete, and the new TDM-Powered Program, aimed at skill development in the tool, die, and mold-making industry has now been running for four years. The research question for this study was: "What features were important in the successful transfer of M-Powered to TDM-Powered?" Using a model from the education policy borrowing field, four specific sub-questions were utilized to break the transfer process into distinct phases. The objective of this investigation was to understand and describe the experiences of those on the US and South African sides who worked to make this happen. By incorporating the perspectives of both those from the borrowing and lending countries this case study provides an example of an industry led cross-national initiative to develop manufacturing competency via transfer of a TVET model. This research was conducted as a qualitative case study using a constructionist lens. Methods for data collection have involved the triangulation of document analysis, in-depth semi-structured interviews, and focus groups. The same process of investigation was undertaken in both countries with fifteen participants in total. Findings from this case study paint a specific picture of what was involved in the TVET model's transfer both in terms of a narrative story and from the collective themes of those on each side. An analysis of these findings allowed for comparisons to be drawn between those themes from the data and in light of the literature. Though not meant to be an evaluation of the process or programs in either country, it is hoped that this record is instructive. The specific implications of this study are focused around these areas: (A) the ways in which the fields of HRD, TVET, and education policy borrowing interact with and inform one another; (B) the impact of an industry led initiative to solve a national skills crisis by looking abroad; (C) incorporation of the perspectives of lenders and borrows leading to a more holistic view of educational program transfer.
National Democratic Institute: Political Party Program Country Context Analysis
(Hubert H. Humphrey School of Public Affairs, 2014-05-09) Diouf, Abdou; Khlebnikov, Alexey; Kawas, Rima; Shen, Xiaoyun
The preventive and survival benefits of antiretroviral use in a rural South African community
(2014-11) Vandormael, Alain Marc
In this dissertation, I undertake three empirical analyses using data from the Africa Centre for Health and Population Studies, which is located in the Hlabisa subdistrict of northern KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. In the first analysis I assess if antiretroviral therapy(ART) usage in the household is associated with a reduction in individual HIV acquisition risk. To my knowledge, this analysis is the first attempt to quantify the preventive impact of a public sector treatment program based in a rural community with poor knowledge and disclosure of HIV status, frequent migration, late marriage, and multiple partnerships. I argue in the second analysis that efforts to optimize the preventive efficacy of ART in South Africa and elsewhere will be critically dependent on the ability of the public health sector to initiate and then keep HIV-infected patients on treatment. Here, I examine the socio-demographic and structural factors that are associated with poor or imperfect adherence to antiretroviral medications, which can be obtained for free at multiple health-care centers within the study area. The third analysis continues this work by examining the diagnostic performance and cost-effectiveness of two monitoring strategies---CD4 and HIV-1 viral load count testing---to detect poor patient response to ART. My approach is based on the idea that the cost-effectiveness of a treatment monitoring strategy is a function of its predictive performance.
Producing the global imaginary: academic knowledge, globalization and the making of the world.
(2010-05) Kamola, Isaac Alexander
My dissertation examines how the concept of globalization has transformed the way social scientists think about the world. I argue that while globalization is often studied as an empirical fact, it should instead be studied as a social imaginary produced within asymmetrical relations of academic knowledge production. I develop this argument by diagnosing a set of contradictions and tensions within the globalization literature. For example, scholars based in the U.S. and Europe typically claim that globalization is a universal trend--even while treating Africa and African states as anomalous. I argue that Africa is often represented as "not globalized" because African scholars have been structurally excluded from the production of knowledge about globalization. On the one hand, the U.S. academy is a key site for the mass production of knowledge about globalization--as exemplified by changes in research funding, the flourishing of Global Studies departments, and the proliferation of study abroad programs in colleges and universities across the country. In contrast, African universities--including relatively resource-rich South African universities--are being remade into development institutions designed to respond to a world already imagined as "global." These asymmetrical relations of knowledge production mean that Africa is represented as particular, exceptional and "local." Studying "the global" as an imaginary produced within a highly stratified political economy of higher education makes it possible to investigate the power relations at work and the political stakes in the academic production of concepts like "global governance," "global economy," and "global development
(Re) Constructing Identities: South African Domestic Workers, English Language Learning, and Power
(2018-05) Kaiper, Anna
Domestic workers have played an essential role in the history of South Africa; and yet, current research neither explores the educational experiences of these women nor examines the ways in which national discourses surrounding English language learning influence their educational motivations. This dissertation aims to ameliorate this dearth of research while simultaneously broadening global conceptions of adult language learners by focusing on the English language learning of older, Black, female, South African domestic workers. Utilizing Critical Ethnographic Narrative Analysis (CENA), in which I draw from the histories, narratives, and HERstories of 28 female domestic workers over three-year span, I explore the complex reasons and motivations for South African domestic workers to learn English in a multilingual linguascape. Framed in poststructural theories of language, identity, and power in connection with postcolonial theories of English language learning, I make three main arguments. First, I contend that the terms “education” and “literacy” have become metonyms for “English language education” and “English literacy” that undeniably affect these women’s educational and linguistic motivations. Second, I find that these women are living in a three-fold state of domination in which they incur symbolic violence from the neo-colonial importance placed on English leading to their linguistic vulnerability. Third, I find that despite metonymic discourses purporting the essential nature of English in post-apartheid South Africa, and notwithstanding the numerous forms of violence enacted upon these women in their past and present lives, South African domestic workers live within interstices in which they are showcasing aspects of agency and autonomy in their work, home, and educational spaces while concurrently remaining within the boundaries of metonymic discourse that binds them to these spaces.
Sithutha Isizwe ("We Carry the Nation"): Dispossession, Displacement, and the Making of the Shared Minibus Taxi in Cape Town and Johannesburg, South Africa, 1930-Present
(2018-11) James, Elliot
This dissertation interrogates the growth of shared minibus taxi vehicles in South Africa over the course of the 20th century – along with their antecedents – to show how a century of forced removals targeting black South Africans in diverse rural and urban communities, homes, and homesteads, and forcibly relocating them to impoverished ghettoes created a “black taxi” revolution (BTR) in late 1970s and early 1980s, while also undergirding a pandemic of “black-on-black” “taxi wars” in the twilight of the racist apartheid regime. In today’s transport technology boom, few remember the history of South Africa’s shared minibus taxi industry, a black entrepreneurial powerhouse inadvertently catalyzed by South Africa’s racist and repressive apartheid state. The 16-passenger shared minibus taxi vehicles were created and increasingly manufactured and marketed to buyers in late 1970s, but had historical antecedents at the turn of the 20th century, as a response to forced removals, racial segregation, and poverty in the urban ghettoes the apartheid state created for displaced black South Africans. Within this environment, taxi operators struggled to get their businesses off the ground in an apartheid economy that privileged private and SATS-backed (read “white”) modes of transport – i.e. buses and trains – and that undercut and forbade black enterprise anywhere but in the homelands. But through diligence and racial solidarity, the taxi industry grew to become the black-owned and operated transport powerhouse it has been since the late 1980s. This is the story of one of South Africa’s revolutionary black enterprises, a story that turned sour in the 1990s with the proliferation of the Taxi Wars. Although few retell the narrative of “the black taxi revolution” now, the story of a successful black business in sub-Saharan Africa in the face of colonial and apartheid restrictions and oppression continues to inspire models of development through entrepreneurship. Moreover, the taxi story still figures into a collective memory of the struggle against apartheid.
South Africa - Sustainable horticulture crop production
(2010-11-28) Sydow, Sarah
Towards a simulation of minibuses in South Africa
(Journal of Transport and Land Use, 2015) Neumann, Andreas; Röder, Daniel; Joubert, Johan W.
After private cars, minibus taxis are the most common transport mode in South Africa. Especially for low-income citizens living in townships, minibus services are often the only possibility for mobility. Despite the great importance of the mode, there is very little knowledge of routes, fares, and the number of minibuses. Hence, it is difficult to simulate and to understand the influence of this mode on other modes and on transport planning in general. This article presents the development of the first ``close-to-reality'' minibus supply model based on demand and street network only. The approach adopts the survival-of-the-fittest principle, using a co-evolutionary algorithm that is integrated into a microscopic multi-agent simulation framework. The successful application of the approach to a large-scale, real-world scenario in the Nelson Mandela Bay Area Municipality in South Africa shows that it is able to identify the main minibus corridors as well as to find robust service coverage in lower-demand areas. The resulting minibus supply model can then be used for planning purposes (e.g., to investigate aspects of strategic, operational, or regulatory changes).
Tracking Wildlife Conservation in Southern Africa: Histories of Protected Areas in Gorongosa and Maputaland
(2015-10) McKeown, Kathleen
In this dissertation, I argue that the development and demarcation of protected areas in southern Africa has not only been a process of defining boundaries but also of defining belonging. I focus specifically on how wildlife has been determined to belong in particular areas and how these animals have been claimed as belonging to individuals, communities, provinces, nations, and regions. I focus on the histories of wildlife conservation in Mozambique and the northern part of KwaZulu Natal, with particular emphasis on Gorongosa and Maputaland during the period from the early 1960s to the late 1990s, a time of great social and political change in both South Africa and Mozambique. I have selected these areas not to propose points of comparison between conservation practices in these neighboring countries, but rather to demonstrate complex continuities, exchanges, and cross-fertilizations. Ideas about wildlife conservation crossed national borders, as did animals, their advocates, and, eventually, protected area boundaries. By employing a transnational perspective on protected area histories, I illustrate and analyze this movement of personnel, non-human animals, and conservation practices between nation-states. By interrogating the scientific knowledge production and policy-making of protected area development, my narrative foregrounds the ways that wildlife has been implicated in and impacted by ideas about where these animals belong and to whom. Conceptions of indigeneity and nativeness, which tie belonging to place, have impacted the territories and scales of protected areas, as well as what (or who) has the right to dwell within their borders. However, these categories of belonging are not inherent to the wildlife species they have been attributed to. Instead, “belonging” is a condition that is made through a complex network of biocultural interactions. It is produced through dynamic constellations of political conditions, cultural values, economic interests, scientific ways of knowing, and animal behavior.
Transforming sport and identity in the post-apartheid South African nation state.
(2010-11) Maralack, David Mark
This dissertation examines processes of state restructuring and nation-state building in post-apartheid South Africa through the lens of sport policies and institutions. The post-apartheid state used sports to nurture post-apartheid identity, overcome economic inequalities, racial cleavages, and foster civic participation at the same time. However, contestations have pervaded sport transformation in South Africa from apartheid to the present. In 2005, the Sports Minister lamented that it is inconceivable that 12 years of democracy has not reduced contestation over sport transformation and remains the most vexing and divisive issue for post-apartheid sport. I seek to understand why sport transformation remains challenging in post-apartheid South Africa and analyze the ways sport has and could be used to create post-apartheid national identity. Through a critical assessment of sport strategies, policies, processes and dilemmas, I analyze the tension between elite and community sport at the national and local/Cape Town scales. Using a diverse set of methods including document analysis, participant observation, and interviews, I assess the efficacy of sports policies in transforming sport, identities and nation building at national and local scales. At the national scale I focus on the ways in which processes of internationalization and globalization in sport affected apartheid and post-apartheid state restructuring and sports policies. At the local scale in Cape Town, I examine a situated practice of deliberative democracy in sport processes, addressing negotiations across difference - racial cleavages and inequalities in resource distribution. I argue that sustainable sport transformation should not be a single national project but a multi-scaled project with a heterogeneous set of strategies, enacted by multiple actors who are situated in a variety of institutions and located at a variety of scales. I conclude with a proposal for praxis of sport politics, a Collaborative Sport Development and Praxis Model.

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