UWCScholar
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In the shade of coal: A micro-history of resettlement and the mining industry in Tete province, Mozambique, 2009-2018
(University of the Western Cape, 2024) António, Bernardino; Israel, Paolo
The narratives and stories of the daily experiences of the local communities with the Vale mining project show that it has disrupted not only the lives, livelihood, and ecology but also the cultural and spiritual factors of the local communities in Moatize. Nevertheless, the power asymmetry between the various actors involved in the extractive industry (the mining company, local government, local communities and civil society organisations), dominated by the mining companies, has influenced how the mining issues have been negotiated at the local level. The emergence of the coal mining projects in Tete province displaced thousands of families from their homelands, where they have lived for generations. Thus, many scholars and civil society organisations have sought to analyse the socio-economic and environmental impact of the phenomenon. However, most of these studies have focused on the macro issues, preventing us from accessing peculiarities and details that can widen our understanding of the phenomenon. In contrast, my research, through a micro-historical approach, focuses on the singularities of the Vale resettlement, exploring a range of issues, such as the group of potters displaced by the Vale mining company to initiate its mining activities, the cemetery constructed by the mining company in Cateme and the conflict around the exhumation of the bodies from the old cemetery. However, besides the resettled communities, my research also analyses the ecological effects of the Vale mining activities on the local communities close to the mining site, which Nixon calls “Displaced without moving.”
Prevalence of dental caries and tooth brushing habits among preschool children in Khartoum State, Sudan
(University of the Western Cape, 2014) Elidrissi, Sitana Mustafa Idris; Naidoo, Sudeshni
Introduction: Dental caries in preschool children remains a major dental public health problem as it affects significant number of preschool children in both developed and developing countries and it is on increase in the developing ones as in Sudan due to the change in life style with the absence of oral health preventive programs and inadequate access to oral health care. Aim: The aim of this study was to determine the prevalence of dental caries and tooth brushing habits among 3 to 5 year-olds preschool children in Khartoum state. Materials and Methods: This was a cross sectional descriptive study among 553 preschool children age 3 to 5 year-olds in Khartoum state. Data were obtained through clinical examination using a modified WHO examination sheet and through interviews for mothers/guardians using a structured administered questionnaire. Results: Five hundred and fifty three preschool children aged 3- 5 year-olds participated in this study with their mothers or guardians (n=553). Girls (n= 287) slightly outnumbered boys (n= 266). The prevalence of dental caries of the children was 52.4% with mean dmft of 2.27. There was an increase in the dmft scores with increasing age. The highest brushing frequency was found among the children whose mothers had a postgraduate degree and the lowest proportion was from uneducated mothers. Eating sugar-containing food was significantly associated with dmft.
Public eating, food spaces and social identities in South Africa’s spur family restaurant
(University of the Western Cape, 2023) Bongwana, Thembelihle; Lewis, Desiree
Within the broad body of scholarship on critical approaches to the cultural politics of eating, food tastes and food branding, an increasing amount of work is being done on the social and cultural functioning of restaurants. This study contributes to a global body of work on the semiotics, social history and politics of popular restaurant culture by exploring a steakhouse franchise that emerged in apartheid-era South Africa, but that has gone on to become a beacon of convivial South African eating among black and white South Africans from different social classes. One aim of the study, building on a provocative MA thesis at UP several years ago, is to explore how this chain of restaurants, influenced by the American steakhouse model, embeds and reproduces apartheid-era forms of identity formation in a post-apartheid South Africa. Key to this study’s preoccupations therefore are the mechanisms that reinforce relations and ideologies based on “race” in the everyday context of fast-food consumption. This is explored both in the restaurant chain’s employment patterns and in its ideas and standards for service, productivity and leadership. Also important to this study is how the Spur, as a particular kind of fast-food franchise perpetuates and draws on national and globalised myths and meanings. Attention is therefore paid to the iconography it uses in branding, its distinctive advertising images, tropes and strategies, and its evolving efforts to offer South African food consumers the promise of familial experiences of eating. Here, attention is paid to the Spur’s reliance on post-apartheid mythmaking: it is shown how the Spur’s marketing content and strategy draws on popularised ideas about South Africa as a rainbow nation. On one hand, then, the restaurant is explored as a public site of democratic South African conviviality, play, pleasure and entertainment in titillating different senses in relation to food. On the other hand, the Spur’s pleasures are shown to rest on legacies and images of racial and gendered violence, othering and an oddly “nostalgic” imagining of coloniality.
The politics of aesthetics and performance: Visuality and the remaking of culture in the Calabar Festival and Carnival, 2004 -2019
(University of the Western Cape, 2024) Udo, Nsima Stanislaus; Witz, Leslie
The Calabar Festival and Carnival was inaugurated in 2004. Aspects of Calabar cultural festivals had been appropriated into Caribbean carnivals and were performed from around the second half of the 18th century, particularly in the Trinidadian carnival. In 2004, it returned to Africa and was remade at a time of political-economic change that demanded diversification and the creation of a tourist economy. The Calabar Festival and Carnival has become an arena for sociocultural and political discourse, as well as an object of multifocal photographic practice. Since 2004 when it was first re-introduced, Calabar Festival has been generally hyped by both the media and scholarship as Africa’s leading street party framed in carnival form, but also eulogized as a cultural and tourism fiscal project that has contributed tremendously to the economic and political development of Calabar, Cross River specifically, and Nigeria in general. This study takes a leap away from these romanticized eulogies to critically evaluate some socio-political, visual and affective elements that make up the operationality and performativity of the festival. I draw from the concept of dilapidation and dissonance to assert that the festival started in 2004 with some elements of promising economic, tourism and cultural objectives. But the state government and its political and economic agencies who instituted and oversee the carnival festival have progressively pushed the event into the realm of a dilapidated cultural project, with reverberating resonances of gloom that have affected both residents and participants, as well as other elements of the society.
The impact of COVID-19 on maxillofacial and oral surgery service in a tertiary hospital in South Africa
(University of the Western Cape, 2024) Sallies, Moegamat; Morkel, J.A.
COVID-19, the coronavirus disease of 2019 caused by the SARS-CoV-2 (SC2) virus, imposed a burden on healthcare institutions worldwide. On 5 March 2020, the first confirmed COVID-19 case was identified in South Africa. On 23 March 2020, the president of the Republic of South Africa, President Cyril Ramaphosa, announced a state of disaster along with a national lockdown which was initiated on midnight, 26 March 2020 (Parker et al. 2020). The lockdown restrictions had numerous effects on the healthcare system. Maxillofacial and oral surgery which is a surgical specialty of dentistry with a strong footprint in medicine was also affected (Yadav et al. 2019). Since the Maxillofacial and Oral surgery departments were not on the front line of the struggle, elective surgeries were cancelled and postponed as the situation developed to make more beds available and offer material and human resources for the evolving health emergency (Saibene et al. 2020).
This study aimed to document how the COVID-19 pandemic impacted the surgical services rendered under general anaesthesia at the Department of Maxillofacial and Oral Surgery at Tygerberg Oral Health Centre, by comparing two consecutive intervals, one period occurring before the pandemic (26 March 2019 - 21 September 2019) and the other during the pandemic (26 March 2020 - 21 September 2020).