Philosophiae Doctor - PhD (History)

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Digital storytelling and the production of the personal in Lwandle, Cape Town
(University of Western Cape, 2019) Sykes, Pam; Witz, Leslie; Hayes, Patricia
Digital storytelling is a workshop-based practice, originally developed by the Californiabased nonprofit StoryCenter, in which people create short, first-person digital video narratives based on stories from their own lives. The practice has been adopted around the world as a participatory research method, as a pedagogical tool, as a community-based reflective arts practice and as medium for advocacy. It is associated with a loosely connected global movement linked by genealogy and a set of ethical commitments to the significance of all life stories and to the power of listening as a creative and political act.
Enduring suffering: the Cassinga Massacre of Namibian exiles in 1978 and the conflicts between survivors' memories
(University of the Western Cape, 2011) Shigwedha, Vilho Amukwaya; Hayes, Patricia; Dept. of History; Faculty of Arts
During the peak of apartheid, the South African Defence Force (SADF) killed close to a thousand Namibian exiles at Cassinga in southern Angola. This happened on May 4 1978. In recent years, Namibia commemorates this day, nationwide, in remembrance of those killed and disappeared following the Cassinga attack. During each Cassinga anniversary, survivors are modelled into 'living testimonies' of the Cassinga massacre. Customarily, at every occasion marking this event, a survivor is delegated to unpack, on behalf of other survivors, 'memories of Cassinga' so that the inexperienced audience understands what happened on that day. Besides survivors' testimonies, edited video footage showing, among others, wrecks in the camp, wounded victims laying in hospital beds, an open mass grave with dead bodies, SADF paratroopers purportedly marching in Cassinga is also screened for the audience to witness agony of that day. Interestingly, the way such presentations are constructed draw challenging questions. For example, how can the visual and oral presentations of the Cassinga violence epitomize actual memories of the Cassinga massacre? How is it possible that such presentations can generate a sense of remembrance against forgetfulness of those who did not experience that traumatic event? When I interviewed a number of survivors (2007 - 2010), they saw no analogy between testimony (visual or oral) and memory. They argued that memory unlike testimony is personal (solid, inexplicable and indescribable). Memory is a true picture of experiencing the Cassinga massacre and enduring pain and suffering over the years. In considering survivors' challenge to the visually and orally obscured realities of the Cassinga massacre, this study will use a more lateral and alternative approach. This is a method of attempting to interrogate, among other issues of this study, the understanding of Cassinga beyond the inexperienced economies of this event production. The study also explores the different agencies, mainly political, that fuel and exacerbate the victims' unending pathos. These invasive miseries are anchored, according to survivors, in the disrupted expectations; or forsaken human dignity of survivors and families of the missing victims, especially following Namibia's independence in 1990.
From chisungu to the museum: a historical ethnography of the images, objects and anthropological texts of the chisungu female initiation ceremony in the Moto Moto Museum in Zambia, 1931 to 2016
(Universty of the Western Cape, 2023) Mbewe, Mary; Hayes, Patricia
This study examines the processes through which sacred cultural practices and people were made subjects of ethnological studies. It considers these histories through a renewed examination of the contexts under which the chisungu female initiation ceremony of the Bemba-speaking people of northern Zambia came to be studied, and how the sacred belongings of the ceremony were collected and turned into objects of ethnography in museums. This project is conceived not only as a biographic study of these collections and their histories but is also a study of processes of meaning-making about cultural practices and people in a museum in Zambia, the Moto Moto Museum. Founded by the missionary Jean Jacques Corbeil in the 1950s, this museum had its origins in particular colonial contexts and was formalised as a national museum in the period after colonialism. The project involves a critical examination of the work of the British anthropologist Audrey Isabella Richards (1899-1982), and the missionary ethnographer Jean Jacques Corbeil (1913-1990) who respectively studied and conducted collecting on the ceremony in the 1930s and in the 1950s respectively. Their studies led to the collection of images, texts and objects for museums and institutions in Britain, South Africa, and Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia). This transformation of sacred cultural belongings into museum objects, and the mobilities that resulted in their circulation were part of the making of empire. This was done within processes of colonial knowledge construction that were disruptive, extractive, and epistemologically violent. Ethnological studies and resultant ethnographic museums were part of colonial governance and control, within the broader contexts of indirect rule, which operated through the use of local systems to rule over colonised people
From chisungu to the museum: A historical ethnography of the images, objects and anthropological texts of the chisungu female initiation ceremony in the Moto Moto Museum in Zambia, 1931 to 2016
(Universty of the Western Cape, 2024) Mbewe, Mary; Hayes, Patricia
This study examines the processes through which sacred cultural practices and people were made subjects of ethnological studies. It considers these histories through a renewed examination of the contexts under which the chisungu female initiation ceremony of the Bemba-speaking people of northern Zambia came to be studied, and how the sacred belongings of the ceremony were collected and turned into objects of ethnography in museums. This project is conceived not only as a biographic study of these collections and their histories but is also a study of processes of meaning-making about cultural practices and people in a museum in Zambia, the Moto Moto Museum. Founded by the missionary Jean Jacques Corbeil in the 1950s, this museum had its origins in particular colonial contexts and was formalised as a national museum in the period after colonialism.
The impact of migrant labour infrastructure on contract workers in and from colonial Ovamboland, Namibia
(University of Western Cape, 2020) Nampala, Lovisa Tegelela; Hayes, Patricia
This thesis explores the ways in which migrant labour infrastructure and the related operating practices of the South African colonial administration impacted on workers in and from the colonial north-central part of Namibia, formerly known as Ovamboland. This study stretches from the Union of South Africa�s occupation of the region in 1915 up to 1954 when the last Native Commissioner for Ovamboland completed his term of office and a new administrative phase began. Infrastructure refers to the essential facilities that an institution or communities install to use in order to connect or communicate.4 Vigne defines infrastructure as the mode of connections between techniques, practices, social values, cultures, economies and politics.5 This dissertation deals with two types of infrastructures.
The Impact of Migrant Labour Infrastructure on Contract Workers in and from Colonial Ovamboland, Namibia, 1915 to 1954
(University of the Western Cape, 2020) Nampala, Lovisa Tegelela; Hayes, Patricia
This thesis explores the ways in which migrant labour infrastructure and the related operating practices of the South African colonial administration impacted on workers in and from the colonial north-central part of Namibia, formerly known as Ovamboland. This study stretches from the Union of South Africa�s occupation of the region in 1915 up to 1954 when the last Native Commissioner for Ovamboland completed his term of office and a new administrative phase began. Infrastructure refers to the essential facilities that an institution or communities install to use in order to connect or communicate.4 Vigne defines infrastructure as the mode of connections between techniques, practices, social values, cultures, economies and politics.5 This dissertation deals with two types of infrastructures. The first is the colonial infrastructure, which was comprised of tangible facilities such as medical examination procedures, transport, housing, rations, sanitation and postal and remittance services. The second type of infrastructure was an intangible one, based on cultural resources that included domestic rituals performed around contract labour, human infrastructures and practices of hospitality (uukwawo wanankali), all were rooted in the pre-colonial Aawambo beliefs and practices, which passed on through generations even under colonial conditions. The thesis starts with the preparations and arrangements commonly done for a man leaving home for the recruitment centre, when he is away, and when he returns from contract. It also reveals how the ancient Oshiwambo custom siku lyoye siku lyamukweni (a similar proverb is �every dog has its day�) was employed by homestead owners as they welcomed strangers into their homes which later included the migrant labour community. The dissertation goes on to examine the entire recruitment process, explaining why and how the recruiting organizatclassified the workers, and explores the implications of the mandatory medical examination. It also articulates what okaholo (the contract) signified to all parties involved in the migrant labour system. The thesis then investigates how workers coped in the new milieu with compound accommodation and communal sanitation systems, unfamiliar climates, as well as different nutrition and diseases. It examines how workers adapted to a new social setting: without family structures and women; with new liabilities to care for their sick colleagues; dealing with death and the impact of workplace mortality on others and families back in the sending area. The thesis also explores the infrastructure in which migrant workers from colonial Ovamboland engaged before they were introduced to the infrastructure of contract labour. It analyses the approaches and arrangements regarding mortality within which institutions were operating and how those strategies were implemented. The final chapter considers why the colonial administration redirected some of its new technologies and facilities such as remittance and postal services to the migrant labour system in order to serve the contract workers and broader community of Ovamboland. It also deliberates on what the contract labour infrastructure meant to such a society, indicating how people made use of the infrastructures as well as the social impact of these new communication networks. I learned that the colonial infrastructure introduced from 1947 of postal and remittance services served people in ways that were not as oppressive as the other features of the existing migrant labour system infrastructure. The colonial administration ensured that these facilities reached and were accessed by beneficiaries in rural areas of Ovamboland, who greatly benefited from the new services. I argue that many Aawambo eventually adopted these colonial means of communicating (letter writing in particular), a mode they employed across many years, even when the contract labour system was over.
Omhedi: displacement and legitimacy in Oukwanyama politics, Namibia, 1915-2010
(University of the Western Cape, 2011) Shiweda, Napandulwe Tulyovapika; Hayes, Patricia; Dept. of History
This is a study of the contest over political and social legitimacy in a former precolonial kingdom, Oukwanyama, in northern Namibia, from 1915 to the present. It tracks the historical shifts in this long time frame through the history of one place, a site of important local power, Omhedi. The research begins with the colonial occupation of the kingdom by Portugal and South Africa during World War 1, which resulted in the displacement of the kingship to the southern half of the territory which was now bifurcated by an international boundary between Angola and South West Africa. Following resistance by the last king Mandume, the institution of kingship was abolished and a Council of Headmen installed in its place. Omhedi emerged as a site of important opposition to Mandume by a leading headman, Ndjukuma, and he became one of the senior headman elevated to new levels of authority by olonial rule. The thesis tracks the establishment and consolidation of the policy of Indirect Rule under South Africa, whose aim was the efficient supply of migrant labour to the south, and the selective preservation of traditional customs in Oukwanyama in order to maintain stability in a time of rapid change. The main contribution of the research however is to follow this story into the second half of the 20th century, when Ndjukuma was succeeded by Nehemia Shoovaleka and then Gabriel Kautwima, at a time when nationalist opposition to South African rule was growing and old political legitimacies were tested. Omhedi became a site of the enforcement of headmen�s authority over both striking workers and the educated elite in the early 1970s when Ovamboland became a Bantustan homeland under apartheid. After Independence in 1990 and the demise of Kautwima, Omhedi remained empty until the restoration of the Kwanyama kingship occurred under postcolonial legislation on Traditional Authorities. The question becomes one of how political legitimacy can be reactivated at such a contradictory site of �traditional� power like Omhedi, now the seat of the new Kwanyama Queen. The thesis engages with notions of gender, history, landscape and memory, as well as theories of space developed by Lefebvre and de Certeau, in order to understand the local reconceptualisation of Omhedi as different things over different times. It also analyses the textual, visual and cultural representations of the place, most notably under colonial rule, and the impact of this archive (or its limits) on postcolonial political developments
Photography and the spectacle of ASO? EB� in Lagos, 1960-2010
(University of Western Cape, 2011) Nwafor, Okechukwu Charles; Hayes, Patricia
This research charts the political and visual economies of aso? eb� in urban Lagos from 1960 to 2010. Under political economy I address the politics of aso? eb� dress in Lagos: the contestations surrounding the use of aso? eb� among friends, family members, organizations, among others. Under visual economy I engage the role of photography and other visual cultural practices in the practice of aso? eb�. From the 1960s aso? eb� began to be redefined in line with the cultural and socio-economic changes that came with late global capitalism. Within aso? eb� practice in the city of Lagos meanings of friendship, solidarity, camaraderie and wealth have undergone radical transformation as more people migrate to the city after Nigeria�s independence. From the 1970s through the 1980s, individuals were compelled by the economic conditions to adopt new modes of aso? eb� practice. For example new types of textile materials used for aso? eb� expanded to include cheaper textiles imported from China and elsewhere. Instead of offering aso ebi free, individuals sold it to their friends and within such transactions, politics of exclusion and inclusion ensued. From the 1990s through the 2000s, the rise of digital photography and the emergence of radical printing technology ushered a new mode of fashioning aso? eb�. In the process, photography and fashion magazines became a means of negotiating sartorial elegance and cosmopolitan modernity. In this thesis, therefore, the central argument resides in the contestations surrounding the use and meanings of aso? eb� within these transformations in the city of Lagos.
Photography, facebook and virtualisation of resistance in Nigeria
(University of the Western Cape, 2016) Agbo, George Emeka; Hayes, Patricia
Nigerian post-independence history (1960 to the present date) is steeped in socio-political upheavals. The majority of the citizens are frustrated with the injustice, inequality and fraudulent politics that pervade the country. The central argument of this thesis is that these conditions are critiqued through the photographic practices produced on Facebook. Through the circulation of photographs and the conversations around them on the social media platform, Nigerians demand social change. The sociality that underpins the visuality of social networking is explained by Ariella Azoulay's notion of "civil discourse," which theoretically organises the thrust of this thesis. The formulation suggests that the photograph is an outcome of the interaction among many individuals. It is a site of exchange, a process which I have argued to be reinforced by digital and internet technology. For five years, I have followed the visual social production on Facebook in the context of virtual participant observation, downloading photographs and the comments that go with them. A number of the photographs and the accompanying comments are analysed with semiotic tools to understand the key concerns of Nigerians. To explain how the agitation is presented, and the efforts invested in the production, I have reflected on the related questions of technological mediations and appropriations. A network of digital infrastructure conditions the creation and editing of the photographs and their dissemination and meaning-making processes on Facebook. Again, the Nigerian example demonstrates how state failure fuels activism, insurgency and counter-insurgency, all of which are actuated by digital photographic production. In this situation, the photographic image is burdened with the task to produce violence and to counter it. What ultimately emerges are complex relations among people, photography and technology. I conclude that the virtual movement presents possibilities for socio-political transformation in Nigeria. From the perspective of photography, this thesis contributes to the debates in social media activism and how it is shaping politics in Africa. It demonstrates the possibility of reading the tensions in an African postcolony through the connected digital, visual and social practices of the ordinary people. We are prompted to acknowledge the influence of digital infrastructure in the political use of the image.
Power relations in landscape photographs by David Goldblatt and Santu Mofokeng
(University of the Western Cape, 2015) Xakaza, Mzuzile Mduduzi; Hayes, Patricia
How far can landscape photographic images allow us to interrogate the extent to which collective socio-political, cultural and economic aspirations of marginalised South Africans have, or have not, been achieved since the dawn of democracy in 1994? In thinking about such aspirations, I posit that the victims of colonialism and the Apartheid system had expectations of living in a free, non-racial South Africa where equality would be realised in political, social, cultural and economic spheres. However, I use landscape as the basis for determining the extent to which such aspirations might or might not have been achieved within the context of post-Apartheid South Africa. What role can the work of David Goldblatt (born 1930) and Santu Mofokeng (born 1956) play in facilitating our ability to read a post-Apartheid diagnosis regarding this question? These issues are the primary focus of this thesis, and connect to a range of other questions. For instance, what methodological approaches do these practitioners employ in framing their photographed landscape scenes, be they populated or depopulated? Why is landscape in the centre of this thesis, and why are these practitioners considered relevant in the context of this study irrespective of their disparate racial and cultural backgrounds? The main body of the thesis traces these photographers� individual methodological approaches, distinguishing them from predominant modes associated with the Afrapix Collective (1982-1992) and the later Bang-Bang Club (1990-1994). It locates them within the context of �struggle photography� with which the Afrapix members and the Bang-Bang Club were primarily concerned. The Bang-Bang Club in particular had a preoccupation with the framing of violent scenes that ensued in the South African political arena during the early 1990s, leading up to the national democratic elections in 1994. My argument centres on what I consider the main element that distinguishes the practitioners in question from the Afrapix and the Bang-Bang Club � the everyday. I explore how specific examples of Goldblatt�s and Mofokeng�s focus on the everyday contribute to an articulation of the role of landscape as a medium of social critique. Instead of framing sensationalist and newsworthy episodes of violent political strife within pre-1994 South Africa, Goldblatt�s long career traces the underlying causes of the social injustices and resultant power contestations while Mofokeng, who was also a member of Afrapix, looks at what I term the spiritual or ethereal elements within landscape. It is this subtlety in their approach that sets them apart from their counterparts as they use landscape as a kind of proverbial text in which we can �read� human actions over time. Thus time and space are inevitably significant in the study of these photographers� oeuvre. But what do all these elements have to do with the challenging question of land in South Africa? What do they have to do with the construction of the South African landscape? What is the role of the camera in that construction? Using photographic images as important tools, I place the land issue, especially as it is mediated through landscape construction, at the centre of my interrogation of power relations in Apartheid and post-Apartheid South Africa.
Rural women as the invisible victims of militarised political violence: the case of Shurugwi district, Zimbabwe, 2000-2008
(University of the Western Cape, 2012) Marongwe, Ngonidzashe; Hayes, Patricia
Zimbabwe was beset by militarised politically-inspired violence between 2000 and 2008. How that violence has been imagined in terms of its causes, memorialisation and impact has been far from conclusive. As a derivative of this huge question that forms an important component of the framing for this dissertation, and to�visibilise� the subaltern, so to say, and to visualise �history from below�, I ask how the women of Shurugwi conceptualise it. This question has also polarised Zimbabweans into two, broadly the human rights and the redistributive, camps. But I ask, what do either of these frameworks enable or eclipse in the further understanding of the violence? Deploying genealogical and ethnographic approaches centred on the rural communities of Shurugwi that analyse the historical, socioeconomic and political factors that have engendered human rights abuses from pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial moments, the dissertation problematizes both discourses and invites a much more troubled analysis.As a way to complicate the reading and to attempt to open the analysis of the violence further, I draw on the theoretical insights from Michel Foucault�s theory on the relationship between power and war. Inverting Clausewitz�s aphorism of war as politics by other means, Foucault argues instead that politics is war by other means. This inversion allows for a nuancing of the connections between the violence and the Chimurenga trope in Zimbabwe. In this way, the labelling of farm takeovers and other force-driven indigenisation modes in the new millennium as the Third Chimurenga, I demonstrate, was not a mere emotive evocation, but was meant to situate the violence as the final stage in a sequence with, and in the same category of importance as, the earlier zvimurenga, that is the First and Second Chimurenga that targeted to uproot the colonial project. I thus argue that the violence represented, in a significant way, the continuation of war for ZANU-PF to retain power amid dwindling electoral returns. This mode further illuminates the deployment of the spectacles of punishment for the public disciplining of citizens to achieve their passivity. Throughout the dissertation the central and animating question is to what extent were women the invisible victims of the violence? This question attempts to interrogate the political role of women in the violence. I attend to this question by privileging the narratives of women. Also, by articulating an Africanist feminist discourse that contests the dominant western one which atemporalises, universalises and fixes victimhood with females, this dissertation invites a re-looking of the violence in a way that locates agency at the site of performance. In this way I show that women were not perpetual victims, but were also important political actors whose actions, however small, greatly extended the violence. To conclude, I propose the adoption of the �traditional� Shona practice of kuripa ngozi as a transitional justice mechanism to help stamp out the culture and cycles of violence and impunity that have scarred Zimbabwe especially from the late colonial to the post-colonial eras.
A Space for Genocide: Local Authorities, Local Population and Local Histories in Gishamvu and Kibayi (Rwanda
(University of the Western Cape, 2010) Mulinda, Charles Kabwete; Hayes, Patricia
Soon after the Tutsi genocide in Rwanda, in 1994, research around this horrific event flourished. Although a variety of authors of different expertise (journalists, human rights activists, witnesses, academics, both Rwandans and foreigners) produced a great deal of literature, it is mostly scholars who had conducted research in Rwanda prior to 1994 who after 1994 took the lead in the endeavour to write about this genocide. Certain of these scholars produced serious work that has advanced our knowledge about it. These include anthropologists, political scientists, historians, sociologists and economists. As their prior research had brought them close to Rwanda, they felt the need and the moral obligation to contribute to the understanding of this genocide. This serious literature has increased our understanding with regard to a number of problems. It has for instance challenged the view that the genocide was the result of popular anger following the death of President Habyarimana in the plane crash of April 6h,lgg4.It has rejected the western journalistic view of the war and genocide in Rwanda as a result of innate and secular "tribal" conflict and confrontation between the Hutu and the Tutsi. Most importantly, it has advanced knowledge about the causes,2 the making of the genocide at the national level,3 and at some local levels. In this respect, it has to some extent analysed the contexts of the genocide from the politicals economic,and social T and culturals perspectives. ln establishing the context of the genocide, many authors have turned to the whole history of Rwanda in order to understand the genocide. some extent analysed the contexts of the genocide from the political,s economic,6 social and culturals perspectives.e ln establishing the context of the genocide, many authorshave tumed to the whole history of Rwanda in order to understand the genocide.
A space for genocide: local authorities, local population and local histories in Gishamvu and Kibayi (Rwanda)
(University of the Western Cape, 2010) Mulinda, Charles Kabwete; Hayes, Patricia; Dept. of History
This research attempts to answer the following questions: How and why genocide became possible in Gishamvu and Kibayi? In other words, what was the nature of power at different epochs and how was it exercised? How did forms of political competition evolve? In relation to these forms of competition, what forms of violence occurred acrosshistory and how did they manifest themselves at local level up to 1994? And what was the place of identity politics? Then, what were economic and social conditions since colonial times up to 1994 and how were these conditions instrumentalized in the construction of the ideology of genocide? Finally, how did the Tutsi genocide unfold in Gishamvu and Kibayi?
A visual struggle for Mozambique. Revisiting narratives, interpreting photographs (1850-1930)
(University of the Western Cape, 2020) Assubuji, Rui; Hayes, Patricia
�A Visual Struggle for Mozambique. Revisiting narratives, interpreting photographs (1850 � 1930)� is a study that requires an engagement with the historiography of the Portuguese empire, with reference to Mozambique. This is initially to provide some context for the East African situation in which photography began to feature in the mid- to late 19th century. But the other purpose is to see what impact the inclusion of visual archives has on the existing debates concerning Portuguese colonialism in Mozambique, and elsewhere. The rationale for this study, therefore, is to see what difference photographs will make to our interpretation and understanding of this past. The central issue is the �visual struggle� undertaken to explore and dominate the territory of Mozambique. Deprived of their �historical rights� by the requirements of the Berlin Treaties that insisted on �effective occupation�, the Portuguese started to employ a complex of knowledge-producing activities in which photography was crucially involved. Constituting part of the Pacification Campaigns that led to the territorial occupation, photographic translations of action taken to control the different regions in fact define the southern, central and northern regions of the country. The chapters propose ways to analyze photographs that cover issues related to different forms of knowledge construction. The resulting detail sometimes diverges from expectations associated with their archival history, such as the name of the photographers and exact dates, which are often unavailable.1 In discussing processes of memorialization, the thesis argues that memory is fragile. The notion of ellipsis is applied to enrich the potential narratives of the photographs. The thesis reads them against the grain in search of counter-narratives, underpinned by the concept of �visual dissonances�, which challenges the official history or stories attached to the photographs. Besides a participation in the general debates about the work of photography in particular, this research is driven by the need to find new ways to access the history of Mozambique. Ultimately the project will facilitate these photographic archives to re-enter public awareness, and help to promote critical approaches in the arts and humanities in this part of southern Africa.

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