Department of History

Permanent URI for this community

https://hdl.handle.net/10566/96
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.

Browse

Browsing by Author "Assubuji, Rui"

Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    The political sublime: reading Kok Nam, Mozambican photographer (1939-2012)
    (University of the Western Cape, 2013) Assubuji, Rui; Hayes, Patricia
    Kok Nam began his photographic career at Studio Focus in Louren�o Marques in the 1950s, graduated to the newspaper Not�cias and joined Tempo magazine in the early 1970s. Most recently he worked at the journal Savana as a photojournalist and later director. This article opens with an account of the relationship that developed between Kok Nam and the late President Samora Machel, starting with the photo-grapher�s portrait of Machel in Nachingwea in November 1974 before Independence. It traces an arc through the Popular Republic (1976-1990) from political revelation at its inception to the difficult years of civil war and Machel�s death in the plane crash at Mbuzini in 1986. The article then engages in a series of photo-commentaries across a selection of Kok Nam�s photographs, several published in their time but others selected retrospectively by Kok Nam for later exhibition and circulation. The approach taken is that of �association�, exploring the connections between the photographs, their histories both then and in the intervening years and other artifacts and mediums of cultural expression that deal with similar issues or signifiers picked up in the images. Among the signifiers picked up in the article are soldiers, pigs, feet, empty villages, washing, doves and bridges. The central argument is that Kok Nam participated with many others in a kind of collective hallucination during the Popular Republic, caught up in the �political sublime�. Later Kok Nam shows many signs of a photographic �second thinking� that sought out a more delicate sublime in his own archive.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    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.