Browsing by Author "Moosage, Riedwaan"

Now showing 1 - 7 of 7
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    The everyday life and the missing: Silences, heroic narratives and exhumations.
    (University of Western Cape, 2020) Mendes, Ros�lia; Rousseau, Nicky; Moosage, Riedwaan
    This mini-thesis draws on the biographical materials of activists; Zubeida Jaffer, Nokuthula Simelane and Siphiwo Mthimkulu in order to investigate their representation as South African Anti-Apartheid activists. Within Post-Apartheid South Africa there seems to be a strong tendency to focus on the spectacular violence that occurred between the National Party government and Apartheid activists. This almost singular focus has led to an overwhelming promotion of the heroic narrative and as a result the structural violence of daily life under apartheid has been side-lined
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    The Impasse of Violence : writing necklacing into a history of liberation struggle in South Africa
    (University of the Western Cape, 2010) Moosage, Riedwaan; Rousseau, Nicky; Lalu, Premesh; Dept. of History; Faculty of Arts
    This thesis falls within the category of historical studies that is concerned with a difficult legacy of South Africa's liberation struggle, namely the practice of necklacing that accompanied it. My interest in the practice is limited to its emergence and politicizing as it relates to the ANC, the UDF and the apartheid state. The ANC and the UDF overwhelmingly understood the practice as resistance, yet ambivalently so. The question guiding this thesis therefore asks: how is necklacing written into the narrative of struggle history? Here I refer to its (re)representation, its (re)characterization, its (re)articulation in a wider discursive war of propaganda strategies that was waged through the interplay of an apartheid state discourse and what I consider to be an official non-state discourse, that of the ANC and the UDF.
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    Missing and missed: Rehumanisation, the nation and missing-ness
    (University of the Western Cape, 2018) Rousseau, Nicky; Moosage, Riedwaan; Rassool, Ciraj
    The bringing together of two lines of research that have previously been treated separately � namely the missing/missed body of apartheid-era atrocities and the racialised body of the colonial museum � animates this issue of Kronos. Both the skeletons of empire and those of apartheid-era atrocities can be thought of as racialised, and as �disappeared� and missing. Furthermore, both areas are marked by similar lines of enquiry, linked to issues of identification, redress and restoration, often framed through notions of humanisation or rehumanisation. Consequently, these different �disciplines of the dead� have been brought into collaboration and contestation with each other, with missingness often reproduced through the ways in which the dead have been drawn into grand narratives of the nation and its seeming triumphs over colonialism and apartheid. Notwithstanding their similarities, the racialised body of the colonial museum and the body of more recent conflicts have their own genealogies and literatures. The �disappeared� entered the political lexicon of terror largely through Argentina and Chile; two decades later Rwanda and Bosnia turned international attention to mass violence and genocide as exemplified by the mass grave. South Africa slips through these grids: apartheid security forces tried but failed to emulate their Latin American counterparts in �disappearing� activists on a large scale, while inter-civilian violence, which mostly took the form of political rather than ethnic, racial or religious cleansing, did not produce mass graves. Nonetheless, both �disappearances� and inter-civilian conflict produced missing persons in the South African conflict � most presumed dead, and thus, as Madeleine Fullard describes them (this issue) �in limbo � dead, but missing.� Investigations into such cases, led first by the country�s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), and later by its Missing Persons Task Team (MPTT), sought to locate, exhume, identify and return mortal remains to their families. In so doing, South Africa joined a growing list of countries following this route.
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    Missing-ness, history and apartheid-era disappearances: The figuring of Siphiwo Mthimkulu, Tobekile �Topsy� Madaka and Sizwe Kondile as missing dead persons
    (University of the Western Cape, 2018) Moosage, Riedwaan; Witz, Leslie
    The argument of this dissertation calls for an abiding by missing-ness as it relates to apartheid-era disappearances. I am concerned with the ways in which the category missing is articulated in histories of apartheid-era disappearances through histories seeking to account for apartheid and how that category is enabled and /or constrained through mediating practices, processes and discourses such as that of forensics and history itself. My deployment of a notion of missing-ness therefore is put to work in underscoring notions of history and its relation to a category of missing persons in South Africa as they emerge and are figured through various discursive strategies constituted by and through apartheid�s violence and iterations thereof. I focus specifically on the enforced disappearances of Siphiwo Mthimkulu, Tobekile �Topsy� Madaka and Sizwe Kondile and the vicarious ways in which they have been produced and (re)figured in a postapartheid present. Mthimkulu and Madaka were abducted, tortured, interrogated, killed and their bodies disposed through burning by apartheid�s security police in 1982. In 2007 South Africa�s Missing Persons Task Team exhumed commingled burnt human fragments at a farm, Post Chalmers. After two years of forensic examinations, those remains were identified as most likely those of Mthimkulu and Madaka. Their commingled remains were reburied in 2009 during an official government sanctioned Provincial re-burial. Kondile was similarly abducted in 1981 and after being imprisoned, tortured, interrogated and killed, his physical remains were burnt. The MPTT has been unsuccessful in locating and thus exhuming his remains for re-burial. Sizwe Kondile remains missing. Missing-ness as I evoke it serves to signal the lack and excess as potentiality and instability of histories accounting for the condition and symptom of being missing. The productivity of deploying missing-ness and an abidance to it in the ways I argue is precisely in not explicitly naming it, but rather by holding onto its elusiveness by marking the contours of discourses on absence-presence, those which it simultaneously touches upon and is constitutive of. Articulating it thus is to affirm missing-ness as a question that I argue, be put to work and abided by.
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    Re-humanisation, history and a forensic aesthetic: Understanding a politics of the dead in the figuring of Ntombikayise Priscilla Kubheka
    (University of Western Cape, 2021) Luthuli, Vuyokazi; Moosage, Riedwaan
    In 1987 Ntombikayise Priscilla Kubheka was abducted, tortured, killed and her body dumped by apartheid security police. She was an uMkhonto WeSizwe (MK), the armed wing of the African National Congress (ANC), commander based in Durban and was in charge of weaponry storage and organised safe houses for those returning from exile. Amnesty applications and perpetrator testimony given at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission�s (TRC) amnesty hearings alleged that Kubheka had died, while being interrogated, from a heart attack. The perpetrators claimed the heart attack was possibly as a result of Kubheka being overweight. In 1997 the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) exhumed skeletal remains and items of clothing, including a floral dress, from a pauper grave in Charlottedale cemetery, Groutville. The exhumed skull indicated a bullet wound. The post-mortem and numerous forensic examinations confirmed the identification of the skeletal remains to be those of Kubheka. The forensic examinations of the items of clothing confirmed the findings of the skeletal examinations in establishing identification. These forensic examinations and its findings contested testimony given by the perpetrators. Through the TRC investigations and its findings, a question of what it may mean to re-humanise the once missing emerges. This mini-thesis underscores a notion of re-humanisation through the work of the TRC in its investigation into the enforced disappearance of Kubheka. It suggests that figuring Kubheka through a notion of re-humanisation in the context of the TRC requires one to understand both de-humanisation and re-humanisation and the ways in which gender complicates these understandings. It does so by examining testimonies, t he exhumation, the forensic examinations, the emergence of a forensic aesthetic and the productions of biographies and forensic memory to understand how these might be processes and strategies of re-humanisation. This mini-thesis then is a forensic history that navigates a politics of the dead by examining the figuring of Kubheka through various fields and in various forums. In so doing, the argument presented in what follows is that the notion of re-humanisation is an inherently unstable one but at its core is a politics of the dead that misses gender it its figuring of the human.
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    Re-humanisation, history and a forensic aesthetic: Understanding a politics of the dead in the figuring of Ntombikayise Priscilla Kubheka�
    (University of the Western Cape, 2020) Luthuli, Vuyokazi; Moosage, Riedwaan
    In 1987 Ntombikayise Priscilla Kubheka was abducted, tortured, killed and her body dumped by apartheid security police. She was an uMkhonto WeSizwe (MK), the armed wing of the African National Congress (ANC), commander based in Durban and was in charge of weaponry storage and organised safe houses for those returning from exile. Amnesty applications and perpetrator testimony given at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission�s (TRC) amnesty hearings alleged that Kubheka had died, while being interrogated, from a heart attack. The perpetrators claimed the heart attack was possibly as a result of Kubheka being overweight.
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    Unfinished lives: The biographies of Nokuthula Simelane
    (University of the Western Cape, 2018) Abrahams, Brent Nicholas; Dhupelia-Mesthrie, Uma; Moosage, Riedwaan
    Nokuthula Simelane, born near Bethal in Mpumalanga, joined the ANC's armed-wing uMKhonto we Sizwe (MK) as a courier while studying at the University of Swaziland in the early 1980s. In 1983 she set out on a mission to South Africa on the pretext of purchasing clothing for her up-coming graduation. Simelane was however abducted, and has since not been heard from nor has her body been found. Her disappearance was one of those examined by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) of South Africa. These are some facts about Simelane. This thesis seeks to explore how Simelane's biographies manifest themselves across multiple genres and in so doing determine their similarities and differences, with a view to understanding the difficulties of producing the biography of a missing person. The genres of biography I examine relation to Simelane are: the TRC's Amnesty Committee (AC) hearings, the Human Rights Violations Committee (HRVC) hearing, their transcripts and the TRC reports; a documentary film called Betrayal directed by Mark Kaplan; and a statue of Simelane located in Bethal sculpted by Ruhan Janse van Vuuren.