UWCScholar :: Browsing by Author "Rousseau, Nicky"

Browsing by Author "Rousseau, Nicky"

Now showing 1 - 10 of 10

The 1945 General Strike in Northern Nigeria and its Role in Anti-Colonial Nationalism
(University of the Western Cape, 2014) Yohanna, Stephen; Rousseau, Nicky
This thesis follows the course of the Nigerian general strike of 1945 in the Northern provinces, a previously under-researched region. It examines some of the many ways in which the strike has been understood in the academy, focusing in particular on the works of Alkasum Abba, Kazah-Toure and Bill Freund who have regarded the strike as well supported and successful. By employing Ian Phimister and Brian Raftopoulos's analysis of the 1948 general strike in colonial Zimbabwe, this thesis re-reads the narrative of success by bringing to the fore previosuly ignored issues relating to questions of planning, tactics, propaganda, solidarity, leadership, and execution of the strike. This re-reading reveals a considerably more varied and uneven response across and within the different categories of workers than has been previously assumed by scholars. Such unevenness challenges notions of "solidarity" and "steadfastness" attributed to the industrial action, with implications for how workers struggles have been incorporated into wider narratives of decolonization and anti-colonial nationalism.
The African child and the hidden curriculum at Blythswood Institute: Three snapshots
(University of Western Cape, 2021) Nogqala, Xolela; Rousseau, Nicky
This mini-thesis seeks to understand how the colonial and apartheid state imagined the African child in South Africa through education policies and their associated hidden curriculum. It asks what educational project was deemed suitable for the African child and how did this project configure her future? At the core of this enquiry is a preoccupation to understand how institutions, their curricula and objects rid themselves of colonial precepts. In working through this, I employ Blythswood Institute as a provocation to think and to historicise the education of African children, such as those at Blythswood, in three moments: colonialism and the founding of Blythswood in 1877; apartheid and the passing of the Bantu Education Act of 1953, and the post-apartheid times of democratic South Africa.
Eastern Cape Bloodlines I: Assembling the Human
(Taylor & Francis, 2016) Rousseau, Nicky
This is an article less about red as installation, colour or symbol, and more about assembly.1 I have used Red, the installation by Simon Gush, as provocation to think of exhumation, its work and processes of assembling�disassembling� reassembling.2 The particular exhumation discussed here involves the mortal remains of five anti-apartheid activists recovered at Post Chalmers outside the rural Eastern Cape town of Cradock in July 2007 by the Missing Persons� Task Team (MPTT).3 �Topsy� Madaka and Siphiwo Mthimkulu, and Champion Galela, Qaqawuli Godolozi and Sipho Hashe (the �Pebco Three�) were killed in April 1982 and May 1985 respectively by Port Elizabeth security police, who thereafter burnt the bodies.4
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
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.
In the shadows of the archive: Investigating the Paarl March of November 22nd 1962
(University of the Western Cape, 2012) Van Laun, Bianca Paig�; Rousseau, Nicky
This thesis is concerned with an uprising which occurred during the early morning hours of the 22nd of November 1962 in Paarl- a small agricultural town some 60 kilometres northeast of Cape Town. On this occasion a group of about 250 men, armed with axes, pangas and other home-made weapons, marched from the nearby Mbekweni township to the police station in the town's centre. An event, which lasted no more than three hours, left seven dead and several wounded in its wake. This uprising was a comparatively small event, with comparatively few casualties but it took place against the backdrop of the turn to armed struggle which followed the banning of the African National Congress (hereafter the ANC) and the Pan African Congress (hereafter the PAC). However in the sense that it seemed to directly threaten white civilians, this was an event constructed as most closely resembling the anti-colonialist Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya between 1952 and 1960 during which time press reports focused most often of the brutal killings of white women and children by groups represented as violent "terrorist gangs." Informed by this kind of over-simplified propaganda of the war in Kenya, the events in Paarl, particularly the killing of 17 year old Rentia Vermeulen and 21 year old Frans Richard, as well as the attack on an elderly couple in their bed, by men with "primitive weapons," incited massive latent white anxieties throughout South Africa and intensive repressive measures.
Memory, trauma, silences: Narratives of the 1982 Maseru Invasion
(University of the Western Cape, 2017) Mahula, Pulane Matsietsi; Rousseau, Nicky
The aim of this mini-thesis is to interrogate an incident that happened in Lesotho in 1982, where the South African Defence Force (SADF) invaded the capital, Maseru, under the guise of searching for ANC operatives and killed 42 people thirty of whom were South Africans, while the remaining 12 were Basotho citizens. A particular concern is how traumatic events are represented by witnesses, how they remember or, rather talk, about the event, and the secrets and silences which may arise. A lack of literature on this period of Lesotho's history and the Raid itself has necessitated a wider engagement with Raid as it is the first raid that involved the SADF, perpetrated in Lesotho. The first chapter draws out and highlights the complicated relationships between Lesotho and South Africa and their respective main opposition political parties, namely, the Basotho Congress Party and the overall South African liberation movements including the African National Congress and the Pan Africanist Congress. This brings me to conclude that the 1982 Maseru Raid and subsequent ones took place on the back of a period that was burdened with gross human rights violations in Lesotho and, this can be argued to explain why the Raid is not particularly spoken about.
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.
Popular history in South Africa in the 198Os: the politics of production
(University of the Western Cape, 1994) Rousseau, Nicky; Minkley, Gary; Witz, Lesley
Popular history, like indeed other histories, is informed by different ideas about the relationship between the past, the present and the political uses of history. However, a major problem in trying to explore these ideas as they developed in South Africa in the period under review, is that they remain for the large part embedded in popular history texts. A consistent and conscious theorisation has not been much evident - at least not at a published level. The triennial conferences of the WHW are thus perhaps unique in the opportunity they accorded to projects to reflect on their experiences and more generally to raise issues and debates relating to popularisation. At the same time, and perhaps precisely because it was one of the few arena6 where such reflection was happening, the relative paucity of research to emerge from these quarters is particularly regrettable. while not all would agree with Crais' assertion that the programmatic separation of the popularisation section2 from the mainstream academic one resulted in "exclusionary practices"3, it does seem undeniable that they enjoyed a different and lesser status.
Speak out on poverty: Hearing, inaudibility, and citizenship in post-apartheid South Africa
(WILEY, 2019) Rousseau, Nicky
In 1998, Speak Out on Poverty held hearings across South Africa shortly after the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) completed eighteen months of highly publicized, nationwide hearings at which victims testified. Speak Out challenged the TRC�s focus on overt political violations, seen to occlude forms of structural violence central to apartheid's policy and practice, as well as longer legacies of colonialism. Reading Speak Out alongside the TRC puts pressure on supposed differences between official truth commissions or tribunals and those run by civil society. Discussing Speak Out in relation to the TRC signaled more than a set of comparisons. In a time of transition, Speak Out spoke from within and against the noise of the TRC. It aimed to make poverty and inequality the nation's priority rather than reconciliation, or at least to challenge notions of reconciliation that did not have inequity and poverty at its center.

Browsing by Author "Rousseau, Nicky"

Results Per Page

Sort Options