Browsing by Author "Witz, Leslie"

Now showing 1 - 20 of 31
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Camp Lwandle: Rehabilitating a migrant labour hostel at the seaside
    (Routledge Taylor Francis Group, 2013) Murray, No�leen; Witz, Leslie
    In southern African narratives of migrant labour, hostels and compounds are represented as typical examples of colonial and apartheid planning. Visual and spatial comparisons are consistently made between the regulatory power of hostels and those of concentration camps. Several of these sites of violence and repression are today being reconfigured as sites of conscience, their artefactual presence on the landscape being constructed as places of remembrance. In this trajectory, a space of seeming anonymity in Lwandle, some 40 km outside of Cape Town, was identified by the newly established museum, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, as a structure of significance. The migrant labour compound in Lwandle, of which Hostel 33 is the last remnant, was designed by planners and engineers and laid out as part of a labour camp for male migrant workers in the 1950s. This article explores the ambitious project initiated in 2008, by the Lwandle Migrant Labour Museum (and funded largely by the US Ambassadors Cultural Restoration Fund), to restore Hostel 33. Although Hostel 33 was not a very old structure, having been built in 1958/9, nor was it easily considered to have conventional architectural significance, its material presence in present-day Lwandle represents a reminder of the conditions of life in the labour camp. The article traces the work entailed in the restoration process through paying attention to both the built fabric and its materiality, and by giving an account of the explorations into finding ways to restore the hostel to the museum through making it into a site of significance. In place of the centrality of the building as the object of restoration, the work shifted to considering how the hostel could function most effectively as a stage and destination for the Museum�s narrations of the past. Retaining and maintaining Hostel 33 was less concerned with the fabric as an empirical fact of the past, than with its projection into an envisaged future for museum purposes.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    The cox collection, the museums of Malawi and the politics of repatriation, 1892-2016
    (University of the Western Cape, 2016) Mtotha, Comfort Tamanda; Witz, Leslie
    A wide range of scholarly inquiries have engaged with how museums all over the world deal with societal issues and the way the public interacts with the museum as a space of transaction and knowledge production. In Malawi, only a small proportion of literature deals with the museums and their relationship to the wider understanding of the country's history and the question of nationalism. However, as modern museums are transforming and reconfiguring themselves in dealing with histories of collection and calls for repatriation of ethnographic objects and human remains from their European counterparts are being made, there is no scholarly work or a nuanced representation on these issues for the Museums of Malawi. This study engages with a biography of a collection to think about museums, nationalism and the politics of repatriation. This biography begins when this collection of objects was collected from the tea plantations of Malawi and how it metamorphosizes from souvenirs to artifacts of rarity and then to "national treasures." The life of the collection is analysed and understood through its multiple journeys from Malawi to Europe and then to the United States of America where it attains a new meaning in a museum before its return to Malawi for a nationalist cause.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Culture, History and Politics in Malawi: The Production of National Heritage, 1964-2009
    (University of the Western Cape, 2019) Lusaka, Mwayi; Witz, Leslie
    This thesis is essentially about how Malawi�s national heritage was constituted, in particular how heritage emerged and how it has changed over time. It largely looks at the period from 1964 to 2009. This is significant period which covers the transition from colonialism to independence; dictatorship and the emergence of multiparty democracy. The study explores the changing governments during this period in relation to how knowledge about Malawi�s pasts were constructed and reconstructed as heritage using different cultural forms: national museums, ethnic festivals, cultural performances, national language, commemorations and memorials (monuments, commemorative days and biographical memory) and the framing of traditions and customs into what is referred to as intangible cultural heritage. The overarching question of the research is what changes were made to national heritage in relation to the changing of governments during this period? In response to this question multiple historical modes of inquiry were used to study and examine the production of different aspects of heritage during this period.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    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.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Exhumations, reburials and history making in post-apartheid South Africa.
    (University of the Western Cape, 2018) Karating, Robin-lea; Witz, Leslie
    This mini-thesis, �Exhumation, Reburial and History Making in South Africa�, is concerned with an analysis of the practices of exhumation and reburial through discussing the case studies of the Iron-Age archaeological site of Mapungubwe, the Vergelegen Wine Estate in Somerset West and the reburials carried out by the Missing Persons Task Team (MPPT) from the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA), particularly its unsuccessful attempt at exhumations at the Stikland Cemetery, in an attempt to understand how they form part of the production of history. These case studies conceive of the times of the precolonial, slavery and apartheid, and are all linked temporally to an envisaged future through ideas of nation building and nationalism. As narratives produced through these exhumations and reburials, they contribute to the notion of making the post-apartheid by remaking history and reconstituting nation. Each of these case studies are significant as they in some way have been utilized in a manner that is relevant to us in the new democratic South Africa. This mini-thesis aims at rethinking the role of archaeologists, the exhumation and reburial processes, the construction of ethnicity, how the dead are used to construct narratives of struggle against apartheid and in general the implications each of these have on the re-making of history. It also thinks about what the practices of exhumation and reburial mean conceptually and how they relate to the concept of missingness, which I refer to as the process of making absence or invisibility. Thinking about exhumations and reburial in this way has allowed reflection on the purpose of the practices, in terms of who it�s for and how it�s perceived by the stakeholders involved in each case. Through dissecting each of these issues one may be able to trace how the remains to be reburied become missing. Therefore, the question of exhumation and reburial is essential in thinking about what it does for the human remains and how their identity is either shaped or lost. This thesis mainly argues that the remains in each of the case studies go through various phases of missingness and that their reburials and memorialization, or in the case of Stikland the spiritual repatriation, inscribes them further into narratives of the times that they emerged from.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Frameworks of representation: A design History of the district six museum in Cape Town
    (University of Western Cape, 2020) Hayes-Roberts, Hayley Elizabeth; Witz, Leslie; Murray, No�leen
    Since 1994, the District Six Museum, in constructing histories of forced removals from District Six, Cape Town, commenced as a post-apartheid memory project which evolved into a memorial museum. Design has been a central strategy claimed by the museum in its process of making memory work visible to its attendant publics evolving into a South African cultural brand. Co-design within the museum is aesthetically infused with sensitively curated exhibitions and a form of museumisation, across two tangible sites of engagement, which imparts a unique visual language
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Frameworks of representation: A design history of the District Six Museum in Cape Town
    (University of the Western Cape, 2020) Hayes-Roberts, Hayley Elizabeth; Witz, Leslie
    Since 1994, the District Six Museum, in constructing histories of forced removals from District Six, Cape Town, commenced as a post-apartheid memory project which evolved into a memorial museum. Design has been a central strategy claimed by the museum in its process of making memory work visible to its attendant publics evolving into a South African cultural brand. Co-design within the museum is aesthetically infused with sensitively curated exhibitions and a form of museumisation, across two tangible sites of engagement, which imparts a unique visual language. The term design became extraordinarily popular in contemporary Cape Town, where the city was - in 2014 -the World Design Capital. Yet at the same time as design was being inscribed into the public imaginary, it was simultaneously curiously undefined although influential in shifting representational aesthetics in the city. This research seeks to ask questions about this proliferation of interest in design and to examine this through a close reading of the work of the District Six Museum situated near District Six. In particular, micro and macro design elements are explored as socio-cultural practice in re-imagining community in the city that grew out of resistance and cultural networks. Various design strategies or frameworks of representation sought to stabilize and clarify individual and collective pasts enabling and supporting ex-residents to reinterpret space after loss, displacement and separation and re-enter their histories and the city. Post-apartheid museum design modes and methodologies applied by the District Six Museum as museumisation disrupts conventional historiographies in the fields of art, architectural and exhibition design, where the focus is placed on temporal chronologies, in a biographic mode profiling examples of works and designers/artists. Instead, the research contextualises the work of design as making in a more open sense, of exploring the very constructedness of the museum as a space of method, selection, process and representation thereby asking questions about this reified term design as method and practice. The designing ways of the District Six Museum contribute to understanding idioms mediated through design frameworks allowing for a departure from the limited ways design history has been written. Through an unlayering of projects, practices and an examination of archival case studies, exhibition curation, the adaptive reuse of buildings and through institutional rebranding my argument is that the particularities of the claims to design work at the District Six Museum provide a rich case for relating to other contemporaneous processes of making apartheid�s spatial practices visible as projects such as this claim community. Therefore seeking to demystify how this community museum �making� has been fashioned through an investment in various design disciplines, forms and practices revealing the inherent complexity in doing so.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    The Group Areas Act and Port Elizabeth's heritage: a study of memorial recollection in the South End Museum
    (University of the Western Cape, 2007) Kadi, Palesa; Witz, Leslie; Dept. of History; Faculty of Arts
    The second half of the 1990's was marked by a significant reworking of memory and history in South Africa. WHilst the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was involved in its hearings on amnesty applications and gross human rights violations, new museums were emerging and older ones began reshaping their displays. This thesis interrogated the changing representations of history, culture, identity and heritage in one South African city, Port Elizabeth, which in 2005 was re-named the Nelson Mandela Bay Municipal area. This discussion examined, at times, the historical era prior to South Africa's democracy and the period after the first democratic elections of 27 April 1994.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    A historical and conceptual analysis of the African Programme in Museum and Heritage Studies (APMHS)
    (University of the Western Cape, 2011) Morakinyo, Olusegun Nelson; Witz, Leslie; Rassool, Ciraj; Dept. of History; Faculty of Arts
    In 1998 the University of the Western Cape together with the University of Cape Town, and the Robben Island Museum introduced a Post-graduate Diploma in Museum and Heritage Studies. This programme was innovative in that not only did it bring together two universities in a programme where the inequalities of resources derived from their apartheid legacies was recognised, but it also formally incorporated an institution of public culture that was seeking to make a substantial imprint in the post-apartheid heritage sphere as part of its structure. In 2003 this programme attracted substantial funding from the Rockefeller Foundation and was rebranded as the African Program in Museum and Heritage Studies (APMHS). While this rebranding of the programme might seem to be innocently unproblematic and commendable as part of the effort at re-insertion of South Africa into Africa after the isolation of apartheid, an analysis of the concepts employed in the rebranding raises serious theoretical, conceptual, and disciplinary questions for heritage studies as an academic discipline and for its connections with other fields, especially the interdisciplinary study of Africa. What are the implications of a programme that brings together the concepts of 'African-Heritage-Studies'? Does the rebranding signify a major epistemological positioning in the study of Africa or has it chosen to ignore debates on the problematic of the conjunction of the concepts? This study address these issues through a historical and philosophical analysis of the programme, exploring how it was developed both in relation to ideas of heritage and heritage studies in Africa and, most importantly by re-locating it in debates on the changing meaning of 'Africa' in African studies.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    The historical development of the provision of schooling in Eritrea during the British rule (1941-1952)
    (University of the Western Cape, 2001) Sebahtu, Fessahazion Tewolde; Witz, Leslie; Hayes, Patricia
    This investigation deals with the historical development of the provision of schooling in Eritrea during the British period (1941-1952). It traces the origin of education from traditional to modern education under the Coptic Church, the Mosque, the Catholic and the Swedish Evangelical missionaries. Missionary education served as a stepping stone to the emergence of colonial education. Italian schooling, which was based on racial discrimination, was colonial in nature and consisted of two types. The school for the nationals was superior excluding access to the locals and the second, for the locals, was an inferior one. It had two concepts, emphasising the spoken Italian language and manual labour. In general, Italian education of the locals was limited only to grade four and was no better than propaganda and indoctrination. It was based on the glorification of Italy's past and present history, respect of its leaders, white superiority and black docility. Its long-term aim was to create future troops for Italy's further colonial expansion. British schooling inherited a very backward educational system from the Italians, with lack of trained teachers, inadequate textbooks, and almost nonexistent school buildings. As a result British schooling began from scratch, without allocating sufficient financial expenditure. They only assigned teachers, leaving all the responsibility to be covered by the local people like construction of schools, providing residential areas and salaries to teachers. The British upgraded schooling to middle and secondary education. A number of new developments were introduced namely the opening of Teacher Training College, middle and secondary, English Institute and Girls' schools and they also granted bursaries for further education. They conducted inspection of schools once in three months. Above all they allowed the educated locals to play an active role in the schooling activity. In 11 years the number of schools, pupils and teachers outstripped what the Italians have not achieved in their fifty-one years of rule
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    An investigation of Zimbabwe's contemporary heritage practices of memorializing war : a case study of the Heroes' Acres in Matabeleland South Province
    (University of the Western Cape., 2011) Magadzike, Blessed; Witz, Leslie
    The study through the topic: An investigation of Zimbabwe's contemporary heritage practices of memorializing war: A case study of the Heroes' Acres in Matabeleland South Province focuses on post liberation war memorialisation and management in the post-colonial state of Zimbabwe. It analyses the emergence and management of war memorials and shrines in the form of heroes' acres, in the province of Matabeleland South in Zimbabwe from 1988 to 2010. Zimbabwe attained independence in 1980 after a long protracted war waged by two guerrilla movements against the unilaterally declared independent state of Rhodesia led by Ian Smith. Post-1980, ZANU (PF) became the dominant political party in the new state now renamed Zimbabwe. A national memorialisation structure was established soon after independence; charged with ensuring a befitting memorialisation of the war of liberation. Post-independence political contradictions between the parties notwithstanding, the results of the 1980 election showed an ethnicized landscape, a trajectory that has been at the centre of the national political discourse. Political disturbances in the Matabeleland and Midlands provinces became one of the most important and interesting historical issues that unsettled the nation in respect of memorialisation. Against this background, this research proposes to assess how political actors contributed to the issue of memorializing a war in post-1980 Zimbabwe. Using the central question which arose from a critique of Zimbabwe's memorialisation structure as a graded one, in which the local site subordinates the national, the research aims to examine whether the shifts in the political and management spheres of the heroes acres as represented by the inclusive government currently governing the country and the transferring of management duties of heroes acres to the National Museums and Monuments of Zimbabwe, has managed to challenge the claim made above. By embarking on this work, the research aims to examine whether the local memorial sites actually act as mere subordinates in a deliberate graded structure to the national shrine represented by the National Heroes' Acre in Harare, within the politics of memorialisation.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Kleinplasie living open air museum: a biography of a site and the processes of history-making 1974 � 1994
    (University of the Western Cape, 2012) Jonas, Michael Jesaja; Witz, Leslie
    In 1974 an Agricultural Museum Committee was established at the Worcester Museum which ultimately led to the development in 1981 of the Kleinplasie Open Air Farm Museum.This began a new phase in the museum�s history, one that I will argue was particularly closely linked to Afrikaner nationalist historiography, in particular to ideas about frontier farmers and pioneer farming lifestyles and activities.This study will take the form of a critical analysis of the establishment of Kleinplasie Living Open Air Museum from 1974 until 1994. It will evaluate the making of exhibitions, its architecture, and the performances and public activities in the establishment of the institution as a site of memory and knowledge. The key question this work engages with is how representations, performance, exhibitions, museum activities, and public involvement were shaped to create particular messages and construct a site of cultural identity and memory at Kleinplasie Living Open Air Museum.It will also deal with questions around who decides on the voices and content of the exhibitions, architecture and displays. The role played by professionals, those who claim to represent community, donors and other interests groups will also be placed under the spotlight. There are also questions around the provenance of collections, the way they were acquired through donations and sponsorships, and the crucial role objects played in the construction of the narrative and identity of the museum.A key question that emerges from my own work is the connection between the Afrikaner nationalist scholarship and the development of the open-air museum based on the life of the frontier farmer at Kleinplasie. While Kleinplasie does not seem to follow the monumental approach that was evident in schemes such as the Voortrekker Monument in Pretoria, where triumphalism and conquest are key metaphors, it does rely on a sense of �independence� and self-fulfilment in social history type setting. There is thus a need to consider how Afrikaner nationalist historiography impacted on the way history was depicted at Kleinplasie. P. J. van der Merwe�s studies of the character and lifeways of the trekboer(Die Trekboer in die Geskiedenis van die Kaapkolonie), seems to have played a central role in the construction of the theme and narrative. This three-volume trilogy provided Kleinplasie(literally, �little farm�) with a social and cultural history on which to construct its version of the past.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    The lives and deaths of memorials: The changing symbolism of the 1938 Voortrekker centenary monuments
    (University of the Western Cape, 2019) Uys, Robert Benjamin; Witz, Leslie
    This thesis is concerned with the lives and deaths of four 1938 Voortrekker Centenary Monuments. The 1938 Voortrekker Centenary saw the construction of more than 500 centenary monuments. Each one of these structures has a biography. This study will consider how monuments celebrate current regimes and ideologies instead of narratives pertaining to the past. It will explore how monuments dating from South Africa�s imperialist and apartheid pasts reflect continued inequalities in both rural and urban South African landscapes. It will also consider how monuments cement problematic and mythological versions of the past. The most infamous 1938 Voortrekker Centenary Monument is the Voortrekker Monument, designed by Gerard Moerdyk, in Pretoria. The Voortrekker Monument is important because in many ways it acts as a proxy to the hundreds of smaller 1938 Voortrekker Centenary Monuments scattered around South Africa. This study will look at how some of the theoretical frameworks concerned with the Voortrekker Monument in Pretoria can be applied to three centenary monuments in the Riebeek Valley and Durbanville in the Western Cape. This thesis will consider how perceptions of the symbolism of these monuments have changed between their construction in the late 1930s and 2018. The Afrikaner nationalistic fever that gave birth to these structures will be dissected. It will also consider how the 1938 Voortrekker Centenary Monuments symbolically changed as South Africans witnessed the disintegration of apartheid. This study will explore how these monuments have integrated into the heritage and experiential economies. It will also consider some of the anomalies relating to these structures, including hauntings. Finally, the vandalism, destruction and futures of these structures will also briefly come into question.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Making heritage in post-apartheid South Africa: Agencies, museums and sites
    (University of the Western Cape, 2017) Sambumbu, Sipokazi; Witz, Leslie
    This work responds to the perceptions of post-apartheid heritage practices as producing an authorised heritage discourse. It contrasts this perception by approaching the making of postapartheid heritage as not just a simple discourse, but as a broad and complicated network of many meanings, knowledges, practices and approaches. These are generated and disseminated through multiple disciplinary and practice inputs and outputs, and at different levels and scales. This work approaches these multiple intersecting points of heritage production and reproductions as an intricate network, within and through processes of heritage making can be seen as productive and unproductive. The focus of this work is in these different facets that emerge as different role players navigate through intricate negotiations of meanings and knowledges about pasts and presents. In this thesis, these workings are repeatedly identified through the term complex, which I use to mean complicated, intricate or convoluted. The analysis applies the term differently from the theoretical concept of complex, which refers to the making of public national citizenry through a power/knowledge, rather than power and knowledge discourse. This work therefore investigates the complicated workings of heritage by means of legislation, the complicated heritage governance by a council and agency, and the workings of heritage through equally complicated operations of museums and sites. The investigation involves focused ethnographic studies of the operations of the South African Heritage Resources Agency, National Heritage Council, Nelson Mandela Museum, Ncome Monument and Museum Complex, Freedom Park, and Robben Island Museum. While this work might be theoretically associated within Critical Heritage Studies, especially its recent preoccupation with the notion of authorised heritage discourse, it is framed against this concept. It argues that post-apartheid heritage is produced through intricate negotiations occurring within entanglements, rather than through simple a hegemonic discourse. It also argues that making heritage in post-apartheid South Africa occurs within a wide network of multiple practices and approaches, rather than along streamlined, simple deployments of dominant meanings and knowledges.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    The making of Ruacana as place and its construction as future heritage
    (University of the Western Cape, 2014) Kapuka, Nehoa Hilma; Witz, Leslie
    Ruacana is a town in northern Namibia, located on the border with Angola on the Kunene River. It is about 150 kilometres north of Oshakati. The town was established in the early 1970s by the South West Africa Water and Electricity Commission, to provide accommodation for the Ruacana Hydropower station staff. Having been established without forced removals, Ruacana was an ideal �apartheid town� as only �white� staff lived in the wall-fenced �off town. The �black� staff, soldiers as well as those that provided services in the town, were accommodated in a nearby township known as Oshifo, A few years later, the South African colonial government established one of its largest army bases in Owambo �district� to safeguard the hydropower station from possible guerrilla attacks. However, the town is rarely documented in academic or even South African colonial government publications. It is rather the hydropower complex that is well documented, where Ruacana is represented through its projects of modernization. Also, other than claims to natural heritage and a heritage of ethnicity, Ruacana town lacks formal invocations of heritage. Thus it is argued that Ruacana points to a different pattern of heritage production, as the future itself was planned as heritage. This study is an attempt to analyse how Ruacana became a place of a heritage of development, even though heritage is not formally acknowledged in the institutional structures.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Maritime archaeology and its publics in post-apartheid South Africa
    (University of the Western Cape, 2013) Wares, Heather Lynne; Witz, Leslie
    Since the end of apartheid and with that the construction of a new South Africa, archaeology has experienced what can be seen as a resurgence in the public domain. With the creation of a new nation imagined as existing since time immemorial, there has been an emergence of archaeological pasts providing evidence of a nation believed to have existed before apartheid and colonialism. Due to this resurgence of interest in the pre-apartheid and pre-colonial pasts, there has been a ballooning of research and exhibitions around paleontological finds, rock art sites and Iron Age sites indicative of early state formation. This has transported the nation back into what Tony Bennett has called 'pasts beyond memory'. Where mainstream archaeology focuses on sites which reflect a history outside of a colonial past, maritime archaeology has had difficulty. Being a discipline with its main object of focus being the shipwreck, it is difficult to unravel it from a colonial legacy. In an attempt to move away from these older notions of 'public' through the allure of the shipwreck, some maritime archaeologists have looked at different mechanisms, or what I call 'modes of representation', to construct new South African publics. Two such mechanisms are discussed in this thesis: the temporary exhibition of the Meermin Project, and the Nautical Archaeology Society courses on Robben Island. This is in contrast to the older Bredasdorp Shipwreck Museum, where I argue by using Greenblatt�s notion of 'resonance and wonder', that the wonder of the object salvaged is the central feature of the way it constructs its publics. This thesis discusses how a group of maritime archaeologists, located at Iziko Museums and the South African Heritage Resources Agency, attempted to construct new publics by locating resonance with its subject in an exhibition, and by making new archaeologists through a hands-on course.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    The meanings of heritage practices, spaces and sites in the Busoga kingdom, �Uganda� in the twenty first century
    (University of the Western Cape, 2012) Lubwama, Nabirye Zaina; Witz, Leslie
    This study investigates how the heritage of Busoga has been (re)presented in the local as well as in the national domain. Busoga is a territory and kingdom in east-central Uganda. It is one of the kingdoms that were found in Uganda at independence and entered a federal arrangement with the new nation-state presenting a series of challenges around the question of traditional power vis a vis political power; national versus local heritage; contemporary versus �traditional� and heritage poised against the throes of social and economic change. The argument presented here is that the heritage of Busoga as presented has been invented and created during the colonial and post-colonial times. Over time Busoga as a community and with it, a form of heritage posed as tradition, took shape. After the restoration of the kingdoms in 1993, through a constitutional enactment that reversed the 1967 order that had abolished kingdoms and established a republican and unitary order, kingdoms re-appeared as having been rooted in a timeless tradition assuming �naturality� which but was a re-representation of invented traditions. Spaces, sites and palaces and a narrative thread developed and the institution of Kyabazingaship(kingship) became the central point around which the kingdom revolved. I argue through this study that the post-colonial state, like its colonial counterpart has played a crucial role in the invention of this heritage.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Memory and representation: Robben Island Museum 1997-1999
    (University of the Western Cape, 2000) Solani, Noel Lungile Zwelidumile; Witz, Leslie; Dept. of History; Faculty of Arts
    The notion of what constitutes a nation has been a subject of many debates. The nation, like individual is the culmination of a long past of endeavours, sacrifice and devotion. The post aprtheid project of reconciliation in South Africa is part of this desire to live together as citizens of one country irrespective of past differences. This desire transforms itself to cultural institutions like museums or rather cultural institutions represents this desire in a more systematic way in the post apartheid South Africa as they seek to transform.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    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.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Opting for silence: A history of the history of the Golden Arrow Bus Services drivers’ strike of 1992
    (University of the Western Cape, 2014) Houston, Charlene; Witz, Leslie
    The primary purpose of this research is to examine the production of history and oral history related to Golden Arrow Bus Services in Cape Town, with specific reference to the silences regarding the bus drivers’ strike in the early 1990s. The scope of the study is the production of a company history (of Golden Arrow Bus Services) to date and an analysis of how the strike of 1992 has been recorded. To understand what has happened to the histories of the bus drivers’ strike, this study includes questions about how people relate their stories, what is silenced, what is included and what is excluded, by whom and why. In the course of the study, a history of the strike will emerge. However the emphasis is on the politics of historical production and what the exclusion of the strike means