Philosophiae Doctor - PhD (History)

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Administrative death: Bureaucracy, capital punishment and governmentality in South Africa during the 1960s
(University of the Western Cape, 2018) van Laun, Bianca Paige; Lalu, Premesh
On 15December 2011, the now ousted South African President Jacob Zuma officiated the opening of the Gallows Memorial Museum at the Pretoria Central Correctional Facility, a project undertaken by the Department of Correctional Services. This Project saw the gallows at what was previously Pretoria Central Maximum (C-Max) Prison, which had been dismantled in 1996 following the abolition of the death penalty in South Africa, restored and reopened as a museum. At the top of the notorious 52 steps that condemned prisoners climbed to reach the execution room, the then president unveiled a dedicated wall with individualised plaques for each of the political prisoners who had died there between 1960 and 1989. �Today� the president announced, �all 134 names are officially being enshrined for eternity so that future generations will know what this country went through, so that we never go through a similar horror ever again. The Museum is meant to act as an anti-death penalty monument, to honour the anti-apartheid activists who were hanged by the apartheid state and to encourage �healing.� This was to be �a place where the political prisoners who were hanged there can be honoured and the past can be buried. Reflecting the African National Congress (hereafter ANC)- centered dominant narrative of resistance in South Africa, Zuma emphasised the executions of ANC cadres. He failed to note that the Pan Africanist Congress was the organisation that had lost the greatest number of its members to judicial executions.
Baswahili and Bato ya Mangala: Regionalism and Congolese diasporic identity in cape town, 1997-2017
(University of the Western Cape, 2022) Vuninga, Rosette Sifa; Israel, Paolo
My research is on regionalism among Congolese migrants of South Africa with the focus on the tensions between Baswahili (Kivu inhabitants) and Bato ya mangala (Kinshasa inhabitants) in the city of Cape Town. The two groups incarnate the geopolitical East and West of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), respectively. I locate the tensions between these two regional groups in Cape Town in the DRC�s politics as well as that of the host country, South Africa. In the DRC, the tensions between Baswahili and Bato ya mangala are rooted in the identity politics and discourse of the post-Mobutu era, mainly that which emerged from the major events that have shaped the dynamics of the DRC�s crisis since the late 1990s.
Connectedness and disconnectedness in Thembeyakhe Harry Gwala's biography, 1920-1995: Rethinking Political Militancy, Mass Mobilisation and Grassroots Struggles in South Africa
(The University of the Western Cape, 2018) Dlamuka, Mxolisi Chrisostomas; Rassool, Ciraj
This dissertation is premised on the notions of connectedness and disconnectedness as a contribution to the field of South African biography. I argue that Harry Gwala�s life was characterised by connectedness and disconnectedness and was shaped by his determination to remain connected while the state utilised its coercive power to disconnect him. While South African history has been largely written within the framework of repression and resistance, a study of Gwala�s life enables historians to examine twentieth century history from a different perspective which focuses on themes of connectedness and disconnectedness. Gwala�s rural background, his training as a teacher and his later involvement in trade unionism enabled him to develop and maintain connectedness with grassroots sentiments. In an attempt to disconnect Gwala from these pursuits, he was occasionally tortured and served with banning orders which restricted his movement and political activities. He was imprisoned on Robben Island between 1964 to 1972 and 1977 to 1987. While disconnected by banning orders and constant harassment by state security agents, Gwala continued to retain his connectedness through underground activities and later through his involvement in re-establishing branches of the African National Congress after his release from prison in 1988. This dissertation argues that Gwala was a product of a complex society and varied social milieux which were all characterised by high levels of class deprivation and exploitation. As he meandered through various social milieux he developed a working class political approach which impelled him towards mass mobilisation and opposition to the state�s oppressive notion of race and class. Gwala became a medium to connect various classes and political groupings during the liberation struggle in South Africa. This biography also makes a contribution to the emerging body of literature on the histories of resistance politics at local and national levels in South Africa.
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.
David Cecil Oxford Matiwane and auto/biographic memory: political activism, social pragmatism and individual achievement in twentieth century South Africa
(University of the Western Cape, 2016) Ndhlovu, Bongani Cyprian; Rassool, Ciraj
The main theoretical and empirical interest of this study is the critical examination of the life of David Cecil Oxford (D.C.O.) Matiwane. In it, I critically examine the politics of representing Matiwane�s life and the methods employed in such a discourse. I do this by focusing on the question of representation of political, social and economic struggles launched by D.C.O. Matiwane against segregation and apartheid in South Africa in the twentieth century. This study then questions the notion of creating a biographical supernarrative of his achievements. It confronts the binary approach in the representation of his life and argues that Matiwane�s life is an embodiment of various, even contradictory, philosophies. This study puts forward an argument that Matiwane's representation should be contextualised in relation to the struggles of his contemporaries, and that his narrative should not be seen as a product of a single political route. It unpacks various communal, individual, economic and political strategies employed by organisations and persons against apartheid and colonialism. It looks at how these strategies were implemented to overcome apartheid, and analyses how Matiwane's contribution is documented, especially in relation to contributions made by others. This research project also analyses how different layers and patterns in Matiwane's narrative have been created in an attempt to present his auto/biography as a cohesive discourse in spite of fragmented archival and oral memory. It argues that his memory has been appropriated to pursue different political and personal ends. This study further asks the following question: to what extent and why have different political systems given Matiwane�s voice a platform or silenced his point of view? Are there trends in his representation compared to narratives of his contemporaries? What are the underlying reasons behind such trends, if any? Are there continuities or discontinuities in his representation? What were the ambiguities embedded in their struggles? This study evaluates factors that led to him being declared a persona non grata. It closely examines why and how Matiwane has been represented as a source of controversy, as a lone political activist and as a pragmatist.
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.
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.
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
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
Goema�s Refrain: Sonic anticipation and the Musicking Cape
(University of the Western Cape, 2019) Layne, Valmont; Lalu, Premesh
This thesis traces the making of a social world of the musicking Cape through sound, which it calls sonic anticipation. Sonic anticipation is threaded through a Cape-based musicking milieu called goema in the Nineteenth century, and through the regional jazzing culture that emerged in Cape Town in the latter part of the Twentieth century. A key concern is to read the sonic archive of Cape music without folding into a representational discourse of (apartheid) group identity or of a Cape exceptionalism. First, the thesis explores goema's emergence as folk music. In a central example, sonic anticipation is discernible in the intensities of a song called Daar Kom die Alibama [translated as �There Comes the Alibama�]. This song enabled goema to secure a status as racialised folk memory. Later in the Twentieth century, the song set the scene for a rearticulation that laid claim to the city as a response to the 'anxious urbanity' of race formation. This shift from the Nineteenth to Twentieth century musicking tradition is at the heart of what we have come to know as Cape jazz. In its genealogical construction of Cape jazz, the thesis traces a prefigurative aesthetics and politics that proposes new ways of thinking about the political significance of jazz. It traces the pedagogic strategies that musicians � Tem Hawker, Winston Mankunku, Robbie Jansen and Alex van Heerden - used in pursuing �ethical individuation� with this racialised folk memory. By the early 1960s, jazz had become a method �archive� or formative canon for these musicians. The thesis outlines how musicians used �nomadic� pedagogies; following the energies that moved through the city, inside the technological, and discursive formations by which the social world was made. This thesis on goema�s refrain and the musicking Cape offers a way to consider a �difference that is not apartheid�s difference�.
The hand and the head: the handspring puppet company and the arts archive
(University of the Western Cape, 2021) Minkley, Emma Smith; Lalu, Premesh
My Doctoral dissertation, titled The hand and the head: The Handspring Puppet Company and the arts archive, is focussed on the hand as it appears variously in the production, performance and reception of puppetry as a metonym of care and comfort, but conversely of manipulation and tyranny. The shared proponent of the hand, so crucial to the puppeteer as a means of controlling the movements and �life� of the puppet, acts as the object of study which links the puppet to the modern human and the human body, both through means of creation and representation, in other words, both aesthetically and ontologically. The study thus initiates a set of dialectical connections between body and mind, intuition and intellect, practice and theory, all centred on the relationship between the hand and the head.
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.
A history and critical analysis of Namibia�s archaeologies
(University of the Western Cape, 2020) Gwasira, Goodman; Rassool, Ciraj
This study critically examines the political, social and institutional settings in which archaeology was introduced in Namibia. I re-examine the idea of archaeology as a scientific and objective discipline that could be practiced without input from the knowledge systems of local communities. Archaeology developed alongside colonialism in Africa. Archaeology became an apparatus for knowing about the strategic resources that could be found in Namibia. Through the processes of recording sites and artefacts archaeology provided information that was useful to the colonial administration.
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.
The individual, auto/biography and history in South Africa
(University of the Western Cape, 2004) Rassool, Ciraj; Bundy, Colin; Dept. of History; Faculty of Arts
This thesis is a contribution to the field of public history, which the author and others at the University of the Western Cape's History Department have over the last decade pioneered in defining and mapping out in South Africa. Rassool's theories about the relationship between history and biography were developed in relation to the life of the Unity Movement leader, I.B. Tabata.
Locating 'home': Strategies of settlement, identity-formation and social change among African women in Cape Town, 1948-2000
(University of the Western Cape, 2002) Lee, Rebekah; Beinart, William
This dissertation constructs a social history of African women in Cape Town from the vantage point of their varied attempts over the last five decades to map 'home' in the urban setting: in the physical structures of their homes; the character of their social and kinship networks; and in the ways a notion of 'place' was re-worked. An historiographical examination of existing research has shown that, especially in the South African context, much scope remains for a regionally specific historical analysis of the urbanisation process, and African women's unique role in it. The use of oral histories and the adoption of a trans-generational interviewing strategy have helped fashion a textured account of African women's settlement strategies, and the underlying social and personal transformations that their design and use suggested. 'First-generational' women, who entered Cape Town at mid-century, led an uncertain and highly regulated urban existence, by virtue of their enforced marginalisation under apartheid. Until the late-1980s, Cape Town retained a distinctive demographic composition, and an historical association as the 'home' of the Coloured population. This made state and local efforts to control the entry and residence of the minority African populace more coercive and successful, at least in the first two decades of apartheid rule. Despite these restrictions, African women constructed and managed a dense set of strategies which affirmed their material livelihoods in the city and increasingly enmeshed their identities in the workings of a modern and commoditised world. However, first-generational women also actively contested these developments to some extent, evident particularly in their efforts to regulate the movement of and compel financial support from their increasingly mobile daughters and granddaughters. Evidence from second and third-generational respondents show a growing reluctance to utilise first-generational women's settlement strategies and the conceptual frameworks which underpinned them. For instance, associational links were increasingly organised along non-racialised lines. Third-generational women's desire to establish residence in other areas of the city, or in other cities entirely, was indicative of a similar dynamic. This was also reflective of their embrace of mobility as an expression of greater economic and social freedoms possible in a post-apartheid world. This dissertation constructs a social history of African women in Cape Town from the vantage point of their varied attempts over the last five decades to locate 'home' in the urban setting. It charts the experiences of a group of women who first moved to Cape Town in the 1940s and 50s, and their children and grandchildren. My focus is on the way in which succeeding generations of women developed differing strategies of settlement, in the context of sometimes dramatic social and political change. The social as well as the physical elements of locating home are key elements in the analysis, including the redefinition of kinship and associational networks, as well as the re-casting of identities and a sense of place. Until the late 1980s, Cape Town retained a distinctive demographic composition, and an historical association as the 'home' of the Coloured- population. This made state and local efforts to control the entry and residence of the minority African populace more coercive and successful, at least in the first two decades of apartheid rule. Rather than painting a comprehensive portrait of urban African life in the apartheid era (1948- 1994), this dissertation hopes to map a few significant dynamics which were manifest in the encounters between a select group of African women and the distinctive terrain of this city during the apartheid years.
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.
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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