Research Publications (History)

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African history in context: Toward a praxis of radical education
(Taylor & Francis Group, 2018) Benson, Koni; Gamedze, Asher; Koranteng, Akosua
This chapter reflects on the context, process, and challenges of the Know Your Continent (KYC) popular education course which we ran in Cape Town in the second half of 2015. KYC brought together people from local high schools, community activist networks, universities � both students and academics, and others into conversations emerging from themes and debates in African history and their relevance and relationship to our own contemporary contexts of struggle. First, the chapter examines the KYC�s historical context. Second, it looks at how KYC was deliberately rooted in the contemporary questions posed by the urgent political project of decolonisation � questions concerning how to decentre the university, how to liberate knowledge from the hierarchies that bind it, and how to imagine and practice collaborative radical education. The third part speaks to some of the contradictory potentialities of doing radical work in, or in affiliation to, a university. Through a reflection on the successes and limitations of KYC, we hope to contribute to conversations about the potential for different kinds of engagement, and different kinds of solidarity between the often-segregated spaces of schools, universities, and activist organisations.
Betwixt the oceans: The Chief Immigration Officer in Cape Town, Clarence Wilfred Cousins (1905�1915)
(Taylor & Francis, 2016) Dhupelia-Mesthrie, Uma
Drawing on the personal and official papers of an immigration officer, this article highlights his personality, social life, and the quotidian aspects of his work at the port. By placing the officer at the centre, instead of the usual tendency in South African historiography to focus on ethnic immigration histories, one secures broader insights into the administration of policy, such as the writing test (an exclusionary mechanism) and repatriation, which are often associated with state policies against Indians. While the article draws on examples of arrivals at the port from both the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, arguing against a focus on only Indian Ocean traffic, it emphasises how arrivals from India played a role in shaping the immigration bureaucracy. While scholars have recently begun to see Cape Town as an important Indian Ocean port, this article points to settler society�s unease with what sea traffic from Bombay and Durban might bring and how Cape Town sought to establish a disconnect with the East.
The blur of history: Student protest and photographic clarity in South African universities, 2015�2016
(University of the Western Cape, 2017) Hayes, Patricia
I have three points I would like to put forward � about strong photographs, about clarity and about blur. I also have a number of photographs dating from October 2015 at the University of the Western Cape that will be planted through the text as the argument unfolds.
Bureaucratically missing: Capital punishment, exhumations, and the afterlives of state documents and photographs
(University of the Western Cape, 2018) van Laun, Bianca
For their families, the bodies of many of those hanged by the apartheid state remain missing and missed. Judicial executions, and the corpses they produced, were hidden from the scrutiny of the public and the press. While families might have known about the sentencing and fate of their relatives, and some might have come to Pretoria Central Prison to say goodbye and even attended a brief funeral service at the prison after the hanging, the state claimed and maintained control over the bodies of the condemned, both alive and dead. Families of the condemned were prohibited from viewing the bodies or attending burials, and while they could later request information about grave numbers, they were never allowed to recover the remains. Relatives could request that the remains be cremated but at their own cost, and even then, the ashes remained the property of the state and were not returned to the families. Many simply never knew what had become of their family members� remains.
Cape Indians, Apartheid and Higher Education
(University of the Western Cape, 2013) Dhupelia-Mesthrie, Uma
On a Sunday afternoon, 15 November 2009, the Luxurama Theatre in Wynberg was filled to capacity as Indians in Cape Town gathered to launch the Cape Town 1860 Legacy Foundation in preparation for the 2010 events commemorating the 150th anniversary of the arrival of Indians in Natal. The Foundation had been constituted after meetings in Cape Town had been addressed by Satish Dhupelia and AV Mohammed who were members of the 1860 Legacy Foundation of Durban, tasked with co-ordinating a national movement. They and Ashwin Trikamjee, a religious leader who chaired the Durban committee were present. The gathering brought Gujarati Hindus, Christians, Muslims, and Tamil Hindus of the city together. While the ancestors of many of those present had come as immigrants to the Cape directly from India and had little direct connection to indenture, the Tamils present did have their roots in the indenture system. The movement from Natal to the Cape Colony by the ex-indentured had, in fact, begun from the 1870s in response to the discovery of diamonds in Kimberley.1 Many Tamil Indians would continue to come to the Cape in the post-Union period often breaking inter-provincial restrictions on movement and settling in the Cape illegally.
Durban and Cape Town as port cities: Reconsidering Southern African studies from the Indian Ocean
(Taylor & Francis, 2016) Hofmeyr, Isabel; Dhupelia-Mesthrie, Uma; Kaarsholm, Preben
This special issue arose out of a workshop titled �Durban and Cape Town as Indian Ocean Port Cities: Reconsidering Southern African Studies from the Indian Ocean�, held at the University of the Western Cape in September 2014. The volume is located at the intersection of southern African studies and Indian Ocean studies, and explores this exchange as a site for enriching southern African transnational historiographies.
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
False fathers and false sons: Immigration officials in Cape Town, documents and verifying minor sons from India in the first half of the twentieth century
(University of the Western Cape, 2014) Dhupelia-Mesthrie, Uma
This article examines the rituals of admission to Cape Town, developed by the immigration bureaucracy at the port, for minor sons from India. It provides a context for why the entry of sons of established Indian residents became an issue. Drawing on local knowledge as well as the official archives, the article takes one into the heart of immigration encounters. Its primary focus is on systems of identification and verification of relationships and ages, the role that documents played, and what this says about state power. It points to a progression from fairly primitive methods employed in the early years to demands for certificates to be completed in India, inter-governmental cooperation, village enquiries in India, and the use of technology such as fingerprinting, photographs and x-rays. Over time the bureaucracy seemingly became more powerful. Yet individuals coming from India, where the documentation of individual identity was not a significant state priority, responded creatively. Paying attention to the documents themselves, this article argues that, despite elaborate paperwork and systems, truths about fathers and sons remained elusive. The article points to how, despite demanding documents from India, officials in Cape Town, with some justification, distrusted these papers. The very documentary systems developed to ensure state control over who would be admitted into the country undermined the state's ability to do precisely that.
Feminist activist archives: Towards a living history of the Gender Education Training Network (GETNET)
(UNISA Press, 2018) Benson, Koni
This article engages the dilemmas and challenges of writing histories of the recent past, and of the political agendas of intervening in those histories in the present. This is done through producing an archive of documentation and oral histories of the Gender Education Training Network, GETNET. GETNET was a feminist political education organisation formed in South Africa in the 1990s that is best known for creating spaces of thinking and learning to strengthen action and intervention at numerous levels from 1992 to 2014. This article portrays the history and pedagogy as well as groundbreaking work of GETNET�the first gender training organisation in South Africa that attempted to make real the gains made on paper by challenging gender dynamics and institutionalised sexism in post-apartheid South Africa. It draws on the literature of activist archiving and feminist methodologies of intergenerational dialogue, aiming to (a) share some of the most radical and relevant work done in the decade after 1994 by anti-apartheid feminist activists developing what they called indigenous and regional perspectives, materials, and methodologies to expose and shift gender dynamics, and (b) to spark ideas and conversations about ways of producing activist archives that are accountable to both movements and to the future.
The letters of Sushila Gandhi: From press worker to managing trustee of Phoenix settlement in South Africa, 1927 to 1977
(SAGE Publications, 2023) Mesthrie, UD
On 18 March 1949, Sita Gandhi, the eldest daughter of Manilal and Sushila Gandhi, responded to a request for information from Louis Fischer who was writing his biography of Mohandas Gandhi. The 21 years old had taken over clerical responsibilities in the printing press at Phoenix Settlement where her father edited and published Indian Opinion, the paper Gandhi started in 1903 during his South African stay. With impeccable English and beautiful handwriting, signaling the importance of awaiting her father�s return from India, she added: �My mother doesn�t write English �� (Louis Fischer Papers, Box 3). Language, thus, coldly cut Fischer from accessing Sushila and rendered her mute
Mapping Bodies
(University of the Western Cape, 2018) Minkley, Emma
The images in the visual essay that follows this text are drawn from a set of partnered art events, the Museum of Truth and Reconciliation and Double Portrait/Haunting Objects. The latter took place at the University of the Western Cape in Cape Town, South Africa, in March 2018 as part of the programme at the workshop titled, �Missing and Missed: The Subject, Politics and Memorialisation�, and was intended to be read as a second chapter of the Museum of Truth and Reconciliation, which was enacted in Toronto, Canada in October 2016. The Toronto event invited participants to compile and collate objects collected from the streets of the city in response to a suite of cue cards containing pictorial and textual prompts on themes relating to truth and reconciliation, loss and memory. The collected objects, ranging from bits of organic matter to written pamphlets to foodstuffs, are now stored in small compartmentalised plastic �collector�s boxes� � each imbued with individualised notions of the given prompts. The cue cards exist as a set of indexical maps. Simultaneously images and objects, they hold information on routes through the city, as well as outlines of things and ideas, lost and found.
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.
Mueda massacre: the musical archive
(Taylor & Francis, 2017) Israel, Paolo
As in Pidjiguiti in Guin�-Bissau or Baixa de Cassanje in Angola, the massacre that occurred in the northern Mozambican town of Mueda on 16 June 1960 has been inscribed in the nationalist narrative as the breaking point of anti-colonial unrest and the trigger of the armed liberation struggle. In the past 20 years several scholars have questioned the central tenets of the nationalist interpretation, especially the idea that the aim of the demonstration was political independence � a claim considered too lofty to be articulated by a mass of illiterate peasants guided by leaders enmeshed in ethnic organisations. Caught between the rhetorics of resistance and revisionism, the colonial archive and oral testimony, the event itself has been rendered illegible. To rescue 16 June from such deadlock, this article turns towards a different kind of historical material: song. Proceeding archaeologically, it moves from songs that reproduce the official version; through more ancient songs, which express some direct experience of the event, however layered and reformulated; to songs that were sung at the time of the massacre. These songs and the echoes they elicit from other sources pave the way to a re-interpretation of the event: from the point zero of a vanguardist history of national consciousness, to a utopian moment in which independence appeared as a possibility, however unclearly understood, the political imagination expanding beyond any consideration of objective constraint.
Of borders and crossings: The lives of a healer in northern Mozambique
(Journal of Southern African Studies, 2022) Israel, Paolo
Background: Daria Trentini�s book is a narrative exploration of the life and practice of a healer in the northern Mozambican city of Nampula. Ansha, the titular protagonist, was a Makonde migrant from the province of Cabo Delgado who moved to Nampula, converted to Islam and set up a �spirit mosque� in which the Koran and herbal knowledge were used to cure afflictions. Spirit possession (majini) was central both to illness and healing. A being of many worlds, Ansha crossed, navigated and negotiated a number of borders: between ethnicities, regions and religions; between sickness and health, the city and the countryside, the spirit and the human domain. Indeed, the figure of the border � especially the notions of �border crossing� and �border events� � provide the book with its central conceptual anchoring
Paper regimes
(University of the Western Cape, 2014) Dhupelia-Mesthrie, Uma
In 1915 Baba Bapoo, a store assistant in Cape Town, was thrown into a state of great mental and emotional stress when he lost his permit en route to India. This was the only document that could guarantee his re-admission to South Africa. He wrote to a friend to apply for a replacement indicating, 'Since I have made the lost [sic] my heart has turned into madness'. He managed to secure a fresh permit as his application was on record in the Cape Town Immigration Department. Osman Vazir was less fortunate he left for India rather suddenly, in the process omitting to secure a permit. Later, he wrote an impassioned plea from India to the Immigration Department in Cape Town citing all the documents in his possession which proved he had been in South Africa: 'I have got a register of Transvaal, a pass of Free State, a certificate from Gas Co., a receipt for a pass which was received by me in 1907, a card from Somerset Hospital...' He, however, did not have the right paper needed to re-enter Cape Town. His plea to be allowed in 'with both hands joined, as one to the Almighty and a father' was in vain. In the late 1930s, Walter Sisulu was arrested and taken to the Hillbrow police station in Johannesburg because there was 'something wrong with my pass book'. After paying a fine he was released. The position of African males in South Africa's urban spaces was aptly summed up by a migrant labourer in Peter Abrahams' novel: 'Man's life is controlled by pieces of paper'.
The political sublime: reading Kok Nam, Mozambican photographer (1939-2012)
(University of the Western Cape, 2013) Assubuji, Rui; Hayes, Patricia
Kok Nam began his photographic career at Studio Focus in Louren�o Marques in the 1950s, graduated to the newspaper Not�cias and joined Tempo magazine in the early 1970s. Most recently he worked at the journal Savana as a photojournalist and later director. This article opens with an account of the relationship that developed between Kok Nam and the late President Samora Machel, starting with the photo-grapher�s portrait of Machel in Nachingwea in November 1974 before Independence. It traces an arc through the Popular Republic (1976-1990) from political revelation at its inception to the difficult years of civil war and Machel�s death in the plane crash at Mbuzini in 1986. The article then engages in a series of photo-commentaries across a selection of Kok Nam�s photographs, several published in their time but others selected retrospectively by Kok Nam for later exhibition and circulation. The approach taken is that of �association�, exploring the connections between the photographs, their histories both then and in the intervening years and other artifacts and mediums of cultural expression that deal with similar issues or signifiers picked up in the images. Among the signifiers picked up in the article are soldiers, pigs, feet, empty villages, washing, doves and bridges. The central argument is that Kok Nam participated with many others in a kind of collective hallucination during the Popular Republic, caught up in the �political sublime�. Later Kok Nam shows many signs of a photographic �second thinking� that sought out a more delicate sublime in his own archive.
Re-locating memories: transnational and local narratives of Indian South Africans in Cape Town
(SAGE Publications, 2017) Dhupelia-Mesthrie, Uma
This article plays on the word re-location to examine the memories of Indians in South Africa through oral histories about relocation as a result of the Group Areas Act, to memories of parents and grandparents relocating to South Africa from India as told to interviewees and to their own memories of journeys to India and back. The narratives of mobilities traverse time and national boundaries and are counter-posed by narratives of local mobilities as well as stasis. The article identifies ways of narrating, themes of narration and the meaning of memories while noting the re-location of memory construction against the backdrop of South Africa�s democratic transition and the 150th commemoration of the arrival of indentured Indians to South Africa. It argues that the local and the national are important in narrations of transnational journeys, thus advancing a particular approach to transnational memory studies.
Red assembly: The work remains
(Published by History Department, University of the Western Cape, 2016) Witz, Leslie; Pohlandt-McCormick, Helena; Minkley, Gary; Mowitt, John
The work that emerged from the encounter with Red, an art installation by Simon Gush and his collaborators, in the workshop �Red Assembly�, held in East London in August 2015, is assembled here in Kronos, the journal of southern African histories based at the University of the Western Cape, and previously in parallax, the cultural studies journal based at the University of Leeds published in May 2016. What is presented there and here is not simply more work, work that follows, or even additional works. Rather, it is the work that arises as a response to a question that structured our entire project: does Red, now also installed in these two journals, have the potential to call the discourse of history into question? This article responds to this question through several pairings: theft � gift; copy � rights; time � history; kronos � chronos. Here we identify a reversal in this installation of the gift into the commodity, and another with regard to conventional historical narratives which privilege the search for sources and origins. A difference between (the historian�s search for) origination and (the artist�s) originality becomes visible in a conversation between and over the historic and the artistic that does not simply try to rescue History by means of the work of art. It is in this sense that we invite the displacements, detours, and paths made possible through Simon Gush�s Red, the �Red Assembly� workshop and the work/ gift of installation and parallaxing. To gesture beyond �histories� is the provocation to which art is neither cause nor effect. Thinking with the work of art, that is, grasping thought in the working of art, has extended the sense of history�s limit and the way the limit of history is installed. What to do at this limit, at the transgressive encounter between saying yes and no to history, remains the challenge. It is the very challenge of what insistently remains.
Santu Mofokeng, photographs: 'the violence is in the knowing'
(Wiley - Blackwell Publishing, 2009) Hayes, Patricia
Born in 1956, Santu Mofokeng formed part of the Afrapix Collective that engaged in expos� and documentary photography of anti-apartheid resistance and social conditions during the 1980s in South Africa. However, Mofokeng was an increasingly important internal critic of mainstream photojournalism, and of the ways black South Africans were represented in the bigger international picture economy during the political struggle. Eschewing scenes of violence and the third-party view of white-on-black brutality in particular, he began his profound explorations of the everyday and spiritual dimensions of African life, both in the city and in the countryside. His formal techniques favor �fictions� that contain smoke, mist, and other matters and techniques that occlude rather than expose. Using angularity and ambivalence, he also ruptures realist expectations and allows space for the uncanny and the supernatural. He works with the notion of seriti (a northern seSotho term encompassing aura, shadow, power, essence, and many other things). The essay follows strands in Mofokeng�s writings and statements in relation to certain of his photographs, most recently repositioned in the substantial 2007 exhibition Invoice, to argue that he has pushed for a desecularization and Africanization of photography from the 1980s to the present. In more recent work the scourge of apartheid has been replaced by the HIV/AIDS virus, a mutation of nature, exacerbating the spiritual insecurities of many people in postapartheid South Africa. The essay concludes that Mofokeng�s work poses a critique of the parallel paradigms of Marxist-influenced social history and documentary photography in 1980s South Africa, both still highly influential, by attempting to reinsert aura (seriti) into photography and by highlighting what secular Marxism has concealed and proscribed.
Shades of empire: police photography in German South-West Africa
(Taylor & Francis, 2013) Rizzo, Lorena
This article looks at a photographic album produced by the German police in colonial Namibia just before World War I. Late 19th- and early 20th-century police photography has often been interpreted as a form of visual production that epitomized power and regimes of surveillance imposed by the state apparatuses on the poor, the criminal and the Other. On the other hand police and prison institutions became favored sites where photography could be put at the service of the emergent sciences of the human body�physiognomy, anthropometry and anthropology. While the conjuncture of institutionalized colonial state power and the production of scientific knowledge remain important for this Namibian case study, the article explores a slightly different set of questions. Echoing recent scholarship on visuality and materiality the photographic album is treated as an archival object and visual narrative that was at the same time constituted by and constitutive of material and discursive practices within early 20th-century police and prison institutions in the German colony. By shifting attention away from image content and visual codification alone toward the question of visual practice the article traces the ways in which the photo album, with its ambivalent, unstable and uncontained narrative, became historically active and meaningful. Therein the photographs were less informed by an abstract theory of anthropological and racial classification but rather entrenched with historically contingent processes of colonial state constitution, socioeconomic and racial stratification, and the institutional integration of photography as a medium and a technology into colonial policing. The photo album provides a textured sense of how fragmented and contested these processes remained throughout the German colonial period, but also how photography could offer a means of transcending the limits and frailties brought by the realities on the ground.

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