Department of History

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https://hdl.handle.net/10566/96

The Department of History is one of the leading History departments in South Africa. Areas of specialization in the Department are women and gender studies, public history, visual history, land and agrarian history, liberation history, urban history, African history, and teacher education.

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The 1945 General Strike in Northern Nigeria and its Role in Anti-Colonial Nationalism
(University of the Western Cape, 2014) Yohanna, Stephen; Rousseau, Nicky
This thesis follows the course of the Nigerian general strike of 1945 in the Northern provinces, a previously under-researched region. It examines some of the many ways in which the strike has been understood in the academy, focusing in particular on the works of Alkasum Abba, Kazah-Toure and Bill Freund who have regarded the strike as well supported and successful. By employing Ian Phimister and Brian Raftopoulos's analysis of the 1948 general strike in colonial Zimbabwe, this thesis re-reads the narrative of success by bringing to the fore previosuly ignored issues relating to questions of planning, tactics, propaganda, solidarity, leadership, and execution of the strike. This re-reading reveals a considerably more varied and uneven response across and within the different categories of workers than has been previously assumed by scholars. Such unevenness challenges notions of "solidarity" and "steadfastness" attributed to the industrial action, with implications for how workers struggles have been incorporated into wider narratives of decolonization and anti-colonial nationalism.
A land occupation called Covid in the time of COVID-19
(University of the Western Cape, 2024) Mvimbi, Yanathi; Benson, Koni
Most people would associate the word “Covid” with the coronavirus pandemic that disrupted people’s lives globally in 2020. However, in this research, besides referring to the pandemic, “Covid” refers to a land occupation in Cape Town, South Africa. Living without proper housing is one of the hardest struggles that millions of poor black South Africans experience every day. Reflecting ongoing spatial apartheid, it is one of the greatest injustices of the democratic era that many people still do not have a decent home. This research seeks to understand the struggles that people went through during and after COVID-19 in the land occupation that resulted in the informal settlement named Covid. The mini-thesis documents how settlements like Covid are publicly represented through a critical reading of a selection of news articles, government media statements and nongovernmental organisation (NGO) reports. The paper examines how these ‘outsider’ perspectives represent and construct socioeconomic rights, poverty and inequality and how this impacts their attitudes and solutions to homelessness in Cape Town. The study highlights the roles of NGOs and social movements in the fight against spatial injustice during and since the pandemic. Most importantly, all these perspectives are contrasted with how Covid residents represent themselves and their decision to occupy land.
A study in the history of Protea Village and the impact of the Group Areas Act
(University of the Western Cape, 1995) Bantom, Ronald
In this story I will look at the Group Areas Act and how it effected the life of people with particular reference to the Protea Village Community in Cape Town. Protea Village was a coloured spot situated on the slopes of Table Mountain beneath Kirstenbosch Botanical Gardens with Rhodes Drive as the boundry. Protea Village started in 1885 when Cecil John Rhodes built a road from Groote Schuur to Hout Bay. It was important for him to have his coloured labourers close to the workplace, thus he rented the Stegman Cottages in Kirstenbosh as home for their families.
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.
Affect and art: encounters with objects of power in South African museum and archival collections
(Universty of the Western Cape, 2024) Stone, Kristy; Grunebaum, Heidi
This doctoral thesis investigates the ontological foundations of museum praxis by examining four objects of power located in Western Cape Museum archives in South Africa. These objects – a Tsimshian soul catcher, a bushman hunting bag, Entada rheedii sea beans and an azimat (Islamic written amulet) – all classified under the label of "charms," an invented category that groups everything that is not “rational”, Western and Christian together. In museums “charms” are continuously derided as the antithesis of modernism and the embodiment of paganism, animism or as traditional and taken as symbols of “pre-contact societies”. The term "charm" also encompasses objects connected to diverse healing paradigms, intimately tied to ideas of sickness, the body and spirituality. Consequently, these artefacts hold profound personal and social significance to the communities from whence they originated, prompting a deep enquiry about the histories of oppression that resulted in their collection, and whether they should continue to remain in museums and archives. These objects, in other words, challenge traditional museum categories and narratives, asking uncomfortable questions of the institutions that store them and those who study them.
The African child and the hidden curriculum at Blythswood Institute: Three snapshots
(University of Western Cape, 2021) Nogqala, Xolela; Rousseau, Nicky
This mini-thesis seeks to understand how the colonial and apartheid state imagined the African child in South Africa through education policies and their associated hidden curriculum. It asks what educational project was deemed suitable for the African child and how did this project configure her future? At the core of this enquiry is a preoccupation to understand how institutions, their curricula and objects rid themselves of colonial precepts. In working through this, I employ Blythswood Institute as a provocation to think and to historicise the education of African children, such as those at Blythswood, in three moments: colonialism and the founding of Blythswood in 1877; apartheid and the passing of the Bantu Education Act of 1953, and the post-apartheid times of democratic South Africa.
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.
Anthropology and literature: Humanistic themes in the ethnographic fiction of Hilda Kuper and Edith Turner
(University of Western Cape, 2021) Shaik, Zuleika Bibi; Bank, Andrew
This mini-thesis makes an argument for the significance of a female-dominated hidden tradition of experimental ethnographic writing in British social anthropology. It argues that the women anthropologists who experimented with creative forms of ethnography were doubly marginalised: first as women in an androcentric male canon in British social anthropology and American cultural anthropology, and second as creative writers whose work has been consistently undervalued in sombre scholarly circles. The study proposes that Hilda Beemer Kuper (1911-1995) and Edith Turner (1921-2016) should be regarded as significant in a still unexcavated literary tradition or subgenre with Anglo-American anthropology. It showcases the narrative craft of Kuper through a detailed textual analysis of her two most accomplished experimental ethnographies A Witch in My Heart (written in 1954, performed in 1955, and published in siSwati in 1962 and English in London in 1970) and A Bite of Hunger (written in 1958 and published in America in 1965). I highlight Kuper?s multiple literary techniques in evoking of the fraught position of young Swazi co-wives, modern women and women accused of witchcraft in a patriarchal culture with particular attention to her gifts in creating dramatic plots, complex characters and dialogue rich in vernacular metaphor and proverbs. It then celebrates the even more experimental creative writing of Edith Turner. While Turner has sometimes been acknowledged for her hidden contributions to the co-production of her deeply loved and more famous husband Victor, she has not been given her due as an experimental ethnographer, also placing the experiences of African women centre-stage. In what she overtly advertised as �female literary style�, Turner?s belatedly published 1987 novel The Spirit and the Drum. A Memoir of Africa is analysed with meticulous attention to the literary techniques by which she seeks to explore an anthropology of experience and empathy. These accomplished but under-acknowledged women creative writers sought to explore what they both explicitly conceived of as gestures of humanist cross-cultural engagement.
Anthropology and literature: Humanistic themes in the ethnographic fiction of Hilda Luper and Edith Turner
(University of Western Cape, 2020) Shaik, Zuleika Bibi; Bank, Andrew
This mini-thesis makes an argument for the significance of a female-dominated hidden tradition of experimental ethnographic writing in British social anthropology. It argues that the women anthropologists who experimented with creative forms of ethnography were doubly marginalised: first as women in an androcentric male canon in British social anthropology and American cultural anthropology, and second as creative writers whose work has been consistently undervalued in sombre scholarly circles. The study proposes that Hilda Beemer Kuper (1911-1995) and Edith Turner (1921-2016) should be regarded as significant in a still unexcavated literary tradition or subgenre with Anglo-American anthropology.
Artistic Interventions in the Historical Remembering of Cape slavery, c.1800s
(University of the Western Cape, 2020) Lewis, Mischka Jade; Mnyaka, Phindi
This mini-thesis thesis intends to grapple with silences by looking the possibilities of reconceptualising archives through notions of �traces,� �absence,� and �fragments.� Examining archives as bodies of knowledge, a window to telling us something about pastpresent- future representations is to think about navigating archives of colonialism and slavery as sites of historical memory. The aim of this paper is to enter the pedagogical problem of remembering and gendered representational voids by seeking to explore how artistic representations offer insights in the absence of detail in the colonial archives. In exploring the relationship between bodies, remembering and the historical trauma of slavery and colonialisation, specifically in relation to historical corporeal and flesh narratives attached to indigenous black women, and how women negotiate these meanings through embodied interventions in (post-) slavery South Africa. The positioning of the body as an archive probes questions on how the memory of traumatic wounding in a (post-)slavery South Africa body politics are inscribed to convey meaning, memory and identity. The notions of embodiment that this thesis is concerned with asks in what ways can we creatively and imaginatively re-construct, outside of conventional historiographies and knowledge(s), that which has been disembowled through colonial dominating narratives of enslaved subjects?
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.
Being / becoming the "Cape Town flower sellers" The botanical complex, flower selling and floricultures in Cape Town
(University of the Western Cape, 2010) Boehi, Melanie Eva; Rassool, Ciraj; NULL; Faculty of Arts
This mini-thesis is concerned with histories of flower selling in Cape Town. Since the late 19th century, images and imaginings of the flower sellers in Adderley Street and to a lesser degree in other areas of the city attained an outstanding place in visualisations and descriptions of Cape Town. The flower sellers were thereby characterised in a particularly gendered, racialised and class-specific way as predominantly female, coloured and poor. This characterisation dominated to an extent that it is possible to speak of a discursive figure of the 'Cape Town flower sellers'. In tourism-related media and in personal memoirs, the 'Cape Town flower sellers' often came to represent both the city and the inhabitants of Cape Town. The images and imaginings of the 'Cape Town flower sellers' can partly be traced back to representations of 'flower girls' in fictional stories, paintings, photographs and film in Europe, particularly in Great Britain. In Cape Town, this European discourse about flower selling developed in a specific way within colonial, apartheid and post-apartheid contexts.
Being and neoliberalism: A conceptual history of the subject
(University of the Western Cape, 2022) Naidoo, Kiasha; van Bever Donker, Maurits
The idea of neoliberalism, as both a guiding principle for economic policy decisions and a governing rationality, is a pertinent issue of our time. The concept itself is often used to describe the contemporary mode of political economy but when we look closer, it is notoriously elusive. Scholars such as Michel Foucault and Wendy Brown seek to conceptualize neoliberalism as a governing rationality. What these scholars share is a reading of neoliberal governmentality in terms of the subject. In social and political philosophical critiques of neoliberalism which inherit from this Foucauldian line of thought, the subject is a central figure. However, thinking on the subject did not begin with a consideration of neoliberalism, it has a long philosophical history. I discuss this through a conceptual history of the subject and in doing so, understand the neoliberal subject as another iteration of subjectivity.
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.
Biography in and of an archive : the Shelagh Gastrow Collection and South Africa
(University of Western Cape, 2012) Kwao-Sarbah, David; Rassool, Ciraj
This study is about the recent political history of South Africa. It examined the crucial period of late apartheid, through the political transition into democracy. The study was conducted through the lenses of Shelagh Gastrow's work, whose series of publications titled Who�s Who in South African Politics traversed the spectrum of a severely polarised South Africa, and earned her the accolade as a "leading authority" in the biographical enterprise of Who's who. Gastrow had interviewed people in political office, those in opposition, those hiding from political persecution and even those in exile outside South Africa. It involved about 100 personalities for each of her five volumes. The study involved examining archival collections, documentary analysis, desktop research and interviews with Shelagh Gastrow. It also examined the Mayibuye Archives, where the Gastrow collection was eventually transferred, as an archive of resistance to apartheid. The study showed that from its origin as a research project about personalities in South Africa�s resistance and transition history, the Shelagh Gastrow collection was transformed into a heritage resource. The study examined political collections as heritage resources in the process of remaking the nation, and the contributions they make in the national re-engineering process. The study drew on the convergence of two theoretical claims. First, Achille Mbembe, among others, has asserted that there is no state without its archives. An indispensable, symbiotic, socio-political relationship exists between the state, actors in the state, and related archives. The second, posited by the likes of Arjun Appadurai and Igor Kopytoff, is to the effect that objects have social lives, and that they are formed and transformed through interactions with their related societies. Between the objects and their societies, meanings and values are transmitted, exchanged and retained. Thus, a careful analysis of the formation and transformations (a biographical study) of such objects can reveal the obscure about the societies they relate to. Consequently, socio-political collections do reveal much about the individuals, groups, and societies they represent. In the case of South Africa, the analysis showed the corpus of Shelagh Gastrow's collection (the object in this study) which included transcripts of political interviews, manuscripts and Who's who publications, revealed the transition from apartheid into democracy as a critical historical juncture. Political collections constitute important heritage resources, which contribute to the production of national narratives. They may originate in the past, but their analysis in the present has resonance for the collective future of the nation.
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.
Cape-�Helena: An exploration of nostalgia and identity through the Cape Town -� St. Helena migration nexus
(University of the Western Cape, 2018) Samuels, Damian; Hayes, Patricia
For an Island measuring merely 128 square kilometers, and in spite of its remote location in the mid-�South Atlantic, St. Helena �punches way above its weight in history�, earning and occupying a privileged place in British scholarship of its imperial thalassocratic age. However, prior to this period in which the Island was indispensible to British Empire formation, it had passed through the hands of at least two former European naval nations before it was eventually laid claim to and effectively colonised by the British. The Portuguese, who were the first to stumble upon the uninhabited Island in 1502 -� naming it St. Helena in honour of Roman Emperor Constantine the Great�s mother -� managed to keep its existence a closely guarded secret for over eight years. For nearly a century, the Island was reserved for exclusive use by the Portuguese as a port for recuperation, replenishing and re-�provisioning, which they usually visited on their homebound journey from trading (and conquering) in the East Indies. This Portuguese monopoly of use of the Island, however, ended during the last decade of the sixteenth century when other maritime nations, particularly Dutch and later English traders, became aware of and started frequenting the Island. The initial overlap period, constituting the first three decades of the seventeenth century when mostly the Dutch and Portuguese shared use of the Island, was cause for occasional hostile encounters between the two nations. Apparently, continued Dutch and English harassment of Portuguese (and Spanish) ships made visiting the Island untenable for the Portuguese who opted to avoid St. Helena and instead make use of a number of their other port �possessions� along the West African coastline to replenish and repair their ships.
Cape-�Helena: An exploration of nostalgia and identity through the Cape Town -� St. Helena migration nexus
(University of the Western Cape, 2018) Samuels, Damian; Hayes, Patricia
In the following two chapters I will attempt to offer a more systemic account of St. Helena immigration to South African between 1838 and 1948. To date, no such study has been undertaken, despite a vibrant oral tradition amongst the descendants of St. Helena immigrants celebrating their St. Helenian heritage and often, in peculiar fashion, romanticise their Island of provenance. The commencement date for my chosen timeframe emerges from a need to authenticate rather tenuous historical accounts of St. Helena�s first mass emigration for the Cape of Good Hope in 1838. Where cases of migration are discussed, these are either incidences of large-�scale 41, often aided, migration and settlement, or of those St. Helena migrant workers initially employed under temporary contacts to work in South Africa, specifically within burgeoning industrial sectors of the late-�nineteenth or early-�twentieth century South Africa.

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