It is well-established in the South African historiography that the apartheid government adopted a new “language of legitimation” (Posel, 1984) in the aftermath of the 1976 student uprisings.
Partial or complete absence of the melanin pigment in the skin, eyes, and hair shape varied cultural expressions and labels denoting albinos or persons with albinism (PWA).
Nations, as Isabel Hofmeyr long ago observed, are forged, in part, from words. Many, perhaps most, of those words are in the nature of history, stories of the past that provide explanation, justification, a charter for present arrangements. What are the politics of this process?
This paper examines the recent history of population registration and credit surveillance in Kenya. It argues that the events taking place there are important because they mark out the development of new kinds of administratively created informational collateral which, for the first time, m
There has been increasing interest (particularly on online forums) on the apparent underrepresentation of African-based scholars in economics scholarship on Africa.
In his 2014 book Askari: A Story of Collaboration and Betrayal in the Anti-Apartheid Struggle historian Jacob Dlamini considers why collaborator Glory Sedibe turned from being a commander in the ANC’s military arm to working with fervour for the apartheid Security Branch.
This paper is a work in progress. Key references, including quotations, are missing. Please do not circulate. The remarks I am about to make are shaped in no small part - but not exclusively - by the turmoil in South African academy over the last two years.
The isiZulu word ‘isithunguthu’ (pl. izithunguthu) is today hardly known outside a small circle of scholars. It does not appear in modern isiZulu dictionaries, nor is it known to isiZulu-speaking academics whom we have consulted. There is no entry for it in A.T.
This paper considers the history of an experiment in architectural education that took place at what is today the University of Nairobi, between 1965 – 1967.
For the period that we might loosely call "late pre-industrial" in both Southern Africa and North America: What was the relationship between colonialism and profound indigenous developments--new social formations, family arrangements, scales of war, relationships with the environment, a
In 1961 Frantz Fanon, seriously weakened by leukaemia, and aware that his life was rapidly coming to an end, dictated his last thoughts in a flat in Tunis. The Damned of the Earth was published at the end of that year, shortly after his death.
Cedric Nunn (b.1957-) is a South African anti-apartheid photographer and a long time biographic chronicler of identity. Classified as coloured, yet self-identifying as black, Nunn resisted the complicity that was inextricable from coloured classification during apartheid.
This paper would like to explore some of my initial research for my PhD in film studies around the role of film in the production of the colonial imagination.
This research aims to indicate the sense in which African conceptions of persons can be considered gendered, ableist and anti-queer. In making the case for this I look at the Force Thesis, Shadow Thesis and Ifeanyi Menkiti’s normative conception of person.
Bodies of Truth offers an intimate account of how apartheid victims deal with the long-term effects of violence, focusing on the intertwined themes of embodiment, injury, victimhood, and memory.
How do people live in a country that has experienced rebellions and state-organised repressions for decades and that is still marked by routine forms of violence and impunity? What do combatants do when they are not mobilised for war?
The significance of South Africa’s capital markets in the economy is substantial. The country’s stock market is valued at twice the value of output as measured by the Gross Domestic Product.
