Herman Charles Bosman: A man of profound contradictions
- Authors: Leff, Carol W
- Date: 2016
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/458524 , vital:75751 , https://hdl.handle.net/10520/EJC190700
- Description: Herman Charles Bosman is best known for his humorous short stories with signature twist endings. He is less well known for his essays and journalistic writing, which illustrate another side of this enigmatic man. This essay focuses on the paradox that Bosman was (and continues to be) and aims to respond to the following questions: How are we to understand the identity of Herman Charles Bosman? How did he contribute towards an understanding of language and culture in South Africa during his lifetime? Was Bosman consistent in expressing his views through his literary works, or is there evidence of incongruity? These complexities are explored by, first, paying close attention to various biographies on Bosman. His hybrid identity is then illustrated by providing examples of the many pseudonyms he employed over a period of time. This is followed by discussion of several of Bosman's non-fiction pieces, highlighting how contradictions are apparent in his beliefs and philosophy. The essay concludes that Bosman vacillated in both his writing and his beliefs, and was indeed a man of contradictions.
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- Date Issued: 2016
Post-apartheid nostalgia and the sadomasochistic pleasures of archival art:
- Authors: Nsele, Zamansele
- Date: 2016
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/145598 , vital:38450 , DOI : 10.4314/eia.v43i3.6
- Description: The burgeoning genre of archival art practice in post-apartheid South Africa has catalysed the evocation of nostalgia in abundance. The archive has been at the centre of numerous exhibitions in contemporary art. This paper explores the meaning of an emerging nostalgic turn in post-apartheid South Africa. The discussion considers the pleasure afforded by the sentimentality underpinning nostalgia and attends to the manner in which nostalgia coheres with the creative and aesthetic techniques of archival art. Scopophilia and the covert function of the sadomasochistic gaze are outlined. It is suggested that such acts of retrieval and repetition generally override ethical considerations in part because they unfold from the realm of the unconscious. The paper draws on psychoanalysis by way of Frantz Fanon.
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- Date Issued: 2016
Responding to poverty in the light of the post-development debate: Some insights from the NGO Enda Graf Sahel
- Authors: Matthews, Sally
- Date: 2016
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/142487 , vital:38084 , https://www.ajol.info/index.php/ad/article/view/135799
- Description: How can we take on board the many valuable insights of post-development theory without seeming to advocate indifference and inaction in the face of the misery that many people in the world experience daily? In this paper, I provide a partial response to this question. I begin by looking at some of the alternative strategies offered in post-development literature and set out to show that while there are several problems with these alternatives, to read post-development theory as advocating indifference or inaction is to read it uncharitably. Secondly, I draw on the experiences of the non-governmental organisation (NGO) Enda Graf Sahel in Dakar, Senegal to suggest some ways in which the insights of post-development theory, or some versions of post-development theory, can be taken into consideration without leading to inaction or indifference in the face of the suffering of those who occupy a less advantaged position in contemporary relations of power and privilege.
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- Date Issued: 2016
Ways of belonging: meanings of “Nature” among Xhosa-speaking township residents in South Africa
- Authors: Cocks, Michelle L , Alexander, Jamie K , Mogano, Lydia , Vetter, Susan M
- Date: 2016
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/66021 , vital:28877 , https://doi.org/10.2993/0278-0771-36.4.820
- Description: publisher version , The concept of biocultural diversity, originally used to describe indigenous people and their ways of using and managing natural resources, has more recently been applied within the urban context to understand the variability of interactions between humans and nature. Significant progress has been made internationally in acknowledging the need to preserve and maintain green spaces in urban environments. Current efforts to address the need for greening urban areas in South Africa primarily focus on the establishment and maintenance of botanical gardens and parks as well as various green belts within the urban landscape. South Africa's urban areas are overwhelmingly shaped by the historical segregation of space and stark disparities in wealth. The distribution, quality, and extent of urban green spaces reflect this. Many township dwellers do not have access to these amenities and their interactions with nature are thus usually constrained to access to municipal commonages. This article explores how areas of natural vegetation in municipal commonages on the outskirts of urban centers in South Africa continue to offer places of cultural, spiritual, and restorative importance to Xhosa-speaking township dwellers. A case study from Grahamstown, an urban center in the Eastern Cape with a population of around 80,000, illustrates how ability to access and move through such places contributes to people's well-being, identity formation, and shared heritage. A case is made for adopting a biocultural diversity approach to spatial planning and urban development within the South African context.
- Full Text: false
- Date Issued: 2016
Absenting the absence of parallel learning pathways for intermediate skills: The ‘missing middle' in the environmental sector in South Africa
- Authors: Ramsarup, Presha
- Date: 2015
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , book chapter
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/436964 , vital:73320 , ISBN 9781315660899 , https://www.routledge.com/Critical-Realism-Environmental-Learning-and-Social-Ecological-Change/Price-Lotz-Sistka/p/book/9780367597689
- Description: Environment and sustainable development are recognized for: their significance for the future of South Africa’s well-being; their complex, transversal nature; and their associated ‘new-ness’ within South African education and training systems. In a sector with relatively new occupations without clear learning pathways into jobs and where occupational contexts are rapid-ly changing with evolving skill needs, the chapter explores a critical realist dialectical view of learning pathways across sys-tems of work and learning. It highlights the need to develop more sophisticated understandings of learning pathways, and the way in which work, education and training systems inter-face to support the transitions needed for particular forms of work and learning. The chapter also explores how critical real-ist dialectics can help to explain more fully the absence of in-termediate pathways in the environment and sustainable de-velopment ‘sector’ in South Africa. It highlights the absences within the post-school provisioning system and through this analysis raises the patterns of emergence that characterize environmental learning pathways. This then advances an edu-cational critique that assists in the development of deeper knowledge of the object of the study (elements constituting learning pathways) in order to understand possibilities for change and to present opportunities for creating more seam-less environmental learning pathways into green jobs, enhanc-ing social justice potential and public good concerns.
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- Date Issued: 2015
The countercultural university:
- Authors: Tabensky, Pedro
- Date: 2015
- Language: English
- Type: text , book
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/142133 , vital:38052 , ISBN 9781869142902 , https://books.google.co.za/books?id=49o8rgEACAAJanddq=Being+at+home:+Race,+institutional+culture+and+transformation+at+South+African+higher+education+institutionandhl=enandsa=Xandved=0ahUKEwiPgsa6mpjjAhXNN8AKHbNwAtoQ6AEIKDAA
- Description: This edited work has gathered together contributions on how to transform universities in South Africa; as many are struggling to shift their institutional culture. In a South African context, transformation means to attempt to change higher education institutions such that they no longer reflect the values promoted by apartheid but rather reflect the values embodied in South Africa's 1996 Constitution. Institutional culture is the main subject for discussion in this book. In order to transform South Africa's universities, the contributors begin by analyzing the idea of what a university is, and relatedly, what its ideal aims are. A second theme is to understand what institutional culture is and how it functions. Moreover, transformation cannot occur without transforming the broader cultures of which they are a part. Related to this theme is a general concern about how contemporary moves towards the instrumentalization of higher education affect the ability to transform institutions. These institutions are being pushed to conform to goals that are outside the traditional idea of a university, such as concerns that universities are being 'bureaucratized' and becoming corporations, instead of a place of learning open to all. In conclusion it can be said that the contemporary South African academic community has an opportunity to recreate itself as the end of apartheid created space for engaging in transformative epistemic projects. The transformation of the tertiary sector entails a transformation of institutional cultures.
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- Date Issued: 2015
'We must start with our own children’: reflectively researching intergenerational leadership for social justice, education, and sustainability
- Authors: Lotz-Sisitka, Heila
- Date: 2014
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , book chapter
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/437207 , vital:73353 , ISBN 978-9086862528 , https://doi.org/10.3920/978-90-8686-802-5_1
- Description: This paper was prepared today, 13 December 2013, for this book on ‘Intergenerational learning and transformative leader-ship for sustainable futures’, to be released in November 2014 at a World Conference to mark the end of the UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (UN-DESD) in Nago-ya, Japan. The UNDESD was born in Johannesburg in 2002; it was an outcome of the Johannesburg Implementation Plan formulated by world leaders at the World Summit on Sustaina-ble Development, hosted by the South African government, building on the earlier Rio Earth Summit. Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela attended the opening of the World Summit on Sus-tainable Development soon after he left office as the first dem-ocratically elected President of the Republic of South Africa. He passed away a week ago today, on 5 December 2013, at the age of 95. His life story is well known. I write here about his words ‘We must start with our own children’.
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- Date Issued: 2014
Feral whispering, community and the reach of the literary
- Authors: Wylie, Dan
- Date: 2014
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/458091 , vital:75715 , https://hdl.handle.net/10520/EJC171542
- Description: Google "elephant + basenji" and you will observe a remarkable event. Every so often, on the edge of Cecil Kop Game Reserve, bordering my home town of Mutare, Zimbabwe, one of the reserve's two elephants approaches the fence of a private house. On the house side is a Basenji dog. The two animals get as close to one another as the electrified fence permits. They seem to take a great interest in each other. Neither the other elephant, nor the household's other dog, participate in the exchange; this is a communing between two unique individuals. Sometimes, the elephant lies down, and she and the dog continue staring at each other. Just what is passing between them is impossible to say, but something is going on. Curiosity at least, and a measure of trust. Albeit tentative, a new, wholly unpredictable social aggregation has come into being, neither quite wild nor tamed: feral.
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- Date Issued: 2014
Running with the jackals: Antjie Krog the journalist
- Authors: Garman, Anthea
- Date: 2014
- Language: English
- Type: text , book
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/159813 , vital:40346 , ISBN 9781869142537
- Description: Antjie Krog: An Ethics of Body and Otherness brings together critical responses to the fascinating life's work of one of South Africa's most prominent writers and public figures. As the writer of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission chronicle, Country of My Skull (1998), other works of creative non-fiction, Afrikaans poetry, translations, and journalism, Antjie Krog has, over a career spanning four decades, produced an important body of work informed by her no-holds-barred openness, acute self-awareness, and social engagement. As a public figure, she is both a dissident who provocatively challenges norms and a mediator between cultures. In this book, scholars from a range of disciplines explore the many facets of Antjie Krog's work. The book's essays focus on identity, race, gender, apartheid, trauma, and transformation. There is also a thought-provoking interview with Krog on translation. This book will be of interest to scholars of postcolonial literature, politics, South African literature, as well as media and translation studies.
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- Date Issued: 2014
The pastoral, the primal and the post-apartheid sublime in Justin Cartwright's White Lightning
- Authors: Klopper, Dirk
- Date: 2014
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/458599 , vital:75755 , https://hdl.handle.net/10520/EJC171543
- Description: Country is a familiar topos in South African literature, featuring in travel writing and the farm novel, in imperial romance and postcolonial narratives, as pastoral and as anti-pastoral, an uncanny presence in the landscape of modernity. A surprising number of recent South African novels present what may be called post-apartheid country narratives. I am particularly interested in the return to country in J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace, Justin Cartwright's White Lightning, and Damon Galgut's The Impostor. Given the history of settler occupation of the land, and the literary deployment of the idea of the land both to posit and to problematize white settler identity, why these stories of a white man's return to the land in the post-apartheid period? What is the impulse behind retracing of contested ground?.
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- Date Issued: 2014
A Crown on the Move: stylistic integration of the Luba-Lunda complex in Lunda-Kazembe performance
- Authors: Simbao, Ruth K
- Date: 2013
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/147524 , vital:38646 , https://doi.org/10.1162/afar.2006.39.3.26
- Description: Carried on a scarlet and zebra-hide litter above the heads of a throbbing crowd, Mwata Kazembe XIX gloriously stretches out his arms as if to embrace a world that is his own (Fig. 1). As he parts the sea of well-wishers, splashes of red burst into view and the talking drum beats out its decree. Basking in a charged clamor where the senses blur in clouds of dust, Mwata gracefully sways from side to side, jangling the beads and cowries on the back of his akatasa crown. It is on this day that the Lunda-Kazembe Crown moves.
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- Date Issued: 2013
Introducing a Critical Pedagogy of Sexual and Reproductive Citizenship: Extending the ‘Framework of Thick Desire'
- Authors: Macleod, Catriona I , Vincent, Louise
- Date: 2013
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , book chapter
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/434411 , vital:73056 , ISBN 978-1-4899-8025-0 , https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9780203069141-7/introducing-critical-pedagogy-sexual-reproductive-citizenship-catriona-macleod-louise-vincent
- Description: In Michelle Fine’s influential 1988 paper,‘Sexuality, Schooling, and Adolescent Females: The Missing Discourse of Desire’, she examined the “desires, fears, and fantasies”(p. 30) shaping responses to sex education in the United States in the 1980s. Fine’s work encouraged a ‘turn to pleasure’in sexuality education research. This work focused on and critiqued Fine’s idea, elaborated below, of a ‘missing discourse of desire’in the education of young people and of young women in particular (see for instance Allen, 2004, 2005; Connell, 2005; Rasmussen, 2004, 2012; Tolman, 1994; Vance, 1993). Less taken up, however, was a second major thread in Fine’s 1988 paper, namely the ‘absence of entitlement’in which she argued that not only the absence of a discourse of desire but also the absence of “viable life options” for young women combined to produce their vulnerability (Fine, 1988, p. 49). Almost twenty years later, in a 2006 article, Fine, with Sara McClelland, revisited the missing discourse of desire, this time in the context of an educational crusade in the United States advocating Abstinence Only Until Marriage (AOUM) approaches to sexuality education.
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- Date Issued: 2013
Waiver of the right to judicial impartiality: comparative analysis of South African and Commonwealth jurisprudence
- Authors: Okpaluba, Chuks , Juma, Laurence
- Date: 2013
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/127138 , vital:35960 , https://0-hdl.handle.net.wam.seals.ac.za/10520/EJC153154
- Description: This paper investigates whether judicial independence and impartiality entrenched in written constitutions and recognised by the common law as fundamental requirements of fair administration of justice can be subjected to the private law principles of waiver, estoppel or acquiescence. In an attempt to answer this question, the paper suggests that the starting point should be the interrogation of whether the right alleged to be waived emanates from the constitution or administrative law. At common law, a right can be waived, insofar as the party involved had knowledge of the right and failed to assert it.
- Full Text: false
- Date Issued: 2013
What are the best and worst times in the lives of South African township dwellers? A content analysis of the self-defined end-anchors for Bernheim’s ACSA scale of subjective well-being
- Authors: Moller, Valerie , Theuns, P
- Date: 2013
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/67155 , vital:29042 , https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-012-0073-1
- Description: publisher version , Bernheim’s ACSA, a less conventional measure of subjective well-being originally developed for use in a clinical setting, was applied to a sample of black South African township dwellers (n = 1,020) in the Eastern Cape Province. The Anamnestic Comparative Self Assessment is an experiential self-anchoring scale with concrete anchors (Bernheim in Psychologie médicale 15:1625–1626, 1983). Respondents described the ‘best’ and ‘worst’ periods experienced in their lives in their own words and rated their current life situation within these two extremes that served as the end-anchors of an 11-point rating scale, ACSA. The ACSA score was significantly positively correlated with conventional measures of subjective well-being. The study examined in detail the content of the ACSA anchors, the best and worst periods of respondents’ lives, classified by domain, to gain insights into reference comparisons applied in quality-of-life evaluation in a developing country setting. As was the case in earlier ACSA studies, most domains that served as reference standards were related to the self and family life. However, material living standards, represented by the domains of income, financial security and housing also featured prominently as personal anchors—a reflection of life goals in post-apartheid South Africa. Age, gender, education and self-reported health were associated with the choice of select anchors. The discussion provides pointers for future applications of ACSA in large sample surveys using a pre-coded multiple-choice format for anchor descriptions. It is concluded that the content of ACSA anchors corresponds closely to contemporary definitions of the good life among ordinary South Africans.
- Full Text: false
- Date Issued: 2013
Feminist health psychology and abortion : towards a politics of transversal relations of commonality
- Authors: Macleod, Catriona I
- Date: 2012
- Language: English
- Type: Text
- Identifier: vital:6303 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1015959
- Description: In 1992 Speckhard and Rue argued in the Journal of Social Issues for the recognition of a diagnostic category, post-abortion syndrome (PAS). This term was first used in 1981 by Vincent Rue in testimony to the American Congress, but was only formalised in a published paper a decade later. Speckhard and Rue (1992) posit that abortion is a psychosocial stressor that may cause mild distress through to severe trauma, creating the need for a continuum of categories, these being post-abortion distress, post-abortion syndrome and post-abortion psychosis. PAS, which is the main focus of their paper, and which has taken root in some professional language as well as lay anti-abortion discourse, is described as a type of post-traumatic stress disorder.
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- Date Issued: 2012
From the grave to the cradle : the possibility of post-mortem gamete retrieval and reproduction in South Africa
- Authors: Kruuse, Helen
- Date: 2012
- Language: English
- Type: Article
- Identifier: vital:24533 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/36254 , http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/19962126.2012.11865059
- Description: The development of reproductive technologies in the last century, such as effective contraceptive methods, artificial insemination, pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, amongst others, has fundamentally reshaped traditional concepts of reproduction parenthood and has raised practical and ethical concerns. This article describes one such development, namely, post-mortem gamete retrieval (PMGR) for the purposes of posthumous reproduction. In exploring the particular concerns arising from this technology, I argue that South Africa lacks a coherent, considered approach to the issue. In considering models adopted in overseas jurisdictions, and the various bases for the legalisation of such a procedure, I adopt an interest theory of rights to argue for restricted access to such a technology in suitable circumstances.
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- Date Issued: 2012
Mortgage bonds and the right of access to adequate housing in South Africa: Gundwana v Stoke Development and Others 2011 (3) SA 608 (CC)
- Authors: Juma, Laurence
- Date: 2012
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/127479 , vital:36015 , https://hdl.handle.net/10520/EJC129329
- Description: This article offers a critique of Gundwana v Stoke Development and Others 2011 (3) SA 608 (CC), a case in which the Constitutional Court of South Africa found it to be unconstitutional for the registrar of a high court to declare immovable properties specially executable when ordering a default judgement, to the extent that such an order "permitted the sale and execution of a home of a person". The Court interpreted the property clause in section 25, access to right to housing in section 26 of the Constitution, as mandating "further judicial oversight" in all cases where execution is levied against residential property. The article raises some of the shortcomings of this interpretive scheme and suggests that constitutional values, when used to curtail or enlarge obligations of parties to a mortgage bond, must take into account the general rights and duties which the parties assumed at the signing of the agreement; the circumstances of each of the parties at the time of execution and ascertained through a careful evaluation based on a clearly articulated set of principles, and the nature of constitutional rights themselves. The article argues that, whereas there may be circumstances in which a debtor may need protection, rather than impose a blanket abrogation of procedures allowing for expedient disposal of uncontested claims, the court should instead have considered the establishment of further procedural safeguards.
- Full Text: false
- Date Issued: 2012
Violence and the cultural logics of pain: representations of sexuality in the work of Nicholas Hlobo and Zanele Muholi
- Authors: Makhubu, Nomusa
- Date: 2012
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/147814 , vital:38675 , https://0-doi.org.wam.seals.ac.za/10.1080/02560046.2012.723843
- Description: Nicholas Hlobo and Zanele Muholi have raised critical issues regarding sexual identity in patriarchal contexts since they premiered at the Michael Stevenson Gallery in 2005. Nicholas Hlobo, a sculptor and performance artist, and Zanele Muholi, a photographer and activist, explore different ways of representing sexuality – in particular, homosexuality. Hlobo investigates notions of masculinity and the practice of circumcision, while Muholi documents the existence of transgender and homosexuality in township spaces (her recent work expands to various other spaces). This article focuses on the roles that violence plays in the sexual politics represented in Hlobo and Muholi’s work.
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- Date Issued: 2012