Electronic Theses and Dissertations (Masters)
Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/10539/37997
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Item A relational history of space, administration and economic extractivism in the Mogalakwena Local Municipality in Limpopo, South Africa (1948-2000)(University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2024) Pearson, Joel DavidThis dissertation seeks to contribute to existing local government scholarship by presenting a situated and relational historical study of the Mogalakwena Local Municipality in present-day Limpopo Province of South Africa. By adapting and extending Gill Hart’s spatial-relational methodology, this study draws out key mechanics of change over time in the Mogalakwena area since the early 20 th century. This historical analysis reveals that the shifting array of power relations which together structured the field of rural local governance came to be enacted and concretised through specific and identifiable processes of spatial transformation, administrative government, and economic extractivism. While existing scholarship has elaborated on aspects of these processes, the present study insists on analysing all three together, in relation to each other, attentive to forms of both mutual constitution and contradiction, and cognisant of how these processes feed into political dynamics of varying scales – local, regional, and national. As such, the thesis argues that these three sets of processes should be understood as axes of rural local governance. This analysis draws off an empirical foundation compiled from archival and oral history sources, and which points to three broad historical conjunctures of local governance in Mogalakwena over the apartheid and early democratic eras. The first, spanning the period between the early 1950s and early 1970s, is identified as an era of state-building and remaking the countryside under the ascendant National Party (NP), one in which the white central state initiated massive and sweeping transformations of rural areas to bring to life its “Bantustan strategy”. The second conjuncture, defined as the terminal phase of apartheid from the late 1970s through to the end of the 1980s, was one in which rural local governance came to be dominated by forms of resistance, reform and repression when bottom-up political forces challenged the reach and authority of the apartheid central state in rural localities. And during the third conjuncture, the transitional period of national negotiations and democratisation between 1990 and 2000, rural local governance came to be defined by uneven and contested initiatives towards institutional amalgamation, deracialisation and redress. In considering the field of rural local governance within which the Mogalakwena Local Municipality operates today, this study concludes that the three axes together remain key determinants in structuring local and regional power relations. While dramatic new power relations have unfolded within and around the municipality since its creation in the year 2000, this study concludes that these have continued to be materialised through intertwined spatial, administrative and extractivist processes which extend back into history. As such, it suggests a new systematic approach for the study of local government institutions, histories of the state in rural areas, and studies of the state more broadly.Item Witchcraft management in the early twentieth century Transvaal(University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2016) Pearson, Joel David; Delius, Peter; Falkof, NickyTowards the end of the nineteenth century, colonial governments across Africa, including South Africa, promulgated laws which aimed to prohibit the accusation of witchcraft, methods for the detection of witches and witch trials. However, while administrators saw merely superstition in witchcraft beliefs, “repugnant to the standards of civilisation”, many Africans saw an integral element of the social and spiritual order. The policing of witchcraft beliefs became a thorn in the side of colonial rule. This article brings to light some of the deeper historical complexities in policing witchcraft by looking at the application of witchcraft law in the early twentieth century ‐ a neglected period in witchcraft scholarship. Firstly, it examines some prominent discursive constructions of the concepts of “witchcraft” and the “witch doctor” during the early twentieth century, two terms which feature centrally in colonial witchcraft legislation. It argues that these terms were shrouded in a great deal of misconception and, at times, fear. Secondly, it examines instances in which the Transvaal Witchcraft Ordinance No. 26 of 1904 was applied at the Supreme Court level, demonstrating that it was employed in a wide variety of instances which often shared only a tenuous link to poorly defined notions of “the supernatural”. Nevertheless, diviners seem to have been especially prejudiced in the implementation of the law. Finally, archival correspondence derived from Native Affairs Department files dealing with witchcraft are examined to reveal that the job of policing witchcraft was rather more uncertain and ad hoc at the grassroots level than official “civilising” rhetoric may have suggested. While in principle there was no compromising with beliefs in witchcraft, in practice, such beliefs had to be carefully managed by local officials, who were given (often uncomfortably) wide powers of discretion in deciding when and how to employ the force of the law.