Electronic Theses and Dissertations (Masters)

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/10539/37994

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Subject: search.filters.subject.SDG-17: Partnerships for the goals

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    In the crosshairs of ANC factional battles A historical study of the transformation of the SABC from a public broadcaster to an ANC party broadcaster (2008 – 2018)
    (University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2024) Mda, Lizeka Noxolo; Steenveld, Lynette
    This research set out to investigate the way in which the African National Congress’s political authority influenced changes in the South African Broadcasting Corporation through its webs of power and influence, exercised not only in relation to the Board and various line authorities, but in subtle forms of power exercised through the influence of the ANC’s culture of ‘discipline’, loyalty, and non-critical engagement with authority. Focusing on the years of the Jacob Zuma presidency – 2008 to 2018 – the research explores how the organisational cultures of both the ANC, as an organisation and the leading party in government, and the SABC, enabled the ANC to undermine the SABC’s mandate as a public broadcaster. Both the ANC government’s policies and practices regarding broadcasting and media freedom, and board selection, and the party’s less formal practices, such as cadre deployment, are probed and analysed to understand how the factional battles within the ANC undermined the public broadcaster. A qualitative approach using archival material and in-depth interviews is adopted.
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    The Sinners' Bench
    (University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2021) Bodenstein, Maren Irmela Johanna
    The Sinners’ Bench’ is a memoir which follows the writer’s trawling through family archives, to discover answers to a secret which was revealed to her only a few weeks before her mother’s death. Namely, that her mother had had a love affair, and that her fourth child had been the fruit of this relationship. What particularly shocked the writer was that, as punishment, her mother, together with her four small children, had been made to sit on the church’s Sinners’ Bench. All this took place in Hermannsburg in Kwa Zulu Natal, where the family was living and where she herself grew up. To investigate this event, the writer explores the history of this tiny German-speaking village which was established by the Hermannsburg Missionary Society in 1884. By delving into letters and other documents, ‘The Sinners’ Bench’ looks at the German Lutheran diaspora in South Africa, its cultural and theological underpinnings, and its relationship to Nazism and to Apartheid. While the writer gains some insights into her parents’ complex interactions with their historical and cultural context, ultimately she fails to uncover the mysteries of their relationship to each other and to her mother’s lover