Electronic Theses and Dissertations (PhDs)

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    Mogaga: Play, Power and Purgation
    (University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2023) Magogodi, Kgafela Golebane; Law-Viljoen, Bronwyn
    In street parlance, or iscamto, mogaga refers to the face of confrontation. In Sekgatla, a dialect of Setswana, mogaga is a name for a potent plant used in rituals of “social purgation” (De Graft, 2002: 26-27). This study focuses on the element of go gagaola or the act of triggering mogaga through a fusion of poetic incantations,1 song, dance and “spirit embodiment” (Ajumeze, 2014: 78). Go gagaola, the act of activating mogaga, hinges on agit-prop-mechanics that enable the elimination of botheration or the purging of domination. Does ritual drama have the power to alter material conditions? This and other questions about play-making as a scaffold which holds up a combination of spiritual elevation and political rebellion drive this enquiry. How do we expel botheration using the power of play? As it appears, ritual drama and guerilla theatre have the same framework as acts of “spiritual realism” (Mahone, 2002: 270). Guerilla theatre, like ritual drama, is also a system of change. Plotting the adventures of Phokobje and Phiri, I have found great resources in spiritual traditions such as malopo/malombo of Bakgatla/Bapedi and VhaVenda as well abaNgoma of Ba-Nguni. Mapping the journeys of characters in Chilahaebolae led to unexpected forays into astronomy – bolepa dinaledi in Setswana. People’s Experimental Theatre, Malombo Jazz Makers, Dashiki, Mihlothi, Malopoets and others who accentuated the connection between ritual and rebellion. Through this enquiry I make an offering to the decolonial project and the community of scholars, artists, astronomers and iZangoma who have been silenced by the settler-colonial canon through epistemic violence, massacre, and incarceration. These musings about mogaga play-making recasts theatre as the locus of confrontation and a tool for purging botheration. Going beyond “the banal search for exoticism” (Fanon, 1967: 221), I trace the bloodline of resistance theatre
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    The effects of embracing multilingualism on the academic performance of learners in primary science education in botswana
    (University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2023-12) Kereeditse, Dumelang Lorato Thomas; Inggs, Judith
    In Botswana, primary school learners perform better in Setswana as a subject than in the science subjects. This trend can be observed in the annual Primary School Leaving Examinations results despite the country’s high literacy rate. Since these learners are emergent multilinguals, this study sought to determine the effects of embracing multilingualism on Botswana learners’ academic performance in science as a subject at primary level. Considering that using translation as a pedagogical strategy has never been fully recognised as a useful way of scaffolding in lower levels of education, the translanguaging perspective was employed to determine the effects of translation in multilingual contexts. This was done to enhance comprehension of fourth year primary science texts using bilingual texts because, in the Botswana education system, codeswitching is usually practised as a communication strategy, but textbooks and assessments are printed monolingually in English from Standard 2. The study acknowledged the benefits of both English and Setswana in the education system and on learners’ cognitive development. Therefore, it employed a cognitive theory of communication in translation coupled with the translanguaging theory to develop bilingual science texts that could enhance pedagogic strategies for emergent multilinguals. A quasi-experimental design was used to assess the effects of using bilingual texts on learners’ academic performance. Three participating schools from different language communities in Botswana were selected via non-proportional stratified sampling. The control group received a monolingual science topic with content as usual, whereas the experimental group received the same text translated and presented bilingually in English and Setswana. Both groups attempted a written comprehension exercise after reading the same topic. Data were analysed statistically using SPSS Statistics and qualitatively using moment analysis to determine the significance of differences between 2 the control and the experimental groups. Learners in the minority language speaking school showed a considerable improvement as well as a significant difference in the performance of learners who used monolingual texts compared to those who used bilingual texts. Other schools showed an insignificant difference between the performance of the experimental group and the control group. These results show the potential of bilingual texts in the creation of translanguaging space in the classroom. They support the ostensive multilingualism pedagogy which brings together translanguaging pedagogy and relevance theory in translation to open translanguaging spaces in science education.
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    The role of the fictional biographer in “The Aspern Papers” by Henry James, Summertime
    (University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2023-06) Sandnes, Charmaine Henriette; Van Wyk, Karl
    This thesis is a literary, critical investigation of the role of the fictional biographer in selected writings by Henry James, J.M. Coetzee, Patrick Flanery, and A.S. Byatt. The central focus of the work is the establishment of the possible reason for the inclusion of fictional – rather than real or nonfictional – biographers in “The Aspern Papers” by Henry James, Summertime by J.M. Coetzee, Absolution by Patrick Flanery, and The Biographer’s Tale and Possession by A.S. Byatt. My argument focuses on the essence of the quest for truth, albeit literary truth, and how this determines our appreciation of a work of fiction. This quest becomes evident in the interesting collocation of the five primary texts across historiological, sociological, cultural and philosophical divides. I introduce my work tentatively by defining the concept of the orthodox or real biographer, and ultimately how truth itself is manifested in the biographer’s quest to establish that her subject’s life story is a genuine reflection of her reality. In opposition to the former, I go on to proffer a definition of the fictional biographer. In the first chapter, I explore the philosophy of life-writing with reference to the theories of Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Virginia Woolf and Philippe Lejeune. I also note how modernism and post-modernism are reflected in the five primary texts. In the second chapter, I make specific observations regarding Henry James’ use of the anonymous fictional biographer in his novella, “The Aspern Papers”, and further examine his deliberate metafictional interests in four short stories from his collection, Stories of Artists and Writers. In the third chapter on Summertime, I add to the autobiography-biography dichotomy, and in the fourth chapter I explore Byatt’s playful and erudite metafictional toying with fact and fiction through multiple fictional biographers exploring fictional and real subjects. The fifth chapter focuses on fictional biographers writing outside of their nationality, and explores their aim to determine’ socio-political truths through an engagement with confessional writing in the South African context. Finally, in chapter six I offer a comparative perspective of the uses of the fictional biographers in all five texts.
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    An analysis of domain-specific terminology for pedagogical lexicographic resources: towards a comprehensive english isizulu life sciences dictionary
    (University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2023-02) Dladla, Celimpilo Piety; Zungu, E.B.
    This thesis examined the structure of published dictionaries as a foundation for creating guidelines for developing a domain-specific lexicographic resource in an African language. The resource developed in the study is directed at Grade 10 to 12 learners as a remedy for the absence of domain-specific lexicographic resources for senior phase learners whose mother tongue was previously marginalised. Subjects are taught in a second language despite the language policy of the Department of Basic Education stating that learners and their guardians are at liberty to choose their language of education (Diko, 2018). The unavailability of these resources deprives potential users of the opportunity of having a choice to use reference material in their home language to understand crucial educational material. This limits their ability to achieve the results they would have had if they had the opportunity of learning in their mother tongue (Osborne & Collins, 2001; Mji & Makgato, 2006). Dictionaries have been identified as assistive resources in increasing learners’ understanding of educational concepts (Ranalli & Nurmukhamedov, 2014; Charamba, 2017). Subsequently, this thesis employed the theory of lexicographic functions to develop guidelines for the development of a bilingualised Life Sciences dictionary in isiZulu with English serving as the source language, as users need the information in English in class and in their examinations. This qualitative study garnered data by means of content analysis of existing English-Zulu bilingual dictionaries by examining their structure and function, as a foundation for developing guidelines for the new resource and the ultimate compilation of the resource. Further, the study interrogated the Life Sciences glossary from prescribed Grade 10 to 12 Life Sciences books from the Department of Basic Education and extracted terminology from these resources. Terminology was then translated into isiZulu employing translation strategies applicable in lexicography as this was not a translation exercise but a lexicographic exercise. Nkomo (2019) asserts that most lexicographic practices had been mistaken for a translation exercise because lexicographic theories are often not employed. For this reason, the study employed the theory of lexicographic functions – studying the needs of users, the user situation and the function of a dictionary (Tarp, 2004; 2008; 2012) to create a dictionary development guideline and additionally, produce a digital dictionary to be made available in a freely downloadable form for use and availability to all users. The dictionary developed was analysed according to guidelines set by Ball and Bothma (2018) for analysing digital dictionaries.
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    In Search of Utopia: Sylvia Pankhurst, Ethel Mannin, Nancy Cunard, and International Socialist Woman Authors in Interwar Britain
    (University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2024) Timlin, Carrie; Kostelac, Sofia; Gordon, Colette
    A revival of anti-communist discourse in scholarship and politics has reignited decades-long debates between those who associate communism with the atrocities of totalitarian systems, and those who seek to emphasise the work of Socialists who genuinely sought to create a world free from gender, class and racial discrimination. In literary studies this has manifested as renewed interested in the lives and work of utopian Socialist authors like Nancy Cunard, Ethel Mannin and Sylvia Pankhurst, which suggests a shift in scholarship towards those outside the literary canon. Pankhurst and Mannin drew on literary forms that spoke to the culture, history, and experiences of their readers: women and the working classes. An exploration of the complexity of Cunard’s journey from attempts to infiltrate elitist literary circles, to a poet whose work captured the hardships of racial inequality and war, challenges ideas about the politics of modernist experimentation, and the value placed on high art. Taken together, their fiction and non-fiction unsettles the boundaries between art and activism, high, middle and lowbrow art, and preconceived ideas about the canon in the study of literature. Bringing their fiction and non-fiction into conversation with their socio-political contexts, readerships, and the philosophies and utopian socialist doctrine that shaped them as author-activists opens new avenues of exploration into the interplay of politics and aesthetics. Blurring the line between public politics, fiction and non-fiction, Pankhurst, Mannin, and Cunard’s work was a crucial and effective part of their internationalism, socialist activism, and resistance to totalitarianism. In the tradition of the utopianism of the late 19th Century they adapted literary forms as vehicles for socialist philosophy and doctrine. In addition to their creative work, they used literary techniques to shape non-fiction like newspaper articles, pamphlets and other political texts. The diversity of experience that Pankhurst, Mannin and Cunard recorded in their fiction and non-fiction amounts to an archive of work that complicates reductionist post-Cold War debates about the theory and practice of communism.
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    Precarious spaces: intersections of gendered identity and violence in Zimbabwean literature
    (University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2022-12) Chando, Aaron; Nyanda, Josiah; Muponde, Robert
    This thesis examines ways in which selected Zimbabwean literary works expand understandings of the cultural production and deconstruction of precarity. It seeks to advance the claim that a cross-section of Zimbabwean writers espouses a ‘precarious aesthetic’ to reimagine the nation by deconstructing cultural practices that produce and sustain precarity. I postulate that precarity is ideologically produced at the intersections of gendered identities and institutionalised forms of violence, such as ethnonationalism, heteropatriarchal policing, ableism, homophobia, and misogyny, where notional understandings of masculinity and femininity become central to the politics of (un)belonging. I draw on premises from precarity, gendered identities, and intersectionality studies to make a case for a space-bound understanding of precarity that recognises Zimbabwean textual nuances and environmental specificities. By deploying Western-based theorisations of precarity to address dynamics of disempowerment in a Zimbabwean context, I seek to demonstrate that precarity discourses are in a constant process of becoming and to expand discursive space on a subject that has been predominantly approached through tropes of drought and hunger. A cross-cutting premise in precarity studies is that the experience of marginalisation promotes radical thinking, which enables victims to weaponise their condition. This underwrites my assumption that all marginalising impulses leave spaces for pushback, strategic surrender, and self-affirmation. Therefore, throughout the five core chapters of the thesis, I adopt a close reading strategy to offer context-specific evaluations of refusal politics undertaken by precarious subjects in different sites of displacement. I propose that exploring overlaps among marginalising ideologies and pushback mechanisms can unravel new insights about the political function of vulnerability and bring forth a new grammar with which to talk about precarity. Overall, I argue that the literary front constitutes a site of reinvention where precarious subjects are radically written into existence and where diversity and difference are recast as indices of social hygiene.
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    A critical review of academic practice and integrated edtech use at a South African University: The ‘real’ level
    (University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2023-06) Hoosen, Nazira; Agherdien, Najma; Abrahams, Lucienne
    This study aimed to investigate and understand how academics’ digital competence and critical digital pedagogy (CDP) knowledge shaped pedagogical practice. Freire (1970), Bhaskar (1978), Archer (1995) and Shulman (1987) were the main authors drawn upon in the literature. A qualitative research paradigm and a multiple case study methodology were employed by drawing on critical realism (CR) and social realism (SR) as a theoretical analytical framework. This entailed exploring structural, cultural and agential emergent properties to examine how each construct developed over time prior to synthesis. The analysis demonstrated that the form of agential mediation to which academics were exposed explained why some of them in the same social structures and culture enacted CDP practices, while others did not. Consequently, three crucial dimensions of CDP knowledge and enactment were made visible through this study’s data and theoretical analytical framework, namely digitally-enabling structures, digitally-informed cultures and digitally-capable agency. From a pragmatic perspective, to enact CDP practice, academics need to connect the digital reality to knowledge work and epistemic practice. In this process, academic agency and digital agency would intersect, requiring reflexive and reflective practice. However, while reflection assists in recognising the need for CDP knowledge and enactment, it is insufficient on its own: embodied action and mindful critique of the world are required. From a theoretical perspective, the concept of ‘critical’, in the literature, is related mainly to the level of social relations. This study demonstrated that there is a socio-cultural stratum and a psychological-cognitive stratum. Both these strata need to be considered as mechanisms that interact with each other to produce the outcomes of CDP practice within a digital reality. Collectively, these contributions do not translate to accepting the digital reality as a predestination. Instead, it highlighted that academics functioned in a layered HE system that required, not a singular, but a unified and pluralistic (collective) vision. Individuals and institutions are limited in their capacity to respond proactively to external change and internal complexity. Therefore, the HE system requires a rerouting from the traditional path, critically reframing learning and teaching through transformative foresight, where all parts within the system work co-terminously. One significant outcome of this study is a developmental higher education systems thinking framework focusing on the promotion of CDP practices.
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    Translanguaging with ‘Monolingual’ Teachers and Heterogeneous Multilingual Learners: Forging New Pedagogies with Shakespeare
    (University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2023-10) Ritchie, Linda Anne; Newfield, Denise; Thurman, Chris
    Despite the multilingualism of most South Africans, and the use of two or more languages by many teachers and learners in South African classrooms, there is a particular sector of the formal education system that is characterised by White English ‘monolingual’ teachers who only use English to communicate with their multilingual learners, some of whom do not speak English as a home language. Such monolingualism deprives many multilinguals of the social and educational benefits of learning in their home languages. The dissertation investigates a pedagogy that can be implemented to address the linguistic injustice in this educational sector. Within the broad understanding of the concept of ‘multiliteracies’, it adopts the New London Group’s (1996) Pedagogy of Multiliteracies as its framework because the pedagogy’s emphases on social justice and linguistic inclusivity make it particularly well-suited for addressing the linguistic inequalities in this sector. However, while highlighting the importance of multilingualism, Multiliteracies pedagogy does not emphasise the lingually complex scenarios in the sector on which the study focuses. To accommodate this issue, the study investigates the inclusion of translanguaging pedagogy as a linguistic component that can be integrated into the four pedagogical components of Multiliteracies pedagogy, when and as required. Specifically, it examines the efficacy of translanguaging pedagogy when it is implemented by a ‘monolingual’ teacher (a teacher who only communicates in a single language) in a class with heterogeneous multilinguals (people who speak multiple, often unrelated languages). To obtain the data for the study, practitioner-based research was conducted in a private secondary school in Johannesburg with a class of heterogeneous multilinguals. Using a mixed-method design, a range of translanguaging activities were implemented during the teaching and learning of Shakespeare’s Macbeth. A Shakespearean play was used because the frequency with which Shakespeare is taught in South African secondary schools necessitates an urgent transformation of its pedagogy. Furthermore, the comprehension difficulties associated with the teaching and learning of Shakespeare’s Early Modern English require a form of translation, which facilitates the introduction of translanguaging pedagogy in the sector on which the study focuses. The results of the study indicate that translanguaging in this educational setting raises learners’ awareness of linguistic and cultural diversity and facilitates their understanding of Macbeth. These findings suggest that translanguaging can and should be implemented in this educational sector as much as possible. Perhaps counterintuitively, the implementation of translanguaging in the pedagogy of Shakespeare also provides a way to narrow the educational divide between the global north and the global south by empowering learners to provide uniquely (South) African contributions to global discourses on Shakespeare.
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    “People is people”: African personhood in the works of Bessie Head
    (University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2023-08) Castrillón, Gloria Ledger; Hofmeyr, Isabel
    From the vantage point of Bessie Head’s oeuvre as a whole, I trace the development of her approach to personhood. Rooted in a post-oppositional view of love expressed as acts of ubuntu, she develops a new paradigm of African personhood distinct from western conceptions of the person. In Nguni languages, ubuntu is the term given to the view that personhood derives from a network of relationships, encapsulated in the saying “I am because you are; we are because you are” (Ogude, 2018, p. 1, emphasis in original). Rejecting the forms of literary and political protest of her time and focusing on the rural context, Head applies three narrative tools to lever change. These are, love-based relationships between individuals; love as acts of ubuntu between people; and sage philosophers who mediate history, embedding Head’s view of personhood in Africa’s history. Chapter 1 places Head’s works in context and sets out the parameters of the relationship between law and human rights. The chapter examines the post-oppositional approach which informs Head’s attempts to deviate from binary-based views of tradition and progress, western and African, from which she proposes her particular view of African personhood. Chapter 2 examines Head’s life, works and critical reception. Chapter 3 examines human rights with specific reference to South Africa’s Freedom Charter. The Charter and the political pressures surrounding its generation were central to Head’s contemporaries’ protest literature. Head rejects this genre, so the chapter also surveys her political outlook. In Chapter 4, the roots of Head’s re-envisioning are examined in The Cardinals and When Rain Clouds Gather. In these early novels, Head uses love as the stimulus for personal and communal change. In The Cardinals, love is individual, and change is limited to two characters. In When Rain Clouds Gather, love expands in scope and, realised through acts of ubuntu, provides the foundation for the marriages and other individual relationships. Together, these enable the realisation of personhood in the context of community. In Chapter 5, the operation of love extends further in Maru and A Question of Power. In Maru, love is tasked with overturning the foundations of racism and reversing the tyranny of tribal, hereditary supremacy. In A Question of Power, love is set against its biggest foe: evil and Satan. By the end, however, it is clear it is unable to perform the transformative social work Head assigns it. Thus, in the last three books, she galvanizes a set of semi-fictional, semi-historical sage philosophers whose words and actions typify her post-oppositional reconceptualisation of Serowe’s history. Chapter 6 examines the liminal position of The Collector of Treasures as it bridges the transition from the first four to the last two texts. In it, diverse storytellers debate the incongruities and ambiguities in the African and western traditions. Chapter 7 examines how Head’s sages become more overt spokespeople for her argument that change is essentially African and animated by love and ubuntu will give rise to an African personhood. In Serowe: Village of the Rain Wind, Khama the Great, Tshekedi Khama and Patrick van Rensburg are actualised African persons as they effect love-grounded, ubuntu motivated change, creating the basis of Africa’s future. In A Bewitched Crossroad, Head uses the fictional interpolations of her most developed sage, Sebina, to mine both the ‘real’ history of Southern Africa and western ways to develop a post-oppositional African vision. In the Chapter 8, Head’s efforts to breathe life into a new ‘race’ of Africans are summed up. Head proposes that ‘African’ is not defined by race, colour or ethnic identity, but by post-oppositional responses, the ability to transform the lives of others, and leadership qualities needed for the future. Identifying the common thread across the texts clarifies Head’s articulation personhood as embedded in Africanness and not in the western presumptions underpinning the novel form.
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    Diasporic Landscape: A Geosemiotic Analysis of Greekness in Johannesburg
    (University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2023-03) Vratsanos, Alyssa Vida Castrillon; Baro, Gilles
    After a number of waves of immigration of Greeks from Greece, Cyprus, and the established Greek diaspora in Egypt, South Africa is home to a sizable Greek community – concentrated in Johannesburg – that has established its own cultural identity in the country and left indelible traces of Greekness in the semiotic landscape of the city. In this dissertation, I explore the discursive, multimodal processes employed to inscribe Greekness – the quality of being of Greek heritage – in the city of Johannesburg. The overarching aim of this study was to analyse how members of the Greek diaspora in Johannesburg negotiate and perform their Greek identity and how Greekness is inscribed in various spaces in the city. In particular, it aimed to answer the following research questions: (i) How are certain spaces in the city of Johannesburg materially constructed as Greek spaces?; (ii) How is Greekness semiotically constructed?; and (iii) How is this constructed Greekness experienced by social actors, in the context of a European diasporic community in Johannesburg, a city in the Global South?. Empirically, this linguistic/semiotic landscape study made use of multimodal data, in the form of ethnographic field notes, photographs of signs, interviews, and newspaper articles, which were analysed within Scollon and Scollon’s (2003) geosemiotics framework. Previous works by McDuling (2014) and McDuling and Barnes (2012) have examined the Greek diaspora in Johannesburg from a sociolinguistic perspective, with a focus on language shift and maintenance. This study differs significantly in approach, shifting the focus from language use to an analysis of the signs used to assert and inscribe Greekness in Johannesburg, thereby drawing this subject matter into a linguistic landscape study of the diaspora In the empirical chapters of the dissertation, I used geosemiotics as a methodological toolkit to analyse several themes that arose from my data. First, I analysed the role food plays in inscribing Greekness in Johannesburg through an analysis of the Greek foodscapes in the city, such as Greek restaurants and supermarkets, as well as the food-centric elements used in other Greek spaces to communicate Greekness. I then introduced the concept of syncretism as a term that can be applied in a semiotic sense, to describe the ways in which signs and symbols from various, sometimes incompatible, aspects of Greek history and identity are deliberately displayed side-by-side in a space and operate in aggregate to communicate homogeneous and ‘authentic’ Greekness. Finally, I took a ‘semiotic approach’ (Van Leeuwen, 2001) to authenticity and analysed how authenticity in the Greek diaspora is semiotically constructed both visually and aurally in Greek spaces in Johannesburg. This study argues that the Greek diaspora in Johannesburg seeks to construct spaces in the city as recognisably and undeniably Greek, deliberately distinguishing themselves from the rest of the city, including other South Africans and other diasporas, by using a constellation of multimodal and multisensorial signs to convey a sense of homogeneous Greekness. The types of signs that are used to inscribe Greekness are all linked to the desirability – and by extension superiority – of Greek culture, heritage, and history. Thus, the ways in which Greekness is inscribed by the diaspora in Johannesburg rely on a process of self-exoticism (cf. Iwabuchi, 1994).