Electronic Theses and Dissertations (PhDs)

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/10539/37993

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    Invisibility of women’s voices, choices, and opinions in African traditional marriages: a case study of the Swati people from Kanyamazane
    (University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2024) Ngobeni-Hlophe, Nkateko; Zungu, E. B.
    Most Africans believe that marriage is a gift from the ancestors. Marriage is also perceived as an occasion that brings together two families through the union of two individuals. The study explores the role of makoti within traditional Swati marriages. Traditional marriages require several cultural marriage rites to be observed and completed before a couple can be considered to be married. Different types of traditional marriages require different ceremonies, but the basis of every traditional marriage is lobola. In traditional Swati societies, the only way a woman can officially enter into a man’s family and become a member of that family is through marriage. Once lobola has been paid and makoti joins her new family, she begins to form relationships with her in-laws. Having unpleasant relationships within the family can cause a lot of conflict between family members, which in turn angers the ancestors. African families are known to avoid direct conflicts as a way of avoiding angering the ancestors (Ngidi, 2012). Therefore, family members opt for alternative ways of dealing with conflicts by using mitsi on one another. For this study, Critical theory and Feminism theory were used to explain the impact of cultural practices in the way that woman are perceived and treated in traditional societies. The study was conducted from an ethnographic perspective using a qualitative method for data collection. This was done in order to fully outline different cultural aspects with full understanding of the people being studied. This study has proved that the excitement of being a makoti is short-lived and has demonstrated how culture is often used to eclipse the voices and choices of traditionally married women in the Swati society with particular reference to the Swati community of Kanyamazane. Makotis who participated in this study have reported experiencing a shift in character upon getting married. Most of these shifts have resulted in there being conflict within the household. They have also reported drastic changes in their relationship with their in-laws after they were married into the family. Some of the v negative experiences they have had with their in-laws include physical altercations, being bad mouthed, name calling, being put under excessive pressure to conform, and many others. Once married, in-laws expect makotis to transition into their role as the newest member of the family. Makotis are expected to change the way they dress, behave, who they associate with and are also told how to treat her husband. Failure to meet any of these expectations will result to makoti being mistreated.
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    Media Voices and Power: A decolonial analysis of black voices in the post-apartheid South African media landscape using City Press newspaper as an analytical focus
    (University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2023-03) Mgibisa, Mbuyisi; Menon, Dilip; Daniels, Glenda
    This study conducts a decolonial analysis of black voices in the post-apartheid South African media landscape using City Press newspaper as an analytical focus. For the purposes of this study, I have analysed four case studies linked to the mediation and meditation of black voices in the media and public sphere. First, this study explores the subjection of black voices inside the newsroom using the black-oriented newspaper, City Press, as an example. It assesses the structure of whiteness in that newspaper and interrogate whether it provided its black journalists with a room to write from the standpoint of “black perspective”. The second theme is an exploration and personal account of my lived experience in the typical South African neoliberal newsroom and an attempt to bring theory in order to figure out my lived experience. Third, this thesis focuses on forms of gendered and racialised forms of subjection posed by the silencing of voices of black women journalists in the South African mainstream media, including social media. And the fourth theme looks at the importance and significance of voice or speech in doing politics in the post-apartheid South Africa and interrogates how the Economic Freedom Fighters’ (EFF) has deployed its “radical black voice” through the concept of Black rage. The study utilises decolonial theory and Steve Biko’s Black Consciousness philosophy as a lens as it seeks to investigate how essentialised, racialised, politicised, gendered and lived are black voices in post 1994 South Africa media landscape and public sphere. This study, then, involves the critical analysis of four themes, all of which are integrally related. The main argument advanced in this thesis is that black voices continue to be subjected through the concept and function of coloniality. For this reason, the study not only historizes black voices as producers, users and custodians of knowledge but also situates their lived experiences. This study finds that even in the face of debilitating coloniality in our everyday lives, black voices persist through those politicised, gendered, racialised and lived negative forms of invisibility and marginalisation and think and speak from the perspective of blackness. Therefore, this thesis posits that black voices are a communicative plane on which blackness performs and articulate itself, for itself. Moreover, this study is a form of epistemic protest against systematic and systemic silencing of black voices and an attempt to counter efforts of rendering black people, in particular black women, speechless. The transdisciplinary methodological approach deployed here is, first and foremost, embedded in the theoretical framework and various methods and concepts will be operationalised to bring to light the complex and complicated nature of how black voices are mediated in the post-apartheid South African media landscape and public sphere. The interview method, which comprises a reflective commentary, and autoethnography are important components of this study. Additionally, the empirical findings through interview material, newspaper articles and tweeter feeds have been examined through discourse analysis and through the prism of the conceptual analytical tools deployed here.