Electronic Theses and Dissertations (PhDs)
Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/10539/37993
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Item 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.Item 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, ColetteA 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.Item Using mixed-method approaches to provide new insights into media coverage of femicide(2019) Brodie, Nechama R.South Africa has a femicide rate that is six times the world average. Over 2,500 women aged 14 years or older are murdered every year, the majority of these women killed by an intimate partner. Despite the prevalence of femicide, less than 20% of these murders are ever reported in South African news media. Studies on news-media coverage of femicide reveal a subjective and obscure process of media selection and exclusion, which contribute to an archive of crime reporting that is not reflective of actual crime rates and which actively distort the nature and frequency of certain types of crime. This influences public perceptions and fear of violent crime, including notions of who is a suspect and who is most at risk. This study uses mixed-method approaches to document and analyse the content and extent of commercial news media coverage of femicides that took place in South Africa during the 2012/2013 crime reporting year, through an original media database listing 408 femicide victims associated with 5,778 press articles. Victim and incident information is compared with epidemiological and statistical data, including mortuary-based studies and police crime statistics. Media data is explored through various media effects models, including a mixedmethods framing analysis, and is also examined by title, and by language. These analyses reveal how media constructs and depicts particular notions of gender, violence, race, and crime in South Africa.