3. Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) - All submissions
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Item The life and labour of 'illegal' and deportable people: undocumented Zimbabwean migrants living and working in Witbank, South Africa(2019-03) Machinya, JohannesThis study is based on ethnographic research among undocumented Zimbabwean migrants living and working in Witbank, South Africa. It explores and analyses the existential and juridical condition of migrant 'illegality' by examining how state enforcement of immigration laws helps to constitute a pervasive sense of 'illegality' and deportability, which is the state of living with deportation as a ubiquitous possibility for undocumented migrants, even if not actually effected. Migrant 'illegality' is produced at the intersection of state efforts to make migration flows legible or readable to the state and migrants' attempts to deal with the state's ability to control migration flows, which highlights the dialectical relation in and adds nuance to the theorisation of the production of migrant 'illegality' and deportability. Deportability inundates undocumented migrants' lives with anxiety and uncertainty over the indeterminacy of the materialisation of actual arrest and deportation. This is markedly characterised by undocumented migrants' inability to determine with certainty what might (or might not) happen to them in their encounters with the regime of immigration law enforcement, whether they would be arrested and deported, or not. This indeterminacy and uncertainty speak to the temporal irregularity that emerges from the unpredictability of arrest and deportation. The threat of deportation registers a vivid awareness among undocumented migrants that one day they will get deported and this translates into a hideous form of anticipatory anxiety over the possibility of something happening without needing it to happen -deportation. I argue that living fearfully anticipating, although without hankering for, the materialisation of actual deportation provides a pervasive sense of 'waiting' for eventual deportation. By underlining the anxieties and uncertainties that emanate from the possibility of deportation, I show how the awareness of being 'illegal' and deportable shapes the everyday lives and work experiences of undocumented migrants. I argue that migrant 'illegality' as well as the threat and fear of deportation are powerful determining conditions that write themselves enduringly into the fabric of undocumented migrants' everyday lives and significantly alter the pattern of their everyday existence and work experiences. This thesis thus also focuses on the sociotemporal implications of living and working under the constant threat and expectation of deportation, which reminds undocumented migrants that their time in South Africa is ephemeral and indefinitely terminable; and this fear infiltrates and shapes undocumented migrants' everyday lives and work experiences. The thesis further looks at undocumented migrants' responses to the challenges that emanate from being 'illegal' and deportable in the face of such adversity. I demonstrate how the responses oscillate between visibility, and therefore engaging directly with state officials on the one hand, and social non-visibility or undetectability on the other, with migrants avoiding interactions with state officials who possess powers to arrest and deport those migrants who are in violation of the country's immigration law.Item The affective black experience: struggles with conformity for young black professionals in corporate South Africa(2017-09) Bokala, Kutlwano TlameloSouth Africa’s democratic transition was cultured by, amongst others, the mythical ideology of Rainbowism. Rooted in happiness and the promises thereof, the renowned national metaphor was utilised by the state to radically shift the country’s narrative around nationhood towards a shared understanding of identity, belonging, citizenship, and diversity. Today, the influence of Rainbowism within state-led efforts towards social change has slowly deemed under much public scrutiny. Persistent poverty, inequality and violence have fostered the emergence of, what many are calling, an “End of the Rainbow” discourse. As integral and lurid entities within post-apartheid nation-building, black youth and institutionalised spaces have affected and been affected by the shortcomings of Rainbowism. Their shared history and intersecting significance in fuelling collective action amongst South Africans have been well depicted in recent times where youth-led movements have highlighted the inequality and unhappiness that exists in institutions spaces like the university. However, little mention has been made about how black youth are making sense of institutional life within spaces like the workplace, against the backdrop of promised happiness. Through the conversations had with eight young black professionals, this research report centres Rainbowism as a project of happiness that governs institutional life for black youth in South Africa. Happiness is revealed as a dominant discourse operating along axes of power that shape ‘happy’ employees based on various forms of corporeal differentiation.Item Racial identity in psychotherapy: a study of trainee psychologists’ experiences(2019) Samakosky, AlexandraRacial identity permeates psychotherapy and holds particular meaning in South Africa because of its history of racial naming, oppression and segregation. This qualitative research study set out to investigate trainee psychologists’ experiences of working with racial identity in psychotherapy during the transformative process of becoming psychologists. This process involves the negotiation of their personal and professional identity. Interviews were conducted with trainee psychologists. A relational psychoanalytic framework informed an understanding of the interview exchange as a mutual engagement between two raced subjects. Interview transcripts were analysed using Thematic Analysis (TA). Four themes were identified: the difficulty of addressing racial identity in psychotherapy; the experience of White guilt; the complexity of being Black; the process of becoming a raced psychologist and the research interview as an intersubjective encounter. Findings suggest that although trainee psychologists acknowledged the importance of addressing racial identity in psychotherapy, they experienced difficulties, resulting in either avoiding the topic, or attempting to address it unsuccessfully. This links to their inexperience and fear that talking about racial issues may potentially create ruptures in psychotherapy. It would be helpful for trainee psychologists to gain further insight into how to address racial identity therapeutically during the transformative process of becoming psychotherapists.Item Even poodles can fly: a collection of essays, including a reflecting essay(2019-06) Thompson, Wesley RolandItem Misery merchants: a creative non-fiction on a private prison in South Africa(2019-07) Hopkins, RuthI visited management prison for the first time in 2012, when I was following up on letters that inmates had sent to the Wits Justice Project (WJP), the organization I worked for. I returned to Mangaung prison many times and interviewed inmates, warders and several other sources. I accessed damming government reports that I had been stuffed under the carpet and leaked video footage of abuse. Mangaung Prison is a Public Private Partnership (PPP). A consortium of five shareholders signed a contract with the government in 2000 to build, run and maintain a private prison. The evidence I gathered showed the prison's riot team-also known as the "Ninjas" - taking inmates to either the hospital or the the isolation unit, where there are CCTV blind spots. There they would shock them with their electrified shock shields. Inmates were also being injected against their will with anti-psychotic drugs, often when they had no history of mental illness. The warders went on several strikes in August September 2023 and the chaos in the prison escalated to unknown heights. When the prison appointed unqualified staff to replace the absent workers, the state stepped in and took over.Item The eyes of the naked: what do the eyes of the naked see?(2018-11) Hermanus, LithaProtest literature is dead! Modify it or kill it, said many, including the likes of Professor Njabulo Ndebele and Justice Albie Sachs. At the dawn of the South African democracy, the latter is famously reported to have requested that, at the very least, the genre be sent into a five-year coma (Plummer, 1998). At its height, protest literature was criticised for its lack of creative depth and complexity. A ‘go-to’ for many African writers, it became too ubiquitous. Most of the genre’s authors produced works that were said to suffer from too much sameness. Their white characters were often predictably and typically oppressive, and their African ones were necessarily good. Among other recurring themes, existed political turmoil, violence, death and communities engaging in politically-charged funerals (Lockwood, 2008). Themes did not venture much beyond the struggle against apartheid. It was argued – by Professor Ndebele and others – that a plethora of other themes were part of the South African human experience and they also warranted exploration in literature. This Masters in Creative Writing work, which is comprised of a novel and a complementary reflexive essay (titled The Eyes of the Naked: What Do The Eyes of the Naked See?), explores the notion that, despite the end of apartheid, the conditions that gave rise to protest literature endure. There remains much to protest. There was plenty to protest before the advent of apartheid. Thus, in the essay, the novel The Eyes of the Naked is positioned in the South African canon between a seminal protest literature novel in Mongane Serote’s To Every Birth Its Blood and a pivotal post-apartheid literature text in Zakes Mda’s Ways of Dying. In all three novels there is a colonial thread that traverses epochs. It is suggested that The Eyes of the Naked is a reimagining of protest literature. However, this new variety unequivocally aspires towards complexity and depth. In the novel, protest is located in myriad themes that have their roots in the colonial (and apartheid) experience. These are themes such as civilian violence/crime; love; sexuality; filial disconnection; cultural deracination; masculinity/femininity; the migrant labour system; racism/xenophobia/revolution vs. terrorism. In the end, however, one must submit that The Eyes of the Naked is not classic protest literature. It is a revival of it that seeks to address, with creative depth and complexity, and through a host of other themes, the unrelenting subjugation of Africans in a land that is their home – on soil which most of their feet have never left.Item Wonders and miracles: a study of how Mockumentaries interrogate sociopolitical issues in South Africa(2019) Motaung, Obett HlonoloThe aim of this research is to examine the extent to which mockumentaries are able to interrogate the socio-political issue of how of the public are being taken advantage of by powerful public figures, such as pastors and politicians. For this research I will be focusing on the mockumentary devices of stereotyping and alienation. I will be looking at these two devices as a means of interrogating the social political issue of how a corrupt ‘pastor’ and fraudulent ‘politician’ abuse the people they serve. The research will use Wonder Boy for President (2016) to illustrate the success and limitations of mockumentary to interrogate the socio-political issue of how people are being abused by political leaders. Following the findings from the case study, this research will, create its own mockumentary that is focused on the thematic concern of how people placed in authority in particular pastor abuse their powers and negate the aspirations of the society they purport to represent. My film will examine how fraudsters use Christianity as a means to exploit people and enrich themselves. Therefore, in investigating how mockumentaries as a film form, are able to deal with this thematic concern through the use of Wonder Boy for President (2016) and creating my own mockumentary as a case study, I will be able to analyze the effectiveness of mockumentaries in interrogating the social political issue.Item Drawing on Words: Jasper Johns's Illustrations of Samuel Beckett's Foirades/Fizzles(1994) Richards, Colin PeterBetween 1973 and 1976 artist Jasper Johns produced some thirty-three illustrations to accompany five prose texts authored by Samuel Beckett. The result was the book Foirades!Fizzles, published in New York in 1976. Almost without exception the critical literature published on this book draws the relation between image and text away from any idea of illustration. And this only when the idea is not simply ignored. This critical attitude reflects a wider tendency in especially elevated critico-aesthetic discourse to consider illustration as aesthetically and textually debased. Bracketed off, illustration merely signals a parasitic relation. Compromising the integrity of the texts it enjoins, it articulates a secondary aesthetic of the accessory. This view seems unproductive not only when applied to Johns's work, but also to image-text combinations more generally. The sheer incidence of such combinations (including illustration) in recent and current aesthetic production suggests that the indifference or prejudicial critical reflex routinely provoked by illustration marks a moment of poverty in contemporary critical thinking. This moment appears solidly rooted in a once dominant and still apparently powerful formalist and purist impulses within modernist discourse. The persistence of these impulses suggests the survival of unexamined, limiting and tenacious critical assumptions. A closer examination of selected texts - pre-modernist, modernist, and post-modernist - point beyond these assumptions. Here the logic of the supplement in particular illuminates very specifically how illustration might come to function, and where its incendiary critical potential may lie. The supplement resists the easy hierarchisation or even synthesis of different texts which has been the fate of illustration. It renders illustration both critically robust and radical. The concept of allegory is also illuminating here. It not only helps us understand better the fate of illustration within modernism and postmodernism, but also provides for enlightening readings of Foirades!Fizzles. In turn, a revaluation of illustration opens up a more productive view of allegory in both modernist and postmodernist discourse. Illustration, in coordinating different semiotic systems, however marginally, can function as a framing, focusing and spacing device, a way of bracketing and specifying themes, structures and forms within a given textual complex, a way of opening readings otherwise foreclosed or overlooked. In this study such readings are articulated through a set of textual configurations which include: vision and perception; the body, eye, and skin; calibration, measurement, and point of view; memory, repetition and originality; and finally liminality, ambiguity and metastable signification. Against the grain of published opinion there is then much to be gained by recognising the capacious critical potential of illustration, what we might term its 'motivated contingency'. Rather than being considered critically inconsequential or an aesthetic impedin1ent, illustration may in fact provide an almost unique opportunity not only to explore issues germane to Johns's work (both independently and in relation to Beckett's texts), but also to address certain important critical debates within postmodern discourse. Its value may be felt in reading Foirades!Fizzles, in reading other image-text combinations, and the broader relations between visual art, literature, and language.Item The geology of the Otjosondu manganese area: south west Africa(1959) Roper, HaroldGeological mapping and compilation of data from mining and prospecting operations in the Otjosondu area in South West Africa provided the information presented in this thesis. The geomorphology of the area is described and the general geology is discussed. Details of the complicated folding suffered by the Iamara rocks are presented. The petrology and petrography of' the outcropping representatives of the ancient sedimentary and intrusive rocks is described under the section on economic geology, interpretations of the complex structures of the ore bodies are presented. The mineralogy of the ores was studied by means of polished sections, X-ray diffraction and differential thermal analysis techniques. It is concluded from both field and laboratory evidence that these ores represent the metamorphosed equivalents of syngenetic manganese bearing sedimentsItem The transformation agenda implementation at Eskom, Koeberg: lessons learnt for nuclear new build(2019) Dijkstra, Faye ReneSouth Africa aspires to re-industrialise and transform the economy into a globally competitive one, comprised of inclusive growth and development of all citizens. By leveraging the state’s procurement spend it strives to unlock opportunities for localisation and empowerment within state owned companies such as Eskom. This study sought to make recommendations from the investigations and analysis at Eskom, Koeberg regarding the lessons learnt from the implementation of its transformation agenda in the procurement processes, to assist nuclear new build. Data was collected and analysed, finding that little buy-in was obtained. Entrenching Transformational DNA – the central point around which the study binds – indicates the corrective action needed to commence its change journey, where DNA entrenchment is a sustainable and necessary precursor to future implementation in nuclear new build. The findings are significant if Koeberg is to maximise its local developmental impact in the ‘nuclear’ and ‘designated sectors for localisation’ productive sectors. It is recommended that Koeberg should re-implement the transformation agenda, taking cognisance of the lessons learnt.