3. Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) - All submissions
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Item The experiences of being black in the South African workplace(2019) Magubane, Nokulunga N.The psychosocial condition and socioeconomic position of black employees in the South African workplace remain unchanged in spite of the advent of democracy in 1994. The black employee’s racial experience in the workplace is indicative of the normative experience of blackness in contemporary South African society that is in agreement with the everyday familiarity of socioeconomic disadvantage and psychosocial subjugation that affects the overall existential experience of blackness. As such, hostile racial interactions in the workplace reflect that the socioeconomic and psychosocial changes expected post-apartheid are materialising at seemingly substandard rates. The current investigation utilised a phenomenological approach to the broader critical psychology of race the interpretive research paradigm and semi-structured interviews to direct thematic data analysis techniques that informed the study conclusions. The participant group consisted of eight tertiary educated black employees, one male and seven females, with an age range of 21 to 27 years, with workplace experience ranging from two weeks to four years. The results of this investigation significantly shows the inefficiency of the democratic redress policy in the facilitation of workplace diversification, and its ineptitude in expediting psychosocial and socioeconomic inclusion, integration and participation such that the existential black employee’s experience of racial identity in the post-apartheid South African workplace is not adversarial. The findings of this investigation suggest that the instances of on-going racism in the workplace are the result of an institutional socioeconomic investment in racial inequality that facilitates hostile racial interactions in the workplace.Item Violence, betrayal, complicity: a study of apartheid perpetrator narratives(2018) Bloch, Robyn CassandraThis investigation considers the phenomenon of perpetration and its representation in contemporary South Africa. To uncover what is hidden or omitted in these narratives and to understand how writing about violence influences the text and the writer, I critically analyse five recently published books by or about apartheid perpetrators. My first chapter analyses Anemari Jansen’s biography Eugene de Kock: Assassin for the State (2015) by tracking De Kock’s shifting representation over the past 20 years. In my second chapter, which investigates Askari: A Story of Collaboration and Betrayal in the Anti-Apartheid Struggle (2014), I examine writer Jacob Dlamini’s battle to confront black betrayers. Hugh Lewin’s Stones Against the Mirror: Friendship in the Time of the South African Struggle (2011) is the story of how Adrian Leftwich, a fellow anti-apartheid saboteur, stood state witness against Lewin. I analyse white betrayal as premised from a position of privilege. My fourth chapter looks into the autobiography of the apartheid spy Olivia Forsyth, Agent 407: An Apartheid Spy Breaks her Silence (2015). Forsyth absconds from responsibility by writing three contradictory narratives and training her focus on surfaces. Her depiction of black women shows that she plays into the power dynamics of a white madam. Finally, my fifth chapter examines Bridget Hilton-Barber’s Student, Comrade, Prisoner, Spy: A Memoir (2016). Hilton-Barber, I argue, conjures her past and relives it in the present. In doing so, she acts as a witness to her younger self. But her book reveals forms of privilege and whiteness, and thus enacts another kind of betrayal. I conclude that each text employs narrative devices to contend with this contentious material and that the violence of the material causes the writers’ sense of self to fractureItem Structuralism, colonialism and development: understanding the interpellation of the black subject in South Africa(2017-03) Dabas, AnandiniToday a large percentage of the black elite in South Africa have identified with the ideology of the white coloniser and in doing so is reproducing the effects of colonialization albeit in a free and fair democratic country. Structuralist and post-structuralist discourse both provide the conceptual tools that enable the articulation of the subject under the colonial and developmental symbolic. Colonialism is conceived as an overdetermined and asymmetric differential relation and takes forward the understanding of both coloniser and colonised and the structure of their historical trajectories as political subjects. Development as a discourse is undertaken for the Americanisation of the global landscape has rendered the economic as the principal determination of society. Furthermore, the development of the subject is affected by nodal points in history, for example, the effect of liberalism, Marxism and democracy. These dominant discourses intertwine and reveal four principal identifications and experiences of the black colonised subject. The presentation of the four identifications of the black colonised subject is undertaken chronologically from 1962 to present. These identifications include the elementary position of the black subject suffering from subjective destitution; the black colonised subject identifying with the white coloniser but being further pushed into the Real and Steve Biko’s positivised black subject. Fourth and lastly, today at a conscious level a very significant number of black citizens have succeeded in moving beyond the elementary colonial definition of who they are as blacks and have enthusiastically embraced the identity the Constitution offers them. But it would be a mistake to think that this signals the eclipse of colonial forms of identification. On the one hand, there are blacks who because of the way they behave towards other blacks, must at some level believe they are white. Consciously, they are empirical black agents who define themselves in non-racial universalist terms but without realising it, they themselves desire to be white and identify with whiteness. On the other hand, the majority of blacks are being treated as they were under colonial conditions, but this time by their black counterparts. The Economic Freedom Fighters push forth an agenda that emancipates the black subject from colonisation via a program of economic liberation.Item Sonic defiance: the deployment of song as active heritage in post-apartheid South Africa(2018) Langa, MargarethaStruggle songs have continued to pulsate in South Africa after the advent of democracy in 1994. This study examines the deployment of song as a form of intangible heritage. It looks at why the songs originally composed under the oppressive conditions of apartheid continue to be deployed with such vigour in a democratic South Africa, and what the effects and meanings of this deployment in different spaces are. It also explores what it means for the field of heritage as well as the performance of song if struggle songs are considered a form of intangible heritage. This thesis draws on the seminal work of James Young (1992) on the notion of the counter-monument to examine the deployment of song, and the multiple twists and turns it takes during its performance journey. Three case studies are presented to examine the utilisation of song: The court transcripts of the 2011 Dubula ibhunu trial between ‘Afrikaner’ civil rights organisation AfriForum and Julius Malema, at the time President of the Youth League of the African National Congress (ANC), the ANC’s National Conference in 2012, and the Singing Freedom: Music and the struggle against apartheid museum exhibition at the Iziko Slave Lodge. This thesis shows that the notion of heritage has become enormously potent in post-apartheid South Africa. It concludes that song operates as a sonic counter-monument that defies containment in heritage frameworks, local and international policies and formal memorialisation projects. It is a form of active heritage – one that is deeply felt by its singers.Item Regimes and rights on the Orange River: possessing and dispossessing Griqua Philippolis and Afrikaner Orania(2012) Cavanagh, EdwardGriqua Philippolis (1824-1862) and Afrikaner Orania (1990-present) are explored in this thesis, according to a legal-history framework that allows for a comparative appraisal of their foundations. As I argue, property – specifically, property in land – helps us to understand sovereignty and the question of rights in the South Africa. As this thesis explores, both settlements were formerly home to prior inhabitants (the San in Philippolis; Coloured squatters in Orania), and these inhabitants had to be transferred away. Both communities emerged out of contested and dynamic political contexts – situations that would determine how they saw themselves and others. Land regulations were devised within these respective contexts, in direct response to specific external pressures and the demands of the market. Internally, both polities were tightly governed. Externally, to various institutions and individuals, both argued for their ‘rights’ – mainly rights to land and to special treatment – all the time. Indeed, in a way, this study is an historical exploration of the effective deployment of ‘rights talk’, and to that end, my argument carries across two centuries right up to the present day using Orania and Philippolis to do this. This thesis, then, is a study about land rights, and the different regimes that create and erase them, that acknowledge and ignore them; it is a local history of settler colonialism past and present, using two case studies to explore the continuities of South Africa’s ever-pertinent land question.Item The implementation of urban apartheid on the East Rand, 1948-1973 : the role of local government and local resistance(2001) Nieftagodien, Mohamed NoorThe overarching theme of the thesis is the urban ‘racial’ restructuring of the East Rand during the first twenty-five years of apartheid. The thesis examines the adoption and implementation of apartheid state’s social engineering strategy, especially its strict racial segregation of the urban areas. In this context, the creation o f ‘modern’ African townships and group areas is emphasised. The thesis focuses attention on the implementation of urban apartheid in Benoni, particularly the establishment of the ‘model’ township, Daveyton. Benoni’s experiences in implementing apartheid policies are compared to that of its municipal neighbours. The thesis contends that local authorities were important role players in the implementation of apartheid. Thus, the ways in which the changing relations between the local and central tiers of the state influenced the making of apartheid at regional and local levels are foregrounded throughout this study. The impact of apartheid policies on the ‘multi-racial’ populations of the urban ‘black spots’ and their responses to these policies are primary concerns in the narrative provided here. The diverse reactions of people affected by forced removals - from acquiescence to militant resistance - in the 1950s and 1960s are analysed. A central focus of this study is the making of apartheid in the 1960s, the so-called golden age of apartheid. Finally, the thesis discusses the introduction and effects o f ‘separate development’ and ‘community development’ as principal interventions by the state to politicise ethnicity and ‘race’ during the period of ‘high apartheid’.Item 'Gendered histories and the politics of subjectivity, memory and historical consciousness - a study of two black women's experiences of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) process and the aftermath.'(2016-03-01) Letlaka, Palesa NthabisengThis study examines the gendered histories of two black women who both narrated their personal testimonies in self-authored narrations for public consumption, and who both testified at the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). It situates the politics of subjectivity, memory and historical consciousness within the social constructivist and hermeneutical theoretical frameworks of Butler and Ricoeur respectively; and through a generative process, working with their TRC testimonies and subsequent oral interviews, it examines self-narrativity, subject formation and the formation of female selfhood in the formation of gendered historical consciousnessItem South African literature and Johannesburg's black urban townships(2015-01-26) Hart, Deborah Mary