3. Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) - All submissions
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Item Dr S. Modiri Molema (1891-1965) : The making of an historian(2008-12-05T11:33:27Z) Starfield, JaneThis thesis finds that Dr SM Molema made a considerable contribution to the construction of the history of black people in South Africa, and was the first African historian to do so. Yet, he and other African writers were marginalised from the mainstream twentieth-century canons of South African history. Therefore, the thesis investigates the reasons for which Dr Molema (a medical doctor) became an historian and an ethnographer in 1920, and explores the nature of his critical engagement with the ways in which these disciplines represented black people. To understand the controversial treatment of black historical writers, this study appraises South African historiography and its tendency to construct debates about black people, while rendering black writers marginal to such debates. Further, the thesis explores the generic complexity of Molema’s work and finds he wrote in a hybrid genre, autoethnography. This complexity may have contributed to the many misreadings of his work. This study outlines the generic specificity and implications of autoethnography and finds that, like autobiography, autoethnography has been one of the genres of the Self (of personal testimony) that, under colonialism and apartheid, many black writers employed in providing corrective versions of mainstream versions of South African history. Autoethnography enabled Molema to represent his own life, but — more importantly — that of his community (the Rolong boo RaTshidi of Mafikeng) as a form of cultural translation for readers at home and abroad. Methodologically, the thesis understands that Molema’s own family history played a large part in motivating him to write history. In order to explore this relationship between the experience of history and its representation, the thesis has a dual structure: the first four chapters present biographical studies of three generations of the Molema family: Chief Molema, the founder of Mafikeng, his son Chief Silas Thelesho Molema, and Silas’ son, Modiri Molema, the historian and ethnographer. Chapters Five and Six present an exposition and critique of his first work, The Bantu Past and Present. Dr Molema’s biographies of Chiefs Moroka and Montshiwa are used as ancillary texts.Item Stained judgments, tarnished judges, tainted desire: The rhetoric of sexual orientation in South African judgments 1926-1999(2008-03-18T09:12:01Z) Montgomery, John HenryAbstract This is a study of law and language; in particular an investigation into the language of judgments. The focus is on judgments as texts authored by judges. The main thinkers chosen as the theoretical basis are not experts in law – Michel Foucault, Mikhail Bakhtin, Norman Fairclough and Hayden White, for example. The reason for this choice is to consider the language of law from insights outside of law. Topics such as rhetoric, narrative, critical discourse analysis, intertextuality, interpretive communities, the monologic voice, oppositional reading, and power relations are seldom found in mainstream legal literature. The position taken is that judgments are texts which are no more privileged (simply because they are legal texts) than any others that a society creates. However, judgments are viewed by some as being special societal texts, coated with a patina of mystique because they are dealing with inviolate legal principles. The patina is removed enough to suggest that judges use various linguistic processes to shape their judgments in ways no different from other authors, notwithstanding that they are writing about ‘the law’. Judges are rhetoricians who use rhetoric to shape the facts, choose the most expedient legal principle, and incorporate views of society expedient to their opinion. The thrust of this study is to locate rhetoric at work within a specific sphere. The corpus consists of forty-four cases over a seventy-five year period dealing with sexual orientation. This area of law was chosen for a number of reasons. It is self-contained and lends itself to detailed examination. The topic is emotive which means more rhetorical techniques are at play than in a fairly technical area of law. There have been significant changes in the way sexual orientation has been treated in law over the years. It is interesting to trace how rhetoric facilitated that change. Lastly, we see how a judicial hegemony deals with an apolitical, splintered minority. Any categorical conclusions are impossible in an exploration of this kind. The findings, however, indicate that judges are not as restricted as is generally considered and that their judgments are shaped by employing linguistic techniques available to writers of both fact and fiction. The intention is to provide a fresh way of reading judgments, where observations gleaned in one area can be applied to other areas of law.