Africana Library

Permanent URI for this communityhttps://wiredspace.wits.ac.za/handle/10539/7317

For information on accessing original analogue content in any of these collections please contact Margaret Atsango via email : Margaret Atsango

Alternatively, please contat Margareth Atsango by Tel: 011 717 1933/1977

Browse

Filters

1988 - 198911990 - 19912

Settings

Author: search.filters.author.Starfield, JaneHas files: Yes

Search Results

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
  • No Thumbnail Available
    Item
    "A documentary drama": The case of Malisela Letsoalo and the Banareng tribe versus the union government
    (1988-03-28) Starfield, Jane
    Tuesday 28 January 1958 was a tepid 20.8 degrees C in St George's Street, Cape Town. Not far off, the Houses of Parliament were considerably hotter. Generator of this heat was none other than the 'Famous Lawyer' and former Native Senator, Mr Hyman Meyer Basner. Basner had just bombarded every MP, including the Senate, with copies of an affidavit rebutting the Minister of Native Affairs' attack upon his integrity the day before.
  • No Thumbnail Available
    Item
    The lore and the proverbs: Sol Plaatje as historian
    (1991-08-26) Starfield, Jane
    Sol T. Plaatje's Sechuana Proverbs (1916) is a small blue book containing 732 Setswana proverbs, their translations and their 'European eqvivalents'. At the University of the Witwatersrand , Johannesburg, this store of Setswana wisdom is kept under lock and key, not because it offends against any vicious South African censorship laws, but because it is an old book that needs protection. Notwithstanding the recent reprinting of much early African literature, scholars and publishers have not re-issued Sechuana Proverbs, nor do readers in libraries or the open market make any significant requests for it (1). This state, of affairs is, unhappily, not what Plaatje intended when he set out to save these proverbs from the likely oblivion of orality, by writing them down. This was the trap into which writing enticed many of its practitioners among the African elite. This article explores Plaatje's desire to preserve the proverbs, which he considered central to the continued regeneration of Tswana culture. The paper examines the interface between orality and literacy and the role of those who moved between these two forms of social communication. Sol Plaatje, South African nationalist, journalist, novelist, translator and cultural historian, lived from 1876 to 1932.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    "For future reference": The Mamathola Removal of 1958 and the making of apartheid
    (1990-05) Starfield, Jane
    "One may make one's own history", said Marx, "but not in the circumstances of one's own choosing". The argument in this paper is that, the production of particular versions of history may be inversely related to their makers' choice over the circumstances in which they are made. For example, in a situation of increasing powerlessness, one may be drawn to a sense of a time when one's power was greater. That sense may turn the past into metaphor. That sense is a kind of knowledge. It is not the knowledge that lives in facts and figures, but it certainly lives with them. It is their casing, their skin. To use another metaphor, a sense of the past is a basic perceptual operating system. This is not the carefully considered, philosophically integrated ideological position of the serious historian; nevertheless, most people have such operating systems. History in this sense is a system of narration, a way of apprehending the world.