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

Start date: 2000End date: 2011

Search Results

Now showing 1 - 6 of 6
  • No Thumbnail Available
    Item
    Social change Among Bushmen of the Eastern Ghanzi Ridge
    (2011-05-20) Silberbauer, G.
    Pre-settlement culture: Hunting and gathering bands, each occupying and exploiting the resources of recognised, defined territory. Although politically autonomous, bands formed loose alliances for trading, mutual support in times of drought, and visiting. The band was an open community without exclusive qualifications for membership. It was egalitarian and was ordered by a consensus policy. Leadership was ephemeral and non-authoritarian; it rotated among band members. Members were linked by bonds of real and fictive kinship. The kinship system provided a framework for the ordering of relationships and for social control within, and between bands.
  • No Thumbnail Available
    Item
    Economy and society in South Africa
    (2011-05-09) Schlemmer, Lawrence
    Between 1974 and the time of writing, dramatic political events in the Southern African region have tended to shift the ongoing debate on the economy and change in South Africa somewhat into the background. There has been a primacy accorded to the political rather than the economic in discussions of change. However, the events over the period since the Portuguese coup in 1974 until the time of writing will have to be seen in retrospect as having changed the political environment of Southern Africa rather than as having introduced changes of a meaningful kind within South Africa. Not that the South African political climate has been unaffected. Far from it; the very recent (mid-1976) disturbances in Soweto, other Black townships and in black educational institutions as well as a minor spate of political trials and detentions way very well attest to a heightened restiveness among South African Blacks partly as a consequence of events in Southern Africa. Yet a lull in the tempo of events seems inevitable with White Rhodesia preparing for a long drawn-out resistance to Black incursions and responses in South West Africa - Namibia dominated by the same Major issue of extended, inconclusive querilla warfare and what are likely to be extensive constitutional debates.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    We can run, but we can't hide: The need for psychological explanation in social history
    (2000-04-17) Dagut, Simon
    There have been many occasions in my experience when the explanatory techniques normally used by social historians have seemed inadequate to deal with some particular process or event. No doubt this happens to every historian, but I sometimes suspect that the social world of British colonialism in nineteenth century South Africa - my particular interest - provides these moments more often than some other areas. This feeling is, no doubt, largely the result of not knowing as much about the peculiarities of other places and times, but I do think it is at least arguable that colonial encounters created more extraordinarily odd situations than many other social environments. In past work, have taken two approaches to these kinds of explanatory challenges. In the case of really bizarre material, I have simply avoided discussing it in writing and have rationalised my omissions on the grounds that this sort of thing is too atypical to be helpful in building up a broad general picture of British settlers' attitudes and experiences. In the case of more frequently occurring oddities, I have attempted to argue that they were the result of the construction of settlers' attitudes by the prevalent discourses concerning class identity and colonialism, which combined to create so great a social distance between settlers and African people that what would otherwise have seemed socially impossible became everyday and natural. Although I do, in general, stand by this analysis, I have increasingly come to feel that it needs to be supplemented. Firstly, really peculiar circumstances deserve some time in the historical spotlight by way of an adjunct to those which an historian has decided were 'normal'. Extreme cases can be very useful in revealing the limits of the normal. Secondly, explaining even the 'normal' seems to me to require the use of psychological terms and techniques, however much historians may wish that this weren't the case.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    The neglected role of labour relations in the South African public service
    (2000-04) Adler, Glen
    Public service workers now enjoy trade union and collective bargaining rights for the first time in the country's history. These changes provide public servants with opportunities to bring their conditions of service into line with industrial relations 'best practice' in the private sector, and for black workers in particular, to redress decades of racism, employment insecurity, and low pay.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item