Faculty of Humanities (ETDs)
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Item Using mixed-method approaches to provide new insights into media coverage of femicide(2019) Brodie, Nechama R.South Africa has a femicide rate that is six times the world average. Over 2,500 women aged 14 years or older are murdered every year, the majority of these women killed by an intimate partner. Despite the prevalence of femicide, less than 20% of these murders are ever reported in South African news media. Studies on news-media coverage of femicide reveal a subjective and obscure process of media selection and exclusion, which contribute to an archive of crime reporting that is not reflective of actual crime rates and which actively distort the nature and frequency of certain types of crime. This influences public perceptions and fear of violent crime, including notions of who is a suspect and who is most at risk. This study uses mixed-method approaches to document and analyse the content and extent of commercial news media coverage of femicides that took place in South Africa during the 2012/2013 crime reporting year, through an original media database listing 408 femicide victims associated with 5,778 press articles. Victim and incident information is compared with epidemiological and statistical data, including mortuary-based studies and police crime statistics. Media data is explored through various media effects models, including a mixedmethods framing analysis, and is also examined by title, and by language. These analyses reveal how media constructs and depicts particular notions of gender, violence, race, and crime in South Africa.Item ‘They stood their ground!’ – Professional Gangsters in South African Indian Society, 1940 - 1970(2019) Heatlie, Damon; Menon, Dilip; Bloore, Peter; Kros, CynthiaThis thesis is one part of a Creative PhD that investigates the emergence of a new breed of South African Indian gangsters in Durban and Johannesburg in the early apartheid period. The second part, existing as a separate creative text, is a screenplay for a feature film loosely based on dynamics and events present in the Durban Indian underworld of the 1950s. In the thesis I argue that while prominent ‘professional’ Indian gangsters were similar to other ‘non-white’ gangsters in certain respects (their self-fashioning in relation to gangster films, for one), these ‘gentlemen gangsters’ were different in terms of their high level of social and economic integration into Indian society. Focusing on the Crimson League in Durban and Sherief Khan’s gang in Johannesburg, this research comprises reconstructions from (and analysis of) interviews and written sources. It shows how these hustlers positioned themselves as protectors of the Indian community, but also cultivated reputations as punishers, capable of brutal violence if opposed. In Chapter 1, I explore the world of changing South African Indian identity in the middle decades of the twentieth century, and the mobilisation of an ‘Indian’ identity by disparate groups to advance collective interests. In Chapter 2, I look at how subjugated Indian masculinity, a sense of vulnerable ‘territory’, and the rise of street gangs intersected in ritualised games of soccer and gang fights. Chapter 3 traces the rise of Durban’s dominant gang in the early apartheid period, the Crimson League, a vigilante outfit that turned to illicit activities and thuggery. Chapter 4 looks at some of the adversaries that the League engaged and ultimately defeated, including the Salots and the Michael John Gang – I dissect the John murder trial to show how the Crimson League seemingly bent the law to their will. In Chapter 5, I move on to a description of Sherief Khan’s rise to power over rival Old Man Kajee in the Indian areas of Johannesburg in the 1940s and early1950s, culminating in an analysis of his gang’s various ‘business’ activities. Chapter 6 finds Khan and company back on the streets in the 1960s - and examines a decisive conflict with contenders, the ‘Malay Mob’, that re- established Khan’s reputation as ‘South African king of the underworld’. In Chapter 7, I look at how mid-century Hollywood gangster films resonated with Indian gangsters, and how a convoluted conversation between Drum magazine, Hollywood films and Indian gangsters developed. Chapter 8 concludes the analysis with considering the thriving South African Indian cinema scene of this period, and how the cinemas functioned as multifaceted fantasy spaces for both gangsters and ordinary Indians.Item Witchcraft management in the early twentieth century Transvaal(University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2016) Pearson, Joel David; Delius, Peter; Falkof, NickyTowards the end of the nineteenth century, colonial governments across Africa, including South Africa, promulgated laws which aimed to prohibit the accusation of witchcraft, methods for the detection of witches and witch trials. However, while administrators saw merely superstition in witchcraft beliefs, “repugnant to the standards of civilisation”, many Africans saw an integral element of the social and spiritual order. The policing of witchcraft beliefs became a thorn in the side of colonial rule. This article brings to light some of the deeper historical complexities in policing witchcraft by looking at the application of witchcraft law in the early twentieth century ‐ a neglected period in witchcraft scholarship. Firstly, it examines some prominent discursive constructions of the concepts of “witchcraft” and the “witch doctor” during the early twentieth century, two terms which feature centrally in colonial witchcraft legislation. It argues that these terms were shrouded in a great deal of misconception and, at times, fear. Secondly, it examines instances in which the Transvaal Witchcraft Ordinance No. 26 of 1904 was applied at the Supreme Court level, demonstrating that it was employed in a wide variety of instances which often shared only a tenuous link to poorly defined notions of “the supernatural”. Nevertheless, diviners seem to have been especially prejudiced in the implementation of the law. Finally, archival correspondence derived from Native Affairs Department files dealing with witchcraft are examined to reveal that the job of policing witchcraft was rather more uncertain and ad hoc at the grassroots level than official “civilising” rhetoric may have suggested. While in principle there was no compromising with beliefs in witchcraft, in practice, such beliefs had to be carefully managed by local officials, who were given (often uncomfortably) wide powers of discretion in deciding when and how to employ the force of the law.