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Recent Submissions

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    Negotiations of Social Identity and Creolisation through Recipes in South Africa and Jamaica
    (University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2024) Mohulatsi, Mapule
    This thesis examines recipes — including those featured in creative writing—to demonstrate how collectives and individuals create and sustain narratives of social identity in South Africa, with some comparison to Jamaica. The thesis draws out the longstanding sociality of food in South Africa, paying close attention to the country’s history with recipe writing and contemporary narrativizations of social identity as they take place through the recipe. In addition, creolised foods, as they are apprehended in different historical periods in South Africa, also lead to fluid principles of organisation, particularly regarding the aesthetic and narrative choices cookbook writers make. I read two novels, Imraan Coovadia’s The Institute for Taxi Poetry (2012) and Sally Andrew’s Recipes for Love and Murder (2015); one short story titled “Mrs Plum” by Es’kia Mphahlele; six recipe books: The Cape Malay Cookbook (1988) by Faldela Williams, Cass Abrahams Cooks Cape Malay – Food from Africa (2000), The District Six Huis Kombuis: Food & Memory Project (2016), Hildagonda Duckitt’s Hilda’s “Where is it?!” of Recipes (1899) and Diary of a Cape Housekeeper (1902); a poem titled “Ackee and Codfish” (1976) by Barbara Zencraft and Cecile Emeke’s 2014 short film Ackee and Saltfish. These texts emerge from differing social groups, geographies and perspectives, but all reveal the recipe’s capacity for self-imagining and the extent to which recipes narrate social and cultural histories. They showcase the interdependence of oral/embodied and written mediums. Importantly, they also show the value of the recipe form to current debates on creolisation and separationism in literary and food studies in South Africa and abroad. At its heart, the project explores the extent to which differing social groups in South Africa apprehend culinary and cultural relations through recipe writing and compares this with Jamaica’s culinary vernaculars.
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    The Silencing of Women’s Trauma: Descendants’ Reflections on Disremembered Women Anti-Apartheid Activists
    (University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2025) Goldschmidt, Lynne; Langa, Malose
    Restorative potential and political threat are ambiguously embedded within remembering and silencing, attributed to its alliance with historical and contextual structures. This research inquiry is framed within and beyond the apartheid circumstance, seeking remembrance and unsilencing through the memories shared by women descendants of women anti-apartheid activists. The contributions of women anti-apartheid activists have been excluded from dominant accounts of apartheid history. It is argued that this disregard has not only functioned to silence the intersectional forms of oppression women activists were subjected to but has also halted human reformation and restoration, evidenced by the escalating prevalence of gender- based violence and femicide in South Africa. This study, therefore, sought to attain an understanding of the consequences of apartheid, the unacknowledged vicissitudes of colonial violence, and how the consequent colonial wound may manifest intergenerationally. A bricolage, informed by a critical approach to discourse analysis and heuristic phenomenological frameworks, guided an attendance to the research aims and questions, within a qualitative research design. These processes enabled an understanding of the individual and collective means of remembering lived experiences, whilst simultaneously making meaning of how unsilencing and remembering may threaten the dominant discourses as archived alongside existing power hierarchies. In concurrence with the bricolage, the analysis was guided by an integrated conceptual framework, embedded in African and Decolonial-centred praxis facilitated by a Fanonian lens and Tamale’s Afro-Feminist principles to inform intersectional alignment. The research findings are guided by an understanding of the systemic intersectional inheritance of identity and positionality construction across generations, reflecting on the experiences of the women anti-apartheid activists, as remembered by their descendants. The experiences underscore the epistemic violence of colonial disruption across the macro and micro systemic forms of existence, and how these are collectively and intergenerationally maintained across the post-apartheid milieu. Trauma discourse on remembering and silencing in individual and collective narratives emphasises discursive networks of framing silencing, silence as a discursive device, and discursive networks working in favour of women’s perpetual exclusion and invisibility.
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    Money in Black: A Socio-Psychological Study of Economic Practices among Black Professionals in South Africa
    (University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2025) Nkosi, Kagiso; Kiguwa, Peace
    This thesis takes on the task of exploring money from more than just its technical function, which is usual explored in the social sciences largely in Economics. Rather the study examines the psycho-social and everyday economic practices of black professionals in the context of democratic South Africa. The central thesis is that in the post-apartheid context, black professionals have inherited inequalities which shape their relationship with money as an object, icon and symbol. The thesis employed qualitative interviews with black professionals aged between 21-50. The research explored their meaning making of money by examining cultural values, familial responsibility, systematic barriers and discourse in the contemporary socio-economic conditions that shape money attitudes, behaviours and cultures. In the framework of this research ‘Money’is theorised not merely as a tool of exchange but as a socio-psychological object. Money embodies a social ontology, as an object which moves at the Will of collectives and individuals. Money practices as such are socio-psychological responses to power relations and socio-economic realities. Findings reveal trans-generational tensions between familial obligation such as building family homes, collective discourses of black tax, Ubuntu and the aspiration for financial independence and upwards class mobility. The framework a Racialised ontology of Money explores money as a mirror of social ontology. Money in both social and individual contexts embodies racial sensibilities that cannot be explained by economic and financial models. The framework considers the subject positions (black) and ongoing discourses (social, legal, historical and history) that construct everyday behaviour and thought
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    A Faith-based Response to the Precarious Work-Life of Black People through Six Days of Labour, One Day of Rest in Ibandla lamaNazaretha
    (University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2025) Masikane, Fikile
    This study explores work and rest within the religious and cultural life of Ibandla lamaNazaretha; a church founded by a Black South African prophet Isaiah Shembe (1869– 1935) in 1910. Known for its synthesis of African traditional values and Christian doctrine, the church expresses its theology most vividly through Izihlabelelo zamaNazaretha (the Nazarite Hymn Book), a body of hymns composed by Shembe himself. These hymns continue to shape the moral and spiritual imagination of amaNazaretha. This offers guidance on how to live including how to work and how to rest. Grounded in ethnographic fieldwork, archives, ethnomusicology, sound, active participation and life history interviews with Shembe followers, this study further examines how these teachings are understood and practiced by followers. It shows how they resonate within the broader context of ongoing social and economic precarity faced by Black South Africans in post-1994. The study argues that precarity, as a human condition, is re-imagined and in some ways subdued through the conceptualisation of rest that is not leisure, in relation to work that is not labour. Focusing on Shembe’s teachings, I demonstrate how his conceptualisation of work and rest transcends conventional understandings tied to productivity, economic value, and individual leisure. Instead, Shembe offers an alternative framework in which rest holds spiritual, communal, and ethical significance, serving as a form of resistance to material precarity in the Black lived experience. Ultimately, the study seeks to cover the gap that straddles between religious praxis and the meaning of work and rest, particularly as it relates to faith, dignity, and liberation in Black life
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    Singing Politics?: A Historical and Contemporary Examination of the Role of Popular Gospel Music and Pentecostalism in Kenya’s Presidential Elections
    (University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2024) Ngoru, Damaris Ngoki
    This study investigates the role of popular gospel music and Pentecostalism in Kenya’s presidential elections. Pentecostal-Charismatic Christianity has, over the years, shaped the political and social fabric of the country, as a significant portion of the population adheres to this religion. Contemporary gospel music, originating from Pentecostal ideologies, has become the dominant genre in Kenya and has as a result been employed by presidential candidates during electoral campaigns. My work has led me to conclude that gospel music serves three essential functions in a campaign: endorsement of presidential candidates; a socio-political reflection of the society; and facilitation of peacebuilding and reconciliation. I conducted both physical and virtual ethnographies, which included interviews with gospel artists who have collaborated with presidential candidates and online observations of live campaign coverage. I have theoretically employed Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) on the lyrics of selected songs as case studies, some of which contain biblical passages that figuratively likened presidential candidates to biblical figures. I also incorporate religious populism in my analysis chapters, a relatively interesting concept that remains overlooked in African nations, particularly in Kenya. Presidential candidates have employed the theory of ‘religious populism’, characterised by a dichotomy of ‘us’ versus ‘them’, where ‘us’ represents political candidates embodying religious principles and ‘them’ denotes the opposition. I argue that gospel music in this context was appropriated to exploit the general will of the population. Although gospel music continues to be an important component in politics both presently and in the foreseeable future in Kenya, the pitfalls of employing gospel music in these ‘secular’ contexts must be acknowledged, as discussed in the concluding section.