Patterns and shifts in cultural heritage in KwaZulu-Natal : selected case studies, 1977-1999.

Thesis (M.A.)-University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2001.An analysis of why cultural heritage sites are created, preserved, and developed is what concerns the pages of this study. It identifies patterns and shifts in cultural heritage preservation in the period between 1977 and 1999 in KwaZulu-Natal, and analyses the motivations for the preservation of cultural heritage. Using specific case studies, I argue that in KwaZulu-Natal political necessities and ideas of economic development largely motivated cultural heritage preservation. I also examine the (dis)connection between academic historians and cultural heritage preservation. I indicate that their (dis)connection with cultural heritage preservation, especially its motivations, was a complex one. I argue that in complex ways some academic historians were drawn into the tendencies that were characteristic of cultural heritage presentations of history in KwaZulu-Natal during this period

The levying of forced African labour and military service by the colonial state of Natal.

Abstract available in pdf file

Building a better Brit: Imperialism and masculinity in the lives and works of H. Rider Haggard and Rudyard Kipling

This work began as an investigation of the role that literature played in conveying imperialistic values to children during the Victorian period. Over the course of my research into the fiction of H. Rider Haggard and Rudyard Kipling, I began to question the role of masculinity in the imperial project. This work has developed out of that line of thought. Maintaining and defending the British Empire was a man’s business, and as such the British required a generation of men that held the masculine ideals and values required to undertake such an endeavor. This need manifested itself in many ways, such as in the fictional stories that boys read. Having lived abroad in the colonial possessions of the British Empire, Haggard and Kipling both understood and lived this ideal, and this presented itself in their respective writings. Masculinity plays a major role in each of these two author’s writings. Both authors make use of characters and themes that push the Victorian ideas of manliness onto the young male readers that so readily devoured their works. This thesis examines the role of masculinity in Victorian society and in the lives and works of both Haggard and Kipling. Furthermore, this same examination of the role of masculinity in juvenile literature could easily be undertaken for several other authors of the period

Model selection in historical research using approximate Bayesian computation

Formal Models and History Computational models are increasingly being used to study historical dynamics. This new trend, which could be named Model-Based History, makes use of recently published datasets and innovative quantitative methods to improve our understanding of past societies based on their written sources. The extensive use of formal models allows historians to reevaluate hypotheses formulated decades ago and still subject to debate due to the lack of an adequate quantitative framework. The initiative has the potential to transform the discipline if it solves the challenges posed by the study of historical dynamics. These difficulties are based on the complexities of modelling social interaction, and the methodological issues raised by the evaluation of formal models against data with low sample size, high variance and strong fragmentation. This work examines an alternate approach to this evaluation based on a Bayesian-inspired model selection method. The validity of the classical Lanchester's laws of combat is examined against a dataset comprising over a thousand battles spanning 300 years. Four variations of the basic equations are discussed, including the three most common formulations (linear, squared, and logarithmic) and a new variant introducing fatigue. Approximate Bayesian Computation is then used to infer both parameter values and model selection via Bayes Factors. Results indicate decisive evidence favouring the new fatigue model. The interpretation of both parameter estimations and model selection provides new insights into the factors guiding the evolution of warfare. At a methodological level, the case study shows how model selection methods can be used to guide historical research through the comparison between existing hypotheses and empirical evidence.Funding for this work was provided by the SimulPast Consolider Ingenio project (CSD2010-00034) of the former Ministry for Science and Innovation of the Spanish Government and the European Research Council Advanced Grant EPNet (340828).Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Cultural pillages of the leisure class? : consuming expressions of identity.

Thesis (M.A.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, 2011.Society ‘obscures itself’ by presenting a world that is self-contained and logical (Barthes, 1973) – a world underpinned by a transparency of its underlying systems of meaning. This formulation maps the theoretical location of the dissertation, by which an investigation into tourism, as an economic and political expression of contemporary culture, occurs. More specifically, the dissertation addresses the type of tourism that bisects narratives of history and of cultures – that popularly described under the label of cultural tourism. Thus it employs an array of critical tourism and cultural theory, to offer an exposition on how best to understand the articulation of meaning in the consumption of ‘place’, formations of heritage and Otherness. The study also explores the epistemological nature/agendas of the so-called ‘Image of Africa’ and the ‘Absolute Other’, and how these are recycled in the parameters of modernity. Using a genealogical approach to studying discursive formations articulating some kind of Zulu Otherness, the dissertation grounds these conventions of identity predominantly in the symbolic practice of a colonial Western society. This exposes the arbitrary, constructed nature by which contemporary society governs itself. Methodologically, the research applies participant observation and semiotic analyses, predominantly in the cultural/filmic village of Shakaland, near Eshowe, KwaZulu-Natal, to explore how the constructions of identity manifest and are negotiated and consumed in the activity of this tourism

"Ways of staying" paradox and dislocation in the postcolony

Abstract The first section of the thesis is a narrative non-fiction book-length work titled Ways of Staying, which is to be published by Picador Africa in May 2009 and is a journey through selected public and private concerns of contemporary South African life. Written in the first-person, it seeks to give the reader an intimate view of some of the more significant headlines of the past two years – the David Rattray murder, the ANC Polokwane conference, the xenophobic attacks, to name just a few – and to intersperse these with personal accounts of the fallout from violent crime (the author’s cousin Richard Bloom was murdered in a high-profile attack in 2006). The objective of the book is to present in a non-solution orientated (or heuristic) manner the various textures and paradoxes of a complicated country. The second section of the thesis is a reflexive essay on the above, where Ways of Staying is located within a range of thematic and symbolic influences, specifically: the work of novelist VS Naipaul vis-à-vis the parallel and incongruous dislocation of self and other in the post-colony; the work of Alan Paton, JM Coetzee and Rian Malan vis-à-vis the theme of ‘fear’ as a dominant force in white South African writing; and the non-fiction work of Antjie Krog vis-à-vis race and identity in a postapartheid context. My conclusion, if it can indeed be said that I have one, is that the ‘unease’ of the modern white South African (or at least a large enough number of us for the generalisation to be made) is an inevitable and necessary consequence of history, and so is perhaps better publicly acknowledged than willfully ignored

UNCOVERING HIDDEN FRONTS OF AFRICA’S LIBERATION STRUGGLE: BLACK POWER, BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS, AND SOUTH AFRICA’S ARMED STRUGGLE, 1967-1985

Many scholars have argued the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM)’s principal contribution was as an intellectual/student movement, and its main shortcoming the limited degree of active political and military opposition it was able to offer the apartheid regime. My dissertation, ‘Uncovering Hidden Fronts of Africa’s Liberation Struggle: Black Power, Black Consciousness, and South Africa’s Armed Struggle, 1967–1985’, broadens our understanding of this movement and moment in South African history by unearthing the little known history of BCM’s unrelenting engagement with armed struggle as a form of resistance to apartheid rule during the 1970s and 1980s. The first part of my dissertation charts the evolution of Black Consciousness (BC) inspired organisations such as the Azanian People’s Liberation Front (APLF), the Isandlwana Revolutionary Effort (IRE), and the South African Youth Revolutionary Council (SAYRCO) from 1974–1982 as they organised for armed confrontation with the apartheid state. It then moves to a discussion of the Black Consciousness Movement of Azania (BCMA) and its armed wing the Azanian National Liberation Army (AZANLA) that emerged in the 1980s as the BC alternative to the non-racialist nominally socialist African National Congress of South Africa (ANC-SA) after previous movements failed to consolidate themselves. Their failures are less important than examinations of why they failed, which reveals their struggles were mostly caused by BCM being outmanoeuvred and betrayed by the ANC-SA and the Pan Africanist Congress of Azania (PAC) in exile. The second part of my dissertation excavates how many new recruits of the Soweto generation attempted to radicalize Umkhonto We Sizwe (MK) from within. While this is acknowledged by most MK scholars, they do not link this drive for radicalization with the politics of BC that a number of these recruits carried with them into the movement. From this perspective, the mutinies and internal suppressions that wracked MK during the 1980s need to be viewed as an internal ideological struggle for what the future of South Africa would look like. Although my work offers a careful historical reconstruction of previously under-explored events, my thesis suggests BCM’s vision of a future South Africa/Azania, where land and resources would be redistributed to the masses, was outmanoeuvred and defeated by bourgeois liberal-democratic and South African Communist Party (SACP) forces of the ANC-SA. Returning to this history helps frame contemporary struggles South Africa finds itself in as current movements strive to find answers to continued racism and economic inequality. While BC did not have all the answers, it offered a different vision of freedom that Black activists today have rediscovered