The rise and fall of the Rhodesian economy

African Studies Seminar series. Paper presented 22 February, 1993The period of the Rhodesian Front party's Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) is sometimes described as providing a "hot-house" atmosphere for economic development, a characterisation which stems from extraordinary rates of growth from 1966-1974 as well as from the various barriers to free financial flows erected by the state.1 These barriers imposed a condition of semi-autarchy on the financial circuit of capital, which in turn had implications for accumulation and uneven geographical and sectoral development. The most significant of these may be that the hot-house financial environment exacerbated capitalist boom-bust tendencies, in an economic context which was already deteriorating due largely to overproduction in relation to the small size of the local market, as well as to exogenous factors. When a classic crisis of "overaccumulation"2 of capital emerged in the mid 1970s, the effect on the social and political formation was formidable, and indeed has not been resolved to this date. One reason why different attempts to deal with the crisis have not been successful is that economic development has generally been viewed in static and aspatial terms, with scant regard for the complex roles of space and of time. This, then, is a key challenge to the paper: while constructing an empirically- and theoreticallyinformed argument about the Rhodesian UDI period, I attempt to analyze spatial and temporal features that shed brighter light on limits to the economy's development

Problematising Civil Society- on What Terrain Does Xenophobia Flourish

Is there a need to reconceptualise civil society organisations (CSOs) given the fragmented, uneven, varied and sometimes contradictory responses of CSOs to the May 2008 violence

Finding words: a collection of poems with a critical preface

Finding Words: A Collection of Poems with a Critical Preface is a collection of fifty-five poems preceded by an introductory essay. The poems were all written in the period 2005 – 2011. The critical preface is in four chapters. The first is in the form of a recollection of the circumstances of poetry in my early life. The second engages with the critical thinking of Geoffrey Hill. The third responds to an exemplary poem of John Clare’s The Midsummer Cushion period. The fourth introduces and places in context the poems of the collection, and experience of reading poetry aloud. Chapter One is a form of autobiography. It retrieves half-submerged fragments of the story of a British Colonial child in the 1950s, seeking out the texture and feel of various discontinuities including the move to the UK from Mauritius, the long-term illness and early death of my father, different languages in early childhood, Catholicism with a southern-hemisphere emphasis, and the growth of an intense dedication to poetry from the age of eleven. Chapter Two engages at length with the dilemma of an individual poetics which expresses itself in the form, ‘How do I understand the conversion of my experiencing into the experiencing of words?’ My practice of poetry is uncovered as both unconscious and sui generis. The root experience of finding words and forming poems is illuminated by engagement with the ideas of Geoffrey Hill, particularly the moral imagination as the formal creative faculty, words regarded as pledges and not signs, language that both redeems and betrays the intentions of the poet, and the analysis of grammar to reveal ethical processes. The ideas of phenomenologist, David Abram, are used to illuminate my consistent experience of wonder-in-nature, and processes of sensation and perception as part of the writing of poetry. The discussion returns to Hill at the point of a divergence from Abram on the nature of the imagination, and explores the implications of Hill’s rigorous criteria on solipsism, the ambivalent power of words, and the frailty of human attempts at communication. It ends with a brief discussion on therapeutic writing, and acknowledgement of Hill’s proposition of a theology of language as a means of grace. Chapter Three describes a poet, John Clare, with whom I have always had a powerful relationship, even though he is not a direct influence on the style of my poems. The chapter looks briefly at John Clare’s unusual literary status, to illuminate aspects of his standing as a poet. It enlists the help of an essay by the philologist, Professor Barbara M. H. Strang, who examines the linguistic characteristics of Clare’s poetry. It is argued that Clare’s poetry does not need punctuation or other editorial improvements. The semantic insights of Geoffrey Hill on poetry are applied to one of the major poems of the Midsummer Cushion, namely Shadows of Taste. Hill’s observations on ‘temper’ and ‘taste’ are linked to Clare via the hymns of the Wesleyan Methodists; and the elements of Clare’s linguistic mimesis of nature are elucidated, particularly his repeated use of the word ‘joy’. Chapter Four introduces the fifty-five poems, and discusses the processes of writing, revising, selecting and grouping. Major poetic influences are briefly examined, from the Gawain-poet to Basil Bunting, as well as the main features of the poems themselves, in particular the use of an alliterative pulse modelled on the poets of the fourteenth century. The chapter includes a brief reference to reading poetry aloud in small community groups, and the experience of reading John Clare’s poems outdoors in forests and fields. The thesis is an attempt to define a practice of writing poetry which has been largely instinctive and consciously personal. An attempt is made to sketch the fine boundary between a solipsistic self-expression, and the technical demands of a craft which has its roots in a poetic and cultural tradition of at least eight centuries

Botswana and Zimbabwe: Relative success and comparative failure

Botswana and Zimbabwe represent two cases of differential access to the world economy. Notwithstanding its lack of diversification and its reliance on a primary mineral export, Botswana has prospered while Zimbabwe has fallen into a deep crisis. Historical and comparative evidence allows us to transcend the superficial presumption common to much policy discourse, namely, that the basis for success depends upon adherence to the ‘Washington Consensus’ export-oriented strategy, or to good governance, or even to geographical considerations. We argue instead that there are much deeper problems and possibilities that Botswana and Zimbabwe unveil, which relate largely to developmental linkages and aspects of agency

Simulating Reionization: Character and Observability

In recent years there has been considerable progress in our understanding of the nature and properties of the reionization process. In particular, the numerical simulations of this epoch have made a qualitative leap forward, reaching sufficiently large scales to derive the characteristic scales of the reionization process and thus allowing for realistic observational predictions. Our group has recently performed the first such large-scale radiative transfer simulations of reionization, run on top of state-of-the-art simulations of early structure formation. This allowed us to make the first realistic observational predictions about the Epoch of Reionization based on detailed radiative transfer and structure formation simulations. We discuss the basic features of reionization derived from our simulations and some recent results on the observational implications for the high-redshift Ly-alpha sources.Comment: 3 pages, to appear in the Proceedings of First Stars III, Santa Fe, July 2007, AIP Conference Serie