Curbing coercive identities

human development, culture

Using Fractionalization Indexes: deriving methodological principles for growth studies from time series evidence

Recent cross country growth studies have found that ethnolinguistic fractionalization is an important explanatory variable of long-run growth performance. This paper highlights some limitations of cross country studies by focusing on the time series evidence for South Africa. In presenting variation over time in a number of social, political and economic dimensions, this paper adds longitudinal evidence on a range of dimensions that have been linked to long run economic development. Given South Africa’s history of ethnic and racial politics, it constitutes a useful case study to explore the dynamics of the possible effects of ethnolinguistic fractionalization on growth. We introduce three new sets of fractionalization indicators for South Africa and one set of political indicators. The results of this study provide important nuance to the existing body of evidence, for the use of fractionalization indices in growth studies.

Measuring Institutions: The Zimbabwe Case

The current, persistent growth problem in Zimbabwe is often attributed to poor economic and political institutional frameworks characterised by insecure property rights and an unreliable rule of law. An empirical test of this hypothesis presents some methodological difficulties. Although political scientists have been constructing measures of social and political dimensions of societies for some time, such measures are not available over sufficiently long time runs to inspire confidence in their usefulness in being able to address the long-run and dynamic questions that arise when linking economic performance and institutions. The aim of the paper is to assemble a new set of political and economic institutional indicators for Zimbabwe covering the period 1946 to 2005. While the new indices span for a significantly long time period, they are highly correlated with existing, widely used institutional indices produced by the Freedom House, the Heritage Foundation and the Fraiser Institute. The new data set will contribute towards understanding the institutional dimension of Zimbabwe’s persistent economic decline.

Cecil Rhodes distorted politics in South Africa long before apartheid

Cecil Rhodes’ policy reforms disenfranchised up to 15,000 mostly black and mixed-race voters in South Africa. This voter suppression created an unequal political environment that favoured white men 50 years before apartheid, write Daniel de Kadt and Joachim Wehner

Writing in English with an ‘African voice': ownership, identity and learning

The paper draws on the academic literacies approach to student writing and investigates academic writing, in English, by speakers of African languages at the University of Natal, Durban. Given that education can be considered to involve the formation of consciousness and identity, we ask to what extent these speakers of other primary languages feel able to participate fully in this and to claim ownership of the knowledge construction required in tertiary education. To answer this question we investigate whether black students feel able to write in the academic context with an ‘own voice'. Interviews with 20 students suggest that few respondents feel able to assume an African identity in our university. We consider ways in which the university might be more adequately constituted as a ‘site of diversity' (Lillis, 2001): by reconsidering the current monolingual bias of teaching and learning, and by revisiting the knowledges that students are expected to own. Keywords: academic literacies; academic writing; African languages; identity; voice; ownership; knowledge construction; diversity (J Language Teaching: 2003 37(1): 92-103

Digital reconstruction of District Six architecture from archival photographs

Word processed copy.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 88-92).In this thesis we present a strategy for reconstructing instances of District Six Architecture from small sets of old. uncalibrated photographs that are located in the District Six Museum photographic archive. Our reconstruction strategy comprises two major parts. First, we implement a geometry reconstruction framework. based on work by Debevec et al. [1996]. This is used to reconstruct the geometry of a building given as little input as a single photograph. The approach used in this framework requires the user to design a basic model representing the building at hand. using a set of geometric primitives, and then define correspondences between the edges of this model and the edges of the building that are visible in the photographs. This approach is effective, as constraints inherent III the geometry of architectural scenes are exploited through the use of these primitives. The second component of the reconstruction strategy involves texturing the reconstructed models. To accomplish this, we use a combination of the original textures extracted from the photographs, and synthesized textures generated from samples of the original textures. For each face of the reconstructed model, the user is able to use either the original texture material. synthesized material, or a combination of both to create desirable results. Finally, to illustrate the effectiveness of our reconstruction strategy, we consider three example cases of District Six architecture and their reconstructions. All three examples were reconstructed successfully, and using findings from these results, critical analyses of both aspects of our strategy are presented

Daughters do not affect political beliefs in a new democracy

A consistent finding in industrialized democracies is that having a daughter shapes parents' attitudes and behaviors in gender-egalitarian ways. We test whether this finding travels to a young middle-income democracy where women's rights are more tenuous: South Africa. Using a dataset of over 7,500 respondents with information on family structure, we find no discernible effect on attitudes about women's rights or on partisan identification. We speculate that our null findings relate to opportunity: daughter effects are more likely when parents perceive economic, social, and political opportunities for women. When women's customary status and de facto opportunities are low, as in South Africa, having a daughter may have no effect on parents' political behavior. Our results demonstrate the virtues of diversifying case selection in political behavior beyond economically wealthy democracies