Early language and literacy learning in a peripheral African setting : a study of children's participation in home and school communicative and literacy practices in and around Manzini, Swaziland

Includes bibliographical references (p. 243-256).This thesis is an ethnographic study of the early literacy development of four children from low-income families in and around Manzini, Swaziland. It investigated the orientations to literacy, language, and communication that children brought to school from home, vice versa, and the sorts of consequences that such traversing of sites has for the children's literacy development and schooling. It is the first study of literacy and children's literacy carried out in Swaziland from a socio-cultural perspective. The study joins a growing body of New Literacy Studies research into the social practices that shape children's early literacy learning and a smaller body of such work from Africa. I used evidence from four children's home and school literacy lives, systematically collected by means of in-depth ethnographic case studies and used an interpretive analytical frame of enquiry. This study breaks with previous research in Swaziland by detailing the situated ways that reading and writing happen in specific socio-cultural contexts

The limits of transnational solidarity: the Congress of South African Trade Unions and the Swaziland and Zimbabwean crises

The Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), the main union federation in South Africa, was instrumental in ending apartheid. This paper evaluates COSATU's post-apartheid role in working for democracy elsewhere in Southern Africa through deepening transnational solidarity, focusing on its role in Zimbabwe and Swaziland. Although the federation successfully mobilised trade union members to oppose the contravention of human and labor rights, its ability to affect lasting change was limited by contradictory messages and actions by the South African government, the dualistic nature of institutional formation in these countries, strategic miscalculations and structural limitations on union power