No chief, no exchange, no story

African Studies Seminar series. Paper presented September, 198

Popularising history: The case of Gustav Preller

African Studies Seminar series. Paper presented 10 August, 198

The narrative logic of oral history

African Studies Seminar series. Paper presented May, 1988Over the last decade, the use of oral testimony has been gaining momentum in southern African studies. Used initially as one source among many, oral testimony has come to occupy a more and more central place in an increasing number of studies.(1) As most of these attempt to chart the terrain of popular culture, consciousness and knowledge, they have turned to oral sources as the ones that can best illuminate these areas of experience

John Bunyan, his chair and a few other relics: Orality, literacy and the limits of area studies

African Studies Seminar series. Paper presented 14 April, 199

Die Kind in die Hospitaal

Hospitalisation enhances the risk of affective disturbances in sick children due to the separation that It brings between the child and his mother and familiar home surroundings. Certain practices tend to intensify this distress, such as limited visiting, the large number of people handling a child, treating the child as a case instead of as an individual, etc. The need for a trained paedotherapist on the staff of hospitals is stressed

The spoken word and the barbed wire: Oral chiefdoms versus literate bureaucracies

African Studies Seminar series. Paper presented 2 March, 199

Thinking oceanically : Ilha de Moçambique/Island of Mozambique

This special issue hosts a conversation between Ilha de Moçambique and its surrounding oceans and coastlines, convening a globally-oriented set of questions around a rich engagement with the local, and in so doing among material culture and new materialisms, maritime archaeology and poetry. Most significantly, it takes the idea of ‘East Africa’, as a region, underwater. Through shipwrecks, shells and sounds, it explores the possibility of incorporating the submarine world into the East African cultural domain.http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/real20hj2021Englis

Durban and Cape Town as port cities: Reconsidering Southern African studies from the Indian Ocean

This special issue arose out of a workshop titled ‘Durban and Cape Town as Indian Ocean Port Cities: Reconsidering Southern African Studies from the Indian Ocean’, held at the University of the Western Cape in September 2014. The volume is located at the intersection of southern African studies and Indian Ocean studies, and explores this exchange as a site for enriching southern African transnational historiographies

Little perpetrators, witness-bearers and the young and the brave: towards a post-transitional aesthetics

The aesthetic choices characterizing work produced during the transition to democracy have been well documented. We are currently well into the second decade after the 1994 election - what then of the period referred to as the 'second transition'? Have trends consolidated, hardened, shifted, or have new 'post-transitional' trends emerged? What can be expected of the future 'born free' generation of writers and readers, since terms such as restlessness, dissonance and disjuncture are frequently used to describe the experience of constitutional democracy as it co-exists with the emerging new apartheid of poverty? Furthermore, what value is there in identifying post-transitional aesthetic trends?DHE