Capitalists, peasants and land in Africa: A comparative perspective

African Studies Seminar series. Paper presented August 1991The paper compares the development of various forms of capitalist and peasant agriculture and state policies towards them in South Africa, Kenya, Nigeria and Tanzania during the coloniao and post-colonial periods. At first sight, our four African examples appear to exemplify distinct patterns of historical transformation: one capitalist (South Africa) and two peasant, one (Nigeria) in a 'capitalist' and one (Tanzania) in a 'socialist' context, and an anmalous fourth version, combining capitalist and peasant forms. However, wage labour and family labour are found in agricultural production in all the countries studied, and labour-, share- and rent tenancies are important in several. These different forms of labour are combined in single enterprises, both on capitalist and peasant farms, and in the strategies adopted by individuals and households to provide for their needs. Similarly, governments of very different political persuasions have often adopted similar policies to control, regulate and 'develop' rural people. Our four examples do not display clearly divergent directions, but they are also not obviously converging on some common destination. In particular, they are not all undergoing the passage from peasant to capitalist, or even to socialist, agriculture. In some cases, the direction of change may be quite the reverse

Transforming labour tenants: A critique of the Land Reform (Labour Tenants) Act of 1996

African Studies Seminar series. Paper presented 30 September 1996In 1996, Parliament approved the Land Reform (Labour Tenants) Act of 1996 despite vocal opposition to some of its key provisions from the Natal and South African white agricultural unions (1). The objectives of the Act are twofold: To provide for security of tenure of labour tenants and those persons occupying or using land as a result of their association with labour tenants; and to provide for the acquisition of land and rights in land by labour tenants;... It sought to protect the rights of labour tenants to existing rural livelihoods and to create new ways for them to acquire land for smallholder farming. Labour tenancy contracts embody a range of obligations and expectations, implicit as well as explicit, on the part of the owner of the land, their tenants and the members of the tenants' families on whom the burden of providing labour has often fallen. Contracts vary in their terms from farm to farm, and from district to district, and have changed significantly over time. Labour tenancy arrangements have different meanings for the parties involved. What for the farmer is a way to secure a supply of labour is for the tenant a means of acquiring land and keeping cattle. Attempts to transform labour tenants into wage workers, or to restrict their access to grazing or the number of cattle they may keep, have been a repeated source of bitter contention. The rights of landowners to use their property as they choose and to decide who may have access to it, and on what terms, conflict with the claims of workers, tenants, and their families to a place to live and to land to grow crops and graze animals

Boundedness, Belonging and Becoming: Primary School Children's Perspectives of Education and Learning in the South Wales Valleys

The impact of poverty and disadvantage on the attainment and outcomes of children is well documented. Less research evidence is available on the experiences of children living in deprived communities and their perceptions of its impact on learning and future life chances. Using a case study approach, this thesis investigates the experiences of children living in the Rhondda Valley, a post-industrial area in South Wales. Nineteen children (aged eleven) from three primary schools in the valley participated in the study using focus groups, individual interviews, photo-elicitation interviews and observation to explore their experiences and perceptions of growing up in the area and how it affected learning. Drawing on Bourdieu’s Theory of Practice (1984), it was found that the topography and geographically bounded nature of the valley significantly affected the children’s experiences. It not only shaped the immediate formal and informal learning opportunities available but the history and culture of the area. Furthermore, the study revealed the children’s awareness of the importance of formal education for their futures. Another key finding was the role of the family in instilling a feeling of belonging to the area, and supporting the children to access informal learning opportunities within and outside the boundaries of the valley. The influence of the landscape, school, and family was clear in the children’s expressions of becoming. This aspirational habitus demonstrated agency and an ability to draw upon their experiences and look beyond the valley boundaries, thus challenging governmental policy that is often written from a perspective of cultural deficit. The research provides new insights into the learning experiences of children growing up in a deprived area. It has implications for policy development in identifying the importance of gaining children’s views and for educational practice in highlighting the importance of the natural environment and local history for learning

Engineered enzymes, pathways, and tools for the biosynthesis of non- natural polyketides and terpenes

Many clinically used drugs are derived from secondary metabolites that are biosynthesized in a modular fashion by the selection and assembly of small molecule building blocks. Chimeric biosynthetic pathways can be constructed in an attempt to produce analogues for drug discovery. Yet, the scope and utility of this combinatorial approach is limited by the inherent substrate specificity and poor functional modularity of most biosynthetic machinery. Here, our approach to expanding the scope of polyketide and isoprenoid combinatorial biosynthesis by leveraging enzyme engineering and synthetic biology will be summarized. Our recent advances that realize the installation of multiple extender units into polyketides by engineered polyketide synthases will be presented, in addition to genetically encoded biosensors that enable directed evolution of natural product biosynthetic machinery in living cells. Furthermore, an artificial biosynthetic pathway for the biosynthesis of isoprenoids is described that utilizes non-natural building blocks and can support high titers of non-natural isoprenoids in E. coli. Our synthetic biology approach expands the synthetic capabilities of natural product diversification strategies and provides an improved understanding of the molecular basis for specificity in complex molecular assemblies

Excelsior as Mass Ornament: The Reproduction of Gesture

In her 1984 ‘Cyborg Manifesto’, Donna Haraway declared: ‘the relation between organism and machine has been a border war’ in Western science and politics – which for her primarily amounted to a racist, male-dominated capitalism, as embodied by the notion of technological progress. Her manifesto identified that ‘The stakes in the border war have been the territories of production, reproduction and imagination’, each of these zones representing its own contentious interface between organism and machine within American post-industrial society: the encroachment of robots in industrial production; the use of test tubes for reproducing the body; the ascendancy of sci-fi imagination in literature and film. And in each case the battles weren’t being won by humans. Haraway was instead confident of a machine victory, pushing her towards a notorious conclusion: we are cyborgs

A Quantum Computer Architecture using Nonlocal Interactions

Several authors have described the basic requirements essential to build a scalable quantum computer. Because many physical implementation schemes for quantum computing rely on nearest neighbor interactions, there is a hidden quantum communication overhead to connect distant nodes of the computer. In this paper we propose a physical solution to this problem which, together with the key building blocks, provides a pathway to a scalable quantum architecture using nonlocal interactions. Our solution involves the concept of a quantum bus that acts as a refreshable entanglement resource to connect distant memory nodes providing an architectural concept for quantum computers analogous to the von Neumann architecture for classical computers.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures, Slight modifications to satisfy referee, 2 new references, modified acknowledgement. This draft to appear in PRA Rapid Communication

Democratization: the Nigerian experience

Paper presented at the Wits History Workshop: Democracy, Popular Precedents, Practice and Culture, 13-15 July, 199

Scalable quantum computation in systems with Bose-Hubbard dynamics

Several proposals for quantum computation utilize a lattice type architecture with qubits trapped by a periodic potential. For systems undergoing many body interactions described by the Bose-Hubbard Hamiltonian, the ground state of the system carries number fluctuations that scale with the number of qubits. This process degrades the initialization of the quantum computer register and can introduce errors during error correction. In an earlier manuscript we proposed a solution to this problem tailored to the loading of cold atoms into an optical lattice via the Mott Insulator phase transition. It was shown that by adding an inhomogeneity to the lattice and performing a continuous measurement, the unit filled state suitable for a quantum computer register can be maintained. Here, we give a more rigorous derivation of the register fidelity in homogeneous and inhomogeneous lattices and provide evidence that the protocol is effective in the finite temperature regime.Comment: 12 pages, 3 figures. Expanded version of manuscript submitted to the Journal of Modern Optics. v2 corrects typesetting error in Fig.