Confrontation, cooptation and collaboration

The Labour Party was a prominent political party amongst coloured people for more than twenty-five years. Formed in 1965 to contest elections for the Coloured Persons' Representative Council (CRC), the Labour Party at the outset adopted an anti-apartheid, anti-separate representation and anti-eRe stance. During the first five years of its existence, the party tried to muster coloured support for its policies. Its promise to cripple the CRC by refusing to occupy seats in the council became the rallying call. The Labour Party won a majority of the elected seats in the first CRC election in 1969 but the government nominated progovernment candidates to all the nominated seats, depriving the Labour Party of an overall majority. Thwarted in their bid to "wreck" the CRC, Labour Party members instead took their seats in the council, vowing to destroy it from within. For the next five years the Labour Party pursued a policy of "confrontation. " By using a "boycott" strategy, it not only hamstrung the effective working of the CRC but thwarted the government in other areas of its "coloured" policy. In the 1975 election the Labour Party won an outright victory, giving it the power to cripple the CRC. However, it did not seize this opportunity. Its decision to "govern" in the CRC constituted a decisive step in the change from confrontation to cooptation. The Labour Party's continued support of the CRC drew widespread criticism from supporters and opponents alike. Its leaders tried to hold together a disaffected party and eventually agreed to the dissolution of the CRC in 1980 in an effort to paper over the cracks in party unity, and to forestall growing coloured opposition to the CRC at the next election. In 1983, the Labour Party displayed a decisive shift in its anti-separate representation stance by lending support to the tricameral system. By doing so, it laid itself open to the same charge of collaboration it had levelled at the other CRC parties. This thesis will examine the history of the Labour Party from its formation in 1965 as an anti-government party, to one of cooperation with its erstwhile opponent by 1984

Multi-messenger Observations of a Binary Neutron Star Merger

On 2017 August 17 a binary neutron star coalescence candidate (later designated GW170817) with merger time 12:41:04 UTC was observed through gravitational waves by the Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo detectors. The Fermi Gamma-ray Burst Monitor independently detected a gamma-ray burst (GRB 170817A) with a time delay of ∼ 1.7 {{s}} with respect to the merger time. From the gravitational-wave signal, the source was initially localized to a sky region of 31 deg2 at a luminosity distance of {40}-8+8 Mpc and with component masses consistent with neutron stars. The component masses were later measured to be in the range 0.86 to 2.26 {M}ȯ . An extensive observing campaign was launched across the electromagnetic spectrum leading to the discovery of a bright optical transient (SSS17a, now with the IAU identification of AT 2017gfo) in NGC 4993 (at ∼ 40 {{Mpc}}) less than 11 hours after the merger by the One-Meter, Two Hemisphere (1M2H) team using the 1 m Swope Telescope. The optical transient was independently detected by multiple teams within an hour. Subsequent observations targeted the object and its environment. Early ultraviolet observations revealed a blue transient that faded within 48 hours. Optical and infrared observations showed a redward evolution over ∼10 days. Following early non-detections, X-ray and radio emission were discovered at the transient’s position ∼ 9 and ∼ 16 days, respectively, after the merger. Both the X-ray and radio emission likely arise from a physical process that is distinct from the one that generates the UV/optical/near-infrared emission. No ultra-high-energy gamma-rays and no neutrino candidates consistent with the source were found in follow-up searches. These observations support the hypothesis that GW170817 was produced by the merger of two neutron stars in NGC 4993 followed by a short gamma-ray burst (GRB 170817A) and a kilonova/macronova powered by the radioactive decay of r-process nuclei synthesized in the ejecta.</p