Unwrapping history at the Cape Town Waterfront

Paper presented at the Wits History Workshop: Myths, Monuments, Museums; New Premises? 16-18 July, 199

Unwrapping History at the Cape Town Waterfront

The International Society for Burns Injuries (ISBI) has published guidelines for the management of multiple or mass burns casualties, and recommends that 'each country has or should have a disaster planning system that addresses its own particular needs.' The need for a national burns disaster plan integrated with national and provincial disaster planning was discussed at the South African Burns Society Congress in 2009, but there was no real involvement in the disaster planning prior to the 2010 World Cup; the country would have been poorly prepared had there been a burns disaster during the event. This article identifies some of the lessons learnt and strategies derived from major burns disasters and burns disaster planning from other regions. Members of the South African Burns Society are undertaking an audit of burns care in South Africa to investigate the feasibility of a national burns disaster plan. This audit (which is still under way) also aims to identify weaknesses of burns care in South Africa and implement improvements where necessary

After Race and Class: Recent Trends in the Historiography of Early Colonial Cape Society

This article reviews the recent upsurge of writing on the history of the early colonial Cape Colony from the VOC period to the early nineteenth century. It responds to important questions raised by Nicole Ulrich's review article of Contingent Lives in this issue. In particular it considers what is gained and what can be lost in the recent shift from class-based analyses characteristic of late twentieth-century revisionist South African historiography to research more influenced by the ‘cultural turn’, transnational and microhistorical approaches

Demanding satisfaction: Violence, masculinity and honour in late eighteenth century Cape Town

This article analyses two separate cases of public violence which took place in Cape Town in the summer of 1772/3. At surface level they appear to be very different in character. One was a scrap among low-ranking soldiers who were playing cards at a shoreline outpost. The other was a formalised challenge between two captains of the VOC return fleet as they were lunching with the Governor, which resulted in a death and the flight of the murderer. Yet closer analysis suggests common ritualised codes of behaviour that intriguingly reveal how violence, masculinity and notions of honour operated at all social levels within the town. Both cases were complex and coded social conflicts, rooted in northern European early modern social beliefs and practices as transferred to a colonial context. However, none of these perpetrators of violence was viewed sympathetically by the VOC authorities at the Cape. By contrast, the assailant Captain who had escaped back to Europe was able to successfully appeal to the VOC directors in the Netherlands

How and why DNA barcodes underestimate the diversity of microbial eukaryotes

Background: Because many picoplanktonic eukaryotic species cannot currently be maintained in culture, direct sequencing of PCR-amplified 18S ribosomal gene DNA fragments from filtered sea-water has been successfully used to investigate the astounding diversity of these organisms. The recognition of many novel planktonic organisms is thus based solely on their 18S rDNA sequence. However, a species delimited by its 18S rDNA sequence might contain many cryptic species, which are highly differentiated in their protein coding sequences. Principal Findings: Here, we investigate the issue of species identification from one gene to the whole genome sequence. Using 52 whole genome DNA sequences, we estimated the global genetic divergence in protein coding genes between organisms from different lineages and compared this to their ribosomal gene sequence divergences. We show that this relationship between proteome divergence and 18S divergence is lineage dependant. Unicellular lineages have especially low 18S divergences relative to their protein sequence divergences, suggesting that 18S ribosomal genes are too conservative to assess planktonic eukaryotic diversity. We provide an explanation for this lineage dependency, which suggests that most species with large effective population sizes will show far less divergence in 18S than protein coding sequences. Conclusions: There is therefore a trade-off between using genes that are easy to amplify in all species, but which by their nature are highly conserved and underestimate the true number of species, and using genes that give a better description of the number of species, but which are more difficult to amplify. We have shown that this trade-off differs between unicellular and multicellular organisms as a likely consequence of differences in effective population sizes. We anticipate that biodiversity of microbial eukaryotic species is underestimated and that numerous ''cryptic species'' will become discernable with the future acquisition of genomic and metagenomic sequences

Monitoring Flower Visitation Networks and Interactions between Pairs of Bumble Bees in a Large Outdoor Flight Cage

This research was supported by a combined grant from the Wellcome Trust, the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (BB/F52765X/1). While writing, ML was supported by the IDEX of the Federal University of Toulouse (Starting and Emergence grants), the Fyssen foundation and the CNRS. NER was supported as the Rebanks Family Chair in Pollinator Conservation by The W. Garfield Weston Foundation. LC was supported by ERC Advanced Grant SpaceRadarPollinator and by a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award

Life-Cycle and Genome of OtV5, a Large DNA Virus of the Pelagic Marine Unicellular Green Alga Ostreococcus tauri

Large DNA viruses are ubiquitous, infecting diverse organisms ranging from algae to man, and have probably evolved from an ancient common ancestor. In aquatic environments, such algal viruses control blooms and shape the evolution of biodiversity in phytoplankton, but little is known about their biological functions. We show that Ostreococcus tauri, the smallest known marine photosynthetic eukaryote, whose genome is completely characterized, is a host for large DNA viruses, and present an analysis of the life-cycle and 186,234 bp long linear genome of OtV5. OtV5 is a lytic phycodnavirus which unexpectedly does not degrade its host chromosomes before the host cell bursts. Analysis of its complete genome sequence confirmed that it lacks expected site-specific endonucleases, and revealed the presence of 16 genes whose predicted functions are novel to this group of viruses. OtV5 carries at least one predicted gene whose protein closely resembles its host counterpart and several other host-like sequences, suggesting that horizontal gene transfers between host and viral genomes may occur frequently on an evolutionary scale. Fifty seven percent of the 268 predicted proteins present no similarities with any known protein in Genbank, underlining the wealth of undiscovered biological diversity present in oceanic viruses, which are estimated to harbour 200Mt of carbon

Demanding satisfaction: violence, masculinity and honour in late eighteenth century Cape Town

This article analyses two separate cases of public violence which took place in Cape Town in the summer of 1772/3. At surface level they appear to be very different in character. One was a scrap among low-ranking soldiers who were playing cards at a shoreline outpost. The other was a formalised challenge between two captains of the VOC return fleet as they were lunching with the Governor, which resulted in a death and the flight of the murderer. Yet closer analysis suggests common ritualised codes of behaviour that intriguingly reveal how violence, masculinity and notions of honour operated at all social levels within the town. Both cases were complex and coded social conflicts, rooted in northern European early modern social beliefs and practices as transferred to a colonial context. However, none of these perpetrators of violence was viewed sympathetically by the VOC authorities at the Cape. By contrast, the assailant Captain who had escaped back to Europe was able to successfully appeal to the VOC directors in the Netherlands

New approaches to VOC history in South Africa

This special feature of eight articles represents a new wave of writing about the history of the Cape under Dutch East India Company (VOC) rule. This period lasted for almost 150 years (1652-1795), but it has hitherto remained something of a Cinderella in recent South African historiography, paling in comparison with the rich writing on early settler societies in North and Latin America and Australia