Includes bibliographical references (pages 115-131). / This dissertation takes its lead from ongoing research associated with the process of formulating policy and developing instruments for safeguarding living heritage or intangible heritage as it is commonly known. In the absence of a national policy and management guidelines for the conservation and sustainable management of living heritage, the South African Heritage Resources Agency (SAHRA) has initiated a process of formulating minimum standards and guidelines for the· protection of intangible elements of heritage associated with tangible heritage resources (objects and sites). In terms of the National Heritage Resources Act (NHRA) of 1999, SAHRA has a mandate to manage heritage resources to which oral tradition or living heritage is attached. Being the designated head of the living heritage unit at SAHRA, I have the responsibility to ensure the proper conservation and management of living heritage. As such I have been charged with a number of key responsibilities such as formulating policy and developing management guidelines for living heritage. As part of the process toward developing policy, a major facet of this research project reviews and draws a comparative analysis of existing heritage legislation, legal instruments and best practices in the world that may be useful in the South African context. Drawing from the review and comparative study process, this dissertation also seeks to identify and define key management issues for safeguarding aspects of intangible heritage. The outcome of the literature review stimulates a critical discussion about the findings which explore the challenges and opportunities related to the strengths and weakness of existing heritage policies and management guidelines for the protection of intangible elements of heritage resources. This eventually informs the conclusion and recommendations which provides not only a summary of closing remarks but also suggests a way forward regarding appropriate measures to be adopted for safeguarding living heritage. In this way, this project takes the form of research and policy recommendations, premised on a real-world situation in which I am personally responsible for guiding national policy on the issue at stake.

2015 was a telling year in the ‘new' South Africa's short history. Twenty-one years of democracy, 60 years of the Freedom Charter and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) saw its 20th anniversary. This has gone relatively unacknowledged, eclipsed by socio-political and economic turmoil. A struggling economy, rising inequality, unemployment, ‘xenophobia' and democratic, constitutional and parliamentary crises appear to be the way this year will be remembered. South Africa has reached a critical point as its democracy enters adulthood. Twenty years ago the TRC was also such a watershed moment in South African society and politics. I return to this national work of ‘truth', reconciliation, nation-building, healing and remembrance to see what this radical (and radically important) process can teach us about the more ethical (re-)definition of our ‘new' nation(alism). Particularly I address the ‘official' rhetoric and narrative of the ‘new' South Africa it birthed 20 years ago - South Africa as reconciled rainbow nation and progressive constitutional democracy united in the spirit of ‘traditional' pan-African ubuntu - and its (in)appropriability on the lived level (Sauter, 2015:190). I use Antjie Krog, Nosisi Mpolweni and Kopano Ratele's quasi-literary, quasi-academic engagement with the TRC and the ‘unintelligible' truth of an-‘other' in There was this Goat: Investigating the Truth Commission Testimony of Notrose Nobomvu Konile (2009) to do so.

Includes bibliographical references (leaves 137-139).

Includes bibliographical references [leaves 91-101].

This research seeks to be a methodological contribution to the fields of visual and memory studies. It enters these conversations through the family photograph found in the home of forcibly removed ex-residents of Roger Street, District Six, Cape Town in an attempt to think about ways of living during and after apartheid. Through this study, practically and theoretically, I engage with the challenges of restorative justice and contemplate how the family photograph may be engaged as a transactional object of translation in this contested area. I look at apartheid through District Six land claims and address as well, questions of trauma, memory, and freedom in the aftermath of apartheid. This dissertation therefore seeks to place three seemingly distinct literatures in the same frame: that of photography, that of memory, and that of justice and freedom. Conflicts over land, both local and global, range across the continuum, where long-term residents are displaced to make way for new developments and the other extreme where residents are forcibly displaced, violently evicted. What is clear in all of these instances, however, is that the problem cannot be reduced to one of monetary remuneration, that the land itself is imbued with meaning that cannot be measured in monetary terms. It is important to recognize - not only that land/place may mean different things to different people, but also that it can mean multiple "things" to the same person. Unless we recognize the multidimensionality of the meanings of land, as well thinking about what it means to be oppressed, any attempts to engage in restitution or restorative justice are destined to fail. This thesis attempts to think through how an ordinary object - the photograph - can be used to gain an interior look into how oppressed people lived during apartheid, and how they continue to live after its demise. Antjie Krog's book, Country of My Skull draws attention to the issue of death during apartheid. What this thesis does is to look at what happens to those who lived through apartheid and how they deal with the aftermath. It looks at the move from death to life. The family photograph may at first glance appear to have little in common with the issue of restorative justice. They both however speak of public and private, of remembering and mourning, of death and life, of absence and presence. They are both prone to multiple interpretations, as well as being at the cutting edge of contemporary and political debates. Taken together, the family photograph and visual studies form a forceful space, initiating interdisciplinary dialogue and providing a creative and scholarly engagement that has both local and global implications.

Includes bibliographical references. / This thesis examines the meanings, significances, and roles of heritage across the colonial and postcolonial eras in Zimbabwe. The study traces dominant ideas about heritage at particular periods in Zimbabwean history, illustrating how heritage has been deployed in ways that challenge common or essentialised understandings of the notion and practice of heritage. The study adds new dimensions to the understanding of the role of heritage as an enduring and persistent source terrain for the negotiation and creation of authority, as well as for challenging it, linked to regimes and the politics of knowledge. This work is part of an emerging body of work that explores developments over a long stretch of time, and suggests that what we have come to think of as heritage is a project for national cohesion, a marketable cultural project, and also a mode of political organisation and activity open for use by various communities in negotiating contemporary challenges or effecting change. While normative approaches to heritage emphasise the disjuncture between the precolonial, colonial and postcolonial periods, or between official and non-official practices, results of this study reveal that in practice, there are connections in the work that heritage does across these categories. Findings of the study shows a persistent and extraordinary investment in the past, across the eras and particularly in times of crises, showing how heritage practices move across landscapes, monuments, dispersed sites, and institutionalised entities such as museums. The thesis also points to a complex relationship between official heritage practices and unofficial practices carried out by local communities. To demonstrate this relationship, it traces the emergence of counter-heritage practices, which respond to and challenge the official conceptualisations of heritage by invoking practices of pastness, mobilised around reconfigured archaeological sites, human remains, ancestral connections, and sacred sites. Counter-heritage practices, undertaken by local communities, challenge hegemonic ideas about heritage embedded in institutionalised heritage practices and they contribute to the creation of alternative practices of preservation. I propose that attention to the relationship between institutionalised heritage practices and community-held practices helps us to think differently about the role of local communities in defining notions of heritage, heritage preservation practices and in knowledge production.

No description available.

In this thesis I investigate and interrogate the historical and current compositions, conditions and dispositions of three collections containing sartorial objects of three formerly separate museums – the South African Museum, the South African National Gallery and the South African Cultural History Museum. Although these three museums were amalgamated in 1999, along with eight other Western Cape institutions to form Iziko Museums, each separate sartorial ‘collection’ retains the effects of the divergent museal practices imposed on its objects over time. I employ the concept of ‘fashion’ in this thesis both to refer to the objects of the study, as well as to the socially-determined set of ideas and ideals surrounding notions such as taste, aesthetics, belonging and modernity. Sartorial objects in museums present strong physical evidence of both deeply personal and extremely public relationships as the traces of and capacity for embodiment imbue these objects with metonymic, subjective and archival capacities. In addition, I employ the contracted form dress/fashion to trouble the commonly held separate notions of ‘fashion’ as a modern, dynamic and largely Western system, and ‘dress’ as ‘traditional’ and an unchanging African sartoriality. I contend that through the terms ‘dress’ and ‘fashion’ – two opposing and segregating tropes still largely present in South African museums – the forms of agency, mutability and historicity applied to Western ‘fashion’ objects, have been and continue to be denied in the collection, classification and curation of African ‘dress’. I use a sartorial focus to unpack the development of and conditions pertaining to each of the museums in this study, namely an ethnographic museum, a cultural history museum and a fine arts museum. I interrogate the three separate phases of dress/fashion objects in these museums, that is, their entry into the collections, their classification and their display. Following each historical investigation, I use a single object-focused strategy to reflect on the specific conditions, dispositions and limitations of these three separate sartorial ‘archives’. I choose to identify and analyse all the trousers found across the three collections (as well as some significant examples that were excluded), as these particular sartorial objects both reflect and offer critical insights into distinct, and often divisive, definitions of gender, politics and socio-cultural attitudes, many of which also changed over time. I offer close readings of a number of trousers (both in and absent from these collections) that make evident the ways in which these divisions have been scripted into the taxonomies, disciplines and exhibitions at Iziko Museums. These practical and conceptual divisions perpetuate the artificial segregation of these museum objects. The divisions are also reflective of wider divisive museal practices that persist despite the efforts of Iziko Museums to transform and integrate their practices and their collections. Drawing on the sartorial as an alternative archive I am able to show the types of histories avowed and disavowed by different museal practices. In addition, the close readings expose the distinct and persistent colonial and apartheid underpinnings of sartorial classification and representation across the three Iziko Museums’ collections almost twenty years after the merger. The trousers readings furthermore, make a number of decolonial affordances evident, as the objects reflect not only alternate histories, but also shared pasts prompting alternative contemporary interpretations. Via the dress/fashion collections, this thesis offers a sartorial approach to ‘decolonising’ the museum. This includes both a reframing of various museal practices and principles, and a contemporary re-imagining of histories and their related identity narratives. Despite contemporary critiques and attempts to transform the disciplinary practices, and various cultural and social distinctions still present in the collections and exhibitions at Iziko Museums, segregation and problematic hierarchies still persist. I show how when considered as an archive, the sartorial makes evident other histories, relationships and interpretations. This approach can contribute towards a new, interdisciplinary dress/fashion museology as both a means of disruption and revision at Iziko Museums, contributing towards new contemporary capacities to curate the sartorial offering alternate, decolonial interpretations of past, present and future South African identity narratives.

The study examines, from a feminist point of view, the stereotypic image of woman in Xhosa prose fiction from pre-literate times to the era of written literature (1909 - 1980). Attaching feminist critical theory to conventional literary characterisation gives this pioneering study a human dime,n sion that is bound to rejuvenate traditional critical appredation and highlight the tremendous power of art to reflect or parallel real-life experiences. Consequently, the study transcends the confines of traditional literary criticism. It throws interdisciplinary light on the African feminist dilemma over the past 70 years while focusing on gender stereotyping as a characterisation technique. Chapter 1 clearly demarcates the scope of study and the critical position adopted, while chapter 2 traces stereotypes back to Xhosa folk-tales. In this way, an interesting link or parallel in stereotyping between oral and written literature is highlighted. It is worth pointing out that Chapter 3 is significant in that no women writers' works produced in the first and the second decades have survived. The male writers of the period describe women in strict stereotypic fashion, without fear of contradiction, from Woman as Eve to Woman as Witch, among other archetypal images. The female stereotypic image in the third and the fourth decades, the role of the first two female novelists and the early seeds of female. resistance to male domination, are discussed. in Chapter 4 while Chapter 5 highlights the depiction of female characters by male and female prose writers in the Fifties, culminating in Mzamane's exposure of glaring anti-female social norms and practices. In Chapter 6 the spotlight is cast on the woman of the Sixties and the rise of active resistance to male dominance. Some contemporary women, as pointed out in Chapter 7, have crossed the Rubicon in diverse ways. They are assertive, independent, proactive and relentlessly opposed to male dominance. Chapter 8 sums up the main points in relation to the Xhosa woman's attitude towards Western feminism: while many Xhosa women feel justifiably unhappy about male dominance, they refuse to let their frustrations affect their unity with men in the greater struggle against racism. Although the study concludes on an anti-climactic note for Western feminists, it focuses on this crucial and unique distinction between Western and black feminism.

This dissertation recognises that waiting for public services in South Africa is becoming an increasingly important point of contestation between the state and its citizens. Rather than exploring the spectacular expressions of this tension seen in ongoing service delivery protests, it foregrounds the everyday experiences of waiting for public services at three key sites in Cape Town: the dispersed everyday waiting for public transport at train stations; the queues at the Department of Home Affairs regional office for South African Identity Document applications; and the waiting room of the Chapel Street Community Health Clinic. In relation to each of these sites, it engages the ethnographic method to investigate who waits for what and for how long, what this waiting entails, and the meanings that those who wait draw from these lengthy and repeated experiences. The dissertation consists of three chapters which put into conversation the connections between postcolonial infrastructural crises, socially fractured temporal experiences, and the everyday culture of interaction with the state. By tracing the history of how infrastructures and systems of delivery were designed to support first the project of colonial modernity, and later the project of apartheid, it explains why the experience of waiting is so prominent in accessing public services in this particular context. It then moves away from the contextual to focus on how these broad frameworks manifest in individuated everyday experiences of waiting. It finds that despite the fact that the modes of waiting vary significantly between sites, in all three, waiting is socially fractured and decidedly uneven, in both obvious and unseen ways. Lastly, it considers the diverse effects of waiting to conclude that although waiting can impel people to patiently endure, there are also moments when waiting is challenged, resisted, and redeployed in the popular domain to take on new and empowering meanings.