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This project investigates.the political and economic development of Ghana and Malaysia and identifies key factors that led to their divergent development paths - specifically Malaysia's relative success and Ghana's setbacks. Both Malaysia and Ghana are former British colonies that gained their independence in the same year. Although they had similar economic conditions at independence, over the course of 40 years, they have experienced very different economic and political development. Thus, this study begins with a most similar systems design but winds up employing a most different systems model. The factors explored in this thesis include gross domestic product (GDP), GDP growth rate, foreign direct investment, electrical power consumption, and external debt. This study aims to identify patterns for successful and unsuccessful development using Malaysia and Ghana as archetypes.

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A vigorous oral tradition has existed throughout South African history, and in many ways represents our truly original contribution to world literature. Despite this, oral literature is largely absent from accounts of literary history in this country. While the particular oppressions of South African political life have contributed to the exclusion of oral forms, the suppression of the oral in favour of the printed text is a feature of literary studies worldwide, and appears to be related to the critical practices that have been dominant in universities and schools for most of this century. In this study I consider ways of recovering oral forms for literary debate, and offer what I consider to be more appropriate strategies of 'reading'. My aim is to re-establish a line of continuity in South African poetry and performance from the songs and stories of the Bushmen, through the praise poems of the African chiefdoms, to the development of Christianised oral forms, the adaptation of the oral tradition in 'Soweto' poetry of the 1970s, and the performance of poems on political platforms in the 1980s. Recovering oral poetry and performance genres for literary debate requires the development of an appropriate critical methodology. Through a consideration of advances in the study of orality, I aim to suggest ways of reading which grant credence to the specific strategies and performative energies of oral texts while locating the texts in the spaces and constrictions of their societies. A great many oral texts from the past survive only in printed, translated forms, however, and a key aspect of such a critical project is how - while acknowledging the particular difficulties involved - one 'uses' highly mediated and artificially stabilised print versions to suggest something of the dynamic nature of oral performance in South African historical and social life. This thesis also considers how texts address us across historical distances. I argue for maintaining a dialectic between the 'past significance' and 'present meaning' of the poems, songs and stories: for allowing the past to shape our reading while we remain aware that our recuperation of history is inevitably directed by present needs and ideologies. These ideas are explored through five chapters which consider, respectively, the songs and stories of the nineteenth-century /Xam Bushmen, the izibongo of Shaka, the hymns of the Messianic Zulu evangelist Isaiah Shembe, Ingoapele Madingoane's epic 'Soweto' poem "black trial", and the performance poetry of Mzwakhe Mbuli and Alfred Qabula in the 1980s. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of Natal, Durban, 1995.

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Applications of lead and strontium isotope analysis were made on archaeological materials from three different contexts in both the Old and New Worlds. These materials comprised pre-Hispanic glaze painted ceramics from Arizona, U.S.A., glass beads from late first millennium AD Igbo-Ukwu, Nigeria, and copper-based metals from early first millennium AD Kissi, Burkina Faso. All materials contain lead at major, minor, or trace concentrations, and lead isotope analysis was employed to determine a provenance for that lead. Strontium isotope analysis also was applied to glass beads from Igbo-Ukwu to determine provenance(s) for strontium found in the glass. Furthermore, application of elemental composition analysis was or had been employed on all samples for additional data comparisons within assemblages and with comparable archaeological materials.Results of these analyses determined, in most cases, regional provenance with high degrees of confidence for lead contained in the analyzed samples. Strontium and elemental composition analysis data also proved valuable in confirming the regional provenance of the raw glass used to produce the glass beads. Leads in the glaze paints from Arizona, which demonstrated a range of resources exploitation, were confidently restricted to a few regions for their procurement. Likewise leads in most glass beads from Igbo-Ukwu were confidently restricted to two main source regions, with a third strong contender also being identified. The elemental composition and strontium isotope data determined with confidence the production regions for the primary raw glasses used to make the glass beads. Finally, leads in copper-based metals from Burkina Faso also were restricted to a few regions, although some inconclusiveness in provenance determination was attributed to mixing of metals from difference sources.These results confirm the utility of heavy isotope analysis of archaeological materials for provenance determination. The combination of these data with elemental composition analyses further confirm the interpretive strength of combining independent but related sets of analytical data for exploring questions of archaeological provenance. With improvements in instrument technology and application in the past two decades, very high precision and high accuracy analyses can be made which eliminate some earlier concerns of heavy isotope applications in archaeology.

Political cartoons as headline representation are in effect a combination of artistic licence and a critical version of the truth. Linley Sambourne and Jean Veber’s 1901 cartoons on the Boer War for Punch and L’Assiette au Beurre create tensions and dialectic not only on British and French feeling about foreign policy in South Africa and at home, but also indicate fine points on each publication’s editorial remit. This comparative study is a mirroring synthesis of these approaches that sets the Boer War forty five cartoons in context. Whereas Punch’s cartoons are set within a text layout and L’Assiette’s are the text themselves, both transmit set ideas on The Boer War as ‘sight bite’ news and opinion pieces. Veber’s cartoons offered swift knee-jerk reactions against the ruling elite and the horrors of British cruelty toward Boer prisoners as coverage of the war escalated in 1901. His extreme capturing of the zeitgeist followed the magazine’s editorial bent, but they also reflected his brave counter-hegemonic stance towards a French government seeking an alliance with its British counterpart. With this in mind, Antonio Gramsci’s theory on hegemony as applied to journalism allows the scholar to look at the media from a cultural perspective. This focus is used to show cartoons as representative of conflicts in the fight for power, but this time publicly conveyed to the readership. Thus, types of truth enhancements in each set of cartoons indicate the cartoonists’ respective entrenchment with, or detachment from, Imperial institutions, thereby signalling emerging attempts of the attitudinal persuasion of the reader toward Punch or L’Assiette’s political leanings. The inclusion of political cartoons in editorial pages was part of the cult of visual attention-grabbing news values that had become professionalised, industrialised and popularised by the early Twentieth Century. Cartoons can be decoded using Ernst Gombrich’s six-point filter in order to identify the cartoonist’s method of compressing messages about people and events. A publication’s politics are reflected in the telescoping of exaggerated opinions – an effective way to pass on an authoritatively saturated message to the readership. Gombrich recognised the power of conveying messages to the audience through seemingly incongruous placement of figures in odd situations within cartoons. His methodology acts as visual shorthand for images designed to elicit a desired response to a reported situation as the publication saw it. In the context of the history of journalism, his psychologically analytical approach is appropriate in the appreciation of cartoons’ extremes, often made more acute by the partisan politics of war.

Thesis (M.A. (Applied Language and Literacy Education))--University of the Witwatersrand, Faculty of Humanities, 2017 / This study critically analyses a set of folktales from the African Storybook website, which is an open licence digital publishing platform supporting early reading in Africa (www.africanstorybook.org). The selected folktales were mostly written by educators and librarians working in the African Storybook project pilot sites. The folktales were illustrated and published as indigenous African language and English storybooks during 2014 to 2015. The analysis is centrally concerned with the settings in which the folktales take place (with a distinction made between space, place and time), and the age and gender associated with central characters. The analytical tools used and the perspectives applied are drawn predominantly from post-colonial studies, African feminism, critical literacy, broad folktale scholarship, and theory from local – as opposed to global – childhoods. The analysis is interested in the conventions of the folktale genre, as it is constructed in the narratives by the writers. The three central findings with regards to the settings of folktales are as follows: (i) 90% of the folktales are set in rural environments in or near villages or small settlements. The somewhat idealised villages and settlements appear to have been relatively untouched by modern communications and infrastructure, and represent a “nostalgic, imagined past”. (ii) The study found that 75% of the folktales are set in the remote past, indexical of the folktale genre’s oral roots. (iii) Supernatural characters, objects and events occur in nearly 75% of the folktales. This suggests a possible interpretive space of intersecting temporalities and dimensions of existence, as well as possibilities for imaginative problem-solving. In addition, it raises challenging questions about the limits of human agency. The study also found that the ASb folktales, perhaps somewhat unsurprisingly for a genre that tends to employ archetypes and stereotypes, seemingly offer no characterisation outside of heteronormative family roles. But despite the heteronormativity and narrowly-defined family roles, especially for women characters, the folktales also present other positions for female gendered characters, and by extension for girl child readers – courageous, interesting, clever and unconventional female characters are in no shortage in these narrative populations. The findings suggest that the ASb folktales provide a range of identity positions for both girls and boys in African contexts, and my study reflects on how educators might navigate this complex territory. In particular, the findings point to how teachers and other adult caregivers might balance the moral and cultural lessons in folktales with the need for children to imagine and construct different worlds and positions for themselves. / MT2017

This thesis finds that Dr SM Molema made a considerable contribution to the construction of the history of black people in South Africa, and was the first African historian to do so. Yet, he and other African writers were marginalised from the mainstream twentieth-century canons of South African history. Therefore, the thesis investigates the reasons for which Dr Molema (a medical doctor) became an historian and an ethnographer in 1920, and explores the nature of his critical engagement with the ways in which these disciplines represented black people. To understand the controversial treatment of black historical writers, this study appraises South African historiography and its tendency to construct debates about black people, while rendering black writers marginal to such debates. Further, the thesis explores the generic complexity of Molema’s work and finds he wrote in a hybrid genre, autoethnography. This complexity may have contributed to the many misreadings of his work. This study outlines the generic specificity and implications of autoethnography and finds that, like autobiography, autoethnography has been one of the genres of the Self (of personal testimony) that, under colonialism and apartheid, many black writers employed in providing corrective versions of mainstream versions of South African history. Autoethnography enabled Molema to represent his own life, but — more importantly — that of his community (the Rolong boo RaTshidi of Mafikeng) as a form of cultural translation for readers at home and abroad. Methodologically, the thesis understands that Molema’s own family history played a large part in motivating him to write history. In order to explore this relationship between the experience of history and its representation, the thesis has a dual structure: the first four chapters present biographical studies of three generations of the Molema family: Chief Molema, the founder of Mafikeng, his son Chief Silas Thelesho Molema, and Silas’ son, Modiri Molema, the historian and ethnographer. Chapters Five and Six present an exposition and critique of his first work, The Bantu Past and Present. Dr Molema’s biographies of Chiefs Moroka and Montshiwa are used as ancillary texts.