It has been more than five decades since the wave of decolonization swept across Africa. For people on the continent, the rise to power by the former liberation movements brought hope for a better future in the post-colonial state. However later developments showed that independence would, in fact, not change the material and social conditions of the ordinary people. Although the national liberation movement took over the government of the former colony, colonial institutions and structures of power, which were founded on the economic exploitation of the colony, remained unchanged. Thus in this thesis I set out to examine Frantz Fanon’s thought in order to provide a critique of post-independence failures in Africa. I will argue that whilst Fanon shared the same ideals as the anti-colonial movements in their objective to remove colonial regimes from power, that Fanon, in fact, had a critical attitude towards the anti-colonial movement. Whereas the latter conceived of freedom as independence, Fanon conceived of freedom as disalienation, premised on the complete recovery of the black self from the negative effects of colonialism. Thus the study sets out to examine the extent to which Fanon offered an alternative idea of freedom and liberation to the one which was being advanced by the national liberation movements.

Includes bibliographical references. / Despite the popularity of sex(uality) peer education as an HIV prevention strategy within diverse contexts, an understanding of the experiences of those intimately placed within these programmes is limited. Instead, the majority of research in this field relies on hegemonic notions of rational human behaviour that operates under the assumption that knowledge leads to sexual behaviour change. This study explores peer facilitators, peer educators, and NGO staff experiences of a sex(uality) peer education programme in Cape Town, South Africa to understand meaning-making around sex(uality) peer education within the complex power dynamics of donor-NGO interactions. This study provides a critical case study of a schools-based sex(uality) peer education intervention, drawing on individual and focus group interviews. Using a feminist and gender lense, the study highlights a number of features of the programme and implementation, which reinforces gender inequalities and notions of a rational sexual being rather than creating channels for a new understanding of sex(uality) to emerge. These include peer facilitators’ and peer educators’ experience as change agents rather than sex educators, the preference for biomedical and socio-economic content over gender content, and the overall absence of a critical engagement with gender constructions and power dynamics in relationships. The study also points to the limits of donor-funded interventions, which tend to prescribe the content and scope of schools-based programmes, to the detriment of real engagement with issues that face and constrain the target group including the implications of what ‘sex(uality) education’ has come to mean for young men and women engaged in these interventions.

This dissertation is an exploration of some of the philosophical thought and spiritual practices which constitute and are present and represented in and through certain instances of South African jazz. Amilcar Cabral’s revolutionary thought on liberation culture, which allows for thinking the radical impulse of cultural production, forms the foundation of the dynamic frame which we use to hear and think through the music’s content and the context by which it is composed. Through an engagement with the thought and music of the following artists - the Blue Notes, Miriam Makeba, Malombo, Nduduzo Makhathini, Zim Ngqawana, and a few others - we find ourselves in the presence of a liberatory tradition rooted in the cosmological worlds of Southern African people. Musical and spiritual practices of sangomas, the frequency of the maternal, medicinal relationships with plants and the land, and the communion and communication with ancestors are all channels of South African jazz. And the spirit of liberation that emerges in the music is situated in and dances through an encounter between these practices and aesthetics of the Black radical tradition. I provoke and elaborate on this encounter, considering the ambivalent, sometimes invisible, place of Africa in that tradition. Africa’s epistemological absence in much of the Black radical tradition, beyond minor essentialised and, at times, romanticised notions of an irretrievable source, a point of origin, or a site generally relegated to the past, is mirrored by the possibility of a productive synthesis which is improvised through the music. Moving with and for the music, listening to its critique of much of the writing about it and what that writing misses, I make the claim for jazz as a cosmologically-rooted African art form, forming part of a broader liberatory tradition which needs to be heard in relation to the spiritual and philosophical traditions which it extends.

Includes bibliographical references (leaves 106-109).

Includes abstract. / Includes bibliographical references. / [The] idea of the collective trauma has been applied to South Africa in the period of transition from apartheid to democracy. Especially during the hearings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), as the commission invested heavily in the practice of traumatic storytelling as part the broader globalization of psychiatric knowledge about trauma (Colvin, 2008). Political cartoons shed an interesting light on the establishment and development of trauma discourse. This study looks at the contribution of South African political cartoonists to trauma discourse at the time of the hearings of the Human Rights Violations Committee (HRVC) of the TRC.

National identity is an important characteristic of a country and helps to create a sense of national unity between its citizens. Identity is a learned concept that develops at a young age from children's surroundings and interactions. According to Martyn Barrett, this sense of National identity is present as early as the age of 5, with children gaining greater understanding of the significance of national identity to the age of 11. During this time period, picture books play a major role in childhood development. Using picture books to help create a positive, unified sense of national identity and multicultural understanding can help a nation to create a socially stable environment that influences political and economic development. In the case of South Africa, national identity has shifted since the end of the apartheid era, but how it is reflected within children's picture books? This mini-dissertation examines six different children's picture books to ascertain whether or not elements of national identity are included and if these elements are able to create a positive shift in national identity within South African society. The elements of national identity to be examined include, but are not limited to, South African plants and animals that are native/ unique to South Africa, important South African figures, shared history, multiculturalism, and also hope for the future. By examining these elements and other external influences, an image of South African national identity as represented in children's picture books is explored. This leads to an understanding of the role that children's picture books can play in the South African education system and child development.

Includes bibliographical references. / My research interest can be framed as an investigation of how the contemporary neoliberal reordering of race, class and gender is negotiated, resisted or embraced by (young) socially mobile women at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. Through a qualitative mixed-method approach consisting of nine semi-structured, open-ended interviews with ten women and auto-ethnography, I wrote into existence counter-representations to the currently hegemonic – mainly northern-based – representations of neoliberal femininities. The Literature Review provides an overview of existing scholarship on neoliberalism, its intersection with postcolonialism and lastly neoliberal subjectivities/femininities. Given that neoliberalism as an ideology affects all areas of life, the two methodology chapters explore feminist epistemology in relation to neoliberal cooption. Additionally, by taking into account neoliberalism’s attendant ideology of non-racialism, I explore the effects of my own white subject position, the world view it affords me as well as how my whiteness affected the encounter with the participants and subsequent representation of their narratives. By utilizing discourse analysis and by reading the interview transcripts through a lens that allowed me to identify the tension and relationship between the two main neoliberal ideals of freedom and responsibility, I assembled the ‘data’ into two main clusters. The first cluster – Bodies and Heterosexuality, subdivided into two chapters – broadly explores gendered socialization and the (ab)use of gendered socialization by the neoliberal project as well as the participants’ representations of their engagements with male bodies. The second cluster – Education and Freedom – locates the reasons for the participants’ wish to become socially mobile/educated; the performances/techniques the participants embrace in order to be able to construct race and gender as choice and concludes with the claim that true human liberation will remain unfinished in neoliberal environments characterized by inequality, non-racialism as well as ideologies of choice and agency which neglect systemic analysis.

This research dissertation explores discourses of masculinity among university-level women track athletes across South Africa. Many scholars have delved into the narratives of racialization and masculinity among black women athletes, muscularity as a premise of athleticism, ‘tomboyism' and gender fluidities, as well as the policing and disciplining of women athletes' bodies in accordance with gender ideals. Nonetheless, as it stands, literature on women's masculinities within sports in South African contexts, along with the idea of meshing masculinities and women's experiences together remains scarce. Interviews were conducted with women sprinters attending universities across South Africa on the online platforms, Microsoft Teams and Zoom, due to the state of the COVID-19 pandemic and restrictions in place at the time. An analysis of their narratives surrounding experiences and discourses of masculinity as cisgendered heterosexual women athletes was carried out. The research concludes that upon reaching adulthood and maturation, the gender binary recloses around the women track athletes so that a "temporary boyhood" is no longer granted to them, and they must negotiate their performative proximity to discourses of masculinity without the safety of the "tomboy" label. Rigid power structures continue to dominate, leaving little to no room for the women track athletes within South Africa to explore a heteronormative female masculinity as part of their gender identities.

There has been a lack of intersectional gender, race, and class analysis of the present COVID19 pandemic by the government and health organizations in South Africa. This study focuses on a small number of unheard voices of urban poor black women and their experiences of COVID-19 lockdown between 2020 and 2021 on the Cape Flats. Using Khayelitsha as a case study, this research highlights their township-based experiences during COVID-19 lockdown, by exploring the impact on their lives, incomes and health from their perspectives as women head of families. Such voices are often ignored and marginalized in mainstream media. As a small qualitative study, it is based on collecting narratives from a small cohort of female heads of households in Khayelitsha which illustrate that these black women are in general negatively affected economically by top-down western-based imposed COVID-19 lockdown measures (as a form of extroversion). This limited small-scale study points to the need for further research on how these western-imposed methods of managing pandemics and diseases in African realities negate local knowledge of indigenous women and that they are inappropriate and not informed by the everyday lived reality. Lockdown measures in South Africa, therefore, need to be critically reviewed within an African lived reality in future.

The Mother City Queer Project (MCQP) is a themed camivalesque costume party held annually, over a single night in December, in Cape Town since 1994. The event began as a celebration of South Africa's constitutional recognition of the right to sexual difference in the form of a location specific small scale "art party", patronised by the friends and peers of organisers architect Andre Vorster and artist Andrew Putter. Since its inception, the MCQP has grown in size and scale to incorporate a more diverse demographic of partygoer from Cape Town residents, nationally and abroad. The development and growth of the MCQP from an underground community event to one of widespread commercial appeal, increased numbers and popular acceptance can be traced through the MCQP's use of five venues over the course of its first ten years.