This dissertation is a study of an instance of political violence that took place during 1985 in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa, but which had a wider resonance across the country. It involved the killing of four prominent anti-apartheid activists, known as the Cradock Four, by a state security death squad. It is an instance of political violence that allows us to ask ontological questions about the relationship between law, rights and violence; colonial violence and the Cold War, as well as questions about the epistemologies that surround violence in relation to questions of justice. Revisiting this violence, as mediated through the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, this study asks: how does this violence relate to the law itself, since apartheid was after all explicit in its claim to being the product of a legal regime? It argues that we need to think about how this violence against the Cradock Four, committed by a 'death squad'--and therefore orphaned through denial by both law and an official political narrative--related to the constitution of a South Africa political community, a political community we also have to remind ourselves, which had a colonial genealogy. To answer these questions I have traced the figures of Matthew Goniwe and his political comrades in two ways. The first half of the dissertation is a study of how they are fashioned in legal discourse--over time mainly as victims of human rights abuses through the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The second half of the dissertation is a study of their constitution in political discourse, where they become transformed from activists to absolute enemies of the state. In my discussion of this latter transformation, I trace and wish to recover what has become a subaltern narrative: thinking about these activists as instantiations of the forms of what I have called `the natives revolt', and therefore apartheid's concrete enemy: they are reluctant urban native subjects; neither properly rural and neither properly urban. It is this subject which I argue, finally disrupts the colonial ambitions of apartheid.

The Crisis' in Zimbabwe, which in significant part began in 2000 with the appropriation of white owned commercial farms, is political, economic and psycho-social, and has resulted in major upheavals and catastrophic changes to Zimbabwean society. The researcher investigates from an autobiographical and speculative point of view what it means to live in and after such a crisis by considering the experiences of loss, mourning and melancholia as they relate to the kind of exilic existence experienced by many Zimbabweans as a result of 'the Crisis'. This kind of exile has been called "internal" and "external" (2007) exile by the Zimbabwean poet Chenjerai Hove, by which he means that those still living in the country under the Mugabe regime are living in conditions of exile emotionally, psychically and psychologically just as those in the diaspora, numbering three million or a quarter of the population, are living in conditions of physical and geographic exile. The researcher uses 'the Crisis' as a site of inquiry into considerations of individual and collective responsibility as a possible response to the emotional, geographic, and existential rupture caused by crisis. This study, which is partly autobiographical, but also historical and political, takes a speculative and conceptual approach to understanding effects of 'the Crisis'. The hybridized methods of writing as inquiry (Richardson, 2000), speculative essay as philosophical inquiry (Schubert, 1991), and autobiography as a form of narrative research, allow the researcher to articulate, meditate and speculate on questions regarding loss, temporality, mourning, melancholia and nostalgia, community, and responsibility from a position of personal interpretation, while accepting that those interpretations are fractured, partial and biased. The study proposes responsibility as one possible response to 'the Crisis' and suggests five claims of responsibility as avenues to open up considerations of how one possibly could respond to such formative experiences. The five claims are: return, melancholia and reflective nostalgia (Boym, 2001), art, learning, and community. These claims are drawn directly in relation to the researcher's interpretations of 'The Crisis' and so are not meant to be seen as normative but rather as suggestive. The recent scholarship that has been produced in response to 'the Crisis' has predominantly focused on logistical and practical concerns; this researcher establishes that psycho-social considerations of how one experiences crisis and could live with/in it are of equal importance to the scholarship of 'the Crisis' in Zimbabwe.

This dissertation excavates the print and archive culture of diasporic and continental Africans who forged a community in Cape Town between 1900 and 1946. Although the writers I consider write after the Victorian era, I use the term "black Victorian" to preserve their own political investments in a late nineteenth-century understanding of liberal empire. With the abolition of slavery in 1834 across the British Empire and the Cape Colony's qualified nonracial franchise of 1853, Cape Town, and District Six in particular, took on new significance in black radicalism. By writing periodicals, pamphlets and autobiographies, black Victorians hoped to write themselves into the culture of empire. These recovered texts read uncannily, unsettling the construction of official archives as well as contemporary canons of South African, African and diasporic African literatures. By turning to the traffic of ideas between Africa and its diaspora in Cape Town, this dissertation recovers a vision of (black) modernity that had not yet succumbed to the formulations of anti-imperial nationalisms.

This ethnographic study aims to understand how African parents use religion to help raise their children in the U.S. It is based on 18 months of fieldwork among African immigrant and refugee families, who identify as born again Christians and attend one of two churches located in the Greater Boston Area of Massachusetts. The parents in this study have voluntarily left or fled the homes and countries (predominantly Rwanda, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, and Burundi) where they were raised and now have children of their own to raise in a new country and culture. They are using God (in concert with church, prayer, and the Bible) to cope with the challenges and find understanding, belonging, and betterment for themselves and their children. Their ultimate hope is for their children "to know God." But what does it mean, "to know God?" Why is this so important for these parents? How do parents help children "to know God" (i.e. what processes are entailed)? And how does this shape their identities and intrapersonal and interpersonal development? This ethnography aims to answer these questions through an analysis of the language and literacy processes of socialization. I describe local child rearing theories, which influence interactions with children and the everyday routines they follow; the characteristics and practices through which a sense of belonging and community is fostered; as well as the practices of praying, engaging with the Bible, and discussion about what their faith means psychologically and socially. Parents and children are teaching and learning from one another through their participation in church services, Sunday school, and Bible studies; in routine prayer individually and collectively; in conversations about God and the world; and reading and discussing the Bible at home at night. I also examine the consequences, theoretical and empirical, of such socialization processes on the understanding of self and one's relationships with God, other believers, and non-believers. I conclude that in learning to distinguish God's voice among their own thoughts, children are potentially developing a Christian sense of self. Yet, adults and children encounter competing discourses within different communities of practice about with whom one should be friends. Social relationships entail positioning him or herself in the way one talks and acts so as to be (or not be) identified as a believer. These African born again Christian parents are socializing their children to be and become believers.

In post-apartheid South Africa, working through the distortions of identity and history of the formerly colonized, as well as the traumas suffered by black South Africans as a result of the alienation of land by European settlers is an ongoing project of the state. The state's attempts to formulate an appropriate national myth with founding heroes and significant events that resonate with the majority has resulted in the promotion of certain figures as heroes. Not all black South Africans who are exhorted to identify with these figures consider them heroes. Some trace the beginnings of the fragmentation of their historical identities to the conquest actions of these figures. Shaka kaSenzangakhona, founder of the Zulu kingdom, is one such figure who is being promoted as the heritage of all Zulus by the state, especially at the level of the province of KwaZulu-Natal, for purposes of constructing a heritage for the province and of encouraging tourism. This promotion of Shaka is seen by some as the perpetuation under the post-1994 dispensation of the suppression of their histories and the disallowing of engagement with a longer history than the reorganization of chieftainship from 1927 and the seizure of land belonging to Africans from 1913. Hence has sprung up groups convening around pre-Zulu kinship identities since the early 1990's in which people attempt to find answers to the question "Who am I?" For most people, this question is driven by a sense that their conceptions of the country's past and of their historical selves (i.e. of the experiences of their predecessors that have brought them to where they are in the present) have been either influenced, mis(in)formed or distorted by the national master narratives that crystallized under European colonial rule and apartheid, even as they were simultaneously being resisted. Informed in part the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of the late 1990's and the state's attempts to "redress the imbalances of the past," many feel they need to work through the meanings of the past in their personal lives in order to inhabit the present with a fuller sense of how they have come to be who they are and so that they can imagine and create different futures for themselves. In this project I examine the attempt of people who trace their history to the Ndwandwe kingdom that was destroyed by Shaka's Zulu forces in the 1820's who have organized themselves into an association named the uBumbano lwamaZwide (Unity Association of the Zwides) to engage with questions of identity and the meanings of the past. The association comprises a group of activists in different parts of KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng provinces who have been meeting since 2003 to attempt to bring together on a large scale people of Ndwandwe, Nxumalo and other historically-associated clans to recall and/or construct a heroic past in post-apartheid South Africa. Implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, the assembly of the Ndwandwe calls into question the definition as Zulu of those Ndwandwe whose forebears were incorporated into the Zulu kingdom in the 1820's.I analyze the use of the idiom of heritage as well as a traditional idiom of kinship that has come to be handed down as a Zulu language for mediating social relations by the uBumbano in ways that challenge the centrality given to Shaka in narrations of the past. I argue that the uBumbano is using these idioms against how they are commonly understood - heritage as a mode of engaging with the past for its feel-good features and kinship as a Zulu idiom in KwaZulu-Natal province. Through an analysis of three closely related oral artistic forms - the izibongo (personal praises) of Shaka in his promotion and the ihubo lesizwe (`national' hymn), izithakazelo (kinship group or clan address names) of the Ndwandwe as well as the personal praises of Zwide, the last Ndwandwe ruler before the fall of the kingdom - I argue that the uBumbano is deploying these forms in subtle ways to overturn the dominance of Shaka in public discourse. Moreover, I contend, the uBumbano is turning on its head the permission to recall their ancestors under the authority of the Zulu ruling elite that Ndwandwe people who were incorporated into the Zulu kingdom have been permitted for almost two centuries. I demonstrate how the language of being an isizwe (`nation') was permitted and perpetuated a Ndwandwe identity that has held the potential to be asserted more forcefully to overturn its secondary position to an overarching Zulu identity.

The aim of this dissertation is to identify effective educational interventions in Sub-Saharan African with an impact on student learning. This is the first meta-analysis in the field of education conducted for Sub-Saharan Africa. This paper takes an in-depth look at twelve different types of education interventions or programs and attempts to not only present analytics on their relative effectiveness, but to also explore why certain interventions seem to be more effective than others. After a systematic literature review, I combine 56 articles (containing 66 separate experiments, 83 treatment arms, and 420 effect size estimates), and I use random-effects meta-analytic techniques to both a.) evaluate the relative impact of different types of interventions and b.) explain variation in effect sizes within and across intervention types. When I examine the relative pooled effect sizes of all twelve intervention areas, I find that interventions in pedagogical methods (changes in instructional techniques) have a higher pooled effect size on achievement outcomes than all other eleven intervention types in the full sample (e.g., school management programs, school supplies interventions, or interventions that change the class size or composition). The pooled effect size associated with these pedagogical interventions is 0.918 standard deviations in the full sample (SE = 0.314, df = 15.1, p = 0.01), 0.566 in the sample excluding outliers and including only randomized controlled trials (SE = 0.194, df = 11, p = 0.01), and 0.228 in a sample that includes only the highest quality studies (SE = 0.078, df = 5.2, p = 0.03). These findings are robust to a number of moderating factors. Using meta-regression, I find that on average, interventions in pedagogical methods have an effect size over 0.30 standard deviations (significant at the 5% level) greater than all other intervention areas combined, even after controlling for multiple study-level and intervention-level variables. Beyond this average effect, I show that studies that employ adaptive instruction and teacher coaching techniques are particularly effective. Further, while studies that provide health treatments or school meals have on average the lowest pooled effect size, I show that if these studies are analyzed using cognitive assessments (tests of memory and attention), health treatments actually produce a relatively large pooled effect size of 0.176 standard deviations (SE = 0.028, df = 2.18); this is particularly true of studies that either prevent or treat malaria. In addition, this meta-analysis examines the state of current education impact evaluation research in Sub-Saharan Africa and highlights both research gaps as well as differences in study design, methodology, and reporting of metrics by academic field. I find that the bulk of the research in this area comes from the field of economics (62%), followed by the fields of education (23%) and public health (15%). Further, the majority of this research has been conducted in a set of six countries: Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, Uganda, Burkina Faso, and Madagascar, while rigorous evaluations of education programs have never taken place in others. Moreover, topics currently under rigorous study are not necessarily representative of the major issues facing many Sub-Saharan African school systems today. For example, there are no impact evaluations of multi-grade or multi-shift teaching and only one evaluation of a bilingual education program. This meta-analysis thus recommends a shift in the impact evaluation research agenda to include both a broader geographic and topical focus, as well as an increased emphasis on improvements in pedagogical methods, without which other interventions may not reach their maximum potential impact.

Little research has been undertaken to show how women in South Africa are integrating their work and family lives. The purpose of this study was to generate data on one area which could facilitate such integration, namely, maternity benefits. Although employers in South Africa are prohibited from employing pregnant women for one month prior to and two months after confinement, they are not compelled by law to transfer women to less strenuous work during pregnancy or to reinstate these women after the enforced period of leave. Whilst the state has not legislated such transfers or reinstatement, they have urged employers to be "sympathetic" to requests for transfers and reinstatement. The study was designed to provide an exploratory and descriptive perspective on maternity-related rights and benefits in the textile industrial sector in selected areas of Natal. Such research data is essential for the purposes of policy advocacy and policy development. Data for this study were collected through the use of the social survey method. The main part of the study included structured interviews with all textile employers in the geographical areas of the study who employed more than ten women. The subsidiary part of the study included structured interviews with selected female employees who had become pregnant whilst working in the textile industry in the area of the study. The purposive sampling method was used. Forty-six textile employers were interviewed and 301 employee interviews were conducted at 31 of these establishments. It emerged from the study that the governmental policy of merely requesting employers to provide benefits has not been effective. In nearly all cases where a maternity benefits package was provided this was as a direct result of pressures to which employers found themselves subject. Unions were the major factor in supplying such pressure. However, even where maternity benefit packages did eventuate, there were two important factors that inhibited their availability. Firstly, women lacked sufficient education about the benefits and the ability to assert their rights sufficiently. Secondly, even where these difficulties could be overcome, no adequate legal machinery exists for the enforcement of the women's maternity-related rights.

This dissertation investigates the role of black African slaves and servants in relation to Italian Renaissance anxieties about them as ‘domestic enemies.’ Three case studies form the basis of this investigation, and include late Renaissance paintings of Judith and Holofernes, the Rape of Lucretia, and Bathsheba at her Bath. Virtually none of the biblical or classical textual accounts of these subjects ascribes an ethnicity to the servile figures. Artists, by depicting black African men, women and children as participants in scenes of threatened or enacted sexual violence, added tension to the iconography. To uncover contemporary cultural attitudes about domestic slaves and servants, documents and textual sources, such as poems and short stories, are examined. These sources provide insight about the types of fears and prejudices that people had about black domestics as potentially insidious, or even nefarious. By including such figures in their paintings, artists were able to exploit the contemporary fascination that people had with the potentially threatening nature of black slaves and servants, thereby adding a degree of titillation to their artworks. The presence of black Africans in narrative paintings evoked deeply ambivalent attitudes about these figures as both faithful and potentially threatening. / Thesis (Ph.D, Art History) -- Queen's University, 2014-02-13 15:34:27.666

Thesis (MD.(Internal Medicine)--Faculty of Health Sciences)-University of Pretoria, 2004. / Summary in English and Afrikaans. Includes bibliographical references. Adobe Acrobat reader needed to open files.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--UCLA, 2007. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 395-408).