Student Number : 0419845J - MA research report - School of Arts - Faculty of Humanities / The aim of this research report is to explore the extent to which public art in postapartheid, democratic South Africa may contribute both to urban regeneration and nation building as well as the extent to which contemporary African monumental public art could reflect African heritage and traditions (Nettleton 2003:3). Another issue that is explored is the role of patronage in determining the function of public art in post-apartheid South Africa. Case studies in the form of two examples of post-apartheid public, namely the Freedom Park and the Constitution Hill projects art are used to explore the functions of public art in South Africa. In summary this research report therefore analyses: • The nature and function of public art-historical issues; • The practical issues affecting the production of public art in post-apartheid South Africa; • The socio-political factors that mitigate for or against the ability of public art to function effectively in the post-apartheid South African context; and • How these functions feed into the broader issues of making a contribution in a demographically complex, post-apartheid South Africa.

There is general consensus that the reorganisation of production and labour processes and shift in union ideological focus and growth of bureaucratic structures have resulted in the diminishing of a collective voice at most workplaces. This study explores the challenges facing shop stewards at the shop floor in their day to day activities in the aftermath of these changes and examines ways through which they get around them. The day to day activities of shop stewards is not a new phenomenon. However shop stewards have not been targeted as subject for study since democratisation. Where they were mentioned, it was mostly due to their involvement at the shop floor where they are required to carry the workers grievances to the management as well as explaining union standpoint to constituent. The study affirms arguments by previous researchers that shop stewards play a contradictory role, trying to satisfy the aspirations of the constituents who elected the stewards as well as management, the stewards’ pay master who expect the steward to be a social partner, though the relationship is highly unequal. The study noted that though they are social partners, management is insincere when it comes to work environment where it’s not meeting the minimum safety requirements. Moreover, union bureaucratic structures though they are meant to increase efficiency have wiped shop floor democracy since decisions are mostly handed down from the top, confirming the argument that as organisations grows bigger, they tend towards oligarchy. In-depth interviews were conducted at one plant in Wadeville and another on in Nigel local of NUMSA’s Ekurhuleni region. The interviews were complemented with documentary analysis as well as observation during shop steward council meetings.

Student Number :0318744F - MA research report - School of Arts - Faculty of Humanities / Title: LIVING DANGEROUSLY Subtitle: HIV/Aids, masculinity and the post-apartheid generation: A case study AIM: to investigate via the story of one young South African man the complexity of dealing with HIV/Aids in South Africa. RATIONALE: With the ending of apartheid and the rise of HIV/Aids, there has been a clear crisis of masculinity in the wake of social change. Government response to the epidemic has been ambiguous. Fana Khaba, aka Yfm DJ Khabzela, was the first young black celebrity to publicly declare he had Aids. I plan to follow his story and to look at HIV/Aids campaigns and to examine why they are not working. METHODOLOGY: Through a literature review, an examination of statistics and public health messaging on HIV/Aids and my investigation into the life of Fana Khaba, I will show the complexities currently not being considered in the compilation of public health messaging. The reason I chose to follow the story of Fana Khaba is because I am a South African deeply concerned about HIV/Aids. I found his life compelling because it encapsulated so much of the rapid and intense culture shift that followed the arrival of democracy in 1994. And because his life echoed that of a pivotal generation in the apartheid struggle: the generation who grew up in Soweto in the seventies and eighties and came to adulthood with democracy. The so-called “lost generation” who later became known as the “Y generation”, they are deeply affected by the pandemic. I intend to show that Fana Khaba was a hugely popular iconic figure for the generation because he spoke to their aspirations and their anxieties. I will argue that because his life experience resonated so strongly with this generation, it is reasonable to draw more general lessons from it. The chief executive officer of Yfm was a friend of mine and, through him, I am able to gain access to Khabzela, his family, friends and colleagues at Yfm. This is an exceptional opportunity to gain an inside view of a life not readily available to relative outsiders such as myself. Clearly there is an ethical issue here. I will at all times keep my interviewees informed about the purpose of my research. I hope to help shed light on this anguished, important and under-debated sphere of life in South Africa.. The format I choose is part investigative journalism, part biography. The reason for this is that I have worked as a journalist for 25 years so all my skills and training point me in that direction. I wanted to make it accessible in order to reach as many people as possible. The narrative-biographical form is conducive to this because it is easy to engage with. In order to give the narrative tension and focus, I shall repeatedly employ the central question of why Fana Khaba refused to take the anti-retrovirals which might have saved his life.

Magister Artium - MA / This mini-thesis, ‘Exhumation, Reburial and History Making in South Africa’, is concerned with an analysis of the practices of exhumation and reburial through discussing the case studies of the Iron-Age archaeological site of Mapungubwe, the Vergelegen Wine Estate in Somerset West and the reburials carried out by the Missing Persons Task Team (MPPT) from the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA), particularly its unsuccessful attempt at exhumations at the Stikland Cemetery, in an attempt to understand how they form part of the production of history. These case studies conceive of the times of the precolonial, slavery and apartheid, and are all linked temporally to an envisaged future through ideas of nation building and nationalism. As narratives produced through these exhumations and reburials, they contribute to the notion of making the post-apartheid by remaking history and reconstituting nation. Each of these case studies are significant as they in some way have been utilized in a manner that is relevant to us in the new democratic South Africa. This mini-thesis aims at rethinking the role of archaeologists, the exhumation and reburial processes, the construction of ethnicity, how the dead are used to construct narratives of struggle against apartheid and in general the implications each of these have on the re-making of history. It also thinks about what the practices of exhumation and reburial mean conceptually and how they relate to the concept of missingness, which I refer to as the process of making absence or invisibility. Thinking about exhumations and reburial in this way has allowed reflection on the purpose of the practices, in terms of who it’s for and how it’s perceived by the stakeholders involved in each case. Through dissecting each of these issues one may be able to trace how the remains to be reburied become missing. Therefore, the question of exhumation and reburial is essential in thinking about what it does for the human remains and how their identity is either shaped or lost. This thesis mainly argues that the remains in each of the case studies go through various phases of missingness and that their reburials and memorialization, or in the case of Stikland the spiritual repatriation, inscribes them further into narratives of the times that they emerged from.

Magister Artium - MA / This study focuses on how we can interpret political meanings embedded in Gladys Mgudlandlu’s work by concentrating on her landscapes, murals, and portraits during the period of the 1960s – 1980s. The core of my thesis is to question whether the artwork of Mgudlandlu was political. The thesis argues that Mgundlandlu’s talents and interventions have been overlooked and undermined. Engaging with a deep analysis of the context in which Mgudlandlu lived and worked, a visual analysis of her paintings and a discussion on the meaning of her life and work from various vantage points across time substantiates the above argument. The study engages with three fundamental approaches. Firstly it approaches Mgudlandlu’s work through how it is articulated and historicized as part of the struggle against apartheid in South Africa before 1994. Here I disrupt the idea that her work was out of touch with reality and that her work was of a naivety that isolated herself from the struggles of black people. I further argue that her work transcends the norms and expectations of black artists during this period. Her work in many ways challenges stereotypes and broke social conventions by painting landscape: something which was mostly associated with older white male artists. Thus I advocate for a reconsideration of her work by revisiting her landscape painting which carries most of the weight of my argument regarding Mgudlandlu’s political stand. My second approach is to explore the production and process of her work by concentrating on cultural workshops and their role in South African art during the apartheid period. Mgudlandlu’s creation and production process was very different from her counterparts which is explored through a careful analysis of Mgudlandlu’s paintings.

Philosophiae Doctor - PhD / In the thesis, I analyse a facilitated pilot project of integration of health care services at the community-level. The importance of the thesis is justified by three reasons: firstly integration and the creation of a district health system, as envisaged under Primary Health Care, is promoted as the solution to the health inequalities inherited from Apartheid in South Africa. However, many pilot integration projects have failed and analysing a failed project from an anthropological perspective provides valuable insight. Secondly a renewed interest in Primary Health Care, as the World Health Report of 2008 sets out, also makes this a pertinent pursuit from an international viewpoint. Thirdly the human experience is often ignored in health reform literature. I argue that anthropology can provide valuable insight into integration processes in a health system. Because anthropology explores the human experience, it provides a detailed understanding of the changes in a community health system and their impact on all role players. The data presented in the thesis were collected in an ethnographic communitylevel study in one township urban South Africa between October 1999 and October 2002. This makes this it a historical piece of work to a degree. I describe and critically analyse the facilitated process from the start of the project in October 1999 till its disintegration in failure in June 2001. I also describe and analyse the findings from community research conducted in 2002. For the analysis, firstly I build upon Scott’s concepts of dominance and resistance from his book Dominance and the Arts of Resistance to construct a framework. I argue that to understand a change process fully requires considering the historical context, the international arena, the present context and the facilitator.

Philosophiae Doctor - PhD / This study approaches the field of military history with approaches to the study of sound in order to interrogate the concept of war that underpins military historiography as a disciplinary formation. It delineates the notion of the phonographic attitude with which to think about the ways in which technology, war, and the senses coalesce in broader historical writing about war, colonialism, and apartheid in South Africa. In so doing, it suggests that an attention to what it calls the warring motifs is necessary if a reorientation of a reading of war and apartheid away from a politics of deadness is to be achieved. It does so through a methodological approach that attends to various objects in South African historiography that may be attended to differently through an emphasis on the sensorial. These include the state-sponsored Walkman bomb that killed ANC lawyer Bheki Mlangeni, a record produced by artist Roger Lucey in memory of the death of activist Lungile Tabalaza, the supposed whistle or shout that led the indigenous Khoikhoi to victory over the Portuguese in 1510, a lithographic print by William Kentridge named after a radio programme for troops engaged in South Africa’s border war, the bell of sunken troopship SS Mendi, and the first recording of the hymn ‘Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika’ by intellectual and key figure in a history of nationalism in South Africa, Sol T Plaatje.

This study lays bare the inconsistencies in the United States of America’s Foreign Policy, and how it contributed to the longevity of apartheid in South Africa. Michael Mandelbaum opined that America’s foreign policy post-Cold War era drifted from containment to transformation.1 America became involved with transferring their democracy and constitutional order to the countries they entangled with in running those countries’ internal governance. Instead of war, America preached and practiced proper, organized governance. Thus, America’s foreign policy to Europe and Asia post-Cold War was all about democracy and protection of fundamental human rights. However, the role of America’s Foreign Policy in Africa took a turn in Africa, with Congo in 1960, Ghana in 1966 and Nigeria with their successive military regimes. This study intends to make sense of it all.

Thesis(M. A.(Communication studies)) -- University of Limpopo, 2018 / Twenty-three years since the transition into the democratic government, the South African post-apartheid government continues to grapple with the challenges of recurring trends of youth protests. The post-apartheid government has been experiencing violent protest actions resulting from dissatisfactions with poor service delivery or lack of social services, unemployment, slow pace of transformation in some South African socio-economic spaces, specifically institutions of higher learning and agitation for affordable access to tertiary education. Many young people demand social change through protest action, which often results in destruction of public infrastructure for this method seems to be an effective way of communicating grievances (Mbindwane, 2016). A first trend in youth protest is related to economic issues and social service provision. This qualitative study explored how high rates of unemployment amongst the youth and poor service delivery was a concern and a motivation for protests. The study of youth protests in the Fetakgomo-Greater Tubatse Municipality in the Limpopo Province was used as a case study, with the protests being used as a tool of communicating socio-economic challenges. Unemployment amongst the youth and poor service delivery in the municipality were challenges that motivated young people to actively communicate their dissatisfactions through toyi-toying (street protest). The municipality has been reported to have the highest rate of youth unemployment, standing at 53, 5%, in spite of the 18 mines that operate in the region (Statistics South Africa, 2016). A second motivation for youth protest trend in post-apartheid South Africa is affordable access to higher education. Exorbitant tuition fees, annual increments, and agitation for affordable access to tertiary education have made headlines since September 2015 when the Minister of Higher Education, Dr Blade Nzimande, announced that university fees were going to rise by 11, 5% in the 2016 academic year. The study revealed that tertiary education has become a commodity in the country and many students from economically disadvantaged backgrounds could not afford to pay for their fees. The drastic fee increments also exceeded expectations of those earning enough to pay for their children’s education, to an extent where they felt that the cost of education was clearing their pockets. The study further showed that the funding mechanisms failed to keep up with the ever-increasing tuition fees. The National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS) and other student loans/bursaries could no longer provide full bursaries as students’ tuition rose exponentially. The final trend of youth protests studied in this paper related to transformation and decolonisation of academic spaces – the case of #RhodesMustFall campaign. The sluggish transformation in South Africa, particularly in institutions of higher learning, first triggered student demonstrations at the University of Cape Town (UCT) and eventually spread to almost the rest of South African universities. The study further discovered that the presence of the Rhodes’ statue at UCT prompted a variety of emotions and rage among students, predominantly the previously marginalised. It appeared to be a constant reminder of colonial oppression and slow pace of transformation in the academia. Amongst other things, the study found that students pressed for the removal of all symbols of colonialism, from renaming streets that are perceived to carry the apartheid legacy, decolonising the curriculum, and advocating for greater representation of Black people in senior management positions, specifically the women as they were less represented in the past.Through in-depth qualitative interviews with selected youth, university management representatives, government representatives, and media archival materials, the study examined the concerns that shaped the trends and the nature of youth protests in the post-apartheid South Africa and explored how activism and protests were not merely a social agitation, but tools for communicating youth social and economic experiences.

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