Travel writing criticism has sometimes suggested that little travel writing has been produced by Africans. This thesis shows that this is not the case, through a literary study of writing about travel published in Yoruba-speaking southwestern Nigeria between 1914 and 2014. This is a study of writing about domestic travel – Nigerians travelling within Nigeria – and of both Yoruba- and English-language texts. It is both a study of conventional ‘travel writing’ such as first-person travelogues, and of the motif of travel in writing more broadly: it encompasses serialised newspaper columns, historical writing, novels, autobiography, book-length travelogues and online writing. As well as close readings, this study draws on archival research and an in-depth interview with travel writer Pelu Awofeso. This is not an exhaustive study but rather a series of case studies, placed in their historical context. I examine southwestern Nigerian writers’ re resentations of laces within Nigeria and changing communal identities: local, translocal, regional and national. I explore their ideas about the benefits of travel and travel writing, knowledge and cosmopolitanism. I argue that we can read these texts as products of a local print culture, addressed to local readers, as well as in relation to the broader travel writing tradition.

Considerable historical attention has been paid to the end of Empire in Britain’s East African colonies and the consequences of this for postcolonial states. The forced migration of minority South Asian populations from the new nation-states of East Africa has received considerably less attention. South Asians remain at the margins of African and British national histories, constructed variously as either fringe opponents of anti-colonial nationalist movements or marginalised minorities. Yet re-assessing the history of these ‘refugee’ communities has the potential to enhance scholarly understanding of both colonial and postcolonial power relations and migrant-refugee identity formulation and re-formulation. Moreover, studies of migrant communities in Britain have tended to treat South Asians as a homogenous group, paying relatively little attention to the specific identity trajectories of those who were expelled from the new nation-states of East Africa. In contrast, this research takes as its starting point the transnational experiences of East African Asians as multiple migrants, exploring the reformulation of political and cultural identities during the course of their expulsion, migration and resettlement in and between postcolonial states.

This thesis explores the role of South African business as non-state actors (NSAs) in South Africa’s post-apartheid economic diplomacy. The work is an empirical contribution to the debate within diplomacy studies asserting the importance of NSAs in diplomacy studies and that the inclusion of economic considerations in diplomacy studies is crucial. Whilst a broader agenda in diplomacy studies is increasingly being recognised by diplomacy scholars, there is limited case-based evidence of the increasingly active role being played by NSAs in diplomacy generally and economic diplomacy more specifically. The research uses a multistakeholder diplomacy framework to analyse the extent to and ways in which corporate actors engage in South Africa’s post-apartheid economic diplomacy. This study explores specific business activities around economic diplomacy, expounds why South African business adopts different strategies at different times and crucially examines how corporate actors do this. The thesis identifies three distinct modes of corporate diplomacy: consultative, supplementary, and entrepreneurial. The thesis concludes that corporate diplomacy warrants far more scholarly attention than has hitherto been the case, both in developed and emerging economies, on the basis that corporate actors in South Africa play a crucial role in economic diplomacy, both as consumers and producers of diplomatic outcomes.

Nontyphoidal Salmonella (NTS) are a major cause of fatal bacteremia in Africa. We investigated the role of bactericidal antibody in complement-mediated killing of NTS. Immunised mice serum lacked such activity due to weak complement activity. Mouse anti-Salmonella antibodies were able to effect killing when given a source of human complement. Human serum bactericidal assays showed that the serum-susceptibility of an African clinical isolate varied based on growth conditions. In vitro kinetics of serum-killing, phagocytosis and antibody and complement deposition indicated that a proportion of Salmonellae are phagocytised before serum-killing occurs and this may explain how the protective effects of anti-Salmonella antibodies are undermined in IFN\(\gamma\) deficiency. We studied targets of bactericidal antibodies using an optimised serum-adsorption procedure and a range of different NTS strains and serovars as well as LPS mutants. Antibodies against the immuno-dominant O-antigen (OAg) were a major target of bactericidal antibodies against NTS in human serum. These data support development of an OAg based vaccine against NTS. Finally, using electron microscopy, we showed the physical effects of serum-killing on Salmonellae and also demonstrated that a major difference between inhibitory and bactericidal serum was the quantity of complement deposited on Salmonellae.

Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) establishes a chronic infection, usually effectively controlled by the cellular immune response. However, EBV has the potential to escape immune control, such as during malaria exposure, or modulate the immune response. In this study, immune control of EBV was examined in Gambian children in two situations: during malaria exposure and early after EBV infection. Additionally, EBV infection may also inhibit vaccine induced antibody responses, hence its impact on a childhood pentavalent vaccine was studied, but infection had no effect. In contrast to historical studies, acute malaria infection was not associated with impaired immunity to EBV, a finding potentially explained by the declining malaria exposure in The Gambia. Children recently infected with EBV had evidence of activated EBV-specific T-cell responses, with latent and lytic epitope-specific responses of equal magnitude. Several donors identified as undergoing primary asymptomatic EBV infection had virus genome loads equivalent to those of acute infectious mononucleosis (AIM) patients. In contrast to AIM patients they did not show a peripheral lymphocytosis but did have significant expansions of activated EBV-specific CD8+ T-cells, which were lower or perhaps more focused than in AIM patients, suggesting that the highly expanded T-cell populations and not virus load drives AIM pathogenesis.

This thesis offers a comparative analysis of British wartime civilian internment policies, focusing on three key case studies: the South African War (1899-1902), the First World War and the Second World War. It seeks to determine the place of the ‗concentration camps‘ of the South African War within the history of internment and the extent to which world war internment episodes were shaped by both historical and contemporary experiences. It suggests that reactions to internment, at both state and popular levels, are revealing about Britain‘s self-image in relation to civil rights, justice and the treatment of minorities. In particular, the thesis argues that gender ideologies were highly significant in determining the development of internment policies, playing a central role in shaping popular images of the enemy and underpinning official assumptions about the treatment of women by the state. The debates and discussions which emerged around internment policy also provide insight into the ways in which the experience of war can accentuate the exclusion of minorities and the reinforcement of racial stereotypes. The thesis examines the ways in which racialized and gendered discourses converged during each conflict to create particular understandings of the enemy, which in turn had a discernible impact on the development of internment policies.

The core of my dissertation is devoted to a re-interpretation of the history of the liberation movement in South Africa in two critical periods of its development. The first I call in short 'the 1940s' but shall be referring more specifically to the years between 1939 and the rise of apartheid in 1948; the second I call 'the 1950s' but shall refer to the years between the emergence of apartheid and the defeat of the liberation movement in 1964. Both the 1940s and the 1950s were marked by fierce class struggles which brought with them hopes of a new democratic order in South Africa; both closed on the sombre note of defeat for democracy and triumph for the forces of reaction and racism. Motivated by a dissatisfaction with prevailing interpretations, I shall explore what went wrong in these years in order to deepen our understanding of the political culture and social base of the liberation movement. I have focussed on these two historical periods because I see the basic parameters of the contemporary liberation movement as set by the class struggles which occurred within them. My central hypothesis is that, although class relations do not on the whole manifest themselves directly on the surface of the liberation movement, they have nonetheless been the crucial determinants of its pattern of evolution. My introductory chapter will be devoted to a theoretical discussion of the relation between nationalism and socialism in the South Africa liberation movement. It was written after the historical research and its ideas reflect a considerable change of mind which resulted from the research; the ideas expressed within it provide a necessary foundation for understanding what I wish to say through the substantive history. My final section will be an attempt to outline the major lessons which I draw from the history of these class struggles; it focusses on what I see as the unresolved conflict between the two traditions of 'radical liberalism' and 'insurrectionism' which run through the history of the liberation struggle and on defining what I see as the 'absent centre' of this history: social democracy or more accurately the social democratic movement of the working class.

In this thesis, I present a theoretical framework in which children's voluntary participation in armed conflict becomes a reasonable act within their social environment. I argue that in order to gain a more analytical understanding of why children volunteer, social scientists require an in-depth knowledge of the political, social and economic conditions in which they join up And of the meanings that children attach to those situations and their reactions. Prior quantitative data on the social distribution of child volunteering have often been used to proclaim that `the most vulnerable of the vulnerable' are recruited. On the basis of a discourse analysis of UNHCR's policies and activities in relation to under-age recruitment, I illustrate my claim that dominant Euro-American conceptualisations of childhood have primarily shaped research and humanitarian aid regarding child soldiering and resulted in the portrayal of child soldiers as innocent victims who are corrupted by adult wars. I subsequently go on to show how a new paradigm for the study of childhood can enhance contemporary knowledge on the social processes and factors that lead children to consider and eventually join a military group or opt for an alternative mode of action to cope with their dire situation. In my qualitative case-study of child soldiering in the anti-apartheid struggle, I found that in joining a political organisation and subsequently its military wing, young South Africans sought to assert their (political) agency within the structural and cultural features that shaped their social environment. Within the context of changing peer and intergenerational relationships, these children carved out more powerful identities for them to address the social injustices that had affected their personal and collective lives.

The thesis, supervised by Jean Lafontaine, focussed on migration from the Comoro Islands near Madagascar, to Zanzibar and the East African Swahili coast, between the 1830s and the 1970s. Comorians had shared a common history and culture with the Swahili for many centuries; in colonial East Africa, chance offered them a unique ‘racial’ and employment niche which evaporated abruptly after 1964 and East African independence. They had suddenly to reassess marriage, residence and self-definition strategies, and their implications for the future. The thesis addressed ethnic identity (which had focussed excessively on its immutability) and demonstrated its adaptability to changing political and economic context. The study also attempted to escape from timeless, fixed-location ethnography, and followed links which led to data-collection in several East African and Comorian locations. Finally, by following Comorian choices over 150 years, the thesis made a contribution to an understanding of broader Swahili history which demands similar light-footed mobility through time and space for the processes of change to be understood. Gill Shepherd completed her PhD at a time when university recruitment was a standstill. Instead she built a career in tropical forest policy at London’s Overseas Development Institute, and focussed on rights for forest peoples.

This thesis addresses the question of why, when almost everyone says they wish it would end, suffering such as that in northern Uganda continues. I argue that, contrary to popular presentations, the situation is not primarily one of war between the Lord’s Resistance Army and the Government of Uganda, but instead a form of mass torture, which I call Social Torture. The principal victims are the population within the ‘war zone’, particularly in ‘protected villages’ for the internally displaced, where tactics and symptoms typical of torture, including violation, dread, disorientation, dependency, debilitation and humiliation, are widespread. The most visible perpetrators are the Government and LRA, but a range of less visible actors are also involved, not least donor governments, multi-lateral organisations, academics, churches and NGOs. In many instances these can be regarded as complicit bystanders; like doctors in a torture situation, they appear to be there to ease the suffering of victims, but in reality they enable the process to be prolonged by keeping the victim alive for further abuse. This serves a number of interlinked economic, political and psychological functions for perpetrators and bystanders alike, and is underpinned by psychological and discursive processes of justification, most importantly the idea that this situation is first and foremost a ‘war’ between the LRA and the Government. In short, in a situation such as northern Uganda, means and ends are inverted: rather than torture being a tactic with which to prosecute war, here war is the guise under which Social Torture is perpetrated. War continues because Social Torture is not addressed. Given that those who in principle have the most power to do so are implicated in Social Torture themselves, the focus has to shift from the intentions of visible perpetrators to the responsibilities of a far wider range of actors.