Includes bibliographical references. / This thesis investigates the origins, development and consolidation of a regional network of three publicly funded and regulated mental institutions in the colonial Eastern Cape, between the years 1875 to 1910. Fort England asylum in Grahamstown was established in 1875. Port Alfred asylum followed in 1889 and the Fort Beaufort institution was opened in 1894. Each asylum retained its own distinctive character and function based on the nature of its patient population. Although geographically dispersed the asylums were intimately connected to each other, forming one integrated system to treat and manage the mentally ill. This thesis critically examines the changing patterns of care in these Eastern Cape institutions, during an important period of social, economic and political change in the Cape Colony. It traces the social and ideological construction of mental illness that was shaped by the racial, class and gendered hierarchies of colonial society. Based on empirical research, this thesis draws on Foucault's insights into the character and uses of disciplinary power implicated in the production of 'regimes of truth' about the mentally ill. The Eastern Cape institutions provide an important record of the ways in which the power invested in psychiatric theory and practice was exercised in a colonial context. In a moment hailed for its reform and progress in the treatment and care of mental illness, strategies for the exclusion, regulation and control of black mental patients were expanded in these Eastern Cape institutions. The major legacy in the treatment of mental illness in the Eastern Cape was the establishment of a system of control for black patients that was to inform future policy decisions after Union.

This thesis focuses on the reproductive experiences and agency of a group of isiXhosa-speaking migrants in the Cape from the 1950s to the 1980s. It examines why they decided to use contraceptive methods provided at state health facilities from 1960-1989, when they had been raised in a cultural context where a woman's reproductive capacity (fertility) was highly prized. While there have been influential quantitative demographic studies documenting the decline in fertility in this period, more qualitative, oral history studies are needed to describe African migrant women's reproductive decision-making in relation to how many children they chose to have and which points in their lives to have them. The study is based on twenty in-depth interviews conducted in isiXhosa with women who migrated between rural areas in the Transkei and Ciskei and towns and cities in the Cape. Three main findings emerged from the research. Firstly, the women all emphasised the maintenance of virginity prior to marriage was a norm that was inculcated in them during their adolescence in the rural areas. Fertility within the context of marriage was normative. Secondly, after many of these women moved to urban areas such as Cape Town, Queenstown and Kimberley, they learnt about contraceptive methods and their decision-making was also influenced by their precarious incomes and status as migrants in an apartheid context. Thirdly, a further issue explored is the extent to which the women viewed apartheid oppression as having influenced their reproductive decision-making. Many of the women argued that their use of contraceptives was not influenced by apartheid oppression, despite the fact that they experienced it with particular intensity in Cape Town and other urban areas discussed. Instead they emphasized the importance of ukuthwala in their sexual and reproductive lives. Ultimately, the study adds to our understanding of African women migrants' reproductive experiences.

This dissertation follows the lives of the children under the care Captain Brenton's Children's Friend Society to the Cape Colony in the period 1833- 1842. Using the works of prominent Cape Colony historians such as Banks, Worden and Ross, l give an overview of the Cape Colony around the time of emancipation. My work includes an in depth study of the results of the 1839 Commission of Inquiry, which contained summaries of over 400 interviews with CFS apprentices stationed in the Cape Colony. Furthermore, I place great emphasis on the reporting by The Times in London on the activities of the CFS. My research highlights their humanitarian and anti-slavery rhetoric with regards to the children. This work attempts to highlight the role of the Times in the falling of the Society, the treatment of the children in the Cape and the failure of the parties involved to enact any change in the situations experienced by the CFS apprentices.

This thesis explores ways in which the First World War affected Cape Town. It addresses the absence of research on urban histories in South Africa and non-European urban histories of the war. It tells of the history in Cape Town and the history of Cape Town during the war. By drawing on a variety of primary sources – government and city records, organisational archives, print media - it demonstrates some of the infrastructural, economic and social consequences of the war on the city. The thesis is structured in three main parts. The first considers the city on the advent of the war and Capetonians' responses to its declaration. This related to the Anglo-Boer War and the 1910 formation of Union, and Cape Town's particular history of Anglicisation. It also explores how war changed the experience of daily life, imbuing the city with war-related sights, sounds and symbols. The second part of the thesis emphasises that the war was a period of considerable infrastructural and demographic change. The city's work-force, too was affected by the war, whilst a rise in living-expenses, and a wartime spread of socialist ideas, led to intensified strike action. This was notable for increased cross-racial co-operation, as well as the marked presence of semi- and unskilled workers organising en-mass for the first time. The third part of the thesis speaks to subjective depictions of Cape Town. It considers three main discourses about the city – ‘slum city,' ‘sin city' and ‘destination city' - indicating the co-existence of multiple and sometimes contrasting representations of wartime Cape Town. Lastly, the war was a period of heightened identifications with Britain, which cut across race, gender and class lines. Nevertheless wartime patriotism was inconsistently sustained, with certain events fuelling feelings of loyalty towards Empire and animosity towards those deemed as ‘disloyal.' Overall it is concluded that although the war has faded in Cape Town's popular memory, it was important to how many Capetonians identified themselves. Moreover it was a significant catalyst for change, informing debates and subsequent policies about health, segregation and the future of South African cities.

This thesis is a study of the changing meanings of the thing that is 'Mapungubwe' (most often considered as a thirteenth-century southern African state) within and outside the academy from 1937 and 2017, deliberately excluding meanings that might have existed prior to 1937, analysing the socio-political work Mapungubwe has been made to do in this period. The study explores the shaping and positioning of evidence in the production of narratives that ascribe and/or enforce particular truths or regimes of truth. To do this, I consider the politico-cultural associations that convert an object into evidence of something and make that evidence meaningful. Under what conditions, and for what reasons does this conversion occur? And, what specific meaning is imposed into the object? This is, therefore, an analytical disaggregation and political assessment of the particular signs and symbols through which the composite and contested imaginaire of Mapungubwe has been historically constructed. Necessarily, it is also an unpicking of the languages of evidence. The work is divided into three parts, each dealing with a different strut in the making of Mapungubwe. The first chapter covers the archaeological production of Mapungubwe, from the first excavational work conducted in the 1930s, until more recent work, during the 2010s. During the early twentieth century, the topic of Mapungubwe was cloistered within academic archaeology, particularly at the University of Pretoria. It was only after the end of apartheid that the 'trope' of Mapungubwe began to be deployed in an increasingly wider social realm and integrated into multiple educational and heritage projects, with particular encouragement from the state. The second chapter looks at the introduction and development of the theme of Mapungubwe in the South African national history education curriculum after 2003, when it was also made a UNESCO World Heritage Site and harnessed as name of the Order of Mapungubwe. The chapter analyses the narrative presentation of Mapungubwe in the existing curriculum, and the attending conceptual devices through which this narrative is constructed and sustained. The third chapter scans the explosion of Mapungubwe in popular discourses, about a decade after its strategic foregrounding in school education and institutionalisation as heritage. In this chapter I examine several literary narratives, artistic productions and promotional activities of tourism in conjunction with the current political and economic developments in the area. I make use of sources from various different academic disciplines, including archaeology, history, politics, education and history education, literary theory, as well as relevant samples from fictive writing, sculpture, poetry, touristic longform writing, and advertisements. In bringing together such diverse orders of discourse, the thesis attempts to map the expanding topographies of Mapungubwe - a venture that, I submit, has methodological and topical significance beyond the immediate field of inquiry. Through this work, the reader will be able to see how the language used to describe and inscribe meaning in Mapungubwe has changed over time, exposing the malleability of (precolonial) history in the hands of both professionals and non-professionals. The thesis makes clear to the reader the importance of 'popular' representations of history in the development of modern culture, both in terms of reproducing existing conditions, as well as resisting them. Finally, the thesis troubles the concept of the 'precolonial', and considers what changing purpose the period has had over time, how it shapes our view of history, and how we could alternatively envisage the precolonial and, thus, history.

This dissertation seeks to explore the ways in which the multiple layers of infrastructure and archive have been coconstituted in Ovamboland from 1915 to 1968 in an effort to store, circulate and redirect water and its knowledge, which in turn seemed to frequently escape and exceed them. In the existent historiography of Ovamboland, infrastructure has usually been taken as a passive background to policies, designs and intentions of an all-knowing colonizing state. In foregrounding infrastructure as its analytical object, this thesis attempts to challenge such self-images of the state, to complicate the standard political chronology of rule, and to examine the various ways in which technical assemblages were both constituted by and productive of broader social, political and economic configurations. Methodologically, the dissertation is attentive to the spiral and palimpsestic nature of infrastructure – in other words, the ways in which new layers of infrastructure had to necessarily rely on, adopt and adapt to older sociotechnical strata. This awareness also allows the work to interrogate the received binary between the Europeans and the natives, pointing instead at their multiple entanglements and imbrications. The first chapter looks at the early attempt of the South African officials to master the underground borehole and well technology, and shows how in the process of extending their political and economic control over the hydroscape, they were necessarily reliant not only on local labour but also on indigenous knowledge and experience. The emergent borehole and well infrastructure of the region was critically connected to older social, political, A b s t r a c t epistemological and technical forms, and embedded in entrenched configurations of cattle, agriculture and land. The second chapter, as it were, moves closer to the surface in order to analyse the production of dam infrastructure as a form of famine-relief work, and eventually the introduction of the Tribal Trust Fund System. It shows how this dam infrastructure, while drawing from precolonial designs and local knowledge, established and acted out new relations between money, grain and labour. Crucially embedded in the colonial refashioning of ‘tribal' economies, the financial infrastructure of the Tribal Trust Fund System, superimposed on the well and dam infrastructure, was devised to operationalise a particular managerial regime of the flows of labour, grain and cash. The third chapter looks at such forms of water infrastructure where the state took a more centralised and developmental approach. It shows that in the attempts to manage the water infrastructure in a self-described scientific and technical manner, the new infrastructure still necessarily adapted to and adopted earlier knowledge, techniques and practices, while older layers of infrastructure continued to operate beside and within it. This chapter explores how the introduction of major canals and hydroelectric power generation led to a new intense developmentalist approach by the state where attempted to design a total integrated water infrastructure and economy.

This paper focuses on the Islamic manuscripts of Cape Town, locally referred to as kietaabs, written by Muslims predominantly in the 19th century, in jawi (Arabic-Malay) and Arabic-Afrikaans. Inspired by the idea of a 'biography' of the archive and 'the social life of things', the study traces the life of the kietaabs, from their creation and original use, to their role in contemporary South African society, as objects of heritage and identity. It approaches the kietaabs as objects, emphasizing their movements, status and use, rather than their content.

Includes abstract.~Includes bibliographical references (leaves 105-109). / This essay looks at the relationship between History and Myth in the literature of the grand shaykh of the Qâdiri ṭarîqa of West Africa Shaykh al-Mukhtâr al-Kuntî (d.1811). It explores the role that "miracles" played in his society and how he dealt with this concept in his literary works. By looking at one of his major works, this study wishes to determine how he combined historical fact with myth and what the underlying reasons were for his approach. While the conclusion suggests that the Shaykh indeed employed myth within his writing it further shows how he used this mechanism to maintain a careful balance between his role as a traditional Islamic scholar and as a leader, thus strengthening his position as the head of the Kunta clan and the Qâdirî ṭarîqa.

Includes bibliographical references. / This thesis sets out to examine the important role of the Xhosa in the development of King William's Town during a crucial period. The local Xhosa community and the nearby Arna Ntinde tribe under Chief Jan Tzatzoe obviously made a major contribution to the history of British Kaffraria's capital in this era (1854-1861), but there were many other external forces. The interaction between cultures in and around King William's Town affected the Xhosa at all levels. This process of acculturation was hastened by many of Sir George Grey's administrative measures. He established several institutions in the Kaffrarian capital for the benefit of the Xhosa population as a whole and some aspects of his "native policy" are still applied on a national basis. Grey's administration therefore forms one of the central issues.

Bibliography: pages 134-142. / This thesis will aim to explore the relationship between the battle of Dithakong and 'mfecane' theory in connection with the growing critique led by Julian Cobbing. Essentially, it will be argued that certain aspects of 'mfecane' theory appear in fact tenable, with particular reference to the upheavals west of the Drakensberg in the years 1822-4, as the thesis seeks to establish the original version of events at Dithakong. Ever since Cobbing has questioned the fundamental tenets of 'mfecane' theory and suggested rather that the destabilizations within black society during the 1820's sprang from European penetration, there have been efforts to give his ideas academic credibility. Dithakong is one key event within the 'mfecane' diaspora that has been attempted to be explained without reference to African agency. Julian Cobbing, Jurg Richner and Jan-Bart Gewald have presented these alternative analyses which, although similar in broader intention, are distinct in detailed explanation. Whereas in the past, Dithakong has been viewed as a defensive battle against the threatening advance of a numerous and destitute 'mfecane' migratory group, the latest versions interpret the events in terms of a raid on an unprovoked and unaggressive people. Although noting the advances made by Cobbing and others, it will be argued that with regard to Dithakong their analyses are forced and suited to meet the respective demands of their larger suppositions, which ultimately brings their singular Eurocentric theory of violence into question. To this end, certain elements within 'mfecane' theory require to be reconsidered.