The aim of this study was to explore the perceptions of RDP beneficiaries on the extent to which the RDP housing project meets their housing needs in South Africa through a case study of Golf Course Estate in Alice Town with the following specific objectives; to assess the extent to which the Alice Golf Course housing project has achieved the RDP programme objectives; to establish beneficiaries‟ perceptions on the extent the RDP Alice Golf Course houses meet their needs; and to explore the level of satisfaction on the RDP houses by beneficiaries. This study utilized triangulation of both quantitative and qualitative methodologies with qualitative as the dominant approach while quantitative was less dominant. The qualitative design took the form of a case study while the quantitative took the form of mini survey. The study sampled 72 participants from the study population. The study utilized an interview guide and a questionnaire as instruments of data collection. The findings indicated that the gender representation of the beneficiaries was skewed. This is because there were more females heading the houses than males; unemployment was also high; most participants were unmarried and most were adults. This study also discovered that most people residing in these houses are not the real owners who were allocated the houses. There were qualitative problems associated with the components of these houses such as poor roofing, doors, windows, floors and walls. Service delivery complaints were based on inadequate access to clean water, small size and spacing of the RDP house. Security was also a challenge because all the houses did not have street lights and the roads were very bad. Though it is commendable that drainage and sewer facilities are available, but they are not serving their purpose since there is no water in these houses. The findings also indicated that there were discrepancies in allocation of the houses; pervasiveness of social ills; inadequate consultative meetings between the RDP Administrator or social worker and the beneficiaries; as well as the pervasiveness of HIV/AIDS among other issues. This researcher recommended that the government needs to promote economic empowerment to deal with unemployment; to improve the quality of the material building the houses; improvement on service delivery gaps; to beef up infrastructure; renovation and revamping of current houses; to establish commissions of inquiry to deal with corruption; to honour and monitor waiting lists. Partnership with other stakeholders was also critical, in addressing access to social services and helps deal with social ills and run behaviour modification campaigns. This researcher also recommended that there is a need to carry out further research on the role played by the municipalities in the RDP housing project as well as conducting a purely qualitative research to further explore the perceptions of other stakeholders, NGOs, traditional leaders, church leaders, and police on the implementation of the housing project. This researcher advises that such a research could be carried out through focus group discussions and also since this study was bound by a case study it is also necessary for similar research to be carried out in different places in South Africa.

This thesis covers a period of drastic change in that part of Xhosaland later known as Victoria East. Chapters one and two deal with the clash between the Glasgow missionaries at Lovedale and the amaXhosa who were expected to simply discard their way of life in favour of the new dispensation. Chapter three explains the arrival in the Eastern Cape of the amaMfengu, formerly called abaMbo, and their role in the divisive policies of the colonial government. Chapter four recounts the brief interlude (1836-1846) during which the colonial government tried but ultimately rejected a more equitable model of cross-border relations known as the Treaty System. The final chapter deals with the introduction of direct rule over the newly-created district of Victoria East, and with the policies of Henry Calderwood, its first magistrate, which were artfully constructed to perpetuate ‘Divide and Rule’ so as to maintain a comfortable life for the white settlers in the border area.

Scholarship has firmly established that the short story cycle is well-suited to representations of community. This study considers eight North American examples of the genre: four by Canadian authors Stephen Leacock, Duncan Campbell Scott, George Elliott, and Alice Munro; and four by American authors Sarah Orne Jewett, Sherwood Anderson, John Cheever, and Joyce Carol Oates. My original idea was to discover whether there were significant differences between the Canadian and American cycles, but ultimately I became far more interested in the way that all of the cycles address community formation and disintegration. The focus of each cycle is a small community, whether a small town, a village, or a suburb. In all of the examples, the authors address the small community as the focus of anxiety, concern, criticism, and praise, with special attention to the way in which, despite its manifold failings, the small community continues to inspire longings for the ideal home and source of identity. The narrative feature that ultimately provided the critical framework for the study is the recurring presence of the metropolis in all of the eight cycles. The city, set on the horizons of these small communities, consistently provides a backdrop against which author and characters seem to measure and understand their lives. Always an influence (whether for good or bad), the city’s presence is constructed as the other against which the small community’s identity is formulated and understood. The relationship between small community and city led me to an investigation into the mythology of the small community, a mythology that sets the small community in opposition to the city, portraying the former as the keeper of virtue and the latter as the disseminator of vice. The cycles themselves, as I increasingly discovered, challenge the mythology by identifying how the small community depends, in large part, on the city for self-understanding. The small community, however, as an idea, and a mythic ideal, is never dismissed as obsolete or irrelevant.

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Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / Broken bodies litter the landscape of African American women’s literature. Missing limbs and teeth, paralyzed appendages, lost hair, and deformities appear frequently in the works of authors like Nella Larsen, Zora Neale Hurston, Ann Petry, Dorothy West, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Pearl Cleage, and Octavia Butler. While many white authors also include broken bodies in their works, Hemingway’s preoccupation with synecdoche in terms of body parts perhaps being the most notable example, the motif permeates the tradition of African American women’s fiction like no other genre, appearing in the work of almost every major African American woman author. In the case of some authors, Morrison and Walker for example, broken bodies appear in every novel of their corpuses. In fact, every story in Walker’s first collection of short stories, In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women, features a broken body. Several questions arise from the ubiquity of this motif in the texts of African American women authors: Where did the motif originate? Why does the motif persist? Do the authors use the motif in the same way? What does the trail of broken bodies reveal about how African American women authors interpret the relationship between body and self? Surprisingly, given the prevalence of the motif and the number of critical comments on one or another text, no critic has essayed a comprehensive examination of the motif in African American literature. While this paper does not have the scope to cover the African American canon as a whole, it will discuss the motif across the works of Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker and Toni Morrison.

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