Student Number: 0516477F DEPARTMENT OF POLITICAL STUDIES THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS / This research report is a probe into prospects of meaningful political opposition in the parliamentary system South Africa. Political oppositions play a very constructive role in the entrenching of democracy. A free and open democratic system owes a lot to politics of opposition. The political landscape in South Africa is characterized by one dominant ruling party opposed by small and fragmented opposition. Thus there is a challenge in South Africa’s democracy due to poor opposition politics. The importance of opposition cannot be overstated, democracy thrives when there is healthy deliberation and contestation in parliament. Thus different goals, values and ideas are given the chance to be argued for or against. In South Africa, the African National Congress (ANC) enjoys large support that dwarfs even the official opposition party, the Democratic Alliance (DA). There are other opposition parties inside and outside parliament. However the fact that the opposition is still relatively weak, is a call for concern. Although relatively weak, the opposition in South African politics is of vast importance. The effectiveness of the opposition can be measured in the debates in parliament and the positions that the opposition adopt to counter the ruling party. Currently there is the reality of a very loose and weak opposition. The opposition is not being effective enough to be of considerable substance in the political landscape. The fact that much of the policies the ANC adopts are in principle similar to the beliefs and ideas of the opposition renders the opposition ineffective and the electorate is left with no real alternative. The point of departure of this research report is that the opposition should assume policies that are an alternative to the ruling party so that they can attract the electorate and thus boost democracy in South Africa.

Student Number : 0216658A - PhD thesis - School of Social Sciences - Faculty of Humanities / This thesis is a study of underground organisation from the 1950s until 1976, though it also draws on material prior to and after these periods. It delves into an area of social activity that has been relatively invisible in scholarship on South Africa and resistance history. The study considers the concept of underground operations. It is taken to include not only the place where the ‘final’ activities may have taken place, but those countries where cadres were trained or housed, even if this would normally be characterised as located in ‘exile’. It is ‘outside’, but it such activities are also treated as part of the underground phenomenon considered as a whole. At the level of historiography the thesis is a re-reading of early ANC underground, partly giving a different interpretation to existing literature, but also relying on the insights of oral informants. The establishment of the SACP underground is fleshed out through interview material, but the thesis challenges the notion that the Party controlled the ANC, arguing in contrast that the conditions of the alliance demanded limitations on SACP’s autonomy. In the period after Rivonia the conventional historiography speaks of a lull and an absence of the ANC and its allies. The thesis provides evidence to contradict this showing that while there may have been silence, there was never absence. It also probes the relationship between ANC and Black Consciousness, where it shows far more overlap than much of the existing literature has disclosed. The study is at once a historical narrative and also an attempt to characterise the social character of this area of study, the special features that go to make up clandestine organisaton. Within this characterisation of underground activity, the thesis also probes the gendered nature of these activities, the definite impact of concepts of masculinity and femininity within a conventionally male terrain. Related to these questions the thesis probes the relationship between the personal and organisational, both at the level of individual decision-making and notions of love and realising emotions. The chapter on gender examines the denial of manhood to African men and considers ANC masculinities and assertion of the need to regain manhood in that context. The thesis also examines the entry of women into the male world of the army and underground, explaining many of the difficulties and the countervailing efforts of women as well as certain men to assert the rights of women to equal participation. The chapter on the impact of revolutionary activity on the personal examines the subordination of individual judgement to the collective and in the personal sphere, notions of revolutionary love, found not only in South Africa but in most revolutionary struggles, where ‘love for the people’ tends to displace inter-personal love. The final chapter –by way of an epilogue- examines the outcomes of struggles after 1976, initiated by various forces including the underground organisation. In this period ANC hegemony begins to consolidate and the character of that hegemony is broken down into various components.

This thesis finds that Dr SM Molema made a considerable contribution to the construction of the history of black people in South Africa, and was the first African historian to do so. Yet, he and other African writers were marginalised from the mainstream twentieth-century canons of South African history. Therefore, the thesis investigates the reasons for which Dr Molema (a medical doctor) became an historian and an ethnographer in 1920, and explores the nature of his critical engagement with the ways in which these disciplines represented black people. To understand the controversial treatment of black historical writers, this study appraises South African historiography and its tendency to construct debates about black people, while rendering black writers marginal to such debates. Further, the thesis explores the generic complexity of Molema’s work and finds he wrote in a hybrid genre, autoethnography. This complexity may have contributed to the many misreadings of his work. This study outlines the generic specificity and implications of autoethnography and finds that, like autobiography, autoethnography has been one of the genres of the Self (of personal testimony) that, under colonialism and apartheid, many black writers employed in providing corrective versions of mainstream versions of South African history. Autoethnography enabled Molema to represent his own life, but — more importantly — that of his community (the Rolong boo RaTshidi of Mafikeng) as a form of cultural translation for readers at home and abroad. Methodologically, the thesis understands that Molema’s own family history played a large part in motivating him to write history. In order to explore this relationship between the experience of history and its representation, the thesis has a dual structure: the first four chapters present biographical studies of three generations of the Molema family: Chief Molema, the founder of Mafikeng, his son Chief Silas Thelesho Molema, and Silas’ son, Modiri Molema, the historian and ethnographer. Chapters Five and Six present an exposition and critique of his first work, The Bantu Past and Present. Dr Molema’s biographies of Chiefs Moroka and Montshiwa are used as ancillary texts.

Magister Artium - MA (History) / Nokuthula Simelane, born near Bethal in Mpumalanga, joined the ANC's armed-wing uMKhonto we Sizwe (MK) as a courier while studying at the University of Swaziland in the early 1980s. In 1983 she set out on a mission to South Africa on the pretext of purchasing clothing for her up-coming graduation. Simelane was however abducted, and has since not been heard from nor has her body been found. Her disappearance was one of those examined by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) of South Africa. These are some facts about Simelane. This thesis seeks to explore how Simelane's biographies manifest themselves across multiple genres and in so doing determine their similarities and differences, with a view to understanding the difficulties of producing the biography of a missing person. The genres of biography I examine relation to Simelane are: the TRC's Amnesty Committee (AC) hearings, the Human Rights Violations Committee (HRVC) hearing, their transcripts and the TRC reports; a documentary film called Betrayal directed by Mark Kaplan; and a statue of Simelane located in Bethal sculpted by Ruhan Janse van Vuuren.

For the researcher, education is concerned fundamentally with the notion of human emancipation. In other words, it is only worth the name if it forms people capable of taking part in their own liberation. Education policy in South Africa prior to African National Congress victory in 1994 was dominated by the ideology of apartheid which led to a variety of malpractices in defining the role and status of education. The ANC victory in South Africa ushered in a period of awakening from a situation of oppression to the establishment of alternative education structures promising a redress of past imbalances through equality, justice and democracy as fundamental human rights. While the ANC policy documents may serve South African society in an educative way, it is equally important that this also implies, at a practical level, an increase in collective learning levels. This has to be done in ways that are undistorted and ways that do not devolve all authority to experts. As a preliminary to improving practices, it is vital to penetrate below the surface of the ANC policy documents to understand the true nature of things found to expose internal and external contradictions and distortions. As Durkheim (1994) says why strive for knowledge of reality if this knowledge cannot serve us in life. This implies that the pursuit of knowledge is of little value unless it can serve our interests as social and cultural beings. This thesis aims to examine the role played by the Reconstruction and Development Policy in South Africa's education system. It questions the viability of implementing the policies as set out in the policy documents, which the African National Congress claim to be derived from critical theory. The focus was on the reconstruction of the central and decisive events that have had implications for present educational policy and development. A methodological tool derived from critical theory was applied since it provided a form of meta-critique with an emancipatory rather than manipulative interest in criticism. Critical theory hence became a method of rational valuing and a powerful tool of internal and external criticism with the potential for use in practical as well as theoretical research. It thus becomes of value not only to a policy-maker but to a researcher or classroom practitioner as well. With regards to South Africa's present status, critical theory offers us a clear, less-distorted picture of how things are and at least suggests through transcendence of the existent, the possibility of how things may be different. / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Relay communication has been shown to be effective to extend service coverage and mitigate channel impairments. This thesis focuses on relay selection (RS) of both unidirectional and bidirectional relay networks employing the amplify-and-forward (AF) and decode-and-forward (DF) protocols. This thesis presents four works on RS in two-hop relay networks. In the first work, we study opportunistic relaying (OR) and selection cooperation (SC) in DF-based unidirectional multi-antennas relay networks. We first propose two joint relay-and-antenna selection schemes which combine OR and SC, respectively, with transmit antenna selection. For each joint selection scheme, a single best transmit antenna at the source, a single best relay, and a single best transmit antenna at this selected relay are jointly determined. Then we derive the outage probabilities, and show that the two schemes achieve the same outage performance. In the second work, we study RS with the physical-layer network coding (PNC) in DF-based bidirectional relay networks. By modifying the well-known SC and OR, we first propose two RS schemes for the PNC network: SC-PNC and OR-PNC. Then we derive the outage probability and diversity order of the SC-PNC. Finally, we show that the OR-PNC achieves the same outage performance as the SC-PNC. In the third work, we study RS with the analog network coding (ANC) and time division broadcast (TDBC), in AF-based bidirectional relay networks. We first consider RS schemes for the ANC and TDBC protocols based on a max-min criterion. Then we derive outage probabilities for the ANC and TDBC protocols. In the fourth work, we study joint relay-and-source selection in an AF-based bidirectional relay network. Since RS and opportunistic source selection (OSS) could individually improve performance of relay networks, we propose a joint RS-OSS protocol. In this network, a best source is selected to transmit data to the other source with the help of a selected best relay. Then, we derive the outage probability and average bit-error rate. The considered RS schemes and obtained outage probability expressions will help the design of two-hop wireless communications in determining the system parameters such as relay location and the transmission power at each terminal. / Thesis (Ph.D, Electrical & Computer Engineering) -- Queen's University, 2010-08-23 15:29:50.026

With new radioactive isotope accelerators coming online in the next decade, the problem of extracting reliable nuclear structure information from reactions with unstable nuclei deserves considerable attention. A method has been proposed to determine spectroscopic factors (SFs) using the asymptotic normalization coefficient (ANC) to fix the external contribution of a nonperipheral reaction, reducing the uncertainty in the SF. The ¹⁵C[left right arrow]¹⁴C+n system was chosen as a test case for this new method. The direct neutron capture rate on ¹⁴C is important for a variety of topics of interest in astrophysics, and the ANC for ¹⁵C[left right arrow]¹⁴C+n was also used to calculate this reaction rate. The objective of the first part of this work was to find the ANC for ¹⁵C[left right arrow]¹⁴C+n. This was done in two independent experiments. First, the heavy ion neutron transfer reaction ¹³C(¹⁴C,¹⁵C)¹²C was measured at 12 MeV/nucleon. Second, the inverse kinematics reaction d(¹⁴C,p)¹⁵C was measured using the new Texas Edinburgh Catania Silicon Array (TECSA). The next phase of the experimental program was to measure a reaction with a non-negligible interior contribution, for which ¹⁴C(d,p)¹⁵C at 60 MeV deuteron energy was used. This reaction turned out to be more peripheral than anticipated, and as a result, the ANC for the ground state was extracted from this measurement as well. The final results for the three measurements are C²2s1/2 = 1.96±0.16 fm⁻¹ for the ground state and C²1d5/2 = (4.23±0.38)·10⁻³ fm⁻¹ for the first excited state. Because the 60 MeV ¹⁴C(d,p)¹⁵C reaction turned out to have a very weak dependence on the interior, the SF could not be determined for the ¹⁴C+n ground state in ¹⁵C using the new method. A lower limit of 1.05 was found for the first excited state. It is possible that other reactions might turn out to be more suitable for this method, however, the difficulty encountered at this relatively high deuteron energy highlights a substantial problem likely to be seen in other applications. Using the ANCs determined in this work, the astrophysical ¹⁴C(n,γ)¹⁵C reaction rate was calculated. The resulting value for the cross section for capture to the ground state at 23 keV was σgs(23 keV)=5.1±0.4 μb and to the first excited state was σexc(23 keV)=0.2±0.02 μb.

<p>Diss. (sammanfattning) Umeå : Umeå universitet, 2001. Härtill 6 uppsatser.</p> / digitalisering@umu

This comparative study analyzes two rebel groups that ended their respective civil wars through negotiations and came to power in the first post-war elections. The two cases being the African National Congress in South Africa and the Zimbabwe African National Union – Patriotic Front in Zimbabwe. Specifically the thesis examines rebel institutions and behaviors during armed conflict to assess in what ways they were tolerant or intolerant. The reason for the focus on tolerance and intolerance is that it is viewed as an important factor in how these two parties have related to political opposition after the war. This study shows that there are several similarities in terms of the presence of intolerance in the two cases, which leads to the conclusion that levels of tolerance during the armed conflict can not, on its own, explain the diverging paths of the two cases in the post-war period.

This study is about how the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter writes about apartheid in South Africa in the years of 1948 to 1994. The newspaper's digital archive has been investigated to achieve this purpose. Sweden has become known for its commitment to abolishing apartheid, and this paper finds out if this is in line with how the Swedish press writes about apartheid. The result shows that Dagens Nyheter was consistently opposed to apartheid, and reporting largely depends on the system being unacceptable in a civilized world. Commitment extends across many levels of society, and the workforce on Dagens Nyheter takes a stand despite the fact that the newspaper is called independent liberal. It turns out that many players get space in the newspaper   This civilized world like Sweden and other parts of the western world wants South Africa to be included seems to be determined in advance. This is explained by postcolonial theory.