In a country, which has recently acquired its democracy, education for all citizens is of primary concern. During this time when South Africa finds its self in a period of transition and of prioritising items on its agenda, education in general and in particular education of those who had a little or no education at all, is high on the priority list. Women in the past have been discriminated against and thus deprived of equal access to educational experiences and the accumulation of skills and qualifications – aspects that affected their daily lives. Therefore, many women have not had opportunities for personal development, choice of work and the capacity to influence political decisions. The aim of this study was to explore the experiences that women learners encountered within an ABET programme. Due to the limited research done on women's learning within ABET programmes in South Africa, women learners have been isolated and marginalised in all levels of education. Despite this, women, who head up a third of the world’s households, are not often identified as vital role players for the sustainability of communities especially in relation to issues concerning health, social welfare and economic activities. In order to obtain a greater understanding of the experiences of women learners within ABET programmes, this study was designed to elicit the views of women in an ABET programme. Qualitative methods of data collection and analysis were utilised in this process and I used the constant comparative method of data analysis to search for recurring themes and patterns The most prominent findings emerging from the study was that women felt advantaged as members of a community of learners. It was also evident that numerous factors restricted effective learning for women. In addition, academic progress and self-confidence that would serve as a foundation for future learning also emerged as an important finding. This study has shown that although ABET programmes such as the one in which this research took place, are vital and fulfil a very real need especially for women, there are a number of factors in the programmes themselves and within society in general which hampers optimal learning by women in the programme. / Mrs. N. F. Petersen

Jezebels, Mammies, and Matriarchs… These labels signify racialized and gendered social constructions that transnationally pervade the lives of black women. By contextualizing black women’s artwork as visual responses to social subjugation and objectification, one can discern the (literal) materialization of black feminist epistemology through artistic production and the aesthetic concerns that drive expressive work. This thesis therefore analyzes black Brazilian artist Rosana Paulino’s work as a visual form of resistance to three major “controlling images” of black women in Brazil as sexually promiscuous, domestic laborers, and unfit mothers. Her work represents not only the Brazilian black woman’s experience; it broadens and deepens the conversation on black women’s art in Africa and its diasporas, where similar stereotypes exist. Several of Paulino’s personal statements and artworks address subjects that parallel those made by black women artists--María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Lorna Simpson, Zanele Muholi, and Wangechi Mutu, to name a few--whose artwork is also considered in this paper. Articulated to an international community of black women artists, Paulino’s artwork contributes to the development of a space in art history for the representation of black Brazilian women that enriches understandings of other established areas, be they social, artistic, medical, sexual, cultural, political or economical. / text

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M.A. / In the Western world, anorexia nervosa has long been regarded as an age-old medical syndrome and was conceded to have reached epidemic proportions in white South African females by the 1970s. On the contrary, it has been deemed to be non-existent in indigenous African females, this being attributed to the African socio-cultural preference for the fuller figure. The first clinical case in an indigenous female was reported in Nigeria (Nwaefuna, 1981). In South Africa, the first diagnosis in 1993 and earliest reporting of three cases by Szabo, Berk, Tlou and Allwood (1995) coloured the face of prevailing conceptualisation and was viewed as a nascent indication of global acculturation to a Western lifestyle and value system. This research represents the researcher’s invitation to the reader to embark on an exploratory journey into the biographically situated experience of anorexia nervosa as revealed through the personal experience stories of three black South African female participants. With the researcher’s quest to explore this as a uniquely human, lived experience, it became essential to open up the life of each participant as the arena in which this experience unfolded, so that seminal vicissitudes as well their sense of self in the course of this experience could be gleaned. Further, the researcher shied away from a fait accompli acceptance of the acculturation discourse and sought to interrogate it by giving voice to participants’ lived sense of the relationship between this experience and their cultural identity and affiliation. As its dialectic, the researcher also allowed participants to give voice to the cultural scrutiny of their experience through the lens of their culturally-referent others. Finally, the researcher opened up some of the seminal vicissitudes of her personal experience as the space for introspection and reflection on nuances and resonance between her experience and that of participants, without a concomitant attempt to generalise about either. Through post-modernist interpretive interactionism (Denzin, 1989), the researcher undertook a comprehensive deconstructive review of biopsychosocial discourses on the experience of anorexia nervosa, which sought to uncover and juxtapose various underlying models of human action. This review also included a feminist lens, which allowed that images and conceptions of women that exist within these discourses could be revealed, while simultaneously offering a critique of inherent culturally gendered dynamics. Through metaphoric simultaneity, the crystallised use of personal stories, drawings and naïve sketches sought to provide deepened, complexified and, if it be so, competing accounts of participants’ experience. The researcher drew a number of conclusions pursuant to participants’ experience of anorexia nervosa. First, that although biological factors could not be excluded, especially the role of genetics and hormones in adolescence, the exact nature thereof was beyond the scope of this inquiry and therefore inferential. Second, that although there were varying degrees of resonance in participants’ experience with some of the macro socio-cultural discourses considered, these did not appear to have been pathogenically pre-eminent. Third, that in the exploration of particular vicissitudes of participants’ family relational dynamics, the embryonic seeds and gestalt effect of their susceptibility matrix was vividly exposed. All factors considered, the researcher stands strongly in the opinion that gleaning this as the personal experience of three black female participants and drawing in sediments of her own personal experience, anorexia nervosa is ultimately a uniquely individual experience that stands as a covert and metaphoric language of personal distress. While it may sometimes overlap with some of the dynamics that have coloured the socio-cultural landscape in different epochs, it has its own dynamics and internal logic that is uniquely and inextricably tied to the specific vicissitudes of each person’s biographically constructed self. The specific probing of participants’ cultural identity and affiliation served to confirm that while the evolving cultural identity and affiliation of black females may be undeniable, the prevalent causal attribution of anorexia nervosa to acculturation appears to have been compellingly shown in this case to be an external and cursory one. Finally, the specific probing of participants’ experience through the eye of their culturally-referent others revealed that anorexia nervosa is culturally enigmatic. Its attribution, in participants’ socio-cultural context, to witchcraft, acculturation and especially to HIV and AIDS and attendant stigmatisation and shaming of an already deeply wounded person serves to indicate the degree of distress, isolation and rejection experienced by sufferers. By the same token, it also serves to illumine the felt equivalence of this period in participants’ socio-cultural context with HIV and AIDS. This study represents the researcher’s endeavour to convey participants’ experience of anorexia nervosa in its richness, in an attempt to render it understandable, without any concomitant attempt to foreclose or pretence of being exhaustive. Therefore, it recognises that the understanding presented here inalienably represents the researcher’s hermeneutic circle. The reader is thus invited, if not challenged, to discern their own understanding. Finally, it offers itself as a signpost for future research into what by all accounts, stands starkly as an untapped minefield.

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M.Ed. / This research was conducted in order to elicit and describe the perceptions of a group of young women who have participated in the Umendomuhle Community Education Project as to how it has influenced their lives. The secondary aim was to discover weaknesses and strengths in the project, and to help improve it. The Umendomuhle Community Education Project was initiated in order to increase the number of adult learners at the community centre, to help improve the standard of living for the community, and to empower young women with practical skills so as to increase self-employment. The project’s secondary aims were to develop the young women’s independence and to free them from the mentality of perceiving men as their source of income. This study was conducted with a sample of ten young women participating in the Umendomuhle community development project. The findings indicated that participants developed a change in self-esteem by respecting and trusting the self, respecting others, developing values acceptable to community and interpersonal skills. They also developed practical skills like agricultural skills, business skills, and personal finance management.

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Word coding can be traced to the ancient Kemetic practice of steganography (referring to hiding place or hidden message). Unless the reader is aware of the meaning, the Coded Word can often appear as just art. Afrocentric scholarship however, also incorporates the idea of functionality. Aesthetics, throughout African history, and to this day, serve a purpose. The beautiful quilts sewn by enslaved Black women served dual functions, as bed coverings and as symbols of resistance and liberation. The decorative wrought-ironwork found on gates and doors throughout the United States serves as a Sankofic reminder and protector. The highly coded language in the aesthetics of the Black Power/Black Arts Movement, shifted paradigms. Though the practice of word coding remains an active part of contemporary Black culture, there is a disconnection between the action and the aim (or function); a direct result of the destructive efforts of colonization. Today’s racially charged and oftentimes dangerous climate calls for a reexamination of word coding as a liberatory tool. I created the theory of the Coded Word to analyze three novels by Black women who are unique in their forms of word coding, just as they are characteristically distinct in their forms of expression. The findings for the three novels have resulted in the first three entries into the Glossary of the Coded Word, a resource to be used by Black people in resistance to oppression and in the struggle for liberation of all Black people. / African American Studies