Thesis (Ph.D. (English))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2007.

This dissertation analyzes the South African musical, King Kong, and its resounding impact on South African society throughout the latter half of the twentieth century. A “jazz opera” based on the life of a local African boxer (and not the overgrown gorilla from American cinema), King Kong featured an African composer and all-black cast, including many of the most prominent local musicians and singers of the era. The rest of the play’s management, including director, music director, lyricist, writer and choreographer, were overwhelmingly white South Africans. This inter-racial collaboration was truly groundbreaking in a nation where apartheid was officially enacted a little over a decade prior to King Kong’s 1959 debut. Relatively apolitical in its message, King Kong proved accessible to South African audiences regardless of race or background, and became overwhelmingly lauded as an endeavor that all of the country could enjoy and cherish. The musical successfully toured South Africa’s major metropolises, often to sold-out crowds. Its domestic success later spurred a tour of Britain in 1961, making it the first major South African theatrical production to be staged abroad. Due to the multi-racial efforts behind King Kong, its success and the high quality of its performers, the musical initiated a new era in South African music and theatre for decades to come. Despite being based around King Kong, this dissertation contextualizes the production, as it uses King Kong’s creation, development and legacies to further analyze larger themes within South African and global histories. Each chapter, as a result, examines the evolution of the musical from the life story of the boxer from which the play is based, the musical’s making and tour of South Africa, the play’s 1961 tour of the United Kingdom, the experiences of the black casts in exile, and the failure of the play’s 1979 remake. By examining the play, its cast, and their collective legacies both in South Africa and further afield, this project complicates our understanding of the Black Atlantic framework by infusing Africans as active participants in these transnational discussions.

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The thesis examines some of the short and long fiction set in Johannesburg, which is published between approximately 1980 and 2003. The thesis examines how the residents viewed themselves, and evaluates the various social and political struggles and strategies that were employed in an attempt to belong, imagine the city differently and establish strategic identities that would enable them to live a better life during the focused quarter of a century of experiences in an ever-changing fictive Johannesburg. / Thesis (Ph.D.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2007.

During the 1970s the plays of Pieter-Dirk Uys became causes celebres. In the 1980s he was, commercially and artistically, arguably the most successful South African satirist. By 1990 he had gained recognition in the United Kingdom, the United States of America, Canada, Australia, the Netherlands and Germany. Yet relatively little research has been undertaken or published which evaluates his contribution to South African theatre as a playwright and performer of political satire. This dissertation aims to document and assess the satiric work of Uys and that of his precursors and contemporaries. The first chapter identifies certain characteristic features and purposes of satire as a creative method which cannot be defined in purely literary terms. The views of local practitioners and references to its manifestation in various non-literary and indigenous forms are included to support the descriptive approach to satire in performance adopted in later chapters. Of necessity to a study of Uys's lampoons, Chapter 2 discusses the origins of lampoon and the theatrical presentation of actual persons by Aristophanes (the first extant Western playwright to do so). Both the textual and visual ridicule of Socrates, Euripides, Cleon and Lamachus are considered, to argue that Aristophanes employed the nominal character as a factional type to exemplify a concept for humorous rather than meliorative purposes. Part One of Chapter 3 is a necessarily selective survey of the diversity, style and censorship of satire in South Africa in various theatrical, literary and journalistic forms. Part Two describes the use of satire by Adam Leslie, Jeremy Taylor, Robert Kirby and, more recently, Paul Slabolepszy, Mark Banks, Ian Fraser, Eric Miyeni and the 'alternative' Afrikaners in plays and in revue, cabaret and stand-up comedy. Chapter 4 examines the principal themes of Uys's plays to date, the 1981-1992 revues as entertainment and as a reflection of certain social and political issues, the similarities between his theatrical praxis and that of Aristophanes, and his satiric strategies in performance: his preparatory and visual signifiers, his concern with proxemics, and his mastery of kinesics, paralanguage and chronemics in depicting a spectrum of fictional and non-fictional personae, including Evita Bezuidenhout, P.W. Botha and the Uys-persona. / Thesis (Ph.D.)-University of Natal, Durban, 1993.

The thesis takes the form of an investigation into the various causes leading to the demise of the English language television single play in South Africa. It does not position the genre within any particular theoretical framework, but argues within the context of a liberal/critical discourse that the single play owes its development and significance to the contribution of its many writers, as well as to the creative input of the various producers, directors, from within and outside the SABC. Furthermore, it evaluates the genre within the bureaucracy of the SABC and the input of the various drama managers, among others, whose decisions have affected the position of the single play. The single play is seen as a development of drama having evolved from the stage play, though moving progressively towards the production values of film. Research will show that in the South African context, the creative practitioners of the single play and technology have intersected with style, reflecting the dominant form of naturalism, mainly evidenced during the early period when many single plays were produced in the studios of Auckland Park. Within a wider sociopolitical context, the single play has been evaluated as a negotiation among writers, censorship, technology, naturalism and bureaucracy. The investigation will show that the major cause for its demise was the SABC's increasing commercialisation of TV -1, with the result that programmes on this channel were evaluated in terms of their ability to deliver large audiences to the advertisers. This placed the single play in competition for transmission space with the more popular drama series and serials. Furthermore, the business principle of cost-effectiveness applied to the single play made it more expensive to produce than series and serials. The author's own practical involvement in the production of video and television programmes, including drama, together with primary source information gleaned from some forty interviews with practitioners and those whose decisions impacted on the genre, have been added to the body of the research. / Thesis (Ph.D.)-University of Natal, Durban, 1993.

Chapter One will introduce the central area of exploration of this study and establish the main terms of reference and guidelines of the research. Chapter Two will deal with the background and history of the project, and will include a discussion on creative writing as therapy in the context of a prison. Chapter Three will present a critical overview of the project's aims and results, as well as an account of the pedagogical methods employed. It will also analyse the work of three members of the writing group: Vusi Mthembu, Themba Vilakazi and Sibusiso Majola. Chapter Four will outline the socio-political context of my primary research material: a collection of poems written in prison by Bheki Mkhize, Sipho Mkhize and Bhek'themba Mbhele. It will also include a brief biographical account of the three writers, as well as an historical examination of the Seven Days War in Pietermaritzburg in the early nineties. Chapter Five will focus on the three writers' accounts of incarceration, the threat of violence in prison and their resistance through writing to the loss of identity. Chapter Six will deal with the issue of alterity, and the way that the writers represent issues of identity in their poetry, and create spaces of difference and distinction. It will also focus on intertextuality, and analyse the manner in which the writers negotiate the Western tradition of aesthetics in order to stake claim to their own spaces of difference in the prison. Chapter Seven will conclude the study, and will examine contemporary cultural studies theory with specific reference to South Africa. It will also include an overview of the proposition of the research, and elaborate the way forward for a popular culture embracing such findings. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2004.

A vigorous oral tradition has existed throughout South African history, and in many ways represents our truly original contribution to world literature. Despite this, oral literature is largely absent from accounts of literary history in this country. While the particular oppressions of South African political life have contributed to the exclusion of oral forms, the suppression of the oral in favour of the printed text is a feature of literary studies worldwide, and appears to be related to the critical practices that have been dominant in universities and schools for most of this century. In this study I consider ways of recovering oral forms for literary debate, and offer what I consider to be more appropriate strategies of 'reading'. My aim is to re-establish a line of continuity in South African poetry and performance from the songs and stories of the Bushmen, through the praise poems of the African chiefdoms, to the development of Christianised oral forms, the adaptation of the oral tradition in 'Soweto' poetry of the 1970s, and the performance of poems on political platforms in the 1980s. Recovering oral poetry and performance genres for literary debate requires the development of an appropriate critical methodology. Through a consideration of advances in the study of orality, I aim to suggest ways of reading which grant credence to the specific strategies and performative energies of oral texts while locating the texts in the spaces and constrictions of their societies. A great many oral texts from the past survive only in printed, translated forms, however, and a key aspect of such a critical project is how - while acknowledging the particular difficulties involved - one 'uses' highly mediated and artificially stabilised print versions to suggest something of the dynamic nature of oral performance in South African historical and social life. This thesis also considers how texts address us across historical distances. I argue for maintaining a dialectic between the 'past significance' and 'present meaning' of the poems, songs and stories: for allowing the past to shape our reading while we remain aware that our recuperation of history is inevitably directed by present needs and ideologies. These ideas are explored through five chapters which consider, respectively, the songs and stories of the nineteenth-century /Xam Bushmen, the izibongo of Shaka, the hymns of the Messianic Zulu evangelist Isaiah Shembe, Ingoapele Madingoane's epic 'Soweto' poem "black trial", and the performance poetry of Mzwakhe Mbuli and Alfred Qabula in the 1980s. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of Natal, Durban, 1995.

Nursing throughout the world is striving for international competitiveness and accountability for effectiveness and trust to the students, patients and the community they serve, thus making the issue of accreditation increasingly important. The purpose of this study was to explore the perceptions of the heads of private nursing education institutions on accreditation process by nursing education and training quality assurance body at eThekwini district. Reviewed literature has revealed that the South African Government has facilitated and encouraged the establishment of quality assurance through the South African Qualifications Authority Act, the National Qualifications Framework Act (NQF) and the Nursing Act. Data were collected by means of in-depth interviews with each of the heads of the seven selected private nursing education institutions. Qualitative content analysis using an editing style was performed in this study. Findings of this study revealed that nursing education institutions lack their own internal quality assessment processes as quality of teaching and learning depends on the interaction between the teacher and the students, the collective integrity as well as the professionals in the nursing education institution. Recommendations focused on periodic internal self-assessment as a vehicle to promote the culture of institutional internal self-assessment practices, as quality is seen as logical approach for conveying the importance of excellence to individuals who are nursing care recipients. Reports from the internal review should be provided by the institution to the external evaluation team prior to the external evaluators visit. / Thesis (M.N.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2013.