Publication Support for Young Researchers

Abdud-Dayyaan Badroodien

My research interests lie in the ways in which history can be explored through the crucial questions of language. Framing histories through language further demonstrates how structures of power in African societies deeply shaped by histories of colonialism, oppression and inequality were fundamentally structured through systems of language. These interests have also shaped my research journey in Historical studies, in which my Honours project explored the impact of colonial Christian missionary philological and linguistic interventions in Southern Africa during the 19th and early 20th centuries, particularly in relation to the racialised philological category of 'the Kafir language'.

The article builds on these initial forays and explores how assumptions around race, power and difference operate within numerous primary texts such as 19^th and 20^th century colonial grammars and dictionaries.  My focus is on the nature of pronunciation and orthography, and in particular ‘click sounds’ as the most overt site of power of this racialised discourse. The article resists unquestioning accepting modern language forms of isiXhosa and isiZulu. Remaining sensitive to the racialised underpinnings of this discourse, it traces how the borders of language are shifted in a discursive complex called ‘the Kafir Language.’

Benjamin Vigne

I will be writing a paper based on my masters dissertation, which explored 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. For this paper I focus on the Tribal Trust Fund system introduced in 1929 and its relation to wells and dams. I consider these as a type of infrastructural assemblage that was constructed on the sediments of land, agriculture and cattle. I engage the concepts of fixity and flow to explore how through this infrastructural assemblage money, grain, water and labour were conceptually and materially connected and expected to produce a particular set of effects - to fix a 'tribal economy' in order to ensure the continued flow of labourers south.

Precious Bikitsha

I am a History Masters student; I recently completed my coursework and will be focusing on my thesis. My Honours thesis explored how Xhosa woman poet, Nontsizi Mgqwetho entered the black counter public sphere in the 1920s through publishing her poetry in Johannesburg newspapers, Abantu Batho and Umteteli wa Bantu. Not much has been written on Mgqwetho so the opportunity to publish work done on Mgqwetho is urgent. The paper that I am writing will focus on Mgqwetho’s poem ‘Imbongi ye Zibuko’ (The poet of the ford).

Zachary Fleishman

My research comes out of a desire to merge contemporary debates in the historical and historiographical disciplines with that of performance. Through this, I wish to use performance as a way of communicating various ideas trapped within academia, as a tool for creating a counter archive and a counter-site for memory and as a space where people can challenge, play with and reconfigure the structures and constructs around them. The contemporary landscape, as is true for landscapes generally, exists as a compound of decisions made by previous actors in relation to the landscape they were met with. However, the present individual’s small-scale, everyday, functional interaction with the landscape works to obscure the history of its emergence. The impetus of my work stems from the desire to isolate parts of the everyday for exhumation so that the depth of the landscape, its production and constitution, can be revealed.    

Kathryn Rawson

My research will be looking at the establishment of the Wesleyan Mission Station at Leliefontein in Little Namaqualand in the early 19^th C. The impact of the settlement on the Little Namaqua Khoikhoi, who had themselves sought out the services of a missionary, will be considered. In doing so the article will focus on the ways in which the Namaqua Khoikhoi utilized the missionaries, as well as Christianity, to secure their access to land, better their status in society, foster ties with the go

Recipients:vernment at the Cape and protect themselves from neighbouring farmers. 

Kevin Elliott

I am investigating the economic living standards of female African domestic workers in South Africa during apartheid. Wage data gathered through the Survey of Houses and Servants (SHS) is used to examine these living standards. The SHS was a national survey run annually by the Department of Statistics between 1950 and 1992. It gathered data on rent expenses and wages paid to domestic workers by white households. This wage data is used to construct real wages and compare how the economic living standards of domestic workers improved and declined during apartheid.

Lucienne Argent

My research uses the frequently overlooked site of public toilets to explore the reciprocal relationship between social values and the built environment in Cape Town. Focusing on the period between 1880 and 1940, my paper explores how public toilets both reflected and operationalized shifting attitudes towards bodies and bodily waste, in ways that reinforced hierarchies of race, class and gender.

Thierry Rousset

I was born in Moka, Mauritius. After completing my schooling in Mauritius I enrolled at the University of Cape Town where I graduated from the Humanities Faculty with Majors in History and Law. I recently completed my PhD in the Department of Historical Studies at the University of Cape Town. My thesis analysed the various metropolitan representations of settler colonialism in the context of Tristan da Cunha. This work had a particular interest in the processes that led to the nativisation and racialisation of the island’s inhabitants. My previous work has looked at the elephant seal oil trade between Cape Town and the Crozet Islands, and the use of destitute children as a labour source in the Cape Colony during the nineteenth century. During his time at UCT I convened courses in environmental history, historical theory, genocide studies, and colonial histories of Africa.

Thokozani Mhlambi

Title: Towards a Sonology of Sensing 

I'm writing paper that grapples with sound perspectives as a method for understanding African social formations, in the area now under the province of KwaZulu-Natal,  from the 13^thcentury and later, and how the turn to sound can offer crucial insights as we produce knowledge. The paper forms part of a larger creative project, that explores the sonic moments which characterized the fields of specialisation in skills such as metallurgy, stonemasonry and song composition. In these moments where sound was bound with power, a particular way of specialized listening emerged, which purported to a way of generating information through sensing, rather than through knowledge as a way of cognition.