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5398 results in Wits University Press

Page 199 of 270

  • 7.1 The Politics of Obscenity: Lady Chatterley's Lover and the Apartheid State

  • from 7 - Ideological Exigencies and the Fates of Books
  • Edited by Andrew van der Vlien
  • Book:
    Print, Text and Book Cultures in South Africa
    Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    21 April 2018
    Print publication:
    31 December 2012, pp 348-368

  • Summary

    “Why shouldn't we go to South Africa?”

    “We might!”, he said slowly.

    D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928; 1993, 215–16).

    In late 1928 various factors—piracy, a hostile press, and confiscations by US customs and Scotland Yard—forced D. H. Lawrence to become the first major defender of Lady Chatterley's Lover. In a series of prose pieces published in or around 1929—“Pornography and obscenity”, the introduction to These Paintings, the introduction to Pansies, and the A Propos—he rejected the charge that he was a pornographer and that his novel was, as John Bull had put it, an “evil outpouring” (Lawrence 1993, xxxii). Decrying pornography as the “attempt to insult sex, to do dirt on it”, he presented himself variously (and at times contradictorily) as a physician out to heal the “diseased” modern psyche; as a truth teller seeking to expose the “sentimental lie of purity and the dirty little secret”; as a champion of an enlightened modernity that had left behind the “dim-minded, obscure, violent natures of the Middle ages”; as a defiant individualist up against the “mob, mob, mob” and its “obscene howl”; and as a purifier of the dialect of the tribe who wished to cleanse the word “arse” of its deforming “mental associations” (Lawrence 1998, 286, 294–314; 1993, 307). For good measure, he also added paeans to the Old Church (it “knew best the enduring needs of man”) and to Christian marriage (which has “given man the best of his freedom, given him his little kingdom of his own within the big kingdom of the State”) (Lawrence 1993, 321–22). Although unorthodox, his social attitudes, religious feelings, intentions and hoped-for effects were, Lawrence urged, serious, sincere and high-minded. Lady Chatterley's Lover was “an honest, healthy book, necessary for us today” (Lawrence 1993, 307).

    For 30 years public authorities around the world (the “grey ones” as Lawrence dubbed them) did not believe him (Lawrence 1998, 303).

  • PART II - Anthology

  • Grant Christison, Paul Landau, Peter Limb, Christopher Lowe, Sarah Mkhonza, Sifiso Mxolisi Ndlovu, Jeff Opland, Chris Saunders, Robert Trent Vinson
  • Book:
    The People’s Paper
    Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    21 April 2018
    Print publication:
    31 December 2012, pp 331-490

  • Summary

    INTRODUCTION

    Part II comprises texts from Abantu-Batho in the form of articles, editorials and letters drawn from extant issues, fragments, translations in archives, or reprints in other newspapers or books. The narrow Abantu-Batho archive restricted scope, but for those years where more issues are available, our selection criteria seek a thematic balance across political, intellectual, economic, social and cultural history, biography, gender, class, and region. Despite the very limited and scattered archive we have been able to include at least one piece from each year of publication.

    The sources are chiefly library or archival holdings, notably the extensive run between 1930 and 1931 in the National Library of South Africa (also microfilmed), the 1920 special issue in Durban and SOAS, 1928–29 issues in Atlanta and the Carter-Karis Collection, a range of issues and translations in the National Archives, Pretoria (especially Department of Justice and Director of Native Labour files), and the Swaziland National Archives, plus Rhodes House Library at the University of Oxford. We have given priority to unpublished items, but in the Bibliography readers can locate short extracts in contemporary newspapers and books, and selected reprints in compilations such as the Karis-Carter volumes, Outlook on a Century, and the Garvey Papers.

    We keep notes to a minimum, as many persons and events are explained in Part I, but where necessary more obscure persons or events are annotated. Generally, we follow the language usage and spelling of the time. We have silently corrected some spelling or grammar, but kept this to a minimum to let readers appreciate the flavour of contemporary writing.

    CONTENTS

    1912

  • 1. ‘The Municipalities and Natives’, Abantu-Batho, 23? October 1912

  • 2. ‘Oppression of the Native & Coloured Races’, Abantu-Batho, December? 1912

  • 3. ‘The Affairs of Swaziland’, Abantu-Batho, 25 December–12 February 1913

    • 1913

  • 4. ‘Native Women's Brave Stand’, Abantu-Batho, July? 1913

  • 5. ‘The New Solicitor: Mr. R. W. Msimang’, Abantu-Batho, 5 July 1913

  • 6. ‘An Ancient Couple: Suffering under the Lands Act’, Abantu-Batho, September 1913

  • Chapter Fourteen - The ANC: Party Vanguard of the Black Middle Class?

    • By Roger Southall, professor of Sociology at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg
  • Edited by Arianna Lissoni, Jon Soske, Natasha Erlank, Noor Nieftagodien, Omar Badsha
  • Book:
    One Hundred Years of the ANC
    Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    21 April 2018
    Print publication:
    31 December 2012, pp 325-346

  • Summary

    The African National Congress (ANC) lays claim to being the oldest living nationalist movement in Africa. Purportedly, nationalist organisations represent the interests of a putative or extant ‘nation’ against those of an oppressive external power or coloniser. When their struggles triumph, they lay claim to ownership of the previously externally dominated state, national oppression is overthrown, and the nationalist movement moves into power as the representative of the people. However, as has been wryly observed time after time, the triumph of nationalism exacerbates rather than eliminates differences the nationalist struggle had contained. Once they have assumed power, nationalist movements may claim to represent and promote the interests of the entire nation, yet regularly they have become the vehicles of particular ethnic, class, religious and/or regional interests. The category of ‘nation’ effectively dissolves, except in so far as the now-ruling party defines who and who does not belong to it.

    Likewise, the sectional interests of those who control the ruling party become unambiguously identified with the ‘national interest.’ Across wide swathes of Africa the post-colonial state has come to be identified as effectively owned and controlled by a post-colonial elite which, while it may have all sort of ethnic and other properties, is, above all, defined by its use of the state machinery for purposes of material accumulation. Having taken control of the instruments of power, the nationalist movement establishes the ‘party-state’ and becomes a ‘political machine’ central to the allocation of political and economic goods and consolidation of power and well-being of the new elite.

    According to its theology of the National Democratic Revolution (NDR), the ANC is uncomfortably aware of the dangers of South Africa following this trajectory. The principal dynamic of the NDR is said to be the liberation of Africans in particular and blacks in general from political and socio-economic bondage. The ‘motive forces’ of the revolution are recognised as workers and the rural poor, who constitute the large majority of the popular movement, alongside middle strata (including small business operators and real and aspirant capitalists), which, historically, were blocked from growth and development by the racial exclusions of segregation and apartheid.

    As part of the motive forces, the black middle strata constitute a critical resource, providing not only professional skills but fostering value systems appropriate to the building of democracy and development.

  • SECOND KEYNOTE ADDRESS: A Continuing Search for Identity: Carrying the Burden of History

    • By Joel Netshitenzhe, executive director and board vice-chairperson of the Mapungubwe Institute for Strategic Reflection
  • Edited by Arianna Lissoni, Jon Soske, Natasha Erlank, Noor Nieftagodien, Omar Badsha
  • Book:
    One Hundred Years of the ANC
    Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    21 April 2018
    Print publication:
    31 December 2012, pp 13-28

  • Summary

    Populations that are multiply wounded as a product of permanent stress lose their capacity to make decisions and plan for the future due to the excess suffering they have lived through and not processed … Reconstructing the sense of our national and personal histories … allows us to go forward in life. But going forward is only possible if people can find new energy.

    The centenary of the African National Congress (ANC) presents a unique opportunity to interrogate the ideals that spawned and sustained a movement that has assumed the status of a towering giant in the consciousness of South African society and humanists further afield. Whilst our reflections are about history, the subliminal question exercising our minds is whether there should be, and indeed whether there will be, another hundred years. Are South Africans able, in the words of Nicaraguan psychologist Martha Cabrera, to transcend the ‘excess suffering’ and ‘find new energy’?

    Historians are better able to organise and articulate the detailed facts about the evolution of the movement and their significance. Out of such disciplined scholarship we will be able to understand the ANC's historical narrative and how it is intertwined with the evolution of South African society. However, in the discourse on the centenary, we should be inspired by more than just inquisitiveness about the mysteries of the past. Though that in itself is a noble undertaking, this exercise should help us draw lessons that will help South African democrats find new energy.

    This address tries to examine some of the current challenges facing the ANC against the backdrop of relevant developments in its evolution. The fact that the ANC is able to reach the one hundred-year milestone with its organisational integrity intact – a feat that few political organisations have attained – is deserving of serious intellectual reflection. The central argument in this brief treatise is that survival and success are the product of a continuing search for identity and thus a healthy uncertainty. A few themes in current debates which intersect with the ANC historical narrative have been selected here. The choice of these themes is subjective and has been inspired by the following question: how, in its theory and praxis, should the ANC define its identity and project itself into the future?

  • 5.3 From The Origin of Language to a Language of Origin: A Prologue to the Grey Collection

  • from 5 - Questions of the Archive and the Uses of Books
    • By Hedley Twidle, Namaqualand and outside Johannesburg, studied at Oxford, Edinburgh and York
  • Edited by Andrew van der Vlien
  • Book:
    Print, Text and Book Cultures in South Africa
    Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    21 April 2018
    Print publication:
    31 December 2012, pp 252-284

  • Summary

    In his 1878 account of a five-month visit to South Africa, Anthony Trollope described his experience of the Grey Collection reading room in Cape Town. With the kind of sly provocation that made his account such a talking point at the Cape, he remarked:

    It would be invidious to say that there are volumes so rare that one begrudges them to a distant Colony which might be served as well by ordinary editions as by scarce and perhaps unreadable specimens. But such is the feeling which comes up first in the mind of a lover of books when he takes out and handles some of the treasures of Sir George Grey's gift (Trollope 1878, 74).

    In 1861 George Grey, the singularly ambitious colonial autocrat who before the age of 50 had been governor of South Australia (1840–45), New Zealand (1845–53) and the Cape Colony (1854–61), donated some 5,200 items to the South African Library. With a silver trowel he had laid the foundation stone of the present building at the foot of the Company Gardens in September of 1858; in 1860 it was completed and—apart from a period between 1942 and 1944 when valuable holdings were moved to Stellenbosch for fear of enemy action—his bequest has been housed here ever since, kept, as stipulated, “wholly separate and distinct from the general Collection of Books in the Library”.

    In the kind of cultural transaction often repeated in the nineteenth century, a private collection formed the nucleus of Victorian civic culture and, in this case, a British colonial identity in the process of formation. For a rising Anglophone mercantile class at the Cape, “The Grey” transformed Cape Town's library at a stroke into “a local institution worthy of a much larger European city” (Dubow 2006, 48). Ever since, it has been dutifully celebrated by its custodians as “a mirror of Western culture” and a “treasure for all times”.2 Yet equally, from Trollope's account onwards, a note of unease seems to have been present when considering how exactly such texts might fare or signify when (re)located at the tip of Africa.

  • 3.2 “Consequential Changes”: Daphne Rooke's Mittee in America and South Africa

  • from 3 - Local/Global: South African Writing and Global Imaginaries
  • Edited by Andrew van der Vlien
  • Book:
    Print, Text and Book Cultures in South Africa
    Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    21 April 2018
    Print publication:
    31 December 2012, pp 121-139

  • Summary

    In the 1950s Daphne Rooke was the most popular South African writer in America. This was largely as a result of the triumph of her second and most successful novel, Mittee, which was widely reviewed throughout the United States, where it became a bestseller. In February 1952 Time magazine noted the comparability of Rooke's themes with those of American writers: “The US South used to be the main source of the world's supply of fiction plots about the clash of white and Negro; in the last dozen years, South African writers have moved into the market. The latest is Transvaal born Daphne Rooke” (Anon. 1952a). The New York Herald Tribune Book Review in May 1952 listed Mittee in its top 15 bestsellers and a Cleveland reviewer that year compared her “heady novels of romance and suspense” with those of Daphne du Maurier (Anon. 1952b; O'Neill 1952). In the country of her birth, South Africa, however, Rooke's reception was not as enthusiastic. In a review for the Cape Times, Jack Cope (1952) opined:

    We hear complimentary opinions from abroad that there is a flowering in South African writing. If so, Daphne Rooke adds nothing significant. She uses unconvincing stock figures of the lecherous Boer hungering after Coloured women, or the mean tannie; violence and treachery with little motivation. But if a best seller requires a liberal seasoning of assaults, rape, murder and sexual intercourse, there is no complaint against Mittee.

    Ian Glenn (1987, 3) notes that early South African reviewers were generally “condescending and inaccurate”, and although an edition of Mittee published by Victor Gollancz in London circulated in South Africa from 1951, as J. M. Coetzee (1991, 205) observes, it was only in the late 1980s, when a South African edition of Mittee was published, that readers began to give credit to Rooke in her native land. While an interesting phenomenon in its own right, this discrepancy in reception is not my focus here. Rather, I would like to examine an inconsistency between two editions of Mittee—the edition that first circulated in America (Rooke 1952) and the edition that first circulated in South Africa (Rooke 1951b)—a difference that has not been examined in previously published criticism.

  • The Symbolic World of Politics

  • from CONVERSATION 7 - INTELLECTUALS AND THEIR PUBLICS
  • Michael Burawoy, Karl Holdt
  • Book:
    Conversations with Bourdieu
    Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    20 April 2018
    Print publication:
    31 December 2012, pp 169-174

  • Summary

    Bourdieu writes about the ‘Realpolitik of reason’ or the ‘Realpolitik of the universal’ as the form of politics engaged in by the public sociologist – in other words, the struggle to defend the social conditions of the exercise of reason and expand access to its fruits. What might this mean in a country such as South Africa, emerging from a long history of colonialism and apartheid into a world order still dominated by the West?

    As we noted in Conversation 5 (p121), Bourdieu understands the ‘ambiguity of reason’: on the one hand, it is a form of symbolic capital that serves ‘as an instrument of domination and legitimation’ for injustice and inequality; on the other, it is the basis of emancipation, democracy and human rights. Bourdieu argues for mobilisation and struggle through which those who are denied access to the universal can claim and realise such access (2000 [1997]: 70–72, 77–80), but his formulations are elliptical. What might they mean in practice? And what might they mean in a country of the Global South?

    Bourdieu's text conveys a sense of the social scientist whose scholarship provides a unique access to the truth, which, as public intellectual, he conveys to society from his lectern – but at the same time the symbolic weight of the lectern and of his professorial knowledge serves to legitimate the existing authorities and hierarchies of society. There is little sense here of knowledge gained through concrete practice, which is consistent with Bourdieu's distinction between the logic of theory and the logic of practice. The impression is reinforced by the closing scenes of the documentary film on his life and work, La sociologie est un sport de combat, in which he attempts to persuade a militant meeting of immigrant community members in France that they cannot understand their own situation and should therefore read works of sociology – which they angrily reject, asserting the clarity of their own understanding of their oppression as they do so.

    This is almost the public sociologist as parody. Any sociologist in South Africa who in the times of struggle against apartheid attempted such a role would have been met with a similar response.

  • Chapter Three - Christianity and African Nationalism in South Africa in the First Half of the Twentieth Century

    • By Natasha Erlank, received her History degrees from the universities of Cape Town and Cambridge
  • Edited by Arianna Lissoni, Jon Soske, Natasha Erlank, Noor Nieftagodien, Omar Badsha
  • Book:
    One Hundred Years of the ANC
    Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    21 April 2018
    Print publication:
    31 December 2012, pp 77-96

  • Summary

    The origin of African political consciousness in southern Africa can be traced back to the first half of the nineteenth century, to the impact of the Christian missions and to the development of a non-racial constitution at the Cape … The expectation of progressive involvement in a modern state was bolstered by several additional factors. The most important of these stemmed from Christian missionary education, an education which provided moral principles for individual righteousness. Given the questioning and often the partial rejection of tribal ethics and organisation, these principles were then extended to social and political activity, so providing the motivation, not for political assertion, but for moral appeals to justice even if these appeals were not backed up by effective political organisation.

    A fairly standard, if polygamous, union of nationalism, modernity and Christianity characterises a portion of the historical literature on the rise of an anti-colonial nationalism in South Africa. It can be summarised as follows: Towards the end of the nineteenth century, some African men converted to Christianity and became educated in mission schools. These men, a new black elite, embraced not only modern political thinking but also modern behaviour and practices. They practiced a mainstream, European-derived Christianity. They became South Africa's first generation of African (not ethnic) nationalists, advocating cross-ethnic alliances in the fashioning of an anti-state politics.

    A singular example of this trend, read off from this narrative, was Don Davidson Tengo Jabavu, a Xhosa-speaking Mfengu, journalist, Methodist, lay preacher and political activist educated in the United Kingdom and United States of America. His contemporaries included John Langalibalele Dube of Natal, first president of the South African Native National Congress (renamed the African National Congress – ANC – in 1923) and a product of the American Board Mission, as well as Silas Modiri Molema, a medical doctor active within the ANC from the 1920s onwards. These were men who drew upon their mission experiences and religious training in support of a protest politics characterised in the first few decades after Union by the activities of the ANC. Albeit an elite initially in support of an elite politics, their legacy is omnipresent, if evanescent, in the contemporary politics and remembering of the ANC.

  • Chapter 14 - Rock art, shamanism and history: Implications from a central Asian case study

  • from PART 2 - ON UNDERSTANDING ROCK ART USING INDIGENOUS KNOWLEDGE
  • Edited by Benjamin Smith, Knut Helskog, David Morris
  • Book:
    Working with Rock Art
    Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    21 April 2018
    Print publication:
    31 December 2012, pp 193-204

  • Summary

    On theoretical and cross-cultural grounds, in other words, the Numic attribution of rock art to supernatural agents and agency is understandable as a common if not predictable response to ethnological inquiry, especially given the well-documented Numic reticence about discussing religion with anthropologists, let alone among themselves. Theory and cross-cultural evidence then suggest that a non-literal interpretation of these comments is potentially appropriate, assuming that the empirical evidence systematically supports the non-literal reading.

    THE ETHNOGRAPHY OF SUPERNATURAL AGENTS AND AGENCY

    Internal and indirect empirical (ethnographic) support for a non-literal interpretation of the Numic commentary – that attributions of the art to supernatural agency were circumlocutions for their creation by contemporary shamans – can be cited in a variety of forms. While none of these alone confirms such an interpretation, they do support it when taken as a whole as described below. The first is the widespread and consistent attribution of the origin of art to spirits across the entirety of the Numic realm. Second are the chronological implications of the Numic attributions, which in fact provide quite specific indications of the perceived age of the rock art. The third is consistency in attributions of rock art to supernatural agency beyond Numic territory, demonstrating that this was a common Native American view of the origin of ritual traces. Finally I turn to independent evidence supporting non-literal interpretations of claims of supernatural agency: the perceived nature of causality.

    CONSISTENCY THROUGHOUT THE NUMIC REALM

    Numic attributions of the origin of rock art to the activities of spirits was widespread, common and longlived. These facts demonstrate that this was a shared cultural belief, rather than an idiosyncratic attitude of just one or a few informants. Given the time-depth within the ethnographic period of these accounts, we can also infer that it was a well-entrenched traditional belief rather than one that developed recently.

    With regard to geographical distribution, attributions to supernatural agency were recorded for all three of the Numic language groups (Northern Paiute, Southern Paiute and Shoshone).

Page 199 of 270