Browsing by Author "Bam-Hutchison, June"

Now showing 1 - 8 of 8
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Open Access
    African solutions to African problems: An assessment of the African Union (AU)'s policy implementation for peace and security in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) since 2004
    (2023) Yuksel, Aysegul; Bam-Hutchison, June
    Despite the historical significance of states in Africa gaining political independence since the 1950s, the continent has struggled with the challenges of sustaining security and peace. African leaders, who set out with the ideals of the iconic Nkrumah's ‘Pan-Africanism' of the 1950s, as committed to in the launching of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) in 1963, sought permanent solutions to problems rooted in this decolonial ideal when they founded the subsequent African Union (AU) in 2002. The stated aim of the AU was to create peace, security, and stability in Africa. Accordingly, the slogan ‘African solutions to African problems' is closely linked to Pan-Africanism as a decolonial philosophy and driving force that became a policy objective. The African Peace and Security Architecture (APSA), implemented in 2002 at the founding of the AU, was established as a mechanism to obtain this objective. The AU has undertaken to take a leading role and responsibility in addressing violent conflicts in Africa as the root issue lies in the historical context that African problems are neither caused nor continued by sovereign African agencies; the point is historically, politically, and economically more complex. Hence, the stated ideal of the aphorism ‘African solutions to African problems' can only be meaningfully attained if the mechanisms to achieve peace and security are situated within sovereign African agencies and cultural political philosophies – the complexities of the global and post-colonial political and economic context notwithstanding. This mini-thesis critically engages the stated Africa-centred decolonial aspiration and approach for sovereignty and asks, therefore, to what extent the AU has succeeded in applying its sovereign agency in achieving ‘African solutions' designed for peace in the case study of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) since 2004.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Open Access
    An analysis of Twitter’s role between 2012 and 2018 in contributing to the new way Black Millennials of African Ancestry produce 21st Century PanAfrican Knowledge and Social Activity
    (2019) Rasool, Amira; Bam-Hutchison, June
    Social media has provided new opportunities for Black millennials1 (individuals born between 1981–1996) of the diaspora and Africa to communicate, learn, build social and political movements, and curate joint identities. As a result of this group’s active use of social media over the last decade, Black millennials of African ancestry — referred to collectively in this thesis as ‘Africans’ — have become primary research subjects in the study of social media patterns. This research reveals a contemporary tendency for these Africans to engage in Pan-African social and political activities online. Twitter, in particular, has emerged as one of the most useful tools for centralizing Pan-African ideas and activities. The inclusion of Twitter in Pan-African discourses is a new phenomenon that has only narrowly been explored by scholars that analyzed the impact of Twitter on the global African community (Black Africans and Black People of African Ancestry). These works, however, have neglected to illustrate the ways in which Twitter, and most notably ‘Black Twitter’ , has aided in developing a new 21st century definition of Pan- 2 African activity and knowledge. The research explores the way millennials of African ancestry — particularly American-born Africans who have the greatest access to internet channels amongst African millennials (Nielsen 2018) — used Twitter’s technological and communicative tools between 2012 and 2018 to build and promote a more inclusive and wide-reaching PanAfrican movement that encouraged new ideologies, including new social activity, political movements, and intersectional leadership that were not previously exhibited in mainstream 20thcentury Pan-African movements.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Open Access
    Deconstructing “de/colonised knowledge” in South Africa: the case of radical academic history under apartheid (1960-1991)
    (2022) Martinerie, Camille; Bam-Hutchison, June; Teulié, Gilles
    This thesis explores the inherent complexities and contradictions embedded in the radical turn in South African historiography with regards to the decolonisation of the discipline of history in South African universities under apartheid from 1960 to 1991. By choosing to deconstruct radical history in a white liberal university, the study seeks to further demonstrate the limits of intellectual decolonisation and its underlying assumptions in the academic field during apartheid. It interrogates radical history as a form of academic resistance and leads a reflection on the political role of the intellectual in the context of the anti-apartheid struggle, asking more broadly: to what extent can radical academic history be considered “de/colonised knowledge”? Building on the links between ideology and curriculum, this study aimed to measure the coloniality of history using history examination questions as tools to investigate the methodological, theoretical and ideological assumptions of historians. Theoretically, the study relied on the role of the historian as a recontextualising agent of disciplinary knowledge taught and examined within a historically white higher education institution to study its concomitant underlying historiographical silences at the time. Methodologically, it deployed quantitative and qualitative research methods, using interviews and semi-structured questionnaires with a targeted cohort of authentic interlocutors to triangulate the discursive analysis of institutionalised “de/colonised” historical knowledge. This interdisciplinary study was thus inscribed in a critical deconstructionist approach to knowledge which contributed to a finer conceptual and empirical understanding of the coloniality of history as a discipline and its reproduction in the South African higher education context. The study hopes (1) to contribute to understanding the nuanced intersections between the history of intellectual colonisation and decolonisation and how these tensions impacted on history education in the apartheid university, (2) to provide an original interdisciplinary mixed method of analysis of institutionalised “de/colonised knowledge”, and (3) to contribute new critical insights into blind spots in South African radical historiography in higher education during the period 1960 to 1991, which could shed light on the various understandings of the imperative for decolonisation today in the discipline.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Open Access
    Dislocating the Body and Transcending the Imperial Eye (I): The role of Abaphantsi, through iiZangoma, as pioneers for transformative research methodologies and organic intellectualism
    (2021) Zwane, Li'Tsoanelo; Bam-Hutchison, June
    In this study, I establish myself as both researcher and respondent and I use the literal and figurative interpretations of the word ‘body' to discuss how canonical epistemological paradigms, through their construction of indigenous knowledge systems, construct African bodies and how this impacts knowledge and research methods. I discuss how the corporeal bodies of Sangomas have been constructed, particularly through problematic research approaches which focus on observations of the corporeal body. Critical here, is how the imperial gaze is unrelenting in its deconstruction and reconstruction of African bodies. By engaging with the cosmology of Sangomas and their interaction with ancestors, I discuss the ineptitude of western-centric hegemonic research approaches in providing substantial responses to the variety of social phenomena with which the Social Sciences grapple. I focus on Sangoma practices of inhlolo (divination), ukuphupha (dreams and dream analysis) and the valorization of umbilini (intuition) as useful tools for the reimagination of research methodologies which have the power to transcend the corporeal lens with which canonical research approaches have become synonymous. Critical to the cosmology of Sangomas is community and the communal production and sharing of knowledge which I propose is a useful framework for transcending the individualistic researcherfocused approach which dominates Social Science research. Through an engagement with the fallaciousness of bifurcated knowledge systems, I argue that it is untruthful to assume that indigenous knowledge systems and western knowledge systems do not interact with each other or have never interacted with each other in the past. I recommend an approach to research which invites an integration of various knowledge systems and diverse ways of knowing. Furthermore, I propose, through a discourse analysis on my reflexive practice as a Sangoma, the concept of Ubungoma (as praxis) with its related theoretical and methodical approaches to decolonising the knowledge archive through ukuphupha as a pathway to insights, inhlolo as a quest for knowledge and ukuphahla as a decolonial research methodology.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Open Access
    Imagining space and place: the representation of Africa through image and text in Andrew Lang's Fairy Books (1889-1910)
    (2023) Womersley, Alice; Bam-Hutchison, June; Martinez-Ruiz, Barbaro
    This dissertation examines the representation of Africa and Africans in Andrew Lang's Fairy Books (1889-1910) considered to be the first global anthologies of fairy tales. Published at the heyday of the British Empire, they presented Africa and Europe alongside each other to the Victorian-era British audience of the time. As an appraisal of Lang's role as curator/editor, the study interrogates the books as containing representations of Africa from outside of Africa. While the inclusion of tales originating in Africa makes steps towards acknowledging an African story tradition independent of Europe, the editing process shaped the tales through European tale traditions and coloured by colonial perceptions of Africa. Lang's collaborative team of predominantly female translators/adaptors, as both Victorians and women, shaped the texts through their own sensitivities. The images, also created through one pictorial lens by Henry Justice Ford, were informed by imagination rather than fact, and the images were embraced for artistic merit rather than accuracy. The dissertation explores how the representation interplay and slippage between the image and text in this colonial project of ‘fairy tale' created a complex and contradictory single narrative of Africa and Africans. From this new assessment of Andrew Lang's Fairy Books (1889-1910), the dissertation formulates the argument of the cartographic imagination as fairy tale by comparing both the visual and textual components of fairy stories and maps, in addition to how they operate, how they are assembled, and their roles as agents of socialisation. These visual and textual components of fairy stories and maps were two forms of representation that were both used in the 19th century to socialise African people into being ‘productive' colonised citizens. This study models new approaches – cartographic imagination as fairy tale and the image-text relationship – to reinvestigate Victorian representations of Africa and bring a more nuanced understanding and fresh perspective to this area of scholarship.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Open Access
    Problematising Extroversion in South African COVID-19 Lockdown Measures: a case study of women head of families' stories in Khayelitsha on the Cape Flats
    (2022) Mbombo, Thandazile; Bam-Hutchison, June
    There has been a lack of intersectional gender, race, and class analysis of the present COVID19 pandemic by the government and health organizations in South Africa. This study focuses on a small number of unheard voices of urban poor black women and their experiences of COVID-19 lockdown between 2020 and 2021 on the Cape Flats. Using Khayelitsha as a case study, this research highlights their township-based experiences during COVID-19 lockdown, by exploring the impact on their lives, incomes and health from their perspectives as women head of families. Such voices are often ignored and marginalized in mainstream media. As a small qualitative study, it is based on collecting narratives from a small cohort of female heads of households in Khayelitsha which illustrate that these black women are in general negatively affected economically by top-down western-based imposed COVID-19 lockdown measures (as a form of extroversion). This limited small-scale study points to the need for further research on how these western-imposed methods of managing pandemics and diseases in African realities negate local knowledge of indigenous women and that they are inappropriate and not informed by the everyday lived reality. Lockdown measures in South Africa, therefore, need to be critically reviewed within an African lived reality in future.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Open Access
    Resilient Apartheid survivors and their navigation of historical trauma at the Castle of Good Hope, Cape Town
    (2020) Johannes, Shanél; Scanlon, Helen; Bam-Hutchison, June
    The history of South Africa entails colonial and apartheid era violence and trauma (visible and invisible) which ingrained various socio-economic-political-agrarian orders of brutalisation, mass killings, and the displacement of local people from their culture, language, land, agency, and spirituality. Attached to such history, are the intact remnants of the colonial and apartheid eras – national heritage monuments. The Castle of Good Hope, as a national heritage site, is not limited as being the oldest architectural structure in Cape Town, nor is it only a transitioning site that tries to incorporate democratic principles of multiple heritage. This site wields memories of both individual and collective historical colonial and apartheid trauma. Critically, this research project seeks to empirically analyse whether historical traumas are embedded in the displaced landscape and individual and collective experiences as the descendants of the colonised, enslaved, and oppressed. Historical trauma in this context, is often associated with the scholarship on the trans-Atlantic slave trade (from Africa to the Americas). However, little work is done in relation to the descendant's navigation of trauma – the resultant of the Indian Ocean trade and slave trade. The trauma related to the violent occupation of the European nations, transcended itself and was continued through various apartheid policies which has prevailing legacies of intergenerational historical trauma in Cape Town. Thus, this qualitative empirical research project seeks to explore the memories, experiences, and recommendations of resilient apartheid survivors – the descendants of the colonised, enslaved, and oppressed generations – and the ways in which they navigate the Castle of Good Hope as a site of historical trauma.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Open Access
    The archival records on Chinese slaves, convicts, exiles and ‘free blacks' at the Cape of Good Hope (1654 -1838): Conceptualising a digital curation project
    (2021) Chen, Vanessa; Kahn, Michelle; Bam-Hutchison, June
    Despite the growth of digital archives, there is no dedicated repository that systematically compiles the history of Chinese migration to South Africa. This qualitative study used 62 archival records housed at the Western Cape Archives and Records Service, to explore how the application of digital curation (particularly digitisation of materials) can be used in presenting, preserving and sharing the history on the first wave of Chinese slaves, convicts, exiles and ‘free blacks' at the Cape of Good Hope (1654 -1838). The study method consisted of three parts. First, a thorough literature search and understanding on the theoretical, practical and technical components of the subject. Second, the systematic collection and analyses of archival records (through a customised document analysis form) and third, an exploration on what digital curation can offer in terms of facilitating the access to and the preservation of these records. The study exists under a relativist paradigm which believes that reality is a product of power relations. It was found that the records provide valuable insight into the Cape's political development (from Dutch to British rule) and social hierarchies between Chinese individuals at the time. The archival content, being of historical significance, is in fact at a risk of physical and epistemological loss. This loss can be addressed through the application of digital curation which this study explores conceptually from the conception of a digital project to the use, reuse and dissemination of digital surrogates. It is hoped that this study can be used as a foundation or framework for refiguring the colonial archive and bringing other neglected South African histories to the forefront.