OpenUCT :: Browsing by Author "Bickford-Smith, Vivian"

Browsing by Author "Bickford-Smith, Vivian"

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Aspects of the social and political history of Langa Township, Cape Town, 1927-1948
(1993) Musemwa, Muchaparara; Bickford-Smith, Vivian; Saunders, Christopher C
This study focuses on the social and political history of Africans in Langa Township from 1927 to 1948. Langa conveniently and justifiably serves as a good case study of the urban African experience because it is the area in Greater Cape Town, during this period, where there was the largest concentration of a relatively organised, stabilised and permanent African working class community. It is also the oldest township with the deepest roots and longest evolution in Cape Town. Langa also makes an interesting area of study because the politics surrounding its evolution as an urban African segregated residential township presents it not only as an arena of social conflict between the ruler and the ruled, but also stands out as a veritable testimony of the African struggle to become an integral part of the city. The thesis traces what, initially, began as an "externalised" struggle by Africans against the forced removals from the city and Ndabeni Location to Langa and attempts to establish the continuities of this struggle within the township - i.e."internalised" struggle. African popular struggles in Langa predominantly centred around such issues as rents, railway fares, living conditions, restrictions on beer brewing and trading activities, the demand for direct municipal representation and the freedom of movement. The study explores the nature of the relationship that subsisted between the Langa residents and the Cape Town City Council and the internal social and political relations in the Langa community, paying particular attention to conflicting tendencies and the forms of resolution implemented. The thesis aims to highlight the fact that protest and resistance were the only weapons that empowered the Langa residents to fight against unilateral unpopular decisions by the local authority or central government. Flowing from these findings is an attempt to discover how the lived experiences of the Langa people, their frustrations, disillusionment, crises of expectations, translated into political consciousness and how these help us to explain the people's role in nationalist politics. Alternatively, this will help us to explain how political parties, the African National Congress (ANC), the Communist Party of South Africa (CPS A), and the National Liberation League (NLL) exploited the crises in civic matters to enhance or strengthen their support bases and with what results.
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The Coon Carnival in the 1940's: An expression of culture within a changing political environment
(2001) Rahman, Zarin; Bickford-Smith, Vivian
The 1940's saw tremendous change in the state of the world starting with the Second World War and culminating with the formation of several new independent nation states such as Pakistan, India and Israel. The growing nationalist trend became more apparent over the following decades as African states gained their independence from their European colonizers. The ravaged state of the world recovering from War also saw the formation of an international mediating body in the form of the United Nations Organisation. The world was consequently repositioning itself in political and social terms to deal with the implementation of these changes
Open Access
Creating a 'black film industry' : state intervention and films for African audiences in South Africa, 1956-1990.
(2009) Paleker, Gairoonisa; Bickford-Smith, Vivian; Mendelsohn, Richard
This thesis examines one aspect of cinema in South Africa, namely, the historical construction of a 'black film industry' and the development of a 'black' cinema viewing audience. It does so by focusing on films produced specifically for an African audience using a state subsidy. This subsidy was introduced in 1972 and was separate from the general or A-Scheme subsidy that was introduced in 1956 for the production of English- and Afrikaans-language or 'white' films. This thesis is a critical assessment of the actual film products that the B-Scheme produced. The films are analysed within the broader political, economic and social context of their production and exhibition. The films are used as historical sources for the way in which African identities were constructed. Through critical analyses of the selected films, the thesis examines the manner in which African people, culture, gender and family relations, as well as class and/or political aspirations were represented in film. Africans had very little opportunity or power to represent themselves and where this had been possible, it was within the ideological and political boundaries set by the apartheid government.
Open Access
Crime, community and police in Cape Town, 1825-1850
(1986) Elks, Katherine Dawn; Worden, Nigel; Bickford-Smith, Vivian
This thesis is primarily an examination of petty crime and law enforcement in Cape Town in the period 1825 -1850. This period was one of fundamental change in terms of the spatial and demographic growth of Cape Town, the diversifying economy and the changing legal status of firstly the Khoi and subsequently the slaves. These developments had significant ramifications on the level and nature of crime, and perceptions of crime and criminals. The creation of a technically 'free' population and the transition from slave to wage labour engendered a great deal of alarm among Cape Town's dominant classes. That they felt their dominance and hegemony threatened by the potentially challenging White, Khoi and Black under classes, entailed a re-assertion of their power. Control mechanisms instituted in response to this included the abortive Vagrancy Ordinance of 1834, the Masters and Servants' Ordinance of 1841, a revamped police force in 1840 and varying social control stratagems. These were all designed to bolster the power of the dominant classes and mould a pliable labour force inculcated with the morality of the dominant classes. The under classes proved very adept at side stepping the imposition of control. In this they were often unwittingly aided by the grossly unprofessional and incompetent police. The ascendancy of the dominant classes, however, was temporarily frustrated but never totally checked. Similar studies of crime and law enforcement in 19th Century Britain have greatly informed the manner in which this thesis was tackled, but the nature of the source material in Cape Town has necessitated a somewhat different approach. The incomplete nature of the Court Record Books meant that a statistical analysis was impossible. More fruitful data were the letter books of personnel and institutions involved in the running of Cape Town; the Superintendent of Police, the Attorney-General, Resident Magistrate and the Municipality. For more general attitudes letters to and editorials in the local press proved to be an invaluable key to an understanding of the mores and perceptions of the dominant classes.
Open Access
The Doctor of District Six: exploring the private and family history of Dr Abdullah Abdurahman, City Councillor for District Six of Cape Town (1904-1940)
(2016) Wong, Eve; Bickford-Smith, Vivian; Adhikari, Mohamed
Abdullah Abdurahman is best-known in South African historiography for his four-decade career as the first coloured City Councillor of Cape Town and the President of the African Political Organisation. However, most literature on Abdurahman lack study on the personal and intimate life that animated his politics. Often painted as a tragic narrative of a dynamic man who failed in his struggle against racial segregation in the first half of the twentieth-century, Abdurahman is largely neglected in South African historiography. This project is a partial biography of Abdurahman focused on examining his personal and family life. Research for this project began with the exploration of the well-known Abdurahman collections at the University of Cape Town and Northwestern University and then expanded to include British, American, and Turkish records. This thesis follows a thematic structure, focusing on Abdullah as a son, a doctor, a husband and a father, with a final chapter focusing on Abdullah's many identities. Through the biographical method, this thesis explores the changes and continuities in coloured, Cape Malay, Indian and Muslim politics, attitudes, and identities at the Cape from the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries. The complications and nuances brought about by the ways identities intersect with race, gender, class, religion and other ethos are revealed by focusing on the personal and the intimate. Situating Abdullah Abdurahman within global flows of people, ideas, faith communities, and political ideologies, this thesis allows insight into how coloured, middle-class, Muslim families lived in the early twentieth century and the limits of nonracialism and political organisations of the time. By reincorporating Abdurahman's personal and family life into historiography, the influence of affect and emotions in politics, the import of childhood and early political socialisation, and the role of education in producing citizenship and subjectivity rise to the fore. This unveils themes of how political philosophies are generated, challenged, and transmitted between and across generations. This thesis argues for a transnational and trans-generational approach to considering the contributions of marginalised groups in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Open Access
From Matieland to motherland : landscape, identity and place in feature films set in the Cape Province, 1947-1989.
(2012) Riley, Eustacia; Bickford-Smith, Vivian
This thesis analyses the representation of landscape, place and identity in films set in the Cape between 1947 and 1989. These films are products of a "white", largely state-subsidised film industry, although they include a small number of independent, "alternative" films. A critical reading of these cinematic "apartheid landscapes" provides evidence of the historical context, discourses and values informing their production, as well as the construction and transformation of place and identity in apartheid South Africa.
Open Access
The Gateway of tomorrow: modernist town planning on Cape Town's Foreshore 1930-70
(2013) Botha , Nicholas Michiel; Bickford-Smith, Vivian
Cape Town's Foreshore has been a site of contestation for much of the twentieth century. Conventional accounts of its history describe the sudden reclamation of land in 1937, and subsequent planning throughout the 1940s and 50s. However, these accounts do not take into account the complex nature of these developments. South African urban history has tended to view town planning as an apartheid spatial practice – highlighting an over-emphasis on race that has tried to make a case for 'South African exceptionalism'. This thesis attempts to fill the lacuna on histories of Cape Town, providing a comprehensive, indepth narrative of the development of the Foreshore, and its subsequent impact on most of Cape Town's built form – the most infamous of these are the 'lost highways' of the Table Bay flyovers. It will also challenge the dominant narrative of South African planning belonging to the Corbusian tradition, instead arguing that there is a clear convergence of the City Beautiful movement with that of High Modernism. In attempting to understand the complex forces that shaped Cape Town, a thorough understanding of the particular context of the early twentieth century and the debates around town planning and the reconstruction of cities is essential. These had a direct influence on the contested visions of the city that were advocated by the Cape elite, and were influenced by British and American ideas of town planning and architecture, negotiated in a local context, and employed by a variety of actors that came from both local and international contexts. These networks of ideas highlight the transnational influence of town planning as it plays out on the Foreshore. Through the particular South African context of the time, the space of the Foreshore became layered with a political ideology that affirmed white South African ownership of the space and marked the rise of Afrikaner nationalism and capital. This 'Afrikanerisation' of the Foreshore will be shown in the various commemorative events, naming practices, monuments and buildings that arose on this contested space. This will also highlight the recurring contestations and negotiations between local (City Council) and national (South African Railways and Harbours) authorities.
Open Access
The Great Dance : myth, history and identity in documentary film representation of the Bushmen, 1925-2000
(2005) Van Vuuren, Lauren; Bickford-Smith, Vivian; Mendelsohn, Richard
This thesis utilises a sample of major documentary films on the Bushmen of Southern Africa as primary sources in investigating change over time in the interpretation and visualisation of Bushmen peoples over seventy-five years from 1925 to 2000. The primary sources of this thesis are seven documentary films on the subject of Bushmen people in southern Africa. These films are as follows The Bushmen (1925), made by the Denver African Expedition to southern Africa; the BBC film Lost World of Kalahari (1956) by Laurens van der Post; The Hunters (1958) by John Marshall; the 1974 National Geographic Society film Bushmen of the Kalahari; John Marshall's 1980 film N!ai: The Story of a !Kung Woman; and the South African films People of the Great Sandface (1984) by Paul John Myburgh and The Great Dance (2000) by Craig and Damon Foster. All of these films reflect, to varying degrees, a complex interplay between generic images of Bushmen as pristine primitives and the visible evidence of many Bushmen peoples rapid decline into poverty in Southern Africa, a process which had been ongoing throughout the twentieth century. The aim of the thesis has been to explore the utilisation of film as a primary source for historical research, but focussing specifically on a subject related to the southern African historical context. The films under analysis have been critically appraised as evidence of the values and attitudes of the people and period that have produced them, and for evidence about the Bushmen at the time of filming. Furthermore, each film has been considered as a film in history, for how it influences academic or popular discourses on the Bushmen, and finally as filmic 'historiography' that communicates historical knowledge. This thesis, then, utilises a knowledge and understanding of film language, as well as the history and development of documentary film, to assess and consider the way in which knowledge is communicated through the medium of film. This study has attempted to investigate the popular and academic indictment of documentary film as progenitor and/ or reinforcing agent of crude, reified mythologies about Bushmen culture in southern Africa. It is shown here that the way major documentary films have interpreted and positioned Bushmen people reveals the degree to which documentary films are acute reflections of their historical contexts, particularly in relation to the complicated webs of discourse that define popular and academic responses to particular subjects, such as 'Bushmen', at particular historical moments. Critical, visually literate analysis of documentaries can reveal the patterns of these discourses, which in turn reflect layers of ideology that change over time. A secondary finding of this thesis has been that documentary film might constitute a source of oral history for historians, when the subjects of a documentary film express ideas and attitudes that reflect self-identity. It is proposed that the approach to analysis of documentary film that has been utilised throughout this study is a means of 'extracting' the oral testimony from its ideological positioning within the world of the film. The historian might evaluate the usefulness of a subject's oral testimony in relation to the ideological orientation of the film as a whole, to decide whether it is worthwhile being considered as das Ding an sich or should be seen purely as a reflection of values and attitudes of the filmmaker, or something in between. It is shown in this thesis that documentary film constitutes an important archive of oral testimony for historians who are properly versed in reading film language.
Open Access
History, identity and meaning : Cape Town's Coon Carnival in the 1960s and 1970s
(1996) Baxter, Lisa Mary; Bickford-Smith, Vivian
Little has been written about the Coon Carnival since its inception in the late nineteenth century. This thesis helps remedy the general neglect of popular, "Coloured", working class history during the apartheid years. attempts to situate Cape Town's New Year Carnival within the international debate surrounding popular festival and identity. Following a broadly historical line of inquiry, this thesis straddles different disciplines, borrowing from a range of interpretative fields to assess the form and significance of the event during the 1960s and 1970s, a critical period in the Carnival's history. During these years, District Six - the event's symbolic and spiritual home - was declared for "White" residence only under the Group Areas Act. Coloured residents were forcibly removed from this central city suburb to disparate areas on the Cape Flats - the townships surrounding the metropolis. A year later, in 1967, the carnival parade was effectively banned from the city centre's streets; banished to remote and enclosed stadium venues. Thus, in a relatively short space of time the Carnival came under sustained attack. Due to the relative dearth of critical engagement with, or historical commentary on, the Carnival, this thesis relies heavily on oral sources and journalistic, visual and tourist oriented representations. Focussing particularly on the oral testimonies of twenty-four people involved in the event, it explores the notion of continuity and change in the Carnival during this period, through a thorough interrogation of the narratives.
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Imperialism, state formation and the establishment of a Muslim community at the Cape of Good Hope, 1770-1840 : a study in urban resistance
(1988) Bradlow, Muhammad 'Adil; Bickford-Smith, Vivian
One of the most significant and yet least studied developments of late eighteenth and early nineteenth century Cape Town is the emergence and growth of a muslim community. So dramatic was this process, that by the end of the period of slavery, well over two thirds of the town's non-European population were considered to be members of this community. Yet this process has largely been regarded, in such studies as do exist, as one of only marginal significance to the unfolding pattern of struggles that characterise this turbulent and brutal period of Cape Town's history. This lack of serious research stems largely from the nature of prevailing conceptions, which have tended to characterise both Islam and the muslim community as ostensibly cultural phenomena; culture being defined in its narrowest sense. Denied its political and ideological significance, the process of Islamisation is reduced to the point where it is regarded only as a quaint and colourful anachronism, adding a touch of spice to the cosmopolitan nature of the town. This thesis, however, takes as its point of departure the rejection of the notion that the development of Islam in Cape Town can be meaningfully understood in these terms.
Open Access
Letters home : the experiences and perceptions of middle class British women at the Cape 1820-1850
(1995) Erlank, Natasha; Bickford-Smith, Vivian
My thesis is concerned with the experiences and perceptions of British women living in the Cape Colony, South Africa, during the first half of the nineteenth century. My chief source materials are the letters and diaries written by different women in the period 1820-1850. The women in my thesis were members of the British middle class and proponents of its dominant ideology. This revolved around a "separation of spheres" which prescribed particular types of behaviour for men and women. This view was more of an ideal than a reality, and women in this period found ways in which to both resist and enforce its prescriptions. I am interested in the negotiation of identity that occurred when British women arrived at the Cape. In order to tap into their experiences, I examine in detail the writing of several women who lived in Cape Town, and then compare this to women's writing in different parts of the colony. What emerges is a version of South African history in which the experiences of individual women challenge assumptions about the existence of middle class and colonial homogenising discourses. Women in Cape Town, on the eastern frontier and on mission stations lived in different circumstances. The contexts in which they wrote affected the versions of themselves that they revealed in their writing. The different ways in which they wrote, and they ways in which they constructed a d represented their identities, challenge attempts to fit them into the contemporary feminine mould. While they were creating their own identifies through the medium of letters, they were also creating cultural artefacts. Their letters formed the basis of a private literate culture which both represented these women and their particular view of the Cape to the rest of the world. Women controlled what was written in their letters - their self-representations were presented to their readers in a version not mediated through their male relatives. In their own letters, they were not men's wives, they were their own women. Most of the women I discuss had a commitment to Christianity, and the promotion of Christianity. Missionary wives and evangelical women had a code of behaviour that did not always accord with middle class ideology. They measured their behaviour according to religious and moral standards. This allowed them to contravene middle class ethics if they felt these contravened their own codes of morality. Depending on circumstances, women could be called upon to behave either as middle class women or Christian women, and in these instances would conform to the identity under either ideology. I would therefore suggest that not only did English middle-class women at the Cape create their subjectivity in terms of their status as women, as middle class women and as white women, but they also constructed their subjectivity in terms of their religious beliefs - as religious women.
Open Access
A matter of life and death? : the Western Province Football Board and the implementation of the double standards resolution
(2015) Kahn, Ryan; Bickford-Smith, Vivian
This dissertation focuses on assessing and questioning the perceived 'politicisation' of the non-racial South African Council on Sport (SACOS) in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Through an institutional case study of the organisation's largest provincial football association (the Western Province Football Board (WPFB)) and its implementation of the ostensibly political Double Standards resolution, it re-examines the concept that politics captured the sports movement. Instead it is argued that sporting impetuses based in a desire for institutional survival retained primacy within the Board's decision making. In fact primarily, political ideologies were utilised to deliver sporting goals and not the other way around. This analysis is then extrapolated to demonstrate far-reaching conclusions around the relationship of sport and politics, Coloured identity and the meaning of the anti-Apartheid movement.
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Miserable hovels and shanties on waterlogged wasteland : political-economy of peri-urban squatting around greater Cape Town, circa 1945-1960
(1993) Kondlo, Kwandiwe Merriman; Bickford-Smith, Vivian; Bundy, Colin
This thesis is an intended contribution to the store of historical knowledge on Cape Town. Its title 'Miserable Hovels and Shanties on Waterlogged Wasteland'; political economy of peri-urban squatting in Cape Town, 1945 - 1960, has been decided on the basis of the following facts: (iv) l(i) Very little has been written on this subject especially during the period I have chosen. As a result, a lacuna exists in our understanding of 20th century Cape Town. So this thesis is an effort whose significance and value is that it seeks to provide an account of peri-urban squatting within the framework of political economy. By so doing a wide variety of factors, essential enough to have coloured the epoch, are captured and weaved together. (ii) Most historical works have not adequately examined the economic issues which underpin the phenomenon of peri-urban squatting. They have focussed more, instead, on the political aspect, emphasising the unequal distribution of political power between races. Here in this thesis I have attempted to strike a balance between the two factors (political and economic factors), hence I adopted the concept of political economy. To highlight the economic aspect I have used statistical data, (which I do not claim is entirely accurate) to show the wage, levels between races and also expose the pervasive state of underemployment of most Black people, whilst at the same time showing the political aspect through an examination of government legislations.
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An oral history of Tramway Road and Ilford Street, Sea Point, 1930s-2001 : the production of place by race, class and gender
(2002) Paulse, Michele; Bickford-Smith, Vivian
The political economies of segregation and apartheid contributed to the production and reproduction of a mainly Coloured working-class enclave in Tramway Road and Ilford Street, Sea Point, during the 20th century. Against this background, this thesis discusses activities performed by residents of the enclave in their residential area, activities that reflected the changing political economies and through which the residents themselves produced and reproduced their residential area. From the 1920s through to 1961, the enclave was both a product and a response to the successive political economies of segregation and apartheid. Excerpts of life history interviews are used to discuss activities that residents performed. Those activities discussed focus on the household, occupation, leisure, race and class. In doing so, this thesis is a micro-study of Tramway Road and Ilford Street. Part of the discussion of households and occupation is based on a household survey that was conducted in Tramway and Ilford streets around August 1961. Combined with oral history excerpts, the survey shows that household structure changed over time and in response to conditions internal and external to the enclave. Oral history excerpts are also used to discuss the occupations of people who lived in the enclave. To date there has been little discussion on the working lives of Coloureds in the now-destroyed residential areas. Oral history excerpts and data from the 1961 survey emphasise that the gender and race bias of the political economy limited the occupational status and income of the residents. Based on the 1961 survey, tables on the wages of females and males and household income were developed to support discussion on occupation and the economic well-being of households. The data and excerpts provide evidence of the legacy of the political economy of segregation and its role in the reproduction of a mainly Coloured working-class residential area. Owing to the mainly working-class character of the enclave, residents interacted in ways that promoted their economic well-being and helped to sustain households that lived in the residential area. Oral history excerpts are used to discuss race and class. Matters related to race examines ways that residents of the enclave responded to the racialisation of space in Sea Point. Matters related to class focus on how a general working-class status was expressed through housing but how the inhabitants communicated their personal status through material possession and inter- and intra-class distinction. In doing so, the thesis discusses how segregation and apartheid not only informed a sense of race identity but also contributed to class distinction and tension in the residential area. Newspaper, municipal and city archives are used to discuss the historical origins of the enclave and the concerns of city officials about the condition of the dwellings there. Newspaper archives and oral history excerpts also form an important part of the discussion of the forced removal of the residents of the enclave in 1959-1961. Minutes of meetings and personal communication provide data on the process of restitution for Tramway Road in 1997-2001. Through this micro-study of Tramway and Ilford streets, this thesis is meant to contribute to the histories of now-destroyed residential areas of Cape Town.
Open Access
Redefining the griot : a history of South African documentary film
(2001) Da Canha, Taryn; Mendelsohn, Richard; Bickford-Smith, Vivian
The South African film industry, like the rest of the country, has gone through a very difficult and trying time over the last century and has been faced with enormous challenges since 1994. South Africa is still in a process of transition and the turbulent era of Apartheid is still vivid in our memories and our collective national identity. What is especially exciting about studying the history of the South African film industry, is that it was through film, television and the media at large, that we witnessed the evolution of this history. On a microscopic scale, the history of the film industry, is that of the country, and many of the effects of Apartheid that are being experienced in South Africa today, are likewise being experienced by the film industry. Thus by seeking to understand the historical relationship between film and politics in South Africa, we are enabled to comprehend and contextualise the circumstances that have determined film's socio-political, economic and cultural place in society today. It was with this intention that I began to investigate the documentary film industry in South Africa. My particular interest was in the development of an independent, progressive documentary film movement that tentatively originated in the late nineteen fifties and established itself in the late seventies and eighties as a major force in the resistance movement. Concentrating on organisations such as the International Defense and Aid Fund to Southern Africa (IDAF), Video News Services/ Afravision, and the Community Video Education Trust (CVET), as well as many individual anti-Apartheid filmmakers, the focus of this paper and documentary film, Redefining the Griot, is thus limited to an analysis of the history of socio-political documentary filmmaking in South Africa, in particular, the anti-Apartheid film and video movement that emerged both in reaction to the ideologically-specific and restrictive State control of media, film and eventually television, and as a cultural weapon in the liberation struggle. Understanding this history enables valuable insight into the nature of the documentary film and video-making industry today - one that is still considered emergent in terms of having a homogeneous national identity.
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Remembering and Recollecting World War Two: South African Perspectives
(2014) Walton, Sarah-Jane; Bickford-Smith, Vivian
This thesis explores some of the memories and recollections of World War Two in South Africa today. It aims to address an absence of work done on South Africa in relation to World War Two, memory and commemoration. This thesis is as much about the diverse processes of remembrance and recollection as it is about the war itself and assumes that memories of the war can be located in different media. Accordingly the chapters herein are each delegated a media form, from newspapers, literature, memorials, film and photography to oral interviews, in which ‘memories’ of the war are located. The arrangement of the chapters mimics the history of the war’s remembrance in South Africa as it moved from public to private remembrance. This follows the historical context of South Africa from the war period until approximately mid-2013. The white Anglophone experience is given prominence in approaching the subject of commemoration and World War Two in Cape Town. This is motivated by Vivian Bickford- Smith and John Lambert, both of whom recognise it as South Africa’s ‘forgotten identity.’1 Nevertheless other non-white memories of the war are also discussed as important to understanding South Africa’s relationship to it. In particular, the sons and daughters of the Cape Corps briefly feature in this thesis in recognition of a greater Anglophone identity that is not necessarily bound by race. Black recruits are also touched upon as an oft-forgotten group involved in the war. Accordingly this thesis emphasizes that although some experiences and memories were shaped by race, there were others that transcended it. Lastly the different media forms discussed within this thesis are suggestive of technology’s advances and its impact on the way memories are stored and retrieved. Ultimately, despite the fact that the war has fallen out of public remembrance in Cape Town today, this thesis concludes that it remains important to a few groups and individuals for whom it continues to inform a sense of history and identity.
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Reports on Colloquium Sessions
(2004) Adhikari, Mohammed; Phillips, Howard; van der Watt, Liese; Rijsdijk, Ian-Malcolm; van Sittert, Lance; Deacon, Harriet; Erlank, Natasha; Clowes, Lindsay; Worden, Nigel; Bickford-Smith, Vivian
Since the late 1980s the environmental trope in South African history has been gradually elevated to a field of enquiry in its own right. The impetus to this transformation has been varied, the blossoming of environmental history in the North American academy and green politics and agrarian social history in South Africa being among the more influential.
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"The sea is in our blood" : community and craft in Kalk Bay, c. 1880-1939
(1989) Kirkaldy, Alan; Bickford-Smith, Vivian; Harries, Patrick
This thesis examines the historic right of the Kalk Bay fishermen to occupy the area and exploit the marine resources of False Bay. It attempts to provide the historical base absent from anthropological, and other, works which have focussed on the area. In recent years, the local handline fishing community has faced destruction by a complex web of political, social and economic forces. This work shows that these have simply been new challenges in a long line, albeit the most serious, faced by the fisherfolk of Kalk Bay. The study begins with an examination of human settlement, and the origins of fishing, in Kalk Bay to the late nineteenth century. This is followed by an analysis of the organisation of the local fishing industry at the close of that century. These two chapters provide the backdrop for discussion of the commercialization of the local fishing effort, between 1890 and 1913. The fourth chapter deals with the establishment of the modern fishing industry in Kalk Bay, from 1913 to 1939. The thesis concludes with a brief examination of the community to the 1980s. Major findings are that the local fishermen of today are the product of a cultural and economic tradition stretching back thousands of years. By the late nineteenth century, the rhythm of life in the area was being rapidly changed by its incorporation into the social and economic orbit of greater Cape Town. Over the main period covered by the thesis, the local fishermen, as a result of their race and class, occupied the weaker position in conflicts with local authorities, the state and capital. However, they were able to fight dependence upon a single buyer and growing pressures for their proletarianisation and managed to maintain their independence as petty-commodity producers. The independence of the fisherfolk was nevertheless maintained at the expense of increasingly depressed local markets for their fish. Since the Second World War, the escalating political, social and economic subordination of the fisherfolk has progressively threatened the existence of the handline fishing industry and the fishing community at Kalk Bay. However, should racial ideologies and commitment to monopoly capitalization of the industry be set aside by the state, the Kalk Bay fisherfolk could survive, albeit in altered and diminished circumstances.
Open Access
"She was certainly not a Rosa Luxemborg" : a biography of Cissie Gool in images and words
(2002) Paleker, Gairoonisa; Bickford-Smith, Vivian; Mendelsohn, Richard
This thesis, in both its written and filmed components explores the life of Cape politician and political activist Cissie Gool (1897-1963) against the backdrop oflocal, national and international politics as it impacted on her in both a direct and indirect way. Culled from oral and documentary sources, the historical Cissie is a representation based on memories, perceptions, biases and subjective agendas of not only the oral sources, but also the historian.
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Sports, festivals and popular politics : aspects of the social and popular culture in Langa township, 1945-70
(1994) Molapo, Rachidi Richard; Nasson, Bill; Bickford-Smith, Vivian
The rapid industrialization which transformed South African Society after the discovery of minerals, had a profound impact on the lives of most South Africans. The process of urbanization escalated during and after the Second World War because of better wages and job opportunities in the urban areas. South African urbanization was characterized by the brutal manner in which the state dealt with the Black people. The White middle and working classes' fear of being engulfed by this Black tide led to the multi-pronged strategies which were devised to contain and co-opt the Africans, hence the creation of townships like Langa. This study looks at how the journey from the rural areas to the cities became part of the 'making of Black working class'. Material conditions in the cities were characterized by social squalor and overcrowding. Ghetto-like conditions created ethnic identities and working class culture, consciousness and community struggles came to reflect capitalist domination in the twentieth century township of Langa. Many residents in the township indulged in leisure pursuits such as dance and music which had their origins in the rural areas and this indicated an important cultural resource which they adhered to so as to cope with the alienating and corrosive compound and hostel life. Some of the residents found pleasure in leisure pursuits whose roots and ethos could be traced to the Victorian period such as cricket, soccer and rugby. All these leisure pursuits however, came largely to be influenced by the realities of township life and the general national and economic exploitation. The working class in Langa was not a homogeneous block as there were intense struggles between the migrants and immigrants over township space and resources. Therefore festivals and sporting activities played an important part in the cultural history of Langa township's effort to create "communities". The last part of the study looked at how the conditions in the city led to the realization by the dominated classes that the solution towards the alleviation of the conditions that they were confronted with was through the formation of structures which aimed at overthrowing institutions of oppression, such as the pass laws.