Browsing by Author "Mendelsohn, Richard"
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- ItemOpen AccessColonial mining policy of the Cape of Good Hope : an examination of the evolution of mining legislation in the Cape Colony, 1853-1910(2009) Davenport, Jade; Mendelsohn, Richard; Nasson, BillThe rise of the mining industry in the latter half of the nineteenth century transformed southern Africa. It facilitated the process of industrialisation and enabled the growth and advancement of the region's economy. Owing to the importance of South Africa's mineral revolution as the primary driver for economic development, this subject has assumed a strong theme in South African historiography. However, one subject that has been overlooked by historians is the development and evolution of early mineral law that sought to govern the burgeoning mineral revolution in the nineteenth century. This is a history of the introduction and evolution of mineral law in the Cape of Good Hope, the region of southern Africa where minerals were first discovered and exploited on a commercial basis. This history examines the development of mining legislation between 1853, when the Cape legislature implemented South Africa's very first mineral leasing regulations to regulate the leasing of land believed to contain copper deposits in Namaqualand, and 1910, when the Cape Colony, Natal, the Transvaal and the Orange Free State joined to form the Union of South Africa.
- ItemOpen AccessCreating a 'black film industry' : state intervention and films for African audiences in South Africa, 1956-1990.(2009) Paleker, Gairoonisa; Bickford-Smith, Vivian; Mendelsohn, RichardThis 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.
- ItemOpen AccessThe Great Dance : myth, history and identity in documentary film representation of the Bushmen, 1925-2000(2005) Van Vuuren, Lauren; Bickford-Smith, Vivian; Mendelsohn, RichardThis 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.
- ItemOpen AccessHope, fear, shame, frustration : continuity and change in the expression of coloured identity in white supremacist South Africa, 1910-1994(2002) Adhikari, Mohamed; Mendelsohn, RichardThis thesis examines the ways in which Coloured identity manifested itself in South African society from the time the South African state was formed in 1910 till the institution of democratic rule in 1994. The central argument of the dissertation is that Coloured identity is better understood, not as having evolved through a series of transformations during this period, as conventional historical thinking would have it, but to have remained remarkably stable throughout the era of white rule. This is not to contend that Coloured identity was static or that it lacked fluidity but that the continuities during this period were more fundamental to the way in which it operated as a social identity than the changes it experienced. It is argued that this stability was derived from a central core of enduring characteristics that regulated the way in which Colouredness functioned as an identity during this period. Each of the four emotions in the title of the thesis corresponds to a key characteristic at the heart of the identity. The principal constituents of this stable core are the assimilationism of the Coloured people (hope), their intermediate status in the racial hierarchy (fear), the negative connotations, especially that of racial hybridity, with which it was imbued (shame), and finally, the marginality of the Coloured community (frustration).
- ItemOpen AccessThe letters of Edmund Garrett to his cousin 1896-1898(1983) Shaw, Gerald; Mendelsohn, RichardEdmund Garrett, the writer of these letters, was editor of the Cape Times from mid-1895 until his health collapsed in 1899. He appeared to his contemporaries to have exerted a significant influence on affairs in the last few years before the South African War. Whether they felt this to be for good or ill depended, usually, on the political allegiance of the observers and their views of the cause of the conflict of 1899-1902.
- ItemOpen AccessRedefining the griot : a history of South African documentary film(2001) Da Canha, Taryn; Mendelsohn, Richard; Bickford-Smith, VivianThe 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.
- ItemOpen Access"She was certainly not a Rosa Luxemborg" : a biography of Cissie Gool in images and words(2002) Paleker, Gairoonisa; Bickford-Smith, Vivian; Mendelsohn, RichardThis 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.
- ItemOpen AccessTeachers' League of South Africa 1913-40(1986) Adhikari, Mohamed; Mendelsohn, RichardBesides examining the history of the Teachers' League of South Africa, a specifically coloured teachers' association, during its conservative phase from 1913 to 1940, this thesis in addition attempts to investigate the nature and development of this organization in the context of the wider social dynamic of which it was both part and product. The League is thus not only studied as a professional association but also as a specific constituent of the broader social categories of the coloured elite, the coloured people and South African society. The origins of the T.L.S.A. was rooted in the subordination of peoples of colour in Cape settler society and the development through the 19th century of a segregated education system at the Cape. More immediately, as a result of the social and political consequences of the mineral revolution intensifying racial discrimination against blacks, one of the responses of the coloured elite was the establishment of the League, through the mediation of the African Political Organisation, to protect coloured educational interests, regarded to be crucial to their advancement. The League was a typical embodiment of the assimilationist aspirations and accommodationist strategies that resulted from coloured elite marginality. This is evident in the growth and maturity of the League being largely in response to the progressive and systematic enforcement of segregation against coloureds over this period. More significantly, the League fully accepted white middle class values and codes of behaviour and its organizational life was dominated by the striving to conform to these norms. The League also displayed the essential powerlessness of the coloured elite as its representative in the tripartite contest with the Education Department and churches to influence the direction of coloured education. The interstitial position of the coloured elite in South African society was manifested by the League contradicting its basic principle of non-racism by the qualified acceptance of coloured inferiority and trying to use its closer assimilation to Western culture to claim a position of relative privilege for coloureds vis-a-vis Africans. It is apparent that at all levels of its existence the League was captive to its coloured identity and status.