Browsing by Author "Mohamed, Kharnita"

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    Lobola in Eswatini: Exploring Male Vulnerabilities through Kinship Making
    (2022) Ngwenyama, Nosisa Nolwazi; Mohamed, Kharnita; Mkhize, Zamambo
    The costly performances and displays of emalobolo and marriage by emaSwati aged 25 years to 35 years, during a time where 47% of the youth in Eswatini is unemployed has increased over the last two decades, while the legal marriage rates have decreased in the same period. The ethnographic study conducted predominantly online, in the Kingdom of Eswatini over eight months, during the COVID-19 pandemic uses qualitative methods to investigate the relationship between marriage and lobola practice, the performances of masculinity and how these performances influence and shape kinship making and the creation of family. The processes and procedures ascribed to emalobolo and marriage are not necessarily followed by the participants, as they make decisions and take actions that give the best possible outcomes for those involved. Family and kin relations produced during emalobolo magnify the tensions between consanguineal relatives and often friends take on the responsibilities of family members thus becoming family. The process of lobola also reveals the performative nature of class and social mobility, and places pressure on men to provide even when they cannot. The financial pressures and expectations placed on men to provide financially for members of their families, expose vulnerabilities in men, in ways that hegemonic masculinity neglects and erases. The embodiment of kuhlonipha and how it is practised by men and women help them strive for happiness and do what is right in the contexts they encounter as they navigate emalobolo, marriage and the afterlife of it all. My analysis shows that the creation of new family and kinship bonds through kulobola and marriage and the financial implications of them, expose male vulnerabilities that exist among Swazi men.
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    Such painful knowledge: hope and the (un)making of futures in Cape Town
    (2020) Cupido, Shannon; Mohamed, Kharnita
    Recent writing in the anthropology of affect and cognate fields has positioned hope as a useful category with which to examine socio-political life and formulate a political and theoretical response adequate to its form. This dissertation extends this endeavour by exploring the ‘hopeful projects' mothers and families undertake in order to secure their children's futures in contemporary Cape Town. Based on ethnographic research conducted with Black mothers between March and October 2018, I argue that the supposedly private maternal hopes my interlocutors hold are in fact indexical of the ways in which social inequality functions and becomes manifest in everyday life and care. Situated at the interface of embodied experience and political histories, their hopes are indicative of how liberal logics of selfextension, self-mastery, and self-maximisation are inhabited to produce alternative futures. At the same time, however, such hopes are continually undone by contexts of intractable structural violence and deprivation, reinvested into normative notions of kinship, domesticity, sexuality, and the body, or marshalled to perform reparative work that should properly fall under the purview of the state. In detailing the ways in which my interlocutors attempt to craft more capacious, more just, and more materially abundant futures for their children, I illustrate the affective entailments of life-building in post-Apartheid South Africa
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    (The necessity of) reflexive labour practices at triggerfish animation studios: an ethnography
    (2021) Irvine, Laura Anne; Mohamed, Kharnita
    This ethnographic dissertation argues for reflexive labour practices at Triggerfish Animation Studios in Cape Town, South Africa. Affect is used both as an analytical lens to examine the various social labour processes at Triggerfish, as well as a vitalising medium in reflexivity, which is a form of affect itself. Research was conducted over two months at Triggerfish during January and February 2018, where participant observation was practiced to collect data, along with focus groups and visual diaries collated from participants. The analysis centres on engaging the affective dimension of labour, as well as the ways that affect animates the different relationships that the studio embodies. Employees and management engage with each other through the affective notion of ‘care', and this sustains relationships within a neoliberal labour environment. This sets the context of an affective workplace whose care-economy is carefully balanced and regulated through ‘caring about' and ‘caring for', which has the potential to hide power dynamics, as well as gendered labour expectations. Triggerfish's claims of difference, as well as making a difference, allows them to sell the idea of ‘Africa' through identity claimed as well as identity distanced from. Recognising Triggerfish as a white, historically settler colonial company with an elitist history in a still-segregated society is important, even as the company is also located geographically in the Global South. There is thus the need for reflexivity within the geopolitical relationships involved in creating and selling media. Self-awareness is folded in on itself as an affective medium for understanding the ways that individuals conceptualise service work provided for the Global North, as well as service work provided by the Global North for Triggerfish. This uncovers and allows multiple, sometimes oxymoronic definitions and lived experiences to coexist. I argue that reflexivity at Triggerfish should be encouraged just as it is in Social Anthropology as a discipline. It allows for a multi-dimensional studio that is aware of its history and context, and can therefore make better-informed business decisions and produce better content.
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    The worship of Love
    (2020) Mohamed, Ferial; Mohamed, Kharnita
    Rania, a young introverted woman, lives in a traditional Muslim family. It is a working class family, of Indian and Cape Malay heritage. Her parents married each other against her paternal grandmother's plans for her son, and because of their disapproval of Rania's mother, it caused a rift isolating both Rania and her mother from them. Rania feels stuck in an environment where she doesn't fit in and feels that she doesn't belong. Feeling like this, she escapes into a dream world of books and art to survive her overbearing mother, Shazia, who is both emotionally repressed and verbally abusive toward her. Her father, Ismail (Miley) Ahmed, fuels the drama with his obsessive control which Rania questions, yet obeys. Shazia, heartbroken from a previous love lost, pretends not to be interested in the silliness of love, and feigns disinterest in her husband's suspected extramarital affairs, yet does everything she can to hold onto him. Until he humiliates her beyond her capacity to forgive and she throws him out, but still secretly holds onto a hope that he will want to come back to her. Amara is Shazia's daughter from her previous husband, Rania's stepsister, and Shazia's favourite. Shazia has great plans for her, but she is a strong and free spirited young woman, and rebels against her doting mother by following her own bliss. She chooses happiness over security, even if it means defying her mother's wishes and breaking her mother's heart. Rania, obedient and lonely, yearns to meet someone she can connect to, someone who can save her from the world she believes her parents are keeping her trapped in, but she may be the one blocking herself. It is a coming of age story where three women struggle to find happiness amid difficult circumstances. The events which unfold, change their lives forever.
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    This disabled body: an authoethnographic study of disability in post apartheid South Africa
    (2025) Mata, Siwongiwe; Mohamed, Kharnita
    Disability lies at the heart of a complex framework of knowledge and identity in post-apartheid South Africa. In this autoethnographic study, personal reflections on my history as a queer, Black, physically disabled individual are retold and compared to her current personal narratives to answer questions about disability in a contemporary South African context. Comparing my current experiences to my past, the question of how stigma manifests when considering the relationship between the disabled, other disabled people and the able-bodied is explored through looking at my relationship with my assistive devices. This catapults the reader into understanding how bureaucracy emerges in disabled life, as the assistive devices can be viewed as mediators of the relationship between the disabled and the world. The question of what community means for disabled people is explored in an attempt to articulate the complexities and nuances of disabled identity. Most hegemonic disability theory often does not account for the complexities and flexibility of the everyday life of a disabled individual. Reliant on memory, this study illustrates how crucial personal and intersectional reflections are in establishing how stigma lives in the stigmatiser and the stigmatised in different contexts, shaped by time and experiences. Further, this thesis demonstrates the value of considering events across time and that ableist interactions and experiences are not static but are dynamic and are constantly reshaping social relations.