Browsing by Author "Ralphs, Gerard"

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    'If it's not black gold, then it's bone gold' : contested knowledges of the Prestwich Street dead
    (2008) Ralphs, Gerard; Shepherd, Nick
    The aim of this mini-dissertation is to map out the nature of these contested knowledges of the Prestwich Street dead, and to describe and analyse the struggles of dominance and resistance these different ways of knowing gave rise to. My argument throughout is that out of the clashing of these knowledges emerged a frontier - a discursive space of conflict and turbulence that came into being with the surfacing of the dead, and dissipated with an official decision to prevent basic anatomical research on their skeletal remains. If this discursive battle and this frontier opened up the post-apartheid public sphere to new and emergent (South) African identities, then it also closed down the public sphere with the further entrenchment of particular disciplinary identities and formations, namely archaeology, physical anthropology, development, and heritage resources management.
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    Memory, Conscience andthe Museum in South Africa: The Old Langa Pass Office and Court
    (2008) Ralphs, Gerard
    The old pass office and court in Langa was a site of apartheid brutality. In its day-to-day workings, the court found thousands of South Africans guilty of ‘crimes’ that were only crimes in the radically unjust society that the apartheid government cultivated. This paper explores how residents from Langa have remembered the site of the old pass office and court through the lens of oral history. In doing so, it asks how the site, now the Langa Museum, may become a space of memory, identity, and political conscience and consciousness in a post-apartheid context. What insight and wisdom lie embedded in Langa residents’ oral histories about the old pass office? And how can oral historians, Langa residents, museum and heritage practitioners, and visitors to Langa access and utilise the transformative narrative power of these site-stories in the shifting contexts of the site as an emergent social history museum? At what point does the old Langa pass office cease to be a dark space of apartheid, and begin to become a space of post-apartheid humanity and creativity? Indeed, can the Langa Museum become a ‘living’ social history museum? What would a transformation of this nature entail for oral history, Cape Town's memory communities, community-based heritage practice, citizenship, and identity in the South African postcolony?