Browsing by Author "Saunders, Chris"

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    Contestations over Caprivi identities : from pre colonial times to the present
    (2008) Kangumu, Bennett; Saunders, Chris
    This study investigated the hypothesis that Caprivi identities exist; and that they have always been contested. These identities defined as a sense of not belonging to greater South West Africa exist in two forms: i) as a spatial or geographical entity usually divided into East and West in history for administrative purposes; and, ii) as a people, such as Subia, Mafwe, Mayeyi, Mbukushu, Barakwena, Totela, Mbalangwe, and Lozi, collectively referred to as ‘Caprivians’. Through utilizing primary sources such as oral interviews and archival material as well as secondary sources, the study endeavored to establish how Caprivi identities were constructed; what the nature of its contestations are; and how ‘Caprivians’ responded to its construction. It was established that Caprivi identities were the result of administrative neglect in state formation that constructed isolation on the basis of difference – that ‘Caprivians’ are different from other groups in South West Africa, and that Caprivi was geographically remote from Windhoek and hence difficult to administer as part of South West Africa. Resultantly, only a primitive form of indirect rule existed in the area for most part of its colonial history resulting in constant change of colonial masters. Though it was pushed more to neighboring territories administratively, it was not made an integral part of such territories but made to stand separate as a geographical entity.
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    Memorialising Freedom Struggles
    (2008) Saunders, Chris
    My reading of a set of essays under the title The Civil Rights Movement in American Memory (2006), edited by Renee Romano and Leigh Raiford, leads me to offer some reflections on the different ways in which the civil rights movement in the US south and the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa have been memorialized. Memory is of course a slippery concept, which Romano (Wesleyan) and Raiford (UC Berkeley) at one point choose to define as ‘‘the subjective, selective, and potentially unreliable account of the past told by those outside of the academy and circulated in the media and popular culture.’’1 They do not stick to so narrow a definition, but their concept of memory work excludes the reconstruction of the past by historians and focuses mostly on forms of public remembering.
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    The ANC's 100 years: Some recent work on its history in historiographical content
    (2012) Saunders, Chris
    Much has now been written about the history of the African National Congress (ANC) over its hundred years, but surprisingly there is no survey of this literature. This article surveys some of this historiography before proceeding to discuss two major recently-published monographs, by Peter Limb on the early years of the ANC and by Susan Booysen on the eighteen years since it took office. Limb's book is characterised by its use of new sources to tell the detailed story of what the ANC did at the local level, and is a book that will long retain its importance. Booysen's book is equally detailed, but is not based on the same kind of source-material, and is therefore inevitably unable to see the ANC in recent years in the same kind of perspective. We will learn more about the ANC in its years in power from the memoirs of key figures becoming available, one of which, by the late Kader Asmal, inter alia recounts his experiences as Minister of Water Affairs and Forestry under Mandela and then as Minister of Education in the Mbeki cabinet.