Browsing by Author "Van Sittert, Lance"
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- ItemOpen AccessA reconstruction of the Cape (South African) fur seal harvest 1653 - 1899 and the comparison with the 20th-century harvest(2008) David, Jeremy; Van Sittert, LanceThe Cape fur seal was an abundant resource in southern Africa, when first discovered by itinerant sailing vessels in the late 16th century. Seals were slaughtered indiscriminately by the sailors for skins, meat and oil for three centuries from around 1600 to 1899. Government controls over the sealing industry were first introduced as late as 1893, by which time at least 23 seal colonies had become extinct and the seal population had been significantly reduced. This paper reconstructs the historical seal harvest from the time of arrival of the first settlers in 1652 up to 1899. These data are then compared with modern harvest data from 1900 to 2000, illustrating the marked increase in the harvest from about 1950, and the concomitant recovery of the seal population to a level of around 1.5-2 million animals.
- ItemOpen AccessFracking into the Karoo economy(2016) Young, Adam Alexander; Trollip, Hilton; Van Sittert, LanceWith the potential for shale gas extraction in the Karoo region of South Africa, every effort must be undertaken to understand what the effects this transformative industry may have. This paper attempts to explore what effects the industry may have on "small" Karoo towns by creating a demographic and economic baseline for three towns in the region and compares this with a shale gas extraction future. This was grounded in sociological research based on the "Boomtown Model", which attempts to understand the effects extractive industries have on small towns. The thesis finds that small Karoo towns are particularly vulnerable to the negative effects of the Boomtown Model, in light of their current profile which shows the rural economy has been declining for many years, which is coupled with a number of social issues that affect towns such as alcohol abuse and inter-personal violence. This paper concludes that a new shale gas industry will not benefit the residents of the Karoo unless a suitable policy framework is in place that ensures long term beneficiation and mitigates the environmental costs.
- ItemOpen AccessHistorical reconstruction of guano production on the Namibian islands(2003) Van Sittert, Lance; Crawford, RobThis paper presents data on guano production on the Namibian islands from 1843 to 1895, reconstructed from the nineteenth century customs records of the Cape Colony and United Kingdom. As the latter was the primary market for Namibian guano during this period, the data series can be considered to encompass the global production on the islands. Interpretation of the records as a proxy index for fish stock abundance is complicated by the interplay of cultural and environmental factors in influencing annual production. When compared with rainfall records from the Royal Observatory in Cape Town (1846- 1895), the guano data are suggestive of a relationship between guano production and environment, but firm conclusions must await better proxy records, perhaps based on fish scales in seafloor sediments off the Namibian coast.
- ItemOpen AccessLabour, capital and the state in the St. Helena Bay fisheries c.1856 - c.1956(1992) Van Sittert, Lance; Phillips, HowardThis thesis deals with the history of the St Helena Bay inshore fisheries, 1856-1956. Fishing has long been neglected by social and economic historians and the myths propagated by company and popular writers still hold sway. The thesis challenges these by situating commercial fishing at St Helena Bay in the context of changing regional, national and international economies and showing how it was shaped and conditioned by the struggle for ownership of the marine resource between labour and capital, mediated by the state. The thesis is organised chronologically into three epochs. In each the focus moves from macro to micro, tracing the processes of class formation, capital accumulation and state intervention. The first epoch (c.1856-c.1914) examines the merchant fisheries, the second (c.1914-c.1939) the crayfish canning industry and the third ( c.1939-c.195) secondary industrialisation. It is argued that the common property nature of the marine resource and non-identity between labour and production time in fishing created obstacles to capitalist production, discouraging investment and allowing petty-commodity production to flourish. The latter mediated the vagaries of production through a share system of co-adventuring which enabled owners to avoid paying a fixed wage. This system's impact on the nature and consciousness of fishing labour is examined as is its vulnerability to capture by other capitals through insecure land tenure and credit. Fishing capital, in both its merchant and productive guises was dependent on articulation with petty-commodity production to provide it with commodities or raw material and bear the cost of reproducing labour. Articulation was hampered at St Helena Bay both by the persistence of merchant capital and the rent and labour interests of Sandveld agriculture. The origins and effect of this situation on the fisheries is detailed and discussed, highlighting the importance of agricultural capital's political influence with the colonial and provincial state in blocking or subverting the development of productive capital. The advent of the interventionist central state in the 1930s undermined merchant and farmer dominance of the fisheries and cleared the way for the articulation of petty-commodity primary production with secondary industry during and after the Second World War. This articulation was facilitated by the central state restricting access to the marine · resource and investing heavily in marine research and infrastructure to roll-back the natural constraints on fishing and create the conditions for the establishment of a stable capitalist production regime.
- ItemOpen AccessA modernised man? : changing constructions of masculinity in Drum magazine, 1951-1984(2002) Clowes, Lindsay; Bradford, Helen; Van Sittert, LanceThis study explores changes in the way that Drum magazine constructed manhood from the first edition of 1951 to its sale in 1984. The exploration is undertaken from a feminist post modern perspective that sees gender as a social construct and masculinity as a complex and multifaceted identity that is actively and creatively produced by men in relation to women and through the intersections with other identities such as sexuality, race, class, and ethnicity. I argue that Drum's constructions of the masculinity of black men were infused with both black and white notions of race and sex, informed by both western and African discourses of gender. At times these different discourses were in competition, at other times they were more compatible; together they shaped the representations of manhood found in Drum, which in turn helped legitimise and normalise particular ways of being a man in mid to late twentieth century South Africa.
- ItemOpen AccessOrnaments of the Desert : Springbok Treks in the Cape Colony, 1774-1908(2004) Roche, Christopher James; Van Sittert, LanceBibliography: leaves 199-221.
- ItemOpen AccessPrivate property, capital and the state in the development of white commercial farming in South Africa, 1910-1986(2016) De Jager, B; Inguscio, A; Van Sittert, LanceThis dissertation examines the value of state assistance for small farmers in countries beset by capital deficits. It explores how undercapitalisation inhibited capitalist development of white commercial agriculture in South Africa between 1910 and 1936. From 1937, South Africa's nationalist government intervened in markets through marketing control boards to resolve capital constraints. Accumulation, liberal credit provision and investment followed. Between 1973 and 1981 state control over markets diminished. Nonetheless development continued. This thesis calls into contention the New Institutional Economic school's premise that state involvement should be limited to protecting institutions that optimise the free market. In their approach, protection of private property is the only path to sustainable economic development. The history of white agriculture in South Africa from 1910 demonstrates that state intervention that resolves capital deficits in the context of a competitive market economy is another sustainable path.
- ItemOpen AccessA space for conflict : the scab acts of the Cape Colony, circa 1874-1911(2011) Visser, Natascha; Van Sittert, LanceSheep farmers who protested against the promulgation of anti-scab legislation presented their opinions of the disease in a slew of letters to the press and in testimonies before various scab commissions. Although the farmers' beliefs about scab were heterogeneous, they contained elements of an environmental theory of disease.
- ItemRestricted'The Ornithorhynchus of the Western World': Environmental Determinism in Erin Anderson Walker's South African History, 1911 - 1936(2008) Van Sittert, LanceThe article traces the changing role of environmental determinism in the invention of ‘South African’ history after 1910 through a close reading of the social biography and scholarship of Eric Anderson Walker, professor of history at the South African College (now the University of Cape Town), 1911–36. The dominant liberal historiography still acknowledges Walker as one of the founders of the national academic discipline in English, but otherwise ignores his scholarship which is now deemed irredeemably Eurocentric, empiricist and conservative. By relocating and re-reading Walker in the context of the first quarter century of the new settler nation state confected by Britain out of the wreckage of the South African War, the supposed disciplinary dead-end of his scholarship becomes the route into an examination of historical knowledge as both construct of and aide memoir to the new imaginary of white South African nationhood. It also provides a salutary warning to the modern practitioners of environmental history of the non-innocence of their field and the need to reckon with its determinist past.
- ItemOpen Access“Wars are won by men not weapons”: the invention of a militarised British settler identity in the Eastern Cape c. 1910–1965(2019) Ovenstone, Georgina; Van Sittert, Lance; Field, ShaunThis thesis is concerned with the invention of South African Anglo identity, and aims to provide a new perspective on how this identity was constructed in the Eastern Cape from c.1910 to 1965. In particular, it considers the ways in which the museum developed to construct South African Anglo identity in the Eastern Cape town of Grahamstown. In the nationalisms of the postcolonial states, independent countries possessed museums in their capitals. These institutions constituted an essential part of national heritage, were crucial for the advancement of education, and operated as a means through which the ‘imagined community’ of the nation state was itself curated and sustained. Postcolonial nationalisms are imagined through the grammar provided by empire. In other words, they are imagined in terms of the administrative and archaeological evidence that colonialism has ‘gathered’ and displayed in its museums. The visual representation of the artefact became a powerful signifier for national identity because of everyone’s awareness of its location in an infinite series of identical symbols. This thesis’s primary focus is on how South African Anglo identity was invented in two key sites in Grahamstown, namely, the school and the museum. It will illustrate how rifles, which were used by the cadet corps at St Andrew’s College, and which were carefully selected and displayed in the 1820 Settlers’ Memorial Museum’s Military Gallery, came to play a central role in symbolizing and militarizing Anglo identity in the eastern province in the twentieth century. In particular, this study will argue that although English identity was reinvented following the 1820 settlers’ centenary in Grahamstown, it was not imagined as a military identity until after the Second World War, and the return of the veterans to St Andrew’s College and the cadet corps. Importantly, it will indicate that the school and the museum comprised key sites through which South African Anglo identity was constructed to reflect images of the British soldier, who in the Eastern Cape, could adapt to local conditions.
- ItemOpen Access'You cannot make the people scientific by Act of Parliament' : farmers, the State and livestock enumeration in the North-western Cape, c. 1850-1900(1998) D'Arcy Nell, Dawn; Van Sittert, LanceThis study investigates the tensions surrounding livestock enumeration in the Cape Colony in the late nineteenth century. The study situates livestock statistics in an historical context which is intended to provide some indication of what these statistics meant for contemporary actors. This study looks at the significance of the enumeration oflivestock by the state, both for the state and for farmers, and focuses specifically on the semi-nomadic 'trekfarming' population ofthree districts of the Cape Colony - ClanwiHiam, Calvinia and Namaqualand - referred to for the purposes of this study as the North-western Cape. Livestock enumeration was considered a central component of the officially-sanctioned fund of 'knowledge' on the colony's livestock that was used as the basis of state policy and pastoral reform interventions. Livestock statistics were also a contentious issue in the colony during this period. While certain sectors of the inhabitants of the colony viewed statistics as an indispensable aspect of 'modern' life and put pressure on the colony's civil service to provide more reliable statistics, other sectors of the population viewed enumeration with suspicion. This thesis looks at the tensions surrounding agricultural statistics, and argues that this contest had its roots in the fact that statistics had come to be regarded as a symbol of the 'progressive' agriculture that was sweeping the colony during this period. Ultimately, however, the effectiveness of state knowledge on livestock throughout this period would prove to be constrained by the state's particular preoccupation with the growth of 'progressive' agriculture. Gaps existed in official knowledge on agriculture in the colony which would allow farmers in outlying regions such as the North-western Cape a degree of liberty in their farming practices and use of natural resources.