Browsing by Subject "Bo-Kaap"

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    An Ethnographic Study on Heritage Preservation in Bo-Kaap
    (2020) Correia, Shannon; Haupt, Adam
    This research paper analyses the culture and community in Bo-Kaap, which is battling to preserve its heritage amid growing gentrification. Gentrification in this area is analysed as a special case in point, as although gentrification is happening in other neighbourhoods in Cape Town, Bo-Kaap is the home of Islam in South Africa, and is geographically set in a prime location of the city. This research paper includes an ethnographic study, as well as a photographic essay and a podcast series which supports the research in creative forms.The researcher interviewed several people from the area to discern the culture and the issues faced by the community. This paper examines the ethnographic lived experience of the researcher, as well as that of a local family. Three main events are examined to provide insight into the culture and community, namely an AirBnb traditional cooking experience, Eid AlAdha and the visit to the area by the Duke and Duchess of Sussex. The findings of this paper show that significant changes have and continue to occur, although the community is resilient in their efforts to preserve the culture. This research aims to provide additional and alternative records of the culture of the community as it stands in present day, in a holistic research effort. It also showcases the importance of the rich culture of the community which society needs to ensure is preserved.
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    Changing values in heritage: shifts from the tangible to intangible in urban historic environments bo-kaap as case study
    (2021) Shem-Tov, Tamar; Roux, Naomi
    This study explores the emergence of changing values associated with heritage in postapartheid South Africa, expressed as a shift from tangible to intangible heritage values. Central to the study is an understanding of the evolutionary construction of changing values in a rooted heritage community within the urban historic environment of Bo-Kaap, the oldest residential suburb of Cape Town. Exploring changing values in Bo-Kaap, where tangible and intangible heritage intersect in the contemporary moment, showcases how heritage ably and fluidly adapts and transforms as an ever-shifting cultural process, and forges new, or altered, modes of identity construction. Bo-Kaap, as the case study, is a significant historic urban environment of Cape Town's central city with a vibrant community having cultural rootedness in place, in slave ancestral heritage, and existing living heritage deserving of protection. It is examined against a backdrop of the localised political, governance and civic agency milieu. The study follows the narrative of Bo-Kaap from its origins as a residential quarter of the early Cape colonial settlement, through the mid twentieth century when Bo-Kaap became largely fashioned and formed into an ethnically defined 'Malay' quarter, conforming to essentialised notions of race and ethnicity dominant in nationalist ideology, through the apartheid regime and the penetrating effects of Group Areas on the social and physical fabric of the area, until the present day where we are witness to a sea-change in outlook of the public on the very meaning and purpose of heritage. Heritage claims and heritage activism entered the realm of active public discourse in 2019 in response to free-market developmental pressures in Bo-Kaap, with inflections of social justice touching the edges of the heritage debate, and invited a broadening of the outermost limits of heritage discourse. Integral to this story is how heritage systems have been shaped by the past and colonial histories, new systems of governance post 1994, and a culture of intensifying identity politics. Following the arc of time illuminates the complex interrelatedness of heritage values with social, historical, and political trajectories, and aims to examine just how dynamically heritage values arise, merge and shift within the inter-relational temporal space; what activates them, who activates them, and to what end; and how they have entered into a space of heritage activism and public discourse. I suggest that this present change in discourse and the display of emerging sets of heritage values requires a highly critical reflexivity on the part of heritage structures and the profession, to look at what these changes mean for heritage praxis and governance and, more importantly, how to advance the relevance of heritage to a sector of South African society advocating for a decolonised heritage value framework.
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    Code-Switching among Bilingual Speakers of Cape Muslim Afrikaans and South African English in the Bo-Kaap, Cape Town
    (2020) Cozien, Christine; Mesthrie, Rajend
    The Bo-Kaap is traditionally a Cape Muslim Afrikaans-speaking community, and sociohistorically it is particularly relevant to the development of Afrikaans at the Cape (Davids 2011, Mahida 1993). The Cape Muslim Afrikaans spoken in the Bo-Kaap is a sub-variety of Standard Afrikaans (Kotzé 1989, Davids 2011) and is distinguishable by its retained lexis (Mesthrie and Bhatt 2008) from languages historically spoken by slaves at the Cape, such as Malay, Arabic, Gujarati, and Konkani. Over time a number of socio-cultural, geographic, and historical factors have introduced the use of South African English alongside Cape Muslim Afrikaans in this speech community. The goal of this study was to provide insight into the nature of bilingual talk in the Bo-Kaap community, and to make a useful contribution to the growing body of codeswitching1 (hereafter CS) research generally. Based on natural language data collected during group interviews with members of the community, the study explored the language contact situation in the Bo-Kaap today, taking the viewpoint that what is occurring presently may be considered CS Three aspects of the CS documented were analysed and quantified. Specifically, the study investigated language interaction phenomena (Myers-Scotton 1995, Deuchar et al 2007) triggers (Clyne 1987) and directionality (Muysken 1997, Deuchar et al 2017, Çetinoglu 2017). A quantitative approach was taken to the data analysis. The interview audio files were downloaded and transcribed in ELAN. (Max Planck Institute). The annotations2 produced in ELAN were organised in a spreadsheet for analysis, resulting in a data set comprised of 356 annotations. The full data set was divided into subsets and tagged for language interaction phenomena, triggers, and directionality. These data sets were then sorted and quantified to identify trends in these three areas of interest. The study found Intra-sentential switches to be the most common type of language interaction phenomenon in the CS of this speech community, being present in 79% of the sampled annotations. Results from other CS studies echo this finding in other speech communities (Al Heeti et al 2016, Koban 2012, Falk 2013). The most common trigger for Intra-word switching in this corpus was in the head of the past tense Verb Phrase. Out of 27 occurrences of Intra-word switching, 16 were of this nature. In all of those an English verb head was housed within an Afrikaans past tense structure. No exceptions were observed in the data set, a strong indicator of the relationship status of the two languages involved. Cape Muslim Afrikaans almost certainly playing the role of the Matrix language, with South African English embedded. In terms of directionality, switching from Cape Muslim Afrikaans into South African English was by far the most common, at 85%. This further supports what the findings on triggers suggest about the hierarchy between these two languages.