Browsing by Subject "Eastern Cape"

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    The dynamics of household formation and composition in the rural Eastern Cape.
    (2008) Neves, David; Du Toit, Andries
    Focusing on a specific impoverished region of rural Eastern Cape, this paper examines the dynamics of household formation and composition within postapartheid migratory networks. While the fluidity, contingency and spatially extended nature of African households is generally understood, the paper focuses on the social relationships that both buttress and flow from these qualities. In conceptualising the notion of the household, the paper also suggests the rubric of the ‘household’ can be a powerful, cultural narrative for constituting practices of domesticity. Five detailed case studies are presented and the dynamics of household-making explicated in terms of three distinct levels of analysis. The first is the overarching macro-structural context which includes kinship practices, cultural mores, rural governance and the changing political economy of South Africa’s former homelands. The paper argues that the altered material base of rural livelihoods in the last two decades has seen traditional patterns of male circular migration and trajectories of household formation eclipsed by large numbers of economically marginalised workseekers who precariously churn between both urban-rural and within rural areas. These changes have undercut the prospects for traditional forms of household formation and reconfigured the nature of the contemporary conjugal contract.
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    The impact of illness and death on migration back to the Eastern Cape.
    (2008) Neves, David
    This paper examines the impact of HIV/AIDS related morbidity and mortality on return migration to the rural Eastern Cape. The paper begins by discussing the interrelation between population mobility and HIV and grounds these dynamics within the structural context of underdevelopment in a former homeland region of South Africa. The changing migratory regimes of the post-apartheid era, which have seen formal male labour migration supplanted by increasingly informal and feminized migratory trajectories, between both rural-urban and intra-rural locales, are described. Five case studies are presented, and the multiplicity of factors associated with rural return migration in the face of HIV/AIDS related illness delineated. The empirical material suggests illness-induced back migration is driven not only by the search for health and succour, but also by complex amalgams of shifting entitlement and obligation. Understanding the dynamics of rural return requires attention not only to the highly variegated position that urban returnees potentially assume within receiving households, but also the effects of their return on these households. Even within the relatively limited number of case studies presented, rural returnees are variously subjects or dispensers of care, either relatively peripheral or crucially central members of receiving households. The evidence simply belies any notion of unidirectional rural return, driven by a universal set of imperatives in response to illness.
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    Psoralea margaretiflora (Psoraleeae, Fabaceae): A new species from the Sneeuberg Centre of Floristic Endemism, Eastern Cape, South Africa
    (2011) Stirton, Charles; Clark, Vincent; Barker, Nigel; Muasya, Muthama
    AbstractA new species of Psoralea is described. Psoralea margaretiflora C.H. Stirton & V.R. Clark is endemic to the Sneeuberg Centre of Floristic Endemism, Eastern Cape, South Africa. This resprouter is characterised by its small greenish-white flowers with a small trifid purple nectar patch and translucent veins; 5(–7)-pinnate leaflets; multi-branching erect short seasonal flowering shoots; and tall habit of many stiff bare stems with the seasonal shoots massed at the apex. It is most similar to Psoralea oligophylla Eckl. & Zeyh., a widespread species found in the Eastern Cape. The reseeder Psoralea oligophylla differs in its lax virgate spreading habit with numerous long glaucous seasonal shoots; single stem, 1(–3)- glaucous leaflets; more numerous white flowers; and standard petals with a purple ring surrounding a bright yellow nectar patch.
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    Steve Biko in the intellectual history of the Eastern Cape
    (2013) Mangcu, Xolela
    This audio lecture locates the ideas of the late Black Consciousness leader, Steve Biko, within a long trajectory beginning with the Khoi-Khoi and San wars of resistance in the Northern Cape. For anyone with an interest in the life of Steve Biko and SA history.
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    The impact of industrial agrarian policies on soils: experiences of small-scale farmers in the rural Eastern Cape
    (2023) Phakisi, Nteboheng Portas; Green, Lesley
    After the end of legislated apartheid, the South African government changed old policies that had been driven by segregation against the black majority. Black small-scale farmers in rural areas were encouraged to join commercial agriculture to capitalise on state subsidies and support. Municipalities including Buffalo City Metropolitan, Great Kei, Amathole and others in the Eastern Cape, in collaboration with the Eastern Cape Department of Agriculture and agro industry, introduced programmes such as the Massive Food Production Programme and the current Cropping Project to support rural farmers and to reduce poverty in the province. The initiatives included the introduction of genetically modified maize seeds, chemical fertilisers, chemical herbicides, and pesticides, as well as herbicide-resistant and pest-resistant crops. However, joining state-funded initiatives meant farmers had to give up the farming practices and knowledge systems that had sustained them for years, and they lost the kinship they had built with the local soil and its organisms. By kinship I am referring to a symbiotic relationship that does not separate nature from society, a relationship that is mutualistic and in which there is no mastery of one party over the other. Working with rural Eastern Cape small-scale farmers who participated in these programmes, this study employs a multidisciplinary approach to understand the changing agricultural landscape in rural South Africa, focusing on the consequences of state-funded programmes on local soil knowledge in the context of current Eastern Cape industrial agrarian policies. Navigating from small-scale farmers' voices, remote sensing technology, history, African environmentalism, soil science and the human psyche, the study examines what happens when corporations and the government encroach on traditional and small-scale agriculture. This integrative research methodology of the Environmental Humanities, framed from the Global South, compels us to reconceptualise our relationship with nature. The study argues that while agro-industrial technologies can be used with existing local practices to assist farmers, they should never be introduced as a replacement for existing local knowledge of soil fertility. Moreover, where policies focus on the financialisation of the agrarian economy, such policies risk benefitting agrobusinesses instead of poor, small-scale farmers. If policies intended to stimulate rural development are to be effective, the needs of rural small-scale farmers must be taken into consideration when such policies are initiated.