̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - South Africa

Call of the wild collector

lw355 — Fri, 28 Aug 2020 06:00:53 +0000

Walking at ‘botanist pace’ on Mount Terror in South Africa, Dr Ángela Cano likes to stop and smell the succulents. She then measures, photographs, presses specimens and gathers seeds. Her work is helping to safeguard some of the rarest plants on Earth.

̽��ֱ��Longing of Belonging: African photography on show at MAA

sjr81 — Tue, 13 Jun 2017 10:53:05 +0000

Kholwa: ̽��ֱ��Longing of Belonging showcases the work of South African photographer Sabelo Mlangeni who dreamt up the exhibition during conversations with Joel Cabrita, a researcher from Cambridge’s Faculty of Divinity, who is researching the history of Zionism in South Africa. ‘Kholwa’ means ‘belief’ in isiZulu, one of the most widely spoken languages in South Africa.

Approximately 30 per cent of all South Africans are members of a Zionist church. Zionism (unrelated to Jewish Zionism) is the country’s largest popular religious movement but began life as a 20th century Protestant faith healing movement, originating in the small town of Zion (pop. 24,000), Illinois, in the largely white Midwest of the USA.

Cabrita’s work charts the dramatic shift and 20th century expansion of Christianity and seeks to explain how Zionism travelled across the Atlantic Ocean and became one of the most important influences in black communities more than 8,000 miles away. With approximately 15 million members, it is the largest Christian group in the region.

Mlangeni is a member of the Zionist church and his grounding in the religion can be traced in the intimate and person portraits of church members going on display in Cambridge. He and Cabrita are interested in examining what is at stake when a photographer turns his camera on a religious community they are part of.

Mlangeni said: “ ̽��ֱ��biggest question for me is being part of the community, part of the church. How can I point out other people as being ‘amakholwa’ (‘the believers’) when that is what I myself am? This is a body of work that doesn’t ‘look’ at the Zionist church. It is very important for me to emphasise this, I am not interested in exotifying the church.

“I want to look at people gathering beyond church, and the strong spiritual relationships, which also include me. A long time before even studying photography, I made a lot of work about the church and church members. So my camera was in the church for a long time, church people knew me with a camera. When I look at this work, what’s important is the sense of intimacy between me and the church.”

“For me the most important part of meeting with Joel Cabrita is that it brought something new to me, an understanding of where the Zionists came from, what their beginnings were, where the church was really born [in the USA].”

Some of Mlangeni’s images portray the umlindelo amakholwa (the night vigil of believers). This all-night service forms the cornerstone of Zionist worship across South Africa.

̽��ֱ��service consists of long nights of the entire community gathered in longing expectation for the spirit to descend, whether ancestral spirits or the Christian God. Song, prayer, sermons and dance see the believers through the night. Umlindelo amakholwa is the occasion when bonds of solidarity and community are cemented between those who spend the night in expectant waiting. As dawn breaks, the believers make their way home, while some head to a full day of work.

“Zionism was founded in the in the American Midwest in the 1890s and spread to South Africa in 1904 via missionaries and the circulation of faith-healing literature,” said Cabrita. “From the small town of Wakkerstroom, near the village of Driefontein where Sabelo grew up, Zionism spread across the region with migrant labourers returning from Johannesburg’s gold mines. Today, Zionism has adapted to African understandings of the world, with few traces of its North American roots. Southern African Zionists remain committed to the power of prayer to heal bodily illness as their American forebears.”

Working mainly in black and white, Mlangeni’s photographs focus on capturing the intimate, everyday moments of communities in contemporary South Africa. His work includes ‘Big City’ (2002 to 2015) which focuses on Johannesburg’s history, and ‘Country Girls’ (shot between 2003 and 2009), which focuses on gay communities in rural South Africa, especially in the area of Driefontein, his own village in the province of Mpumalanga.

As a childhood friend of many of his subjects, Mlangeni has been able to create photographs from a perspective of unique understanding and membership of the community he is portraying. Throughout his work, Mlangeni avoids ‘othering’ or ‘exoticising’ his subjects, and instead attempts to show the multi-faceted, intimate reality of daily life of these individuals. While many of them face discrimination due to their sexual identities, or are living in precarious socio-economic situations, Mlangeni’s work does not cast his subjects as ‘victims’ but rather portrays their resilience, joyfulness and dignity as ordinary people.

“His photography continually erases and removes the boundaries between observer and subject,” added Cabrita. “Mlangeni is portraying his own belief as much as he is exploring the spiritual commitments of his photographic subjects.

“They chart his own journey towards belong, and longing for belonging within the Zionist community, a journey that has been mediated through a photographer’s lens. While some photographs reveal open, friendly gazes, others confront us with turned backs, inscrutable silhouettes and hidden figures buried deep in pictures, hinting at anonymity, inaccessibility and profound longing.”

Kholwa: ̽��ֱ��Longing of Belonging – which runs from June 13-September 10 – is free to the public. Visit www.maa.cam.ac.uk for further details and opening times.

A photography exhibition capturing the black South African Zionist community – the most popular religious denomination in the country – opens at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (MAA) today.

What’s important is the sense of intimacy between me and the church.

Sabelo Mlangeni

One of Sabelo Mlangeni's images going on display at MAA from today

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Multiplier effect: the African PhD students who will grow African research

amb206 — Tue, 21 Feb 2017 11:15:37 +0000

“Africa needs a million new PhD researchers over the next decade.” It’s a huge figure. Professor David Dunne uses it to explain the scale of need in Africa for a new generation of scholars who will pioneer sustainable solutions to many of the continent’s challenges.

“There are world-class academics in Africa,” he explains, “but not enough to train and mentor all the young researchers that Africa needs to maintain and accelerate its progress. This is where Cambridge and other leading international universities can help, by making expertise and facilities available to help bridge this mentorship gap.”

Dunne is Director of the Cambridge-Africa Programme, a ̽��ֱ�� initiative that for the past eight years has been building collaborative links between Cambridge and Africa. ̽��ֱ��model is centred on Cambridge researchers helping to mentor young African researchers in their African universities and research Institutions. This contributes to research capacity building in Africa but also benefits Cambridge by widening the experience and opportunities for its researchers and students.

However, that stark fact remains – a great many more new researchers are needed. With this in mind, a new Cambridge-Africa PhD studentship scheme began to enrol PhD students last year from all over Africa – five per year, every year for five years. “It’s at least a beginning,” says Dunne. “We want this programme to grow in Cambridge, and other universities.”

One criterion is that the prospective student must be studying issues that are priorities for Africa. ̽��ֱ��research interests of the current students are broad: from urban growth to poverty, business associations to sustainable industries, infectious disease to post-conflict citizenship.

Taskeen Adam

Taskeen Adam is one of the PhD students. She’d worked as an electrical engineer for two years when she decided that she wanted to use her skills to bring about social change. “What attracted me to engineering was the challenge of solving technical problems. But my real passion is for humanitarian issues and the need to create quality education for all.”

In 2012, the United Nations General Assembly declared access to the internet as a basic human right. But figures from 2014 gathered for Taskeen’s home country of South Africa showed that more than 4,000 schools had no access to electricity and 77% of schools had no computers. Many thousands of children were missing out on the chance to learn the skills needed to make a better life.

Her research is enabling her to look at the educational opportunities afforded by the internet, in particular the potential of decolonised African MOOCs (Massive Online Open Courses) as a means for delivering inclusive educational programmes to the most marginalised learners in South Africa. She’s keen to develop an online educational framework adapted for, and relevant to, communities in developing countries.

Taskeen completed her first degree at the ̽��ֱ�� of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. On graduating, and while working full time, she pioneered an initiative called ‘Solar Powered Learning’ to give students in rural areas access to technology that was both low cost and environmentally friendly.

̽��ֱ��pilot project won Taskeen accolades. She was listed among South Africa’s Mail & Guardian’s top 200 Young South Africans for 2014. This gave her the confidence to embark on a career that would use her engineering skills in ways that could help to bridge inequalities.

As part of her Master’s research, she spent two weeks in Kigali, capital of Rwanda, where she visited schools benefiting from a national scheme to equip every child with a laptop. It was clear that this commendable programme was failing to enhance learning. Although resources were being provided, there was a lack of focus on maintenance skills, curriculum integration and teacher professional development. In many cases, the children were more comfortable using the laptops than were their teachers.

“My trip demonstrated the mismatch between the deliverables and the outcomes of the scheme. ̽��ֱ��focus was on technology deployment, rather than on improving educational attainment,” she says. “Many African governments seem to be following a similar path, and I hope that, by using the resources, networks and expertise here in Cambridge, I might eventually be able to influence policy changes at the intersection of education and technology back in Africa.”

Richmond Juvenile Ehwi

Richmond Juvenile Ehwi also hopes to take his skills and expertise back to his home country, Ghana. He has just arrived in Cambridge to start his PhD in Cambridge’s Department of Land Economy. After his first degree at Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah ̽��ֱ�� of Science and Technology, he worked as a research consultant and estate manager.

Moving to Ghana’s capital city, he became interested in the changes he saw in the property market. “Plush Western-designed detached houses, apartments and gated communities are springing up and I wondered what the future would be like for Ghana’s urban landscape. While this development mirrors Accra’s integration into the globalised city concept, accompanying this trend are social, economic, environmental and cultural costs.”

As Western lifestyles become increasingly popular, the older-style family compounds associated with traditional Ghanaian culture are declining, even in rural areas. “With literacy rates and standards of living rising, households are demanding greater privacy and better sanitation which, in most traditional compound houses, are greatly compromised,” he explains.

In the West, gated communities are often seen in a negative light: they are associated with segregation, racial polarisation and social exclusion. While accepting the realities of this criticism, Richmond seeks to facilitate a balanced discussion and inspire evidence-based planning policies.

He suggests that, as new gated residences develop in the suburbs, there can be both material and social benefits for surrounding areas. “In Ghana, the new gated communities tend to be multiracial rather than segregated according to race or nationality. ̽��ֱ��ability to pay for your house is what counts, not what you do or what your ethnicity is. Gated developments offer the security and services that most people aspire to,” he says.

Entire neighbourhoods can benefit from the expectations of the owners of the new properties, he explains: “It’s misleading to think of gated communities as isolated enclaves. People who live in them are not completely cut off from society. They travel to work, to malls and markets, to church services. These public spaces facilitate social interaction. Also, better-off households offer employment for gardeners, drivers and care givers – and help to raise incomes and opportunities.”

His long-term plan is to create an Urban Study Research Centre back in Accra, and to take back a deeper understanding of the interplay of economic factors with social and cultural issues in urban development.

̽��ֱ��multiplier effect

Dunne points to such plans as an indicator of the promise of the Cambridge-Africa PhD studentship scheme. “We are training 25 Cambridge-Africa scholars. It’s a small number compared with the overall need. But these researchers are a starting point. They will train other researchers and the expertise will multiply back in Africa.”

He adds: “It’s not just that Africa needs research and researchers for its own use. ̽��ֱ��world needs African researchers. We can’t have a situation where 14% of the world’s population – living on a continent with unique culture, diversity and environment – contributes less than 1% of published research output. ̽��ֱ��world needs the unique knowledge and perspective that African researchers can provide to solve our shared global challenges.”

̽��ֱ��Cambridge-Africa PhD studentship scheme is funded by the ̽��ֱ�� and the Cambridge Trust.

To keep up to date with the latest stories about Cambridge’s engagement with Africa, follow #CamAfrica on Twitter.

Taskeen Adam and Richmond Juvenile Ehwi are part of a PhD programme that’s enrolling five African students per year for five years, to help train world-class researchers for Africa.

̽��ֱ��world needs African researchers. We can’t have a situation where 14% of the world’s population – living on a continent with unique culture, diversity and environment – contributes less than 1% of published research output.

David Dunne

Nick Saffell

Taskeen Adam and Richmond Juvenile Ehwi

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

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Modern art’s missing chapter

sjr81 — Wed, 25 Feb 2015 01:01:34 +0000

After being awarded £100,000 by the Art Fund to build a collection of work from Australia, South Africa and Canada, the museum officially opened ̽��ֱ��Power of Paper yesterday. ̽��ֱ��exhibition focuses on artworks made in those countries during an epoch of decolonisation.

It exhibits for the first time in the UK some of the earliest prints made by Aboriginal, Inuit and black South African artists – a rich variety of indigenous art from the 1950s onwards as the end of empire informed works reflecting attachments to land and belief, as well as struggles with violence, dislocation and contemporary city life.

"This show is a revelation," said Nicholas Thomas, Director of MAA and the exhibition's curator. "It presents visions of place and history that are rarely given the attention their eloquence and power deserve, even in today's supposedly global and inclusive art world.

“I'm taken aback by the sheer artistic accomplishment of all the works included, but also love the quirkiness of the artists' take on everything from empire, to township life, to climate change. Why should a military helicopter be hoisting an oversized caribou, walrus and polar bear through the air? You need to come to the show to find out."

Modern art was more than just a project of great Europeans. From the late 1950s onward, as the end of empire gathered momentum, artists in native and local communities began to produce work in modern media in both remote community workshops and city studios; wryly expressing everyday life in townships or settlements, and often illuminating both personal and collective concerns in artworks that could be evocative, oblique or polemical.

Responding to the very limited representation of modern indigenous art movements in British collections, in 2011 the Art Fund awarded the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Cambridge £100,000 to build a collection of work on paper from Australia, Canada and South Africa.

For more than two years, working with a network of artists, workshops and specialist curators, Thomas embarked on what he described as a ‘dream shopping trip’, building a unique collection of around 300 works. While some of the artists are internationally famous, only a few of the works have been on display in Europe.

Art on display in Britain for the first time includes the very first prints produced at the famous Rorke’s Drift print workshop, which played a major role in the development of black art during apartheid.

South African artist Frank Ledimo, whose work King Ubu Encounter (2002) is featured in the exhibition, said: “I create work that is based on the urban landscape in which I live. I have been fascinated by the representation of the figure to relay messages of urban squalor, city life, survivors and victims of urbanisation.”

Added Thomas: “ ̽��ֱ��Power of Paper gives voice to great but marginalized artists, whose words caption their own work. ̽��ֱ��exhibition's most vital message is that art has offered a route to freedom.”

̽��ֱ��Power of Paper runs at MAA until December 6, 2015. ̽��ֱ��exhibition will also feature a working press with opportunities to participate in practical workshops as visitors explore the medium of printmaking as a form of expression.

̽��ֱ��artworks of black and indigenous peoples – a missing chapter in the history of modern art – is brought into sharp focus in a ‘revelatory’ exhibition at Cambridge ̽��ֱ��’s Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.

̽��ֱ��exhibition's most vital message is that art has offered a route to freedom

Nicholas Thomas

Joseph Pootoogook

Joyfully I Saw Ten Caribou

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Activist art reflects fight for rights of African AIDS sufferers

bjb42 — Fri, 22 Jun 2012 08:00:34 +0000

An extensive and vibrant body of artworks produced by a group of HIV/AIDS activists from Khayelitsha Township outside Cape Town and by lead artist Rachel Gadsden (UK) will go on display at the ̽��ֱ�� Museum as part of Unlimited Global Alchemy, a project commissioned by the Unlimited scheme, which funded 29 ambitious projects by disabled artists to be presented as part of the London 2012 Festival. ̽��ֱ��exhibition runs from 23 June – 18 August.

̽��ֱ��seeds of the project were originally sown at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in 2010, when UK artist Rachel Gadsden first clapped eyes on a ‘body-map’ painting by South African activist Nondumiso Hlwele, during the museum’s then exhibition Assembling Bodies. ̽��ֱ��startling work lays bare Hlwele’s attitude to her own body and the HIV infection within, mapping the disease but also the hope that antiretroviral (ARV) drugs bring.

Gadsden, who herself has a chronic illness - a form of brittle asthma that requires her to wear a syringe driver around the clock, releasing drugs into her body at regular intervals to survive - identified directly with the fragility and catharsis conveyed by the work, and the experience of being kept alive by medical intervention, which inspired her to track the artist down.

After a long search and with an award through the Unlimited scheme which forms part of the Cultural Olympiad and London 2012 Festival, Gadsden found herself in working in Khayelitsha Township with Hlwele and five other members of the Bambanani artist-activist group - and the project began for real. Over the course of six weeks in the autumn of last year a large number of drawings, sketchbooks and paintings were created, and a series of films, directed by Gadsden and made with filmmakers Deborah May and Cliff Bestall, which are an integral part of the exhibition.

“I’ve always believed, rightly or wrongly, that we’re all artists, but that we simply haven’t all had the opportunity to express ourselves through artistic processes,” said Gadsden.

During Thabo Mbeki’s time as President for much of the noughties, South Africa’s government was accused of being in denial of the AIDS epidemic - refusing to acknowledge the link between HIV and AIDS in a country where more than 5 million people are HIV-positive.

This meant that many were prohibited potentially life-saving treatment and access to ARVs, leading to a civil rights movement for those afflicted by HIV - with campaigners even taking the authorities to court to secure the right to treatment.

̽��ֱ��work produced by Gadsden and the Bambanani activist group is fuelled by the politics and myths surrounding the chonic health issues they have all experienced – in particular HIV/AIDS – offering perspectives on what it means to experience disabling conditions, and to fight for life in the face of social taboos.

“I discovered that art could be used as a healing mechanism,” said Zodwa Somlayi, a member of the Bambanani. “Exploring this with others infected with HIV/AIDS provided a cathartic experience for me. I wish for all those infected to have the courage and support to disclose their status.”

̽��ֱ��exhibition will be the first following the recent revamp of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (MAA), which reopened last month after a major £1.8m redevelopment - including a front door onto the street for the first time in more than a century.

“I am thrilled to welcome Unlimited Global Alchemy to the Museum as its inaugural exhibition,” said Anita Herle, Curator at the MAA. “Heartfelt, irreverent and provocative, it vividly conveys the resilience of the human spirit and strength of social action in the face of adversity.”

“It’s a pleasure to be able to host work from a project initially conceived when an artist encountered a previous exhibition at this very Museum. It completes the circle.”

Following Cambridge, the exhibition moves to the Southbank Centre in London, with an exhibition in the Royal Festival Hall from 31 August – 9 September. In addition, a full-length performance created in response to the Cape Town residency - co-directed by Gadsden and choreographer Athina Vahla - premieres in the Purcell Room at the Southbank Centre on 5 September. This performance features the creation of visual art live on stage, sound, projections and dance.

22^nd June also sees the launch of a specially commissioned catalogue book, edited by Andrew Mitchelson and designed by David Caines, which carries illustrations of artworks, a DVD of the films and texts including a foreword by acclaimed South African author Jonny Steinberg. This catalogue is available from the Museum bookshop and online here

Produced by Artsadmin, Unlimited Global Alchemy has been commissioned by the ‘Unlimited’ programme, part of the London 2012 Festival; presented in association with the Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology in Cambridge and transferring to Southbank Centre during the Paralympic Games in September.

A new exhibition launching at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology explores the psychology and politics of living with HIV/AIDS in South Africa, where social stigmas meant that those suffering with the disease have had to campaign for work, education and life-prolonging drugs.

It’s a pleasure to be able to host work from a project initially conceived when an artist encountered a previous exhibition at this very Museum. It completes the circle.

Anita Herle

Unlimited Global Alchemy

Artwork by Nondumiso Hlwele

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̽��ֱ��emotional historian?

bjb42 — Tue, 28 Feb 2012 09:51:10 +0000

Reflecting back on the past month and its association with St. Valentine’s Day, it seems February often confronts us with emotion a bit more overtly – even if it is only the retail version of romantic love. It has been hard to miss the flowers, the chocolates and the cards, the pink and red and sparkly silver which seems to appear every year for the convenience and consumption of those lucky in love – only to have vanished forebodingly on the morning of the fifteenth. But when did all this happen? I don’t mean, when is the date when store managers give the okay to their assistants to switch the Christmas tinsel and reindeer for dangling cupids against a backdrop of hearts, and then to replace these a few weeks later with florid posters proclaiming the imminence of Mother’s Day. Rather, when did these symbols start representing love? Why did it become accepted or important to celebrate certain kinds of affective relationships in such a public way? While these sentiments seem so obvious to us, would their meanings have been equally intelligible to people living a century or two ago? How has the way in which romantic or familial love is represented impacted the ways in which it is experienced, expressed or understood? These are just some of the kinds of questions which come up for the historian of emotions.

̽��ֱ��historical study of human emotions such as fear, shame, disgust, anger, love and happiness is a relatively recent development, forming part of the rise of cultural history and a scholarly interest in subjectivity. Traditionally, emotions are regarded as the domain of psychology and neuroscience. These fields tend to view feelings as physiologically governed and therefore emphasise their universalism: that emotions are the same today as they were in the past and will be in the future, irrespective of the spatial or temporal context in which they function. But social constructionists have critiqued this perspective, showing that the experience, expression and interpretation of emotions take place within a specific social context, and therefore emotions must be culturally specific and embedded in cultural meaning. It follows that the experience, expression, evaluation and interpretation of emotion is intimately bound up with its cultural context and is subject to change over time. In short, emotions have a history.

This is skilfully demonstrated in Fear: a cultural history by the British historian Joanna Bourke. In this book Bourke studies two centuries of dread and panic in the Anglo-American world. From the Victorians’ fear of being buried alive to post-9/11 trepidations over terrorist attacks, she effectively shows how an emotion changes over time within the context of broader social stresses. Interest in studying change and continuity in human emotions has accelerated so rapidly that many universities now house centres and institutes specifically dedicated to the historical study of the emotions. Cambridge was one of the first universities to offer a course on the topic as part of the Themes and Sources history undergraduate paper. ̽��ֱ��course is taught by a host of acclaimed Cambridge historians and allows students to ponder the literature and evaluate different approaches and methodologies in the historical study of emotions.

But why do feelings deserve so much attention? Proponents of the approach argue that emotions are on par with class or gender – indispensable categories of analysis which should be considered in any historical study in order to more fully comprehend the past. ̽��ֱ��study of emotions should therefore not simply form a peripheral or unique field of inquiry, but be integrated into all historical research. ̽��ֱ��American medievalist Barbara Rosenwein explains: “Thus, for example, a history of Germany between the two world wars should include a discussion of not only the economy, the relations between men and women, the ideologies of communism, fascism, and liberalism, and so on, but also the emotions that were privileged – and denigrated – during that period by various dominant and marginal groups.” To Rosenwein, this engagement with emotions in all areas of historical inquiry is “the ultimate goal” (2010).

Yet this trend towards historicising emotions has not caught on in all national historiographies. In my own main field of interest, South African history, there seems to be precious little, well, emotional awareness. Why are South African historians “less emotional”?

During the 1980s, when the cultural turn in historiography was in full swing and the history of emotions was fast developing into an independent field in Europe and the United States, South Africa was firmly caught in the escalating struggle against apartheid. In traditionally nationalist universities and research institutes, scholarship typically continued to revolve around the nationalist project, investigating issues relevant to the continuation of white supremacy and focusing on the history of South Africa since European settlement in the mid-1600s. Race was the central and unquestioned category of analysis. This was the case not simply because many academics supported the system, but also because they were dependent on state funding for their livelihoods. Critical voices sounded from more liberal institutions, where scholars were pointing to the importance of class, investigating the histories of South Africa’s non-white population and trying to lend a voice to the disadvantaged and the marginalised. An ideological war was being waged, a national state of emergency – literally – in which there seemed to be little space for sentiment.

̽��ֱ��concerted efforts of the liberation struggle culminated in the first democratic elections of April 1994. Yet despite such obviously emotional phenomena as the euphoria of democracy, Nelson Mandela’s charismatic allure and the revelations of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the years following the “miracle” did not see historians’ attention shift to the significance of emotions. Instead, the end of apartheid and the resulting opening up of the academy saw researchers move to studying previously taboo topics such as the past prior to European settlement, and the complexities of identity formation and resistance within South Africa’s multicultural setting. A reinvention of the education system demanded that history quite literally be rewritten to include previously silenced communities and explain the system of racial discrimination and structural inequality which was the country’s heritage. Much like Germany’s need as from the 1950s to master its particular history saw the development of a very specific post-war historiography in that national context, so efforts to understand the origins, rise and demise of apartheid, and to overcome its legacy, occupied South African research agendas. In many of these studies – such as those dealing with daily humiliations under the apartheid system, the intricacies of the relationships between white “masters” and their non-white “servants”, and instances of resilience under these conditions – emotions slumber beneath the surface, even if the authors failed to recognise the history of emotions as such.

Today, almost twenty years on, there has still been little conscious effort to historicise South Africa’s emotional landscape. For all the academic engagement which exists with the country’s traumatic past, it is remarkable that the emotional issues arising from this have not been widely recognised as an area worthy of historical investigation. A handful of local historians have started looking at humour, laughter and the joke to explore the experiences, identity, memory and attitudes of various communities at specific historical junctures, but these historians do not necessarily posit their work in terms of emotions history – and it is debatable to which degree humour and laughter in their usage point to specific emotions at all.

But there might be another explanation for the relative absence of emotional analysis in South African historiography. Possibly, it is not only due to the engagement of the academy (and of South African society in general) with the legacy of apartheid, but also to a pervasive social view of emotions as irrational, unpredictable and dangerous. This view sees emotionality being associated with weakness, instability or lack of control – a notion which resonates in many “western” societies and would be familiar to many readers. Emotions are seen as something which should be relegated to the private sphere – the realm, traditionally, of women – outside of which a degree of emotional constraint is expected. Within the South African context of limited resources and opportunities and the challenges of change, society does champion strength, street-wise savvy and independence above emotional awareness and sensibility. While the contention would need to be investigated systematically, it is possible that this view of feeling as something which should not play an important role in rational behaviour, keeps scholars from recognising – or admitting – the importance of emotions. As the South African academy remains male-dominated to a large degree, one might see the prevalence of historical studies insensitive to feelings as a kind of “masculine” disciplining of “feminine” emotional phenomena.

My own PhD research seeks to contribute towards an emotions history of South Africa. Responding to broader historiographical lacunae, I am investigating the experiences of working class Afrikaners with transformation and democratisation as from the 1980s. This research not only problematises notions of the blanket privileging of whites during apartheid, but enquires into this community’s emotional experiences, their emotional investment in their material circumstances and how emotions may be employed to negotiate political space. Does the interpretation of transformation-as-trauma hold true for all Afrikaners? How does one make sense of the feelings of shame and defeatism which run parallel to expressions of pride and anger in the broader community? Why does the representation of Afrikaners as victims – both discursively and visually – find so much appeal within a community which actually seems to have retained most of its wealth and structural privilege? These are just some of the contradictions which a historical attentiveness to emotions allows us to explore. As a colleague recently remarked, “It doesn’t make sense to look at Afrikaners without looking at emotions!”

Indeed, South African history is ripe for the emotional picking. ̽��ֱ��dedicated academic engagement with discourse analysis which already exists, along with an interest in past practices relating to sexuality, gender and the body increasingly opens up intellectual space for the discussion of emotions. In a country as ethnically diverse, economically divided and politically sensitive as South Africa, there are myriad opportunities for researchers to set up emotional camp and start delving into the past sensibilities of their chosen subjects.

Danelle van Zyl-Hermann is a PhD candidate in history supervised by Prof Megan Vaughan. She has previously published on emotional life at the Cape of Good Hope at the turn of the nineteenth century. Danelle is a Gates Scholar and member of St John’s College, Cambridge.

Danelle van Zyl-Hermann, a Gates scholar with an interest in the emotional history of South Africa, explains why the study of society's sentiments can unlock a better understanding of the past.

For all the academic engagement which exists with South Africa’s traumatic past, it is remarkable that the emotional issues arising from this have not been widely recognised as an area worthy of historical investigation.

Danelle van Zyl-Hermann

Antonio Schmandke.

Danelle van Zyl-Hermann.

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