Theses and Dissertations (History)
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Item The political life of Jacob Daniel Du Plessis ‘Japie’ Basson 1937–1989(2022-01) Murray, Paul Leonard; Mouton, F. A.This study of the working career of Jacob Daniel Du Plessis Basson (1918 - 2012), a South African politician, covers the years from when he started to work in politics in 1937 until 1989, when he finally retired from full time work in the political field. It traces influences from his early home life as a boy growing up in the town of Paarl in the Boland, processed in his political career, which started out with his involvement in student politics at the University of Stellenbosch where he was instrumental in forming the student branch of the United Party in 1937. His entry into politics at the University of Stellenbosch coincided with the debates around Fusion, when Afrikaners had to decide between the policies of Dr D. F. Malan and Dr J. B. M. Hertzog, and on South Africa’s future relations with Britain. The study also looks at Basson’s views on republicanism and other significant ideologies such as federalism. Preoccupations such as these, manifested themselves in regional and generational tensions, in Afrikanerdom as well as a broader South Africa, and with the sectionalist policies of the National Party government inaugurated in 1948. Further areas of contestation were between Afrikaners and English-speaking South Africans around issues such as the establishment of a republic in 1961, and federation as an alternative model of politics to the Westminster style/model. Left out of the constitutional landscape were black South Africans, whose strong political aspirations Basson was sensitive to, but he firmly believed that gradual and effective change could only be initiated from within party structures. Basson’s clashes with the National Party over the constitutional position of coloured people and black people’s representation in the 1950s are highlighted as an indication of the internecine struggles within white politics at the time. Basson was directly involved in these deliberations, always aware of these tensions, such as in the Progressive Federal Party, which he co-founded in 1978, over the establishment of the President’s Council in 1980 to direct the transition of white politics to a new political and constitutional dispensation for South Africa. By emphasizing these complexities, this thesis attempts to contribute to an understanding of South Africa’s turbulent political past and Basson’s role in it. It draws upon the memoirs he wrote from when he retired until his death and on primary material from archives in South Africa, as well as Basson’s personal papers.Item The dynamics of Tulama Oromo in the history of continuity and change, ca. 1700-1880s(2021-01) Tsegaye Zeleke Tuffa; Tesema Ta'aThe thesis examines the dynamic and perplexing relations between the Kingdom of Shawa and the Tulama, aka the Shawan Oromo, in central Ethiopia from ca. 1700 to the1880s. A history of the kingdom of Shawa and the Tulama has been inextricably intertwined and punctuated by warfare, resistance, collaboration, economic and cultural intercourses, or in a nutshell dominated by the twin processes of homogenization and hegemonization. Unlike other parts of Oromo inhabited territories as well as the southern half of Ethiopia, which were conquered by the kingdom of Shawa within a short period, the conquest and incorporation of the Tulama, took at least more than a century and a half.This perhaps facilitated a remarkable process of cultural exchange between the Oromo and the Amhara on the Shawan plateau. Yet it is enigmatic that the Shawan kingdom encountered the most protracted and stiff resistance from the Tulama on the one hand and the notables of Oromo extraction like Matakkoo Borjaa, Abbaa Maallee, and Gobana Dachi played a pivotal role in the incorporation of the Shawan Oromo into the Kingdom on the other. The kingdom‘s headquarters from the outset was not based in the renowned Shawan sub-province of Manz as usually perceived by scholars but was based in the territories from where the Oromo had been either evicted or integrated into the kingdom. Hence, it is again enigmatic that by using the Oromo territory as their hotbeds the sovereigns of the kingdom of Shawa made campaigns against the Shawan Oromo starting from the time of Nagasi Krestos up to the time of the last but one of the most prominent and illustrious kings of Shawa, Meniek (1865-1889), who managed to incorporate the whole Tulama into the kingdom. Therefore, following centuries of conflicts and negotiations between the Shawan kingdom and the Tulama, central Shawa / the abode of the latter has been steadily transformed from the fringes of the kingdom to the hub of modern Ethiopia, and this development, in turn, has made the Oromo territory the most important base on which the whole edifice of modern Ethiopia has been constructed.Item Carnal vigilance, vending vice: race, gender and sexual commerce in Cape Town, 1868-1957(2021-11) Gonzalez-Stout, Corina; Chetty, SuryakanthieThis Ph.D. thesis is an examination into the history of prostitution in Cape Town from 1868 to 1957, a period that began with societal and legal toleration of the sex trade through government regulation and ended with abolition and criminalization. This historical research does not simply focus on the changing dynamics regarding prostitution in a vacuum that are only specific to Cape Town, but rather assesses local, regional, national, international, and imperial forces affecting the Western Cape and southern Africa. The overarching themes involve socially constructed ideas on morality, gender, race, and class. Such ideas produce and sustain the practice of the following discourses: state power, government control, resistance, surveillance, and policing. Sexual anxieties were also anxieties about threats to the racial order. It is these corresponding attitudes that resulted in greater limitations to the sex trade. Ultimately, this study addresses increasing racially motivated exclusionary and segregationist measures, moral policing, immigration, industrialization, health policies, disease, women’s activism, sexual commerce, national formation, and identity.Item A comparative study of the politics of chieftaincy and local government in colonial and postcolonial Zimbabwe, 1950-2010(2020-09) Ncube, Godfrey; Stafford, Russell; Mlambo, AloisThis thesis historicizes the paradox of the survival of the institution of chieftainship in Zimbabwe from near demise at independence in 1980, when it was largely considered as a discredited institution due to its former alliance with colonial administrations, to its revival and current importance where it is an integral part of Zimbabwe’s constitutional and political structure and wields considerable power. It explores the political manipulation of African chiefs in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s by the colonial state in its efforts to combat African Nationalism, and reveals how the alliance of chiefs with the colonial state drove a political wedge between the chiefs and Nationalists during the anticolonial struggle, a development that made chieftaincy a discredited institution at independence. The thesis argues that the fall-out between the chiefs and Nationalists that was precipitated by the chiefs’ close association with the Smith regime reversed a promising start that had been forged between them in the late 1940s and early 1950s when chiefs had actively supported the emerging Nationalist movements like the African People’s Voice Association. The thesis also examines the sources of the enduring power of the institution of chieftaincy under the onslaught of powerful political and ideological forces that have sought to transform it since the advent of colonial rule, such as colonialism itself, modernism and nationalism, and identifies the sources of its resilience in its mutability. It offers an interesting comparison of colonial and postcolonial intentions in local administrative policy. It not only unveils how colonialism transformed the institution of chieftaincy in Zimbabwe but also builds a case of how the postcolonial state continued to re-invent the same institution for partisan and political expediency purposes. It notes that the Rhodesian state’s retreat from its authoritarian attempts to restructure traditional African society in the 1940s and 1950s, and its reversion to traditional communal land tenure, was a concession to the indispensability of traditional authority structures in rural local governance. Similarly, the postcolonial government’s restoration of chiefs’ powers in 2000, after sidelining them for two decades, also signified their indispensability to the postcolonial state’s control of the rural populations when it was confronted by political challenges from a rising tide of opposition movements that sought to capture the rural constituencies.Item Land tenure reform and socioeconomic structures in Dabra Marqos (Gojjam), Ethiopia : c1901-1974(2020-02) Daniel Dejene Checkol; Tesema Ta'aIn this doctoral thesis I advance a new interpretation of the social and economic history of Ethiopia beginning with the turn of the twentieth century and ending with the third decade of that century. One of my achievements in this study is the careful utilization of property documents in the reconstruction of the modern social history of Ethiopia, more precisely Däbrä Marqos (Gojjam) in northwestern Ethiopia. Besides original use of property documents in my study, I have used new and less conventional genre of sources, viz., courtroom observation, images, biblical references, private documents, and old sayings. Combining these genre of sources and oral data helped me to provide a plausible story and advance a new interpretation of the property system and the socioeconomic and power relations arising from modern Däbrä Marqos (Gojjam). I emphasize the continued relevance of tax appropriation in contemporary Däbrä Marqos (Gojjam). This is to counter an adverse claim to tribute in kind and services as well as the resilience of old practices relating to land use, political power, exploitation, social domination, landholding and violence. All these served as the background to impede changes, in the course of progress of the imperial policy, mostly, between liberation in 1941 and revolution in 1974. As the main argument embedded in my study is that despite the attempt of the imperial state to figure out what the content of land tenure and surplus appropriation in Däbrä Marqos (Gojjam) was like, in actual fact what the effort produced was the people's multiple reaction. New measures relating to property reform which the imperial state tried to codify and fix failed to achieve stability and order, precipitated a revolution leading to the end of the imperial rule with broadly similar historical trajectory to what many scholars viewed on the subject.