Department of Historical Studies People

Head of Department

Position: Department Chairperson and Senior Professor
Email: crassool@uwc.ac.za
Ciraj Rassool is Senior Professor of History at the University of the Western Cape (UWC) and directs the Remaking Societies, Remaking Persons Supranational Forum, with partners in Accra, Kampala, and Cairo, and which supports research and scholarships in museum and heritage studies, exhibition production and forensic history. He has directed the African Programme in Museum and Heritage Studies at UWC since 2003.He is also one of the principal investigators of the international project, Action for African Cultural Restitution (AARC), which works on matters of museums and restitution.

His latest publications are The Politics of Heritage in Africa: Economies, Histories and Infrastructures (New York 2015), co-edited with Derek Peterson and Kodzo Gavua; Rethinking Empire in Southern Africa (published as Journal of Southern African Studies, 41, 3, June 2015), co-edited with Dag Henrichsen, Giorgio Miescher and Lorena Rizzo, Unsettled History: Making South African Public Pasts (Ann Arbor, 2017), written with Leslie Witz and Gary Minkley; and Missing and Missed: Subject, Politics, Memorialisation (published as Kronos: southern african histories, 44, 2018), co-edited with Nicky Rousseau and Riedwaan Moosage.

He served on the boards of the District Six Museum and Iziko Museums of South Africa, and on the Councils of the South African Heritage Resources Agency (SAHRA) and the National Heritage Council. He previously chaired the Scientific Committee of the International Council of African Museums (AFRICOM), was a member of the High Level Museums Advisory Committee of UNESCO. He currently serves on the Scientific Advisory Board for the study of the Physical Anthropology Collection ‘Felix von Luschan’ at the Museum of Ethnology at the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Germany.

Teaching

I teach and supervise in a number of areas, including Museum and Heritage Studies, Curatorial Studies, The Politics of Memory, Public History, History of Cape Town, Political Biography and Liberation Movements, Heritage Disciplines.

Publications

Books, edited collections and special journal issues:

Martin Legassick and Ciraj Rassool, Skeletons in the Cupboard: South African Museums and the Trade in Human Remains, 1907-1917, Cape Town and Kimberley: South African Museum and McGregor Museum, 2000 (Updated Edition, Cape Town: Iziko Museums of South Africa, 2015).

Ciraj Rassool and Sandra Prosalendis (eds), Recalling Community in Cape Town: Creating and Curating the District Six Museum (Cape Town: District Six Museum, 2001).

Ivan Karp, Corinne A Kratz, Lynn Szwaja, and Tomás Ybarra-Frausto, with Gustavo Buntinx, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett and Ciraj Rassool (eds), Museum Frictions: Global Transformations/ Public Cultures, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006.

Paul Faber, Ciraj Rassool and Leslie Witz, South African Family Stories: Reflections on an experiment in exhibition-making (Amsterdam: Tropenmuseum Bulletin Series, 2007).

Leslie Witz and Ciraj Rassool (eds), Making Histories, published as special issue of Kronos: Southern African Histories, 34, November 2008.

Danielle de Lame and Ciraj Rassool (eds) Popular Snapshots and Tracks to the Past: Cape Town, Nairobi, Lubumbashi (Studies in Social Sciences and Humanities Series, Volume 171; Tervuren: Royal Museum of Central Africa, 2010).

Susann Baller, Giorgio Miescher and Ciraj Rassool (eds), Global Perspectives on Football in Africa: Visualising the Game (New York and London: Routledge, 2013 (first published as a special issue of Soccer & Society, Volume 13, No 2, March 2012.

Dag Henrichsen, Giorgio Miescher, Ciraj Rassool and Lorena Rizzo, The South African Empire, published as a special issue of the Journal of Southern African Studies, 41, 3, June 2015.

Derek Peterson, Kodzo Gavua and Ciraj Rassool, The Politics of Heritage in Africa: Economies, Histories, and Infrastructures (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015, The International African Library Series).

Leslie Witz, Gary Minkley and Ciraj Rassool, Unsettled History: Making South African Pasts (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017).

Nicky Rousseau, Ciraj Rassool and Riedwaan Moosage, Missing and Missed: Subject, Politics, Memorialisation, published as special issue of Kronos: southern african histories, 44, 2018.

Selected Articles

‘Photography with a difference: Leon Levson’s camera studies and photographic exhibitions of native life in South Africa, 1947-1950’, Kronos, vol 31, 2005 (with Gary Minkley).*

‘Community museums, memory politics and social transformation in South Africa: histories, possibilities and limits’ in Ivan Karp, Corinne A Kratz, Lynn Szwaja, and Tomás Ybarra-Frausto, with Gustavo Buntinx, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett and Ciraj Rassool, Museum Frictions: Global Transformations/ Public Cultures, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006).*

‘History anchored in politics: An Interview with Martin Legassick’, South African Historical Journal, 56 (2006)*

‘Reclamant espais vius’, Nexus, 38, 2008 (in Catalan, with Spanish and English translations).*

‘Writing, authorship and I.B. Tabata’s biography: From collective leadership to presidentialism’, Kronos, 34, November 2008.*

‘Ethnographic Elaborations, Indigenous Contestations, and the Cultural Politics of Imagining Community: A View from the District Six Museum in South Africa’, in Susan Sleeper-Smith (ed), Contesting Knowledge: Museums and Indigenous Perspectives (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009)*

‘Rethinking documentary history and South African political biography’, South African Review of Sociology, Vol. 41, No. 1, 2010.*

‘Power, knowledge and the politics of public pasts’, African Studies, 69, April 2010*

‘The Challenges of Rethinking South African Political Biography: A Reply to Jonathan Hyslop’, South African Review of Sociology, Vol. 41, No. 2, 2010*

‘Knochengedächtnis. Menschliche Überreste, Recht und National Heritage in Südafrika’, in Marianne Sommer & Gesine Krueger (HG), Biohistorische Anthropologie: Knochen, Korper und DNA in Erinnerungskulturen (Berlin: Kadmos, 2011).*

“Fields of Play”: the District Six Museum and the history of football in Cape Town’, Soccer & Society Volume 13, No 2, March 2012 (with Virgil Slade).*

‘A full circle: Concerning UWC’s academic value’, in Premesh Lalu and Noëleen Murray (eds), Becoming UWC: reflections, pathways and unmaking apartheid’s legacy (Cape Town: Centre for Humanities Research, UWC, 2012).*

‘Remaking an ethnographic museum in Cologne: The New Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum – Cultures of the World’, Museum Worlds: Advances in Research No 2, 2014.*

‘Human Remains, the Disciplines of the Dead, and the South African Memorial Complex’, in Peterson, Gavua and Rassool, eds, The Politics of Heritage in Africa: Economies, Histories,and Infrastructures (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015, The International African Library Series).*

'Re-storing the Skeletons of Empire: Return, Reburial and Rehumanisation in Southern Africa', Journal of Southern African Studies, 41, 3, June 2015, 653-670.*

‘District Six: Sue Williamson in conversation with Ciraj Rassool’, in Mark Gevisser (ed), Sue Williamson: Life and Work (Milano: Skira Editore, 2015).

‘South African art and apartheid’, in Yvette Mutumba and Gabi Ngcobo (eds), A Labour of Love (Bielefeld: Kerber Verlag, 2015), 24-28.

‘A “labour of love” in South Africa: Nelson Mandela’s Red Mercedes-Benz, Auto-biography, Auto/biography and Regimes of Value’, Kronos 42, November 2016.*

‘German Museums, Human Remains and the Challenges of Colonial Legacies’, in: H-Soz-Kult, 16.02.2017, , as part of ‘Human Remains in Museums and Collections: A Critical Engagement with the Recommendations of the German Museums Association (2013)’.

‘“Taking the nation to school”: IB Tabata and the politics of knowledge’, in JR Forte, P Israel and L Witz (eds), Out of History: Reimagining South African Pasts (Pretoria: HSRC Press, 2017).*

‘Building a Critical Museology in Africa: A Foreword’, in T Laely, M Meyer and R Schwere (eds), Museum Cooperation between Africa and Europe: A New Field for Museum Studies (Bielefeld: transcript Verlag 2018).

‘Heritage as Process’, in Birgit Meyer and Mattijs van de Port (eds), Sense and Essence: Heritage and the Cultural Production of the Real (New York: Berghahn 2018).

‘Museum labels and coloniality’, in Wayne Modest (ed), Words Matter: An unfinished guide to word choices in the cultural sector (Amsterdam, Leiden, Berg-en-Dal and Rotterdam: Tropenmuseum, Afrika Museum, Museum Volkenkunde and Wereldmuseum, 2018), 21-24.

Nicky Rousseau, Riedwaan Moosage and Ciraj Rassool, ‘Missing and Missed: Rehumanisation, the Nation and Missing-ness’, Kronos: southern african histories (special issue on Missing and Missed: Subject, Politics, Memorialisation), 44, 2018, 10-32.*

‘The Politics of Nonracialism in South Africa’, Public Culture, 31, 2, May 2019, 343-371.*

‘Remaking Cape Town: Memory Politics, Land Restitution and Social Cohesion in District Six’, in Hiroyuki Hino, Arnim Langer, John Lonsdale and Frances Stewart (eds), From Divided Pasts to Cohesive Futures: Reflections on Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 346-374.

Academic and Administrative Staff

Position: Professor
Email: bankmacher@telkomsa.net
Andrew Bank (b. 1967) was trained as an historian at the University of Cape Town (B.A., Hons., M.A.) and the University of Cambridge (Ph.D., 1995). His graduate research projects were on slavery in Cape Town, which was published as a monograph The Decline of Urban Slavery at the Cape, 1806-1834, and on the intense settler debates about race in the Western and Eastern Cape in a period of emancipation and frontier war, which featured in articles on contests between the artistic, scientific and historiographical representations of Africans produced by ‘Liberals and their Enemies’. The thesis won the Audrey Richards Prize (runner-up) of the African Studies Association of the UK. After a year’s post-doctoral fellowship at UCT, he got a full-time post in the History Department at the University of the Western Cape in 1997. He has taught and researched from that base over the last 22 years. He teaches undergraduate courses on slavery and the history of modern South Africa, and offers a postgraduate module on the history of anthropology in southern Africa.

The most significant products of his two decades of research in the field of cross-cultural social scientific knowledge production in African studies are the monograph Bushman in a Victorian World: The Remarkable Story of the Bleek-Lloyd Collection of Bushman Folklore (Cape Town: Double Storey Books, 2006), the co-edited collection (with Leslie J. Bank) Inside African Anthropology: Monica Wilson and Her Interpreters (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013) and the monograph Pioneers of the Field: South Africa’s Women Anthropologists (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). These three publications won UWC Arts Faculty Book and Edited Collection Awards in the years of application, as did his co-edited collection (with Nancy J. Jacobs) of the journal Kronos: Southern African Histories on the history of natural and social science in South Africa (Nov. 2015). As commissioning editor of Kronos: Southern African Histories from 2001 until 2015, he also co-edited collections on ‘Visual History in Southern Africa’ (with Patricia Hayes), the history of the Eastern Cape (with Leslie J. Bank), ‘Environmental History’ (with Lance van Sittert), ‘The History of Photography in South Africa’ (with Diana Wylie), as well as collaborating on an edited volume An Eloquent Picture Gallery: The Southern African Photographs of Gustav Theodor Fritsch (Cape Town: Jacana, 2008). He won an Oppenheimer Fellowship to Oxford in 2015 and a Mellon-Cogut Fellowship to Brown University in 2017. His most recent co-edited collection (again with Nancy J. Jacobs) is on ‘Awkward Biographies in southern Africa’. He is currently working on a sequel to Pioneers of the Field, a collective biography of three women anthropologists in Northern Rhodesia (Richards, Colson and Powdermaker).

Teaching

Andrew teaches History 2 and the postgraduate course on A History of Anthropology.

Publications

Books

Pioneers of the Field: South Africa’s Women Anthropologists. New York: Cambridge University Press in association with the International African Institute, 2016. xii + 312 pp., hardback. [Wits University Press paperback edition, 2016; IAI Paperback edition 2016]

Bushmen in a Victorian World: The Remarkable Story of the Bleek-Lloyd Collection of Bushman Folklore. Cape Town: Double Storey, 2006. ix + 422 pp., paperback.

The Decline of Urban Slavery at the Cape, 1806-1834. Cape Town: University of Cape Town Centre for African Studies, Communication Series, 1991. vi + 220 pp., paperback.

People of the Western Cape: A History for Schools (Cape Town: Juta and Company, 2003), 124 pp. with Candy Malherbe and Patricia van der Spuy.

Edited Books

Andrew Bank and Leslie J. Bank, eds., Inside African Anthropology: Monica Wilson and Her Interpreters. New York: Cambridge University Press in association with the International African Institute, 2013. xv + 354 pp., hardback
[Cape Town: CUP Africa edition, 2014. xv + 354 pp., paperback; IAI paperback edition 2016]

Keith Dietrich and Andrew Bank, eds., An Eloquent Picture Gallery: The South African Portrait Photographs of Gustav Theodor Fritsch, 1863-1865. Johannesburg: Jacana Media, 2008. x + 176 pp., 70 illustrations, paperback.

Most Recent Refereed Journal Articles

“‘Bridging the Gap between the Intellectual and the Human’: The Awkward Biography of Anthropologist and Scholar-Activist Iona Simon Mayer (1923-)’, African Studies, Special Issue: Awkward Biographies, 78, 2 (2019), 225-244

“Fathering Volkekunde: Race and Culture in the Ethnological Writings of Werner Eiselen, Stellenbosch University, 1926-1936.” Anthropology Southern Africa, 38, 3&4 (2015), 163-179.

“Broederbande’ [Brotherly Bonds]: Afrikaner Nationalist Masculinity and African Sexuality in the Writings of Werner Eiselen’s Students, Stellenbosch University, 1930-1936.” Anthropology Southern Africa, 38, 3&4 (2015), 180-197.

“The Berlin Mission Society and German Linguistic Roots of Volkekunde: The Background, Training and Hamburg Writings of Werner Eiselen, 1899-1924.” Kronos: Southern African Histories, Special Issue on the Micro-Politics of Knowledge Production, 41 (2015), 166-192.

“Biography in Post-Apartheid South Africa: A Call for Awkwardness”, African Studies, Special Issue: Awkward Biographies, 78, 2 (2019), 165-182, with Nancy Jacobs.

“Introduction: The Micro-Politics of Knowledge Production in Southern Africa.” Kronos: Southern African Histories, Special Issue, 41 (2015), 11-36. with Nancy Jacobs.

“Untangling the Lion’s Tale: Masculine Violence and the Ethics of Biography in the ‘Curious’ Case of Apartheid Security Policeman Donald Card.” Journal of Southern African Studies, 39, 1 (2013), 7-30. with Leslie J. Bank.

Position: Lecturer
Email: bvanlaun@uwc.ac.za
Bianca van Laun is a lecturer in the Department of History at the University of the Western Cape. She holds a PhD in history from the University of the Western Cape. Her doctoral research focused on the bureaucratic apparatus surrounding the application of the death penalty in South Africa during the 1960s. Her areas of interest include histories of violence, forensic history and disciplines of the dead, visual history, liberation movements, gender and history.

Teaching

I coordinate and teach on the HIS151 course. The section I teach focuses on the so-called cattle-killing movement among the amaXhosa in 1856-7, through which we consider diverse ways in which events that had a devastating impact on African societies along the Cape coast can be interpreted. We perform a critical review of contrasting interpretations put forward by different historians, in Xhosa oral and written history, and through the photographic depictions of Nongqawuse and Xhosa chiefs. We further look at debates about whether or not conspiracy theories should be entertained in history. I also teach on the honours (HIS711) course.

Publications

van Laun, B. forthcoming. “Bureaucratically missing: Capital punishment, exhumations and the afterlives of state documents and photographs,” Kronos, Vol. 44 (2018)

van Laun, B. “Of Bodies Captured: the visual representation of the Paarl march and Poqo in apartheid South Africa” in Kyle Thomas and Louise Green (eds.), Photography in and out of Africa: Iterations with Difference (New York: Routledge, 2016)

van Laun, B. “Of Bodies Captured: the visual representation of the Paarl march and Poqo in apartheid South Africa,” Social Dynamics, Vol.40, Issue 1 (2014)

Position: Senior Professor
Email: crassool@uwc.ac.za
Ciraj Rassool is Senior Professor of History at the University of the Western Cape (UWC) and directs the Remaking Societies, Remaking Persons Supranational Forum, with partners in Accra, Kampala, and Cairo, and which supports research and scholarships in museum and heritage studies, exhibition production and forensic history. He has directed the African Programme in Museum and Heritage Studies at UWC since 2003.He is also one of the principal investigators of the international project, Action for African Cultural Restitution (AARC), which works on matters of museums and restitution.

His latest publications are The Politics of Heritage in Africa: Economies, Histories and Infrastructures (New York 2015), co-edited with Derek Peterson and Kodzo Gavua; Rethinking Empire in Southern Africa (published as Journal of Southern African Studies, 41, 3, June 2015), co-edited with Dag Henrichsen, Giorgio Miescher and Lorena Rizzo, Unsettled History: Making South African Public Pasts (Ann Arbor, 2017), written with Leslie Witz and Gary Minkley; and Missing and Missed: Subject, Politics, Memorialisation (published as Kronos: southern african histories, 44, 2018), co-edited with Nicky Rousseau and Riedwaan Moosage.

He served on the boards of the District Six Museum and Iziko Museums of South Africa, and on the Councils of the South African Heritage Resources Agency (SAHRA) and the National Heritage Council. He previously chaired the Scientific Committee of the International Council of African Museums (AFRICOM), was a member of the High Level Museums Advisory Committee of UNESCO. He currently serves on the Scientific Advisory Board for the study of the Physical Anthropology Collection ‘Felix von Luschan’ at the Museum of Ethnology at the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Germany.

Teaching

Publications

Books, edited collections and special journal issues:

Selected Articles

Position: Senior Lecturer
Email: kbenson@uwc.ac.za
Koni Benson is a lecturer in the Department working in the areas of Gender History, Urban History, Public History, and Oral History. Her research focuses on mobilisation, demobilisation, and remobilisation of struggle history in southern Africa’s past and present. Her PhD drew on over 60 life narratives of women’s organized resistance to forced removals and for housing from the peak of apartheid to the present. Since 2006 she has worked with various archives and collectives coproducing life histories of self-organization and unfolding political struggles for access to land, public services, and the commons (such as water, housing, and education) in South Africa. These connections grew through the eight years she spent at the International Labour Research and Information Group (ILRIG) doing research and education work with trade unions and social movements. She is committed to creative approaches to history that link art, activism, and African history, and draws on critical approaches to people's history projects, popular education, and feminist collaborative research praxis in her work with various archives, and student, activist, and cultural collectives in southern Africa. Koni is a co-convenor of Revolutionary Papers, a transnational research and teaching project of anti-colonial movement materials, and of Know Your Continent, a popular education African history initiative. She was the 2019 recipient of the HELTASA/CHE National Excellence in Teaching and Learning Award.

Koni Benson is the author of Crossroads: I Live Where I Like, a graphic novel history on women’s organized resistance to forced removals in South Africa, (illustrated by the Trantraal Brothers and Ashley Marais, PM Press, 2021/Jacana Press 2022). This book was awarded the UWC DVC Research and Innovation Award for Faculty of Arts and Humanities Best Book Prize in 2021, and shortlisted as the Best Non-Fiction Monograph by the National Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIHSS) in 2023. She is also the co-author with Faeza Meyer of Writing Out Loud: Interventions in the History of A Land Occupation (forthcoming). With Asher Gamedze and Nashilongweshipwe Mushaandja, she co-produced "Radical Histories II: Ottilie Abrahams Speaks," Owela (Kaleni Kolletive, 2019). With Feminist Alternatives, she co-produced My Dream is to Be Bold: Our Work to End Patriarchy (Pambazuka/ Michigan State UP, 2010). Her writing has been published by the Journal of Southern African Studies, African Studies Review, Transition Magazine, Feminist Africa, Gender Place and Culture: Feminist Geography, Education as Change, Agenda, South African Labour Bulletin, Zambezia, Khanya College Journal, Pathways to Free Education, ILRIG, Zmagazine, and newspapers in South Africa, Canada, Kenya, and Namibia.

Teaching

Koni currently teaches on the following courses: Liberation Struggles and Memory and the City (HIS332 with third years); Comparative Slave Rebellions in the Cape and the Caribbean (HIS231 with second years); The Theory and Practice of Oral History (HIS753/853 with postgraduates); and Activist Archives: Struggles in and Over History and Collections (HIS749/849 with postgraduates). She has previously taught first year, the honours core course, and courses on contemporary South African history, Gender History, Feminist Mobilisations and Transborder Pedagogies for Justice, and African History Through Comic Books: History for What and for Whom? She is also part of the facilitating collective of Know Your Continent (KYC), an African history popular education program.Publications

Books

Benson, Koni, Crossroads: I Live Where I Like. Illustrated by André Trantraal, Nathan Trantraal, and Ashley E. Marais; Foreword by Robin D.G. Kelley, (Oakland: PM Press, 2021/Johannesburg: Jacana Media, 2022).

Guest Editing Journal Issues & Series

Benson, Koni, Mahvish Ahmad, Chana Morgenstern, and Alex Lichtenstein (eds.), Radical History Review, special issue: Revolutionary Papers: Counter-Institutions, Counter-Politics and Counter-Cultures of Anticolonial Periodicals in the Global South, Issue number 150 (forthcoming, October 2024).

Benson, Koni, Mahvish Ahmad, and Chana Morgenstern (guest eds.), Africa is a Country special series on Revolutionary Papers, (monthly editions for the duration of 2023).

Journal Articles

Benson, Koni, and Meera Karunananthan, “Counter Streams: Organizing the Dakar 2022 Alternative World Water Forum,” Transition Magazine. No.133 (2023),147-173.

Benson, Koni and Thulile Gamedze, “Salt River’s Wall Wars: Forging Solidarities Through People’s History,” 3rd Text Africa. No.1 (forthcoming, 2023).

Benson, Koni “‘I like the word comic; because life is ridiculous:’ Teaching The Graphic Novel, An Interview with Nathan Trantraal,” New Agenda: South African Journal of Social and Economic Policy, (No.80, 2021).

Benson, Koni, "Pan-Africanism, Feminism, and Popular Education in the Struggle Against Water Grabbing in Africa: An Interview with Coumba Toure," Agenda 34.4(2020), 112-121.

Benson, Koni, “‘A Conversation I was Missing:’ Illustrating Learning Curves that Refuse a Straight Line, an interview with Zaynab Asmal,” Agitate Journal, Vol 2, Special Edition: Unsettling Pedagogies (Spring 2020)

Benson, Koni, “Feminist Activist Archives: Towards a Living History of the Gender Education Training Network (GETNET),” Education as Change- Themed Issue- Community and Activist Archives 22.2, (2018).

Benson, Koni, “Graphic Novel Histories: Women’s Organized Resistance to Slum Clearance in Crossroads South Africa, 1975-2015,” African Studies Review, Kathleen Sheldon and Judith van Allen (eds.) Special Edition: 40th Anniversary of the Writing of African Women’s History Part II, (59) (1), (2016), 199-214.

Benson, Koni, “A ‘Political War of Words and Bullets:’ Defining and Defying Sides of Struggle for Housing in Crossroads, South Africa,” Journal of Southern African Studies, (41) (2), (2015), 367-387.

Benson, Koni and Richa Nagar, “Collaboration as Resistance? Reconsidering the Processes, Products, and Possibilities of Feminist Oral History and Ethnography,” Gender, Place, and Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography, (no. 792, 2007- republished in a reader of top ten relevant articles by the journal in 2014), 581-592.

Benson, Koni, "Collaborative Research in Conversation," Feminist Africa, (Special Issue no. 13, October/November 2009), 107-117.

Benson, Koni. "Solidarity with Zimbabwe: Another Side to the Xenophobia Story," Khanya College Journal, No. 14 (September, 2007),14-20.

Benson Koni, and Mukoma Wa Ngugi. "Search for Truth: Who assassinated Burkina Faso’s Revolutionary President Sankara?" South African Labour Bulletin (31.5 December 2007), 74-79.

Benson, Koni, “Life Narratives of Crossroads Women/Récits de vie de femmes de Crossroads,” Aluka: A Digital Library of Resources from southern African Liberation Struggles (Jan 2007), web publication.

Benson, Koni and Joyce Chadya, ““Ukubhinya: Gender and Sexual Violence in Bulawayo, Colonial Zimbabwe, 1945-1956.” Journal of Southern African Studies, (31:3, September
2005), 587-661.

Benson, Koni and Joyce Chadya “Ukubhinya: Gender and Sexual Violence in Bulawayo, Colonial Zimbabwe, 1945-1956.” Zambezia: The Journal of Humanities of the University of Zimbabwe, (30:1, 2003), 108 – 133.

Book Chapters

Benson, Koni and Kerusha Govender, “The Shards Haven’t Settled: contesting hierarchies of (teaching) history,” Amrita Pande, Ruchi Chaturvedi, and Shari Daya (eds.), Epistemic Justice and the Postcolonial University. (Wits University Press, 2023).

Benson, Koni, "Drawing (on) the Past in Histories of the Present: Dialogues and Drawings of South African Women’s Organized Resistance to Forced Removals" in Lifongo Vetinde and Jean Blaise Samou (eds.), African Cultural Production and the Rhetoric of Humanism (Maryland: Lexington Books, 2020),p. 127-149.

Benson, Koni and Asher Gamedze, "Beyond a classroom: Experiments in a post-border praxis for the future," in Erzsebet Strausz, Shine Choi, Anna Selmeczi (eds.) Critical Methods in Studying World Politics: Creativity and Transformation (London: Routledge Innovation Series, 2020),p. 121-135.

Benson, Koni, and Ebrahiem Fourie and Leonard Shang-Quartey, “The Flow of Power: Reflecting on Resisting Water Privatization in Ghana and South Africa,” Pathways to Free Education, vol.4 (2019), p. 111-128.

Benson, Koni and Asher Gamedze, and Akosua Koranteng, “African History in Context: Toward a Praxis of Radical Education,” in Aziz Choudry and Salim Vally (eds.) History's School: Past Struggles and Present Realities. (London: Routledge, and UKZN Press, 2018), 104-117.

Benson, Koni and Faeza Meyer, “Writing My History is Keeping Me Alive: Politics and Practices of Collaborative History Writing,” in A Reflexive Inquiry into Gender and Gender-Based Violence: Toward a New Paradigm of Knowledge Production Across Multiple Divides, edited by Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela and Samantha van Schalkwyk (Cambridge Scholars Publishers, 2015), 103-129.

Benson, Koni and Faeza Meyer, “Reluctantly Loud: Intervening in the Politics of a Land
Occupation,” in Pieterse and Edjabe (eds.) African Cities Reader III: Land, Property, and Value. (Cape Town: African Center for Cities and Chimurenga Magazine, 2015), 173-210.

Benson, Koni, “Housing Activism and Feminist Collaborations,” in Feminist Alternative (ed.) My Dream is to Be Bold. (London and East Lansing: Pambazuka Press and Michigan State UP, 2011).

Benson, Koni, and Shereen Essof, “Conclusion,” “Out of the Pages of this Book,” and “Glossary,” in Feminist Alternative (ed.) My Dream is to Be Bold. (London and East Lansing: Pambazuka Press and Michigan State UP, 2011).

Benson, Koni, "The Long March of Women- Feminisms in History," in Feminism for Today. (Cape Town: International Labour Research and Information Group, 2007), 8-18.

Benson, Koni, "A brief history of Argentina," in The Argentine Workers' Federation Visits South Africa. (Cape Town: International Labour Research and Information Group, 2007), 4-11.

Published Reports/Manuals/Curricula

Benson Koni, Femke Brandt, Ronald Wesso, and Sithandiwe Yeni, Feminist Organizing for Water Justice in Africa: A Popular Education Toolkit. (Urgent Action Fund-Africa, 2023).

Benson, Koni and Asher Gamedze and Nashilongweshipwe Mushaandja, "The Social Life of the Namibian Review," A Digital Teaching Tool, Revolutionary Papers, (2022). Available at: https://revolutionarypapers.org/teaching-tool/the-namibian-review/
Benson Koni, Femke Brandt, Sithandiwe Yeni, Womn and Water in Africa: An overview of Water Justice Struggles (Urgent Action Fund- Africa, 2022).

Benson, Koni and Ronald Wesso, “Three Water Justice Roundtables in South Africa,” (Blue Planet Project, 2020).

Benson, Koni, Asher Gamedze, and Nashilongweshipwe Mushaandja, "Radical Histories II: Ottilie Abrahams Speaks," and "Mapping the Life Journey and Movements of Ottilie Abrahams: Revolutionary, Teacher Feminist," in Kaleni Kollective (eds.) Owela: The Future of Work (Kaleni Kolletive, 2019), 40-49 and Map Insert.

Benson, Koni and Anna Davis van Es, “Towards a History of GETNET” (Cape Town: Gender Education Training and Network, 2016).

Benson, Koni, and Nandi Vanqa-Mgijima, Organising on the Streets: A Study of Reclaimers in the Streets in Cape Town.” (Women in Informal Employment Organizing and Globalizing, WIEGO, August 2010).

Benson, Koni. “Revolutionizing Curriculum: The Integration of Mural Art and History for Social Change in Minneapolis’ North Side,” (Neighborhood Planning for Community Revitalization- Centre for Urban and Regional Affairs, University of Minnesota, 2003).

Benson, Koni. "'When there is work to be done, our hands go out,' Expressions of Power Dynamics and Community Change: Sto:lo Women and Politics," (Sto:lo First Nations, Chiliwack BC, 1998).

Benson, Koni. Global Education Multimedia Resource Kit for Grade 11 Teachers and Students, (International Development Education Resource Association, Vancouver BC, 1998).

Benson, Koni. What Canada Does In Zimbabwe (CIDA, Harare Zimbabwe, 1996).

Comic Books (graphic non-fiction) & Illustrative Time Lines

Benson, Koni, “Mapping 500 Years of Salt River’s History: An Interactive Timeline” (Salt River Heritage Society, 2022).

Benson, Koni and Asher Gamedze, "Radical Education Histories I: SACHED and Some Others," Pathways to Free Education Vol II: Third World Education (Pathways, 2017), p.48-62, &184-6.

Benson, Koni, (author) and Andre and Nathan Trantraal and Ashley Marais (illustrators),
Crossroads: I Live Where I Like, part 1 (Cape Town: Isotope Media, 2014).

Benson, Koni, (author) and Andre and Nathan Trantraal and Ashley Marais (illustrators),
Crossroads: I Took Out The Loud Hailer, part 2 (Cape Town: Isotope Media, 2014).

Benson, Koni, (author) and Andre and Nathan Trantraal and Ashley Marais (illustrators),
Crossroads: Imfuduso, part 3 (Cape Town: Isotope Media, 2014).

Benson, Koni, (author) and Andre and Nathan Trantraal and Ashley Marais (illustrators),
Crossroads: Witdoeke, part 4 (Cape Town: Isotope Media, 2015).

Benson, Koni, (author) and Andre and Nathan Trantraal and Ashley Marais (illustrators),
Crossroads: The Mothers of Crossroads, part 5 (Cape Town: Isotope Media, 2016).

Benson, Koni, (author) and Andre and Nathan Trantraal and Ashley Marais (illustrators),
Crossroads: The Women’s Power Group, part 6 (Cape Town: Isotope Media, 2017).

Press Articles

Benson, Koni, Mahvish Ahmad, and Hana Morgenstern, “The Media of the Useable Past,” Africa is a Country, (3 February 2023).

Benson, Koni, “The myth of 1994 – women, resistance and power in South Africa,” Review of African Political Economy, (interview, 18 January 2023).

Benson, Koni, and Suraya Scheba, Faeza Meyer, Meera Karunananthan, Vanessa Farr and Lesley Green, “New Packaging, Same Deal: City of Cape Town’s New Proposal to Replace Water Management Devices with the Drip System Will Further Water Apartheid,” Daily Maverick, (10 May 2021).

Benson, Koni, Meera Karunananthan, Coumba Toure, “No New Water on Earth, Only New Battlegrounds Africans Rising (3 Nov 2021).

Benson, Koni and Linda Cooper, Judy Favish, Kelly Gillespie, Sarah Godsell, Mitchell Hunter and Talya Lubinsky, “The Dangers of Ahistorical Analogy,” Daily Maverick, 20 June 2020.

Benson, Koni, and Uma Dhupelia-Mesthrie, “An Open Letter to the City of Cape Town: Land Restitution and the Rondebosch Golf Course,” Mail and Guardian (9 March 2020).

Benson, Koni and Nashilongweshipwe Mushaandja, “She was there until the end: An ode to Ottilie Abrahams,” The Namibian (10 July, 2018).

Benson, Koni, “An Avoidable Death: Riemvasmaak Informal Settlement,” Cape Times. (July 23,2009).

Benson, Koni, "Changes to bill on evictions ignore root of the problem," Cape Argus, (February 20, 2007).

Benson, Koni, "In Solidarity with Zimbabwe" Znet, (August 13, 2007), Pambazuka, (August 30,2007), Business Day, Kenya, (August 28, 2007).

Benson, Koni, "Sankara, president who put people before profits," Cape Times, (October 14, 2007).

Benson, Koni and Mukoma Wa Ngugi," Justice for Sankara: An Interview with Aziz Fall,” ZNet, (Oct 15, 2007), Pambazuka, (Oct 17, 2007).

Benson, Koni and Mukoma Wa Ngugi, "Burkina Faso: The Struggle Continues 20 Years After Sankara Was Assassinated," Business Daily, Nairobi, (October 16, 2007).

Position: Senior Professor
Email: lwitz@uwc.ac.za
Leslie Witz is a senior professor in the Department. His major research centres on how different histories are created and represented in the public domain through memorials, museums, festivals and tourism. Leslie, together with colleagues Ciraj Rassool and Gary Minkley, have been providing critical reflections on public history in South Africa since the 1990s. These were brought together in their book Unsettled History: Making South African Public Pasts.

He was on the board of the Lwandle Migrant Labour Museum from 2000 and became intensely involved in a set of hands-on collaborations with other board members, museum staff, residents and the appointed professionals in the making of the museum. He co-authored, with Noëleen Murray, a book about the museum, which in 2014 was the winner of the Michael Ames Award for Innovative Museum Anthropology presented by the Council of Museum Anthropology of the American Anthropological Association.

He is the author of Write Your Own History and Apartheid’s Festival: Contesting South Africa’s National Pasts. He also co-edited with Jung Ran Forte and Paolo Israel Out of History, a collection of papers emanating out of the internationally renowned South African Contemporary History and Humanities Seminar at UWC. His latest book Museum Times: Changing Histories in South Africa tracks the circuits of appearance and disappearance of historical depictions in museums and the specific contexts in which they take on particular forms. Leslie has won the award for the best lecturer at the University of the Western Cape and the Arts faculty research awards for the best creative project (with Noëleen Murray), best published journal article and best published monograph. In 2014-15 he held Centre for Humanities Research, UWC / Institute for the Study of Global Change, University of Minnesota Andrew Mellon Research Chair.

Teaching
At undergraduate level Leslie teaches the first-year course on precolonial African history. His major focus is on the critical use of archaeological evidence to construct historical narratives of the cities of Swahili coast, such as Kilwa and Lamu, and the formation of centralised African states, such as Mapungubwe, Kilwa and Great Zimbabwe. He teaches at postgraduate level on issues in museum and heritage studies and public history and tourism. His major concerns are histories of the museum as an institution, the politics of heritage production and the poetics and politics of representation.

Publications

Books

Museum Times: Changing Histories in South Africa. (New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2022), ISBN 978-1-80073-538-5 / Hb / , eISBN 978-1-80073-539-2 eBook.

Unsettled History: Making South African Public Pasts (co-authoured with Gary Minkley and Ciraj Rassool), (Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press 2017), ISBN 978-0-472-07334-4 (hardback),

Out of History: Re-Imagining South African Pasts (Cape Town: HSRC, 2016), ISBN (soft cover) 978-0-7969-2515-2, co-edited with Jung Ran Forte and Paolo Israel

Hostels. homes, museum: Memorialising migrant labour pasts in Lwandle, South Africa (Cape Town: UCT Press, 2014) (co-authoured with N Murray). ISBN9781775820772

JOURNAL SPECIAL EDITIONS

Red Assembly: East London Calling, Special edition parallax 79 (with H Pohlandt McCormick, G Minkley and J Mowitt) https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/tpar20/22/2?nav=tocList

Red Assembly: The Work Remains, Special edition Kronos: Southern Africa histories, 42 (2016). (with H Pohlandt McCormick, G Minkley and J Mowitt). http://www.scielo.org.za/scielo.php?script=sci_issuetoc&pid=0259-019020160001&lng=en&nrm=iso

Chapters in books

2010. ‘Apartheid’s icons in the new millennium: The making and remaking of settler histories’. In Danielle de Lame and Ciraj Rassool (eds) Popular Snapshots and Tracks to the Past (Tervuren: Royal Museum for Central Africa), 203-221. ISBN 978-9-0747-5279-4.

2012. ‘Meetings of world history and public history’ in Douglas Northrop A Companion to World History (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell), 97-110. ISBN: 978-1-4443-3418-0.

2012. ‘Memorials beyond apartheid’, in Premesh Lalu and Noëleen Murray (eds) Becoming UWC: Reflections, pathways and unmaking apartheid’s legacy (Bellville: UWC), 162-177, ISBN: 978-1-86808-727-3.

2015. ‘Fences, signs and property: Heritage, development and the making of location in Lwandle’ (with Noëleen Murray) in D Petersen, Kodzo Gavua and Ciraj Rassool (eds), The Politics of Heritage (Cambridge University Press) 70-96, ISBN 978-1-107-55230-2.

2016. ‘Epistemological Restlessness: Trajectories in and out of History’ (with Jung Ran Forte and Paolo Israel) in Jung Ran Forte, Paolo Israel, Leslie Witz (eds), Out of History: Re-Imagining South African Pasts (Cape Town: HSRC, 2016), 1-30. ISBN (soft cover) 978-0-7969-2515-2

2016. ‘Sir Harry Smith and His Imbongi: Local and National Identities in the Eastern Cape of South Africa, 1952’ (with Gary Minkley) in Jung Ran Forte, Paolo Israel, Leslie Witz (eds), Out of History: Re-Imagining South African Pasts (Cape Town: HSRC, 2016), 31-52. ISBN (soft cover) 978-0-7969-2515-2

Journal articles

2010. ‘Museums, Histories and the Dilemmas of Change in Post-Apartheid South Africa’, University of Michigan, Working Papers in Museum Studies, 3, http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/77459/1/3_witz_2010.pdf

2011. ‘Revisualizing township tourism in the Western Cape: The Migrant Labour Museum and the re-construction of Lwandle’. Journal of Contemporary African Studies, 29, 4, 371-388.

2011. ‘A nineteenth century mail coach, a fifteenth century sailing ship and a bus crash: Re-thinking collection and display in transport museums’, South African Historical Journal, 63, 3, 431-455.

2013. ‘Camp Lwandle: Rehabilitating a migrant labour hostel at the seaside’, Social Dynamics: A journal of African studies, 39:1 51-74 (with N Murray).

2013. ‘The making and unmaking of museum communities at the sea side’, in Centre for the Advancement of Non-Racialism and Democracy, Healing Through Heritage and Memorialisation, Conference Proceedings (Port Elizabeth: Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University Occasional Publication Series), 63-73.

2013. Participant in: ‘Museums in a Global World: A Conversation on Museums, Heritage, Nation and Diversity in a transnational age’, chaired by Conal McCarthy, Museum Worlds: Advances in Research, vol 1, 179-194.

2015. ‘Hunting for Museums’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 41:3, 671-685.

2016. ‘Red Assembly: East London Calling’, parallax, 79, 121-131(with Helena Pohlandt McCormick, Gary Minkley and John Mowitt)

2016. ‘Red Assembly: The Work Remains’, Kronos: Southern African histories, 42 (2016), 10-28 (with Helena Pohlandt McCormick, Gary Minkley and John Mowitt),

2016. ‘Africa [not] in World History: A Review from the South (part 1)’, Journal of World History, 27, 1, 103-120.

2016. ‘Surveying Africa in World History: A View from the South (Part 2)’ Journal of World History, 27, 4, 669-685.

2016. ‘The Voices of the People Involved’: Red, Representation and Histories of Labour, Kronos: Southern African histories, 42 (2016), 71-89.

2019. ‘Archives, museums and autobiography: Reflections on write your own history (with a small detour to the University of Bophuthatswana)’. Journal for Contemporary history, 44 (2), 4-28.

2020.’ The Arcades’ Affinities: Excursions into the Corners and Crowds of Johannesburg’s Pasts’, Critical African Studies, Vol. 12, No. 2, 171–185,

2022.’Commemoration / Centenary: Memorials and the making and unmaking of settler history’. (with Helena Pohlandt- McCormick), Kronos: Southern African Histories, 47/48, (May 2022), 288-305.

BOOKSHELF

Museum Times: Changing Histories in South Africa. (New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2022), ISBN 978-1-80073-538-5 / Hb / Published (June 2022), eISBN 978-1-80073-539-2 eBook, https://www.berghahnbooks.com/title/WitzMuseum

Unsettled History: Making South African Public Pasts (co-authoured with Gary Minkley and Ciraj Rassool), (Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press 2017), ISBN 978-0-472-07334-4 (hardback), https://www.press.umich.edu/9200748/unsettled_history

Out of History: Re-Imagining South African Pasts (Cape Town: HSRC, 2016), ISBN (soft cover) 978-0-7969-2515-2, co-edited with Jung Ran Forte and Paolo Israel https://www.hsrcpress.ac.za/books/out-of-history

Hostels. homes, museum: Memorialising migrant labour pasts in Lwandle, South Africa (Cape Town: UCT Press, 2014) (co-authoured with N Murray). ISBN9781775820772 https://juta.co.za/catalogue/hostels-homes-museums_25108/

Apartheid’s Festival. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,2003) http://www.iupress.indiana.edu/product_info.php?products_id=21861

Position: Associate Professor
Email: nrousseau@uwc.ac.za
As a historian committed to the practice of public scholarship, Nicky Rousseau’s teaching and research have centred on truth commissions, histories of violence and counter-insurgency, histories of liberation, missing persons and human remains. Over her academic career she has taught undergraduate courses on South African history, oral history, research methodologies, the liberation struggle, truth commissions and transitional justice. Postgraduate courses include critical historiography, oral history, rethinking the archive, Western Cape history and forensic history.

Before joining the Department of History, Rousseau worked as a researcher in the Labour Research Committee (LRC) and the Education Resource and Information Centre/ Project both of which engaged in projects of popular history, community research and political education. In 1988 she was appointed convenor of the People’s History Project (PHP) in the Department of History at UWC.

In 1996, Rousseau was seconded to the research department of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), specialising in the history and involvement of apartheid security forces in perpetrating violations of human rights. In the latter years of the TRC, Rousseau was also responsible for research on missing persons. In 2001, Rousseau returned to UWC, while continuing to provide research support to South Africa’s National Prosecuting Authority on post-TRC investigations, prosecutions and missing persons for a number of years. These engagements subsequently shaped her research direction. Between 2011-13, she was project manager for the Violence and Transition Project, a research study convened under the auspices of the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation (CSVR) to explore informal armed formations and gender-based violence during political transitions in South Africa, Kenya and Zimbabwe. Between 2015-2017 she convened the NRF Forensic History Project on missing persons and together with then senior graduate students, Riedwaan Moosage and Bianca van Laun, developed a research community on forensic history. She has actively participated and supported collaborative intellectual projects such as the Andrew W. Mellon Aesthetic Education: A North-South Dialogue, a partnership between the Centre for Humanities Research (CHR) and the Jackman Humanities Institute at the University of Toronto and currently the Andrew W. Mellon Remaking Societies Remaking Persons (RSRP) research platform in the Department of History (see RSRP).

Rousseau has published on the TRC (in several instances collaboratively with ex-TRC colleague, Madeleine Fullard), on counter-revolutionary warfare, on missing persons and human remains. She formed part of the team responsible for writing Volumes Two, Three and Six of the TRC Report. Prior to her academic career she also wrote extensively for community media and publications. She is on the editorial team of Kronos: Southern African Histories and edited the special issue Missing and Missed: Subject, Politics and Memorialisation (Issue 44, 2018) with colleagues Ciraj Rassool and Riedwaan Moosage.

Teaching

At undergraduate level, Nicky teaches a module on the liberation struggle as part of HIS332: Themes in South African History in the 20th Century. At postgraduate level she co-convenes the honors core course (HIS711). She teaches on the Theories and Practices of Oral History (HIS 753/853) where she focuses on histories and memories of trauma and the testimonial turn. This draws extensively on her own engagement with TRC testimony and subsequent memorialisation initiatives. She also teaches Forensic History (HIS 752).

Publications

‘Speak Out on Poverty: Hearing, Inaudibility and Citizenship in Post-Apartheid South Africa,’ Political and Legal Anthropology Review, Issue November 2019. DOI: 10.1111/plar.12315.

‘Missing and Missed: Rehumanisation, the Nation and Missing-ness’, Kronos, 44, 2018. (with Riedwaan Moosage and Ciraj Rassool). http://dx.doi.org/10.17159/2309-9585/2018/v44a2

‘Eastern Cape Bloodlines I: Assembling the Human,’ Parallax, 22, 2, 2016. DOI: 10.1080/13534645.2016.1175069

‘”Unpalatable Truths” and “Popular Hunger”: Reflections on Popular History in the 1980s’ in Leslie Witz, Jung Ran Forte and Paolo Israel (eds), Out of History, Cape Town: HSRC Press, 2016. https://www.hsrcpress.ac.za/books/out-of-history

‘Identification, politics, disciplines: missing persons and colonial skeletons in South Africa’ in Jean-Marc Dreyfus and Elisabeth Anstett (eds) Human remains and identification: Mass violence, genocide, and the ‘forensic turn’, Manchester University Press, 2015. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1wn0s24.14

‘Death and Dismemberment: the Body and Counter-Revolutionary Warfare in Apartheid South Africa’ in Jean-Marc Dreyfus and Elisabeth Anstett (eds), The Tales Destruction Tell: Disposal, Concealment and Destruction of Corpses in Genocide and Mass Violence, Manchester University Press, 2014. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1wn0s3n.13

‘Counter-Revolutionary Warfare: the Soweto Intelligence Unit and Southern Itineraries,’ Journal of Southern African Studies, 40, 6, 2014. DOI: 10.1080/03057070.2014.966292

‘Truth-Telling, Identities, and Power in South Africa and Guatemala’ in Paige Arthur (ed), Transitional Justice in Divided Societies, Cambridge University Press, New York , 2011. Co-authored with Madeleine Fullard. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511976858

‘The Farm, the River and the Picnic Spot: Topographies of Terror’, African Studies, 68, 3, 2009. DOI: 10.1080/00020180903381263

‘Accounting and reconciling in the balance sheet of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission.’ Journal of Multicultural Discourses, 4, 2, 2009. (Co-authored with Madeleine Fullard) https://doi.org/10.1080/17447140802393313

‘Uncertain borders: The TRC and the (un)making of public myths,’ Kronos, 34, 2008. (Co-authored with Madeleine Fullard) http://www.jstor.org/stable/41056608

‘Truth Commissions and Interpretations of Violence: Debating the South African Truth Commission’s Mandate’ in Phil S. Hsu (ed), Political Challenges and Democratic Institutions, Taiwan Foundation for Democracy, Taipei, 2007.

‘Truth, Evidence and History: a Critical Review of Aspects of the Amnesty Process of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’, in C. Villa-Vicencio & E. Doxtader (ed), The Provocations of Amnesty: Memory, Justice and the Politics of Impunity, Cape Town: Institute of Justice and Reconciliation/ New Africa Books, 2003. Co-authored with Madeleine Fullard.

‘An Imperfect Past: The Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Transition’ in J. Daniel, A. Habib, R. Southall (eds), The State of the Nation: South Africa, 2003-2004, Pretoria: Human Sciences Research Council, 2003. Co-authored with Madeleine Fullard. http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11910/8258
Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report, Cape Town: Juta Publishers 1998 and 2003. Team writer. https://justice.gov.za/trc/report/index.htm.

‘“This Narrow Language”: People’s History and the University: Reflections from the University of the Western Cape’, South African Historical Journal, 34 (1996), 175-195. Co-authored with Gary Minkley. https://doi.org/10.1080/02582479608671870

‘Transforming the Cutting Edge: Report on the People’s History Programme, University of the Western Cape, Cape Town,’ Perspectives in Education, 12, 1 (1990), 103-108. Co-authored with Madeleine Fullard, Gary Minkley and Ciraj Rassool.

Position: Associate Professor
Email: pisrael@uwc.ac.za
Paolo Israel is Associate Professor and Chairperson of the Department of History. Since 2002 he has carried out research in the province of Cabo Delgado in northern Mozambique, on a variety of themes related to performance, politics and magic. His monograph In Step with the Times: Mapiko Masquerades of Mozambique (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2014) charts the twentieth-century trajectory of a tradition of masquerading with a micro-historical approach, focusing on creativity and political engagements. Paolo is currently busy with two main projects: an experiment in nonfiction storytelling titled The Magical Lions of Muidumbi, and a microhistory titled Mueda Massacre: Myth and Event. He is part of the Editorial Team of Kronos and of the Advisory Board of the Journal of Southern African Studies.

Research interests: performance, orality, liberation histories, political violence, magic, Mozambique.

Teaching

Paolo has been teaching the course Africa: Colonial and Postcolonial (HIS 331) since he was hired at UWC in 2010. The course has since then undergone many changes. In its last instantiation, it uses film as a pathway to explore histories of colonialism, decolonisation and independence in Africa. Paolo has also taught modules in the History 1 programme, on the Swahili coast and on ethnicity. At postgraduate level, Paolo teaches a section of the MA core course about theories and form of historical narrative. He also co-teaches the course on Oral History and the Atelier in Experimental History Writing.

Publications

Monograph

In Step with the Times: Mapiko Masquerades of Mozambique. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2014.

Edited collections

Out of History: Reimagining South African Pasts, with Jung Ran Forte and Leslie Witz. Cape Town: HSRC Press, 2016.

The Liberation Script in Mozambican History, with Rui Assubuji and Drew Thompson, special issue of the journal Kronos: Southern African Histories, 39 (Nov. 2013).

Voci della Maremma: Novelle e altri racconti dal fondo delle ‘Tradizioni orali non cantate’ della Discoteca di Stato. Grosseto: Biblioteca Chelliana, 2002.

Peer-reviewed articles and book chapters

“The Matter of Return: The Mueda Massacre in Colonial Intelligence”, Journal of Southern African Studies (2020), forthcoming

“The Archive and the Script: Trajectory of a Mozambican Historian”, in Companion to Joao Paulo Borges Coelho, P. Medeiros, E. Brugioni. O. Brussegesse, eds. (Bern: Peter Lang, 2020), forthcoming.

“Animais desordeiros: máscaras e pós-socialismo no norte de Moçambique”, in C. Furtado and L. Sansone (eds.) Lutas de memória em África, Livio Sansone e Cláudio Alves Furtado (Salvador de Bahia: Editora da Universidade Federal da Bahia, 2019), forthcoming.

“Portrait of a Playful Man: Mustafa, Master of Mapiko”, in Africa Every Day: Fun, Leisure, and Expressive Culture on the Continent, eds Kemi Balogun, Lisa Gilman, Melissa Graboyes, and Habib Iddrisu. (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2019): 228-240.

“Mueda Massacre: The Musical Archive”, Journal of Southern African Studies, 43, 6 (2017): 1157-1179.

“Lingundumbwe: Feminist Masquerades and Women’s Liberation. Nangade, Mueda, Muidumbe, 1950s - 2005”, Kronos: Southern African Histories, 39 (2013): 204-229.

“This Is Our Contemporary: Mozambican Masks in Cape Town”, Art South Africa, 10.2 (2011): 44-46, 64.

“The Formulaic Revolution: Song and the “popular memory” of the Mozambican Liberation Struggle”, Cahiers d’Etudes Africaines, special issue Jeux de Mémoire, 197 (2010):181-216.

“Utopia Live: Song and the Liberation Struggle in Mozambique”, Kronos: Southern African Histories, 35 (2009): 98-141.

“The War of Lions: Witch-Hunts, Idiom Occults and Post-socialism in Northern Mozambique (Muidumbe, 2002-2003)”, Journal of Southern African Studies, 35, 1 (2009): 155-174. This article won a prize as best article by a new contributor, and was amongst the 10 most downloaded articles in African studies platforms in 2009.

“Déchirures et rumeurs. La chasse au sorcier et l’héritage idéologique de la révolution socialiste au Mozambique (Muidumbe, 2002-2003)”, Cahiers d’Etudes Africaines, special issue Territoires Sorciers, ed C Henry & E K Tall, XLVIII, 189-190 (2008): 209-236.

“Irony, Ambiguity and the Art of Recycling: Reflections on Contemporary Rural African Art and Africa Remix”, Third Text, 82, 3 (2006): 585-600.

“Kummwangalela Guebuza: The Mozambican general elections of 2004 in Muidumbe and the roots of the loyalty of Makonde people to Frelimo”, Lusotopie, XIII, 2 (2005): 103-126.

“Mapiko masquerades of the Makonde: Performance and Historicity” in Eastern African Visual ‘Traditions’, Arero, Hassan & Zachary Kingdon (eds). London: Horniman Museum, Critical Museology and Material Culture series (2005): 99-121.

“Acheminement vers la parole unique. Autour du débat sur les langues en danger” (review article), Cahier d'études africaines, XLI, 163-164 (2001): 815-832.

Under review:

“Mapiko: Fragments of Revolutionary Time”, in Love and Revolution, P. Hayes, P. Lalu, A. Arunima, eds. Durham: Duke University Press.

“Disorderly Animals: Masquerading and Postsocialism in northern Mozambique” in C. Furtado and L. Sansone (eds.) The Struggle for Memory: Biographies, Locations, Archives, Monuments and Museums in Contemporary Africa, (University of Liverpool Press)

Position: Senior Lecturer
Email: pmnyaka@uwc.ac.za
I completed my PhD in History at the University of Fort Hare in 2012. My research was on mid-20th century African photography. In 2013, I was a Dulcie September Research Fellow at the Center for Humanities Research at UWC. Between 2014 and 2016, I taught courses in art history and visual culture at Rhodes University. My research interests include photography and visual culture more broadly, oceanic humanities, the discipline of history and experimental modes of history writing. My current project is called Writing on Water, and intends to explore the potential offered by taking the ocean seriously in the humanities, particularly the implications this has for how we write African histories.

Teaching

I teach Gender and African History (HIS223), a course that unpacks the significance of gender and sexuality in the making of colonial communities in Africa. I also teach Africa: Colonial and Postcolonial, a third year course that uses film to explore a range of key themes pertaining to Africa’s colonial and postcolonial history. My postgraduate teaching focuses on experimental history writing and aims to explore texts that are at the intersections of genres.

Publications

Position: Senior Professor
Email: umesthrie@uwc.ac.za
I graduated from the University of Durban-Westville with a BA; BA (Hons); MA and then went on to receive my Ph.D from the University of Natal in 1987. I have taught and worked at three South African universities, was a Visiting Research Fellow at Yale University in 1989-1990 and have been at the University of the Western Cape since 1993. I have been a Professor since 2007 and a Senior Professor since 2013. I have also served three terms as Deputy Dean of Research in the Arts Faculty.

My research interests have been in the area of biography, forced removals, land restitution, Cape Flats histories, immigration histories, surveillance histories and India-South Africa connected histories. I received a B1 NRF Rating in 2018. I received the Western Cape Provincial Government award for cultural achievement for my book From Cane Fields to Freedom (Kwela Books, 2000) and from the Noma Book Awards (Africa's Premier Book Award) a special commendation for From Cane Fields To Freedom , 2001. In 2005 my book Gandhi's Prisoner? The Life of Manilal Gandhi (Cape Town, Kwela Books, 2004 and New Delhi, Permanent Black, 2005 won the Via Africa, Best Non-Fiction Award as well as the UWC Arts Faculty Research Award. I am currently working on two manuscripts Letters from Phoenix Settlement: Maintaining Gandhi’s Heritage in South Africa, 1915 to 1976 and A Cape Flats History: Rylands.

I have served as member of the Ministerial History and Archaeology Panel in 2000 and as a member of the Ministerial History Committee, South African History Project between 2001 and 2004.

Teaching

At undergraduate level I co-teach HIS 332: Themes in South African History. Given my interest in oral histories and land, I teach Memory and the South African City and Land Dispossession and Land Restitution. At Honours and MA level, I co-teach HIS 732 and HIS 832 Political Biography and the National Liberation Struggle in South Africa.

Publications

BOOKS

with Malherbe, C. Not Slave, Not Free : Indentured Labour (Shooter and Shuter, Pietermaritzburg, 1992).

From Cane Fields to Freedom: a Chronicle of Indian South African Life (Kwela Books, Cape Town, 2000)

Editor, Sita: Memoirs of Sita Gandhi (Durban, Local History Museums and South African History on Line, 2003, 75pp)

Gandhi's Prisoner ? The Life of Gandhi's Son, Manilal (Cape Town, Kwela Books, 2004, 380pp)

Editor, In the Shadow of the Mahatma : A Grand-Daughter Remembers (Calcutta, New Delhi, London, Sampark, 2005) (Indian edition of Sita : Memoirs of Sita Gandhi)

Gandhi's Prisoner? The Life of Gandhi's Son, Manilal (New Delhi, Permanent Black, 2005) South Asian hard back edition.

Gandhi's Prisoner? The Life of Gandhi's Son, Manilal (New Delhi, Permanent Black, 2007) South Asian paperback edition.

EDITOR SPECIAL ISSUES OF JOURNALS

Special issue on Women in the Cape, Kronos, 1996

co-editor with Isabel Hofmeyer , South African Historical Journal (2007) : India-South Africa : re-imagining the Disciplines

Paper Regimes in Southern Africa, for Kronos: Southern African Histories, No 40 2014,

Durban and Cape Town as Port Cities: reconsidering South African Studies from the Indian Ocean, Journal of Southern African Studies, 42(3), 2016 (with Preben Kaarsholm and Isabel Hofmeyr)

ARTICLES AND CHAPTERS IN BOOKS

`African Labour in Natal: Attempts at Coercion and Control, 1893-1903', Journal of Natal and Zulu History 1982, Vol. V, pp. 36-48.

`Gandhi and the train incident at Pietermaritzburg', Natalia, Dec. 1983, No. 13, pp.98-99.

`White Dominance and Control in Natal, 1893-1903', Journal of Natal and Zulu History, 1984, Vol. VII, pp. 41-56.

Co-author with S. Bhana, `Passive Resistance among Indian South Africans : a Historiographical Survey', South African Historical Journal,', Nov. 1984, No. 16, pp. 118-31.

`Reducing the Indian Population to a "Manageable Compass" : a Study of the South African Assisted Emigration Scheme of 1927', Natalia,, Nov. 1985, No. 15, pp.36-56.

`Reducing the Indian Population' in S.S.P. Saraswati (ed.), `From the Pen of South African Women :an Anthology of Papers (Allahabad, 1988).

`Sushila Gandhi (1907© 1988) : Guardian of Gandhian Traditions in South Africa', Natalia , No. 19, Dec. 1989, pp.55-63.

`Indian National Honour versus Trader Ideology : Three Unsuccessful Attempts at Passive Resistance in the Transvaal, 1932, 1939, and 1941', South African Historical Journal 1989,No. 21, pp. 39-54.

`Indian Responses in Natal to Non-European Unity Moves, 1927 to 1945', Journal of Natal and Zulu History, 1989, Vol.XII, pp. 73-89.

`Tinkering and Tampering : a Decade of the Group Areas Act (1950 to 1960)', South African Historical Journal, No. 28, May 1993, pp.177-202.

` "No place in the world to go to" - control by permit: the first phase of the Group Areas Act in Cape Town in the 1950s' in E. van Heyningen (ed.), Studies in the History of Cape Town , Vol. 7 (University of Cape Town, 1994), pp. 184 - 207.

Entry on `Indians' and `Chinese', in C.C. Saunders (advisory ed.), An Illustrated Dictionary of South African History , (Ibis Books, Sandton, 1994), pp. 68-69, 139-41.

`The Tramway Road Removals, 1959-1961', Kronos,, No. 21, November 1994, pp. 61-78.

` Eastern Roots : a Representation of the History of Indian South Africans on Film. A Review Article', South African Historical Journal , No. 31, November 1994, pp. 235-51.

`From Advocacy to Mobilisation : Indian Opinion, 1903 to 1913' in L. Switzer (ed.), South Africa's Alternative Press : Voices of Protest and Resistance 1880-1960,, (Cambridge, 1997),pp.99-126.

`Land Restitution in Cape Town : Public Displays and Private Meanings', Kronos
, No.25, 1998-99, pp. 239-58.

`Dispossession and Memory : The Black River Community of Cape Town' , Journal of Oral History, Autumn 2000, Vol.28, no.2, pp35-43.

`A Blast from the Past': The Teaching of South African History at an Apartheid University 1960-1981', South African Historical Journal, No.42, May 2000, pp.49-68.

`Manilal Gandhi' for South African History Online, 2004

`The Revival of the Natal Indian Congress, 1971-1979' in SADET, The Road to Democracy in South Africa Vol. 2 , 1970-1980 (SADET, 2006), pp.

`Dr Yusuf Dadoo' in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Online edition, 2006)

`Workers in the Sugar Industry, 1850s to 1930s' for Turning Points in Human Rights : Workers' and Labour Rights (ed.) by Luli Callinicos and to be published by Institute for Justice and Reconciliation and STE publishers, Cape Town, 2006.

`Tales of Urban Land Restitution: Black River Rondebosch’, Kronos, Nov. 2006, 32, pp.216-243.

`The Limits of Visibilty: Indian Women in the Transvaal, 1870s-1930s’, Oriental Anthropologist, Vol 7, No.1 ,January 2007, pp.17-38.

With Isabel Hofmeyr, `South Africa/India : Reimagining the Disciplines’, South African Historical Journal, Vol. 57, 2007, pp.1-11.

`The Place of India in South African History: Academic Scholarship, Past, Present and Future', South African Historical Journal, Vol. 57, 2007, pp. 12-34.

`Sushila Gandhi’ in The Face of the Spirit : Illuminating a Century of South African Women (Dept.of Arts and Culture, SA, 2007), pp. 28-29.

`Memory and the City : the Fruits of Imagination’ Review Article, Kronos, 2007. No.33.

`Gandhi and his South African Family’, India International Centre Quarterly, 2007, pp. 34-45..

`Writing the Life of Manilal Gandhi’, Journal of Natal and Zulu History, Vol. 24 and 25, 2006-2007, pp.188-213.

`The Passenger Indian as Worker: Indian Immigrants in Cape Town in the Early Twentieth Century’ in African Studies, 68, 1, April 2009, pp.111-34

`Satyagraha in South Africa : Principles, Practice and Possibilities’, Historia, Vol.54. No 1, 2009, pp. 13-33

Forced Removals in Democratic South Africa : the N2 Gateway Project’, in South African Labour Bulletin, Vol. 33 Number 1, April/May 2009, pp.26-28.

`Urban Restitution Narratives: Black River, Cape Town’, in C. Walker, A Bohlin, R. Hall and T. Kepe (eds) , Land, Memory, Reconstruction, and Justice (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010) , pp.83-99.

`The Form, the Permit, the Photograph: an Archive of Mobility between South Africa and India’, Journal of African and Asian Studies, Vol. 46, 6, 2011, 650-62.

`Gujarati Shoemakers in Twentieth Century Cape Town: Family, Gender, Caste and Community’. Journal of Southern African Studies, Vol. 38, No. 1, March 2012,168-82.,

`Cultural Crossings from Africa to India : Select Narratives of Indian South Africans from Durban and Cape Town, 1940s to 1990s’, South African Historical Journal, Vol 64, No.2, 2012, 295-312.

`Cat and Mouse Games: The State, Indians in the Cape and the Permit System, 1900s-1920s’ in I. About, J. Brown, Gayle Lonergan (eds), Identification and Registration in Transnational Perspective: People, Places and Practices (New York and London, Palgrave Macmillan,2013), 185-202.

Cape Indians, Apartheid and Higher Education, Journal of Natal and Zulu History, 2013, Vol. 31 , No 1, 45-73.

`Gandhian Ways: The South African Experience and its Legacy’ in P. Vale, L Hamilton and E. Prinsloo (ed.), Intellectual Traditions in South Africa: Ideas, Individuals and Institutions (Pietermaritzburg, UKZN press, 2014), 197-217,

`Speaking About Building Rylands1960s to 1980s: A Cape Flats History’, Social Dynamics, 40,2, 2014, 353-70.

` False Fathers and False Sons: Immigration Officials in Cape Town, Documents and Verifying Minor Sons from India in the First Half of the Twentieth Century’, Kronos : Southern African Histories, 40, 2014, 99-132.,

`Paper Regimes’, Kronos, Southern African Histories, 40.2014,10-22

Split-Households: Indian Wives, Cape Town Husbands and Immigration Laws, 1900s to 1940s, South African Historical Journal, 66, 4, 2014, 635-55.

Betwixt the Oceans: The Chief Immigration Officer in Cape Town, Clarence Wilfred Cousins (1905-1915), Journal of Southern African Studies, 42 (3), 2016, 463-81.

Durban and Cape Town as Port Cities: reconsidering South African Studies from the
Indian Ocean, Journal of Southern African Studies, 42(3), 2016, 375-87 (co-Authored with Isabel Hofmeyr and Preben Kaarsholm)

India-South Africa Mobilities in the First Half of the Twentieth Century: Minors, Immigration Encounters in Cape Town and Becoming South African’ in E Razy and M Rodet (eds), Children on the Move in Africa : Past and Present Experiences of Migration (Suffolk, James Currey, 2016). 159-74.

`Remembering Removals: the Black River Community of Rondebosch, Cape Town’ in A Forte, P. Israel, L Witz (eds), Out of History (Cape Town: HSRC, 2016), 111-134.

`Engaging with the Bureaucracy: Indian Immigration Agents and Interpreters in Cape Town, South Africa (1902-1916), South Asian Studies, Vol. 33, No.2, 2017, 180-198.

Re-Locating Memories: Transnational and Local Narratives of Indian South Africans in Cape Town’, Journal of Asian and African Studies, Vol.52(8), 2017, 1065-79.

`The Desirable and Undesirable in the Life of the Chief Immigration Officer in Cape Town, Clarence Wilfred Cousins, 1905-1915’, Itinerario, 42, 2018, 1, 50-66.

With Margaret Allen, Controlling Transnational Asian Mobilities: A Comparison of Documentary Systems in Australia and South Africa, 1890s to 1940s in Rob Heynen and Emily van der Meulen (eds), Making Surveillance States: Transnational Histories (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019) 133-62.

Introduction `Transnational and Comparative Immigration Histories: From Flows and Connections to Differences’, Journal of Natal and Zulu History, Vol.33, 1, 2019, 87-91. . Book Forum Convenor: : Jeremy Martens Empire and Asian Migration: Sovereignty, Immigration Restriction and Protest in the British Settler Colonies, 1888-1907 (Crawley: UWA Publishing, 2018).

With Jill Weintroub, `Going Beyond Gandhi’s “Inner Circle” of Relationships: Satyagraha House, Hermann Kallenbach and Gandhi’s Sons’, Critical African Studies, 2020.

`Waiting on Cape Town in the Apartheid Era: Life Histories of Five Indian Waiters and Barmen’, Journal of Social History, Vol 45 (4), 2020 (Out in November).

BOOKSHELF

From Cane Fields to Freedom: a Chronicle of Indian South African Life (Kwela Books, Cape Town, 2000)

Editor, Sita: Memoirs of Sita Gandhi (Durban, Local History Museums and South African History on Line, 2003, 75pp)

Gandhi's Prisoner ? The Life of Gandhi's Son, Manilal (Cape Town, Kwela Books, 2004, 380pp)

Position: Lecturer
Email: rmoosage@uwc.ac.za
My research interests include questions relating to political violence, forensic history, public history, philosophy of history and pushing the boundaries of disciplinary history.

Teaching

I co-teach on a first year undergraduate course titled ‘The use of evidence: Selected themes in coastal African histories, 1000-1900: Africa and the worlds of Indian and Atlantic Oceans’; I co-teach on the Honours core module, ‘History after Apartheid: Critical concepts in historiography’, and co-teach a postgraduate course titled ‘Forensic History’.

Publications

Rousseau, N, Moosage, R and Rassool, R, ‘Missing and Missed: Rehumanisation, the Nation and Missing-ness’ in Kronos: Southern African Histories, Special Issue – Missing and Missed: Subject, Politics, Memorialisation, Vol. 44 (November 2018), 10-32.

Moosage, R, ‘A Prose of Ambivalence: Liberation Struggle Discourse on Necklacing’ in Kronos: Southern African Histories, Vol. 36 (November 2010), 136-157.

Position: Senior Professor
Email: visualhistoryuwc@gmail.com
Patricia Hayes was awarded the DSI/NRF SARChI Chair in Visual History & Theory (Centre for Humanities Research) in 2016. A scholar of African history, gender studies and visuality, Hayes began research on photography and the question of history after completing her PhD at the University of Cambridge. Initially conceived through an exhibition project on Namibia called ‘The Colonising Camera’ (1998) and supported by the innovative History Department at UWC, the research and teaching project in Visual History became firmly established.

The Chair’s research and teaching converge around issues of visuality, African history, and the archive as method. Visual history brings debates around the image into a discipline that is usually silent about its epistemological underpinnings and temporal understandings. In relation to African history specifically, this inquiry into images allows an interrogation of the different mediums and analytical categories of the history of the continent, from precolonial to contemporary times. Anchored in constantly expanding research in varied archives, the Chair is also part of a movement to promote the preservation and activation of archives, where the archive also becomes part of methodological and philosophical thinking. Specific paradigms and postgraduate research associated with the Chair now include documentary photography; liberation struggles and the post-apartheid; digital photography in the postcolony; and photography and historical method.

Publications

Ambivalent. Photography and Visibility in African History (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2019), co-edited with Gary Minkley (https://www.ohioswallow.com/book/Ambivalent);

‘Zenzo Nkobi, ZAPU photographer: exile, visibility, and the anteroom of war in Zambia, 1977-80’ in Journal of Southern African Studies, Vol 46 No 5, 2020;

‘War and Vision on New Terms. Archives of the Insensible: Of War, Photopolitics, and Dead Memory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015. By Allen Feldman’ in Cultural Critique 109 (Fall 2020).

Patricia Hayes has also edited several journal special issues on visuality and gender including Gender & History (2006) and Kronos (2000 & 2020). She co-authored Bush of Ghosts: Life & War in Namibia (2010) with photographer John Liebenberg, and has published articles on South African photographers Santu Mofokeng, David Goldblatt, Jo Ractliffe, Omar Badsha, Chris Ledochowski and others, as well as Ricardo Rangel and Kok Nam of Mozambique. Her work appears in Okwui Enwezor’s The Rise and Fall of Apartheid (2012), Crais and McLendon’s The South African Reader (2014), Mofokeng’s Chasing Shadows (Prestel 2011), and Ribeiro’s Proximo Futuro on African photography (2013). Articles on photography and the making of publics have appeared in Photographies (Vol 10 No 3, 2017), Cultural Critique (Issue 89, 2015) and Sanil V & Divya Dwivedi’s The Public Sphere from Outside the West (2015). Hayes is also series co-editor of the series Photography, History: History, Photography at Routledge Publishers (https://www.routledge.com/Photography-History-History-Photography/book-series/BLPHOPHHP).

Position: Associate Professor
Email: rbester@uwc.ac.za
Rory Bester is an art historian, curator and visual learning specialist. He received his PhD in art history from Wits University, Johannesburg. Prior to joining UWC, he held academic, fellowship, visiting and associate positions at the University of Cape Town and Wits University.

Teaching and Research
Bester has a teaching and research interest in the intersection of photographic and archival histories, notably the modes and methods through which photographic archives are activated in public; curatorial practice and its innovations in research, exhibitions, museums, and other public contexts; and the creative making practices of history in public.

Practice
Bester’s curatorial work includes Democracy’s Images: Photography and Visual Art After Apartheid (BildMuseet, Umeå); Kwere Kwere / Journeys into Strangeness (Castle of Good Hope, Cape Town); Rise and Fall of Apartheid: Photography and the Bureaucracy of Everyday Life (with Okwui Enwezor, International Center of Photography, New York), for which the exhibition won the Lucie Award for Best Photography Exhibition and the book won the German Photo Book Prize; and A Short History of South African Photography (Fotografia Europea, Reggio Emilia). In addition to his curatorial work, he has been an executive producer for two ground-breaking music and television projects: The Thula Project / An Album of South African Lullabies, which was South Africa’s first album of indigenous lullabies; and Right Through the Arts, a six-part documentary television series about artistic creativity and experimentation broadcast on SABC2. He has published extensively on South African photography and contemporary art, contributing to publications produced by, amongst others, BildMuseet (Umeå), Christie’s (London), Documenta (Kassel), Fondation Louis Vuitton (Paris), Fotografia Europea (Reggio Emilia), Fotomuseum Winterthur, Iziko South African National Gallery (Cape Town), National Gallery of Victoria (Melbourne), Prince Claus Fund (Amsterdam), Studio Museum (Harlem), and White Box (New York).

Position: Lecturer
Email: aerasmus@uwc.ac.za
Aidan Erasmus has a Ph.D in History from the University of the Western Cape, which focused on the relationship between sound and war in South African military historiography. Broadly interested in sound, technology, and memory as it pertains to African history, his main research project looks at how sound operates in the life and work of Sol Plaatje.

Teaching

Aidan co-convenes the core module in the Honours programme (HIS711: History after apartheid: critical concepts in historiography), which focuses on various historiographical concepts that Honours students explore through a seminar structure. These include amongst others evidence, voice, archive, and race, and the proposal for the Honours research essay is the primary outcome of the course.

Aidan also teaches in the second year undergraduate programme in a course on the making of modern South Africa (HIS241: Studies in imperialism and the making of modern South Africa). The course, through four case studies, deepens students’ understanding of narrative and historiography through an exploration of the relationship between masculinity and biography in Southern African history. Aidan teaches a section on the historical figure Sol Plaatje, which explores the relationship between his aesthetic sensibility and his political work.

Publications

Erasmus A., ‘Book Review Essay: Kwaito Bodies Remastering Space and Subjectivity in Post-Apartheid South Africa by Xavier Livermon’ in Cultural Critique, forthcoming 2021.

Erasmus A., ‘Inhabiting the Edge: Code Switching as floating praxis’, Herri (2), 2020, accessible at https://herri.org.za/2/aidan-erasmus.

Erasmus A., van der Rede, L., ‘Eddies and Entanglements: Africa and the Global Mnemoscape’, in Jie-Hyun Lim, Eve Rosenhaft (eds), Entangled Memories in the Global South: Mnemonic Solidarity in the Global Memory Space (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020).

Erasmus, A., van der Rede, L., ‘Reckoning with Africa and the Desire for a Global Mnemoscape’, in Mnemonic Solidarity in the Global Memory Space, Special Issue of Global-e (a refereed online journal, https://www.21global.ucsb.edu/global-e/global-e-series/mnemonic-solidarity), 12 (13), 2019.

Erasmus, A., ’A Sinister Resonance’, Special Issue: Truth and Reconciliation Practices in a Comparative Perspective, Canadian Review of Comparative Literature, 45.4 (2018).

Erasmus, A., ‘Re-covering: Afrikaans Rock, Apartheid’s Children, and the Work of the Cover’, Maurits Van Bever Donker, Ross Truscott, Gary Minkley and Premesh Lalu (eds), Remains of the Social: Desiring the Postapartheid (Wits University Press, 2017)

Erasmus A., ‘Book Review Essay: To The Technical Media Themselves’, in Maurits Van Bever Donker, Ross Truscott (eds) Special Issue: What is the university for?, Kronos: Southern African Histories, 43 (2017).

Erasmus, A., ’Disquiet’, South African Music Studies, 34/35, 2015.

Alumni

Lukhanyo May, ‘Senzeni na Nkosi: The Politics of Deploying Liberation Songs in #FeesMustFall’, Honours thesis, Department of History, University of the Western Cape (2019).

Position: Associate Lecturer
Email: bkona@uwc.ac.za

Bongani Kona holds an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Cape Town and he is editor of Our Ghosts Were Once People: Stories on Death and Dying (2021). He is a member of the curatorial collective behind the Archive of Forgetfulness project and is one of co-editors of the 2017 Short Story Day Africa anthology, Migrations. His writing has been broadcast on BBC and appeared in a variety publications and anthologies including Chimurenga, The Baffler, and Safe House: Explorations in Creative Nonfiction. Kona was shortlisted for the Caine Prize for African Writing in 2016 and he was awarded the Ruth First Fellowship in 2019.

Teaching:
Bongani Kona co-teaches the Core Course (HIS711) for the Honours Programme with Riedwaan Moosage and Aidan Erasmus.

Position: Associate Lecturer
Email: rhumphreys@uwc.ac.za

Robyn Humphreys is an Associate Lecturer in the History Department. She is currently completing her PhD in Archaeology. Her research focuses on the relationship between communities and bio-archaeologists in relation to human remains from archaeological sites. She is interested in the history of the disciplines of biological anthropology and archaeology, and how this defines current research practice. Furthermore, how liberal movements engaged with these disciplines in the past.

Teaching:
Robyn teaches the undergraduate first year course called ‘History 152: The use of evidence: Selected themes in coastal African histories, 1000-1900: Africa and the worlds of Indian and Atlantic Oceans.’

Publications:

Bam-Hutchison, J., & Humphreys, R.A,. 2021 ‘Decolonising the representation of indigenous women at the Cape during Covid19’, in Rethinking Africa: Indigenous women re-interpret Southern Africa’s pasts Jacana media

Humphreys, R.A., Ackermann, RR., & Bam-Hutchison, J. ‘Archaeology is changing, slowly. But it’s still too tied up in colonial practices’ March 2020 The Conversation South Africa https://theconversation.com/archaeology-is-changing-slowly-but-its-still-too-tied-up-in-colonial-practices-133243

Humphreys, R. 2019 ‘Chapter 11 Archaic Hominin Special Topic: Ancient DNA’ in EXPLORATIONS: An Open Invitation to Biological Anthropology

Position: Administrative Officer
Tel: +27 (021) 959 2225/3600
Fax: +27 (021) 959 3598
Email: jsmidt@uwc.ac.za

Position: Administrative Officer
Tel: +27 (021) 959 3600/2225
Fax: +27 (021) 959-3598
Email: jsmidt@uwc.ac.za

The dissertations below can be accessed through the University of the Western Cape library database.

MA Theses from the Department of History

2021 Keenan Africa, “It’s my house and I live here”: The mobilization of selective histories for claims of belonging in Cape Town”

2021 Mischka Lewis, “Artistic Interventions in the Historical Remembering of Cape slavery, c.1800s.”

2020 Retha Ferguson, ‘Voortrekker Road palimpsest: Social, spatial and temporal dynamics in the city’.

2019 Julia Buss, “From Homestead to Roadside to Gallery: The Social Life of Zulu Pots”.

2019 Bongiwe Hlekiso, ‘Visual entanglement: Political and aesthetic connotations of Gladys Mgudlandlu’s work’.

2019 Michael Desmond McEvoy, “Madeirans in Cape Town: Immigration Documentation, Marriage and settlement, 1900s to the 1970s”

2019 Nsima Udo, ‘Visualizing the body: photographic clues and the cultural fluidity of mbopo institution, Nigeria, 1914-2014.’

2019 Tazneem Wentzel, “Producing and Consuming the Wembley Whopper and the Super Fisheries Gatsby: Bread Winners and Losers in Athlone, Cape Town, 1950-1980”.

2018 Brent Abrahams, “Unfinished Lives: the Biographies of Nokuthula Simelane”.

2018 Robin-Lea Karating, “Exhumations, reburials and history making in post-apartheid South Africa”.

2018 Pulane Mahula, ‘Memory, Trauma, Silences: Narratives of the 1982 Maseru Invasion’.

2018 Damian Samuels, ‘Cape-Helena: A Textual and Visual Exploration of Nostalgia and Identity Through the Cape Town - St. Helena Migratory Nexus’.

2018 Wilton Schereka, ‘Sonic Afrofuturism: Blackness, electronic music production and visions of the future’.

2017 Anthony Ambe, “West Africans in Cape Town : Immigration and Struggles over Documentation, 1994-2016”

2017 Liezl Gevers, ‘“We cannot carry our own poverty.” Native Affairs, welfare reform, and the development of an “inclusive” social pension system in South Africa, 1936-59’.

2017 Clinarete Munguambe, “Solidarity and the struggle for Zimbabwe: Zimbabwean African National Union (ZANU) in Mozambique (1975-1980)”.

2016 Comfort Tamanda Mtotha, “The Cox collection, the museums of Malawi and the politics of repatriation, 1892-2016” .

2016 Mwayi Lusaka, “Conserving Spaces of Memory and Heritage: the Complexities , Challenges and Politics of the Stonewall project on Blue Stone Quarry at Robben Island”.

2016 Sam Longford, ‘The Suppression of Communism, the Dutch Reformed Church, and the Instrumentality of Fear during apartheid’

2015 Mary Mazimba Mbewe, “A Triangulation of Relationships: Godfrey Wilson, Zacharia Mawere and their Bemba Informants in Broken Hill, Northern Rhodesia, 1938-1940”.

2015 Stephen Yohanna, ‘The 1945 General Strike in Northern Nigeria and its Role in Anti-Colonial Nationalism’

2015 Rosette Vuninga, “Théâtres and mikilistes: Congolese films and Congolese diasporic identity in the post-Mobutu period (1998-2011)”.

2014 Lynn Abrahams, “An uncertain remaking: Changing the Hout Bay Museum, 1979 -2013”.

2014 Aidan Erasmus, “Rock and Roll, Protest, and the Politics of Whiteness in South Africa”.

2014 Charlene Houston, “Opting for silence: A history of the history of the Golden Arrow Bus Services drivers’ strike of 1992”.

2014 Nehoa Kapuka, “The making of Ruacana as place and its construction as future heritage”.

2014 Ingrid Masondo, ‘“We are all coloured”: an exploration on the impact of the South African Population Registration Act of 1950 on process of seeing and identification in South Africa’.

2014 Ayanda Nombila, “Christianity, Education and African Nationalism: An Intellectual Biography of Z.K. Matthews (1901-1968)”.

2013 Njabulo Chipangura, “Historic Buildings, Conservation and Shifts in Social value at Old Umtali: Contestations of Heritage in Zimbabwe”.

2013 Hayley Hayes-Roberts, “From family business to public museum: The transformation of Sacks Futeran into the Homecoming Centre of the District Six Museum”.

2013 Jaline de Villiers, “Tamme’s Country: The !Kun-Lloyd Archive of Bushman Folklore, 1879-1884”.

2013 Brutus Simakole, “Political Auto/biography, Nationalist History and National Heritage: The case of Kenneth Kaunda and Zambia”

2013 Heather Wares, “Maritime archaeology and its publics in post-apartheid South Africa”.

2012 Geraldine Frieslaar, ‘“Looking Good, Clean and Fresh”. Visual Representations of the Self in the Van Kalker Studio, Cape Town 1939-1978’.

2012 Michael Jonas, “Kleinplasie living open air museum: a biography of a site and the processes of history-making, 1974 – 1994”.

2012 Zaina Lubwama Nabirye, “The meanings of heritage practices, spaces and sites in the Busoga kingdom, Uganda in the twenty first century”.

2012 Kaingu Kalume Tinga, “Secrets of slaves: The rise and decline of Vinyago Masquerades in the Kenya coast (1907 to the present)”.

2012 Bianca van Laun, ‘In the Shadows of the Archive: Investigating the Paarl March of November 22nd 1962’.

2011 Rui Assubuji, ‘Anthropology and Fieldwork Photography: Monica Hunter Wilson’s Photographs in Pondoland and BuNyakyusa, 1931-1938’.

2011 Melanie Boehi, “Being/Becoming ‘the Cape Town Flower Sellers’: The Botanical Complex, Flower Selling and Floricultures in Cape Town”.

2011 Leslie Connolly, ‘Post-Conflict Transition and Development in Sierra Leone: A case for the transformative-justice model’ (UCT).

2011 Mona Hendricks, “Exhibiting Bushman History: The Bushman Diorama Debate”.

2011 Julian Jacobs `Then and Now: Activism in Manenberg, 1980s to 2011’.

2010 William Keniston, “Richard Turner’s contribution to a socialist political culture in South Africa, 1968-1978”.

2010 Riedwaan Moosage, “The Impasse of Violence: Writing necklacing into a history of liberation struggle in South Africa”.

2010 Sipokazi Sambumbu, “Social history, public history and the politics of memory in re-making ‘Ndabeni’’s pasts”.

2009 Herbert Kanjimi Karapo, ‘Living memory in a forgotten war zone: the Ukwangali district of Kavango & the Namibian liberation struggle’.

2008 Cecyl Esau, “Saul Januarie: Biography of a Wagon-Maker and Blacksmith from Worcester, Western Cape, South Africa”.

2008 Aaron Haufiku Nambadi, “ The Kavango Legislative Council, 1970-1979: A critical analysis”.

2006 Kletus Likuwa, `Rundu Kavango : A Case Study of Forced Removals in Namibia'.

2006 Michael Weeder, ‘From the palaces of memory: A reconstruction of District One, before and after the Group Areas Act’.

2005 Napandulwe Shiweda, ‘Mandume ya Ndemufayo’s memorials in Namibia and Angola’.

2001 Natasha Becker, ‘Collecting, Documenting and Exhibiting the Photograph’.

2001 Josiah Mhute, ‘Downcast: Mining, Social Landscapes and Visual Representation in Colonial Zimbabwe, 1890-1970’.

Phd Theses from the Department of History

2020 Pam Sykes, ‘Digital storytelling and the production of the personal in Lwandle, Cape Town’ 2020 ?Rui Assubuji, ‘A visual struggle for Mozambique: revisiting narratives, interpreting photographs (1880-1930)’.

2020 Mwayi Woyamba Lusaka, “Culture, History and Politics in Malawi: The Production of National Heritage, 1964-2009”.

2020 Hayley Hayes-Roberts, Frameworks of Representation: A Design History of the District Six Museum in Cape Town.

2019 Mariella Franzoni, “The Economy of the Curatorial and the Fields of the Contemporary Art World: Curatorial Instances and the Market of Contemporary Art in and from (South) Africa” (Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona).

2019 Riedwaan Moosage, “Missing-ness, History and Apartheid-era disappearances: The figuring of Siphiwo Mtimkulu, Tobekile ‘Topsy’ Madaka and Sizwe Kondile as missing dead persons”.

2019 Nicky Rousseau, ‘Itineraries: a return to the archives of the South African truth commission and the limits of counter-revolutionary warfare’ (VU Amsterdam).

2018 Melanie Boehi, “A South African social garden: People, plants and multispecies histories in the Kirstenbosch National Botanical Garden”.

2018 Mxolisi Dlamuka, “Connectedness and Disconnectedness in Thembeyakhe Harry Gwala’s Biography, 1920-1995: Rethinking Political Militancy, Mass Mobilisation and Struggles in South Africa”.

2018 Aidan Erasmus, “The sound of war: Apartheid, audibility and resonance”.

2018 Bianca van Laun, “Administrative Death: Bureaucracy, capital punishment and governmentality in South Africa during the 1960s”.

2017 George Emeka Agbo, ‘Facebook and the virtualization of resistance inNigeria’.

2017 Garth Benneyworth, “Traces of forced labour – a history of black civilians in British concentration camps during the South African War, 1899-1902”.

2017 Sipokazi Sambumbu, “Making heritage in post-apartheid South Africa: Agencies, museums and sites”.

2017 Sarah van Horn Melton, “Traveling Histories: Tourism and Transnationalism in the US and South Africa”.

2016 Geraldine Frieslaar, “(Re)collections in the Archive: Making and remaking the International Defence and Aid Fund (IDAF) archival collection”.

2016 Bongani Ndhlovu, “David Cecil Oxford Matiwane and auto/biographic memory: Political activism, social pragmatism and individual achievement in twentieth century South Africa”.

2016 Tracey Petersen, “Teaching Humanity: Placing the Holocaust in a post-apartheid state”.

2016 Mzuzile Xakaza, ‘Power relations in landscape photographs by David Goldblatt and Santu Mofokeng’.

2015 Fidelis Ebot Tabe, `Street Trading in the Central Business District of Cape Town, 1864-2011; A Study of State Policies’.

2013 Ngonidzashe Marongwe, ‘Rural women as the invisible victims of militarized violence: the case of Shurugwi District, Zimbabwe 2000-2008’.

2012 Zuleiga Adams, “Race, Madness and the Archive: The Case of Demitrios Tsafendas”.

2012 Memory Biwa, “Weaving the Past with Threads of Memory”: Narratives and Commemorations of the Colonial War in Southern Namibia.

2012 Kletus Likuwa, `The Contract Labour System in Namibia: Voices from the Kavango’ ( graduated in September 2012).

2012 Olusegun Morakinyo, “A Historical and Conceptual Analysis of the African Programme in Museum and Heritage Studies (APMHS), 1997-2009”.

2012 Okechukwu Nwafor, ‘Photography and the spectacle of aso ebi in Lagos, 1960-2010’.

2012 Vilho Amukwaya Shigwedha, ‘Enduring Suffering: the Cassinga Massacre of Namibian exiles in 1978 and the conflicts between survivors’ memories and testimonies’.

2012 Napandulwe Shiweda, ‘Omhedi: Displacement and Legitimacy in Oukwanyama politics, Namibia, 1915-2010’.

2011 Charles Mulinda Kabwete, ‘A space for violence. Local authorities, local population and local histories in Gishamvu and Kibayi (Rwanda)’.

2011 Jill Weintroub, “A Working Life: The Linguistic and Ethnographic Researches of Dorothea Frances Bleek, 1873-1948”.

2007 Heidi Grunebaum, ‘Spectres of the untold: Memory and History in South Africa after the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’

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