The courses offered by the Department are designed to provide students with critical insights around the writing and re-writing of history. The emphasis is on textual, visual, material and oral analysis. In all the courses differing interpretations and debates are highlighted. Students are encouraged to develop their own understandings about the past, present historical arguments and sustain them through locating and making use of evidence.
Courses are directed at transformation in society particularly in the education, land and heritage sectors. There are courses on precolonial African societies, the Atlantic slave system, comparative genocides, imperialism, colonialism in Africa, gender and African history, postcolonial Africa, and South Africa in the twentieth century.
In the first quarter, this includes the formation of southern African kingdoms or states in the early 1800s, the movement and destruction of societies and chiefdoms in the 1820s, and settlement and movements thereafter. In the second quarter, we move a little further south to examine the coast of what is today the Eastern Cape. We will look at the 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.
The central theme of History 1 is the production of history. The courses focuses on how historians collect evidence from various sources of knowledge, how they interpret and use such evidence to produce history, and how these processes sometimes produce different or conflicting interpretations, opinions and arguments. The HIS151 course in particular is aimed at assisting the students identify and understand different interpretations of the same historical events, develop means to assess the value of conflicting interpretations and, most importantly, enable them to structure their own historical argument, backed up with evidence, woven into a well written essay.
Debates may include the examining of archaeological evidence of precolonial state formation: differing interpretations of Great Zimbabwe; the towns that emerged on the East African Coast between 1000-1500 (known as the Swahili Coast). We pay attention to the use of archaeological evidence, the ethics surrounding the use of burial sites and human remains as historical evidence; ethnographies, African world views, notions of cosmopolitanism, and ask after differing interpretations of material evidence.
We then move to the Atlantic Ocean world of precolonial states in West Central Africa and West Africa with a focus on the Kingdoms of the Kongo and Dahomey. Here we look at documents that are used by historians to help them account for the emergence of these states and how these states became involved in a new system of trade based in the Atlantic Ocean. Central to this was the emergence and grown of the slave trade first to islands with sugar plantations of the coast of Africa (like Sao Tome) and then, in a much more elaborate system, to what become known as the New World. The debate here centres around questions of African rulers, how they envisaged this new trade and how do we as historians approach documents of the trade as evidence.
We will look at the history of Haiti, as well as the debates that were taking place amongst anti-colonial and Pan-Africanist activist thinkers across the Caribbean, Americas, Europe, and Africa in the 1940s that underlie the writing of the seminal history of the revolution, CLR James’s Black Jacobins. We will also look at debates on putting emancipation into practice with the victory of the slave rebellion, and at what some of James’s students have then gone on to write- in particular the feminist scholars who subsequently studied the Haitian revolution from the perspective of women and African born slaves involved in the uprising and its aftermath. The final section of the course will reflect on some of the legacies of slave rebellions in the Cape and the Caribbean through the lens of poetry, music, and politics. There will be the opportunity to delve into digital story-telling (DST), as tools for thinking about the traces, relationships, imprints, and living legacies of slave histories in the present. The recent opening up of a DST laboratory on UWC campus offers additional facilities for the development of this dynamic aspect of the course. This course also includes field-trips notably a walking ‘tour’ to Slave Sites in the City Centre of Cape Town.
The Liberation Struggle module seeks to think outside the boundaries of political movements and parties. It engages with themes and debates in the more recent scholarship on the liberation struggle. These include: Frameworks and narratives of the Liberation Struggle (Problems of concepts, problems of narratives, problems of archives) Armed Struggle & Insurrectionary Violence (Revisiting the turn to armed struggle) Aesthetics of liberation (Liberations songs, Visual representations of the 1976 Soweto uprising) Thinking the Citizen: Who Belongs to The Nation? (Race & Ethnicity, Gender, Xenophobia) Remembering the Liberation Struggle (Biography & Memoir, Memorials & Nation-building, Iconographies of the Missing and Fallen).
The course focuses on a number of cases of genocide in the twentieth century. Examples will be selected from: the Cambodian genocide of the 1970s; Stalin’s policies, as exemplified in the Ukrainian famine, in the Gulag and the purges; Nazism’s “war against the Jews”, culminating in the death camps and the Holocaust; and the Rwandan Genocide in the 1990’s.
On completion of this module, students should be able to: to understand the concept of genocide; to demonstrate knowledge of the arguments in the literature on twentieth century genocides; and to draw comparisons from different case studies.
Courses are directed at transformation in society particularly in the education, land and heritage sectors. There are courses on precolonial African societies, the Atlantic slave system, comparative genocides, imperialism, colonialism in Africa, gender and African history, postcolonial Africa, and South Africa in the twentieth century.
History 153: Historians and their arguments: Societies on the east Africa coast, 1000-1860
The course studies, discusses and debates changes that took place along the eastern coast of Africa between 1000 and 1860. In particular we look at the debates around explaining and writing the history of incredible shifts that created new peoples and new places along the coast of what is today Kwazulu-Natal and Mozambique.In the first quarter, this includes the formation of southern African kingdoms or states in the early 1800s, the movement and destruction of societies and chiefdoms in the 1820s, and settlement and movements thereafter. In the second quarter, we move a little further south to examine the coast of what is today the Eastern Cape. We will look at the 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.
The central theme of History 1 is the production of history. The courses focuses on how historians collect evidence from various sources of knowledge, how they interpret and use such evidence to produce history, and how these processes sometimes produce different or conflicting interpretations, opinions and arguments. The HIS151 course in particular is aimed at assisting the students identify and understand different interpretations of the same historical events, develop means to assess the value of conflicting interpretations and, most importantly, enable them to structure their own historical argument, backed up with evidence, woven into a well written essay.
History 154: History and Evidence: Selected Themes in African Histories from the tenth to the nineteenth centuries
In this course we look at the use of historical evidence more closely and how we use and assess it. Our debates are around the nature of precolonial African political organization and on forms of the state in east Africa, central Africa and West Africa. Our focus is on two systems of state formation: the first which linked the central African interior with the eastern shore of the Indian Ocean (from about 800-1500), and, secondly with the Western shore of the Atlantic Ocean (from about 1500-1750). In the case of the latter this was the beginnings of the Atlantic slave trade.Debates may include the examining of archaeological evidence of precolonial state formation: differing interpretations of Great Zimbabwe; the towns that emerged on the East African Coast between 1000-1500 (known as the Swahili Coast). We pay attention to the use of archaeological evidence, the ethics surrounding the use of burial sites and human remains as historical evidence; ethnographies, African world views, notions of cosmopolitanism, and ask after differing interpretations of material evidence.
We then move to the Atlantic Ocean world of precolonial states in West Central Africa and West Africa with a focus on the Kingdoms of the Kongo and Dahomey. Here we look at documents that are used by historians to help them account for the emergence of these states and how these states became involved in a new system of trade based in the Atlantic Ocean. Central to this was the emergence and grown of the slave trade first to islands with sugar plantations of the coast of Africa (like Sao Tome) and then, in a much more elaborate system, to what become known as the New World. The debate here centres around questions of African rulers, how they envisaged this new trade and how do we as historians approach documents of the trade as evidence.
History 231 Atlantic Slave Trade and Comparative Slave Rebellions in the Cape and the Caribbean
The second year level History core course programme seeks to combine an engagement with the making of the modern world and the making of modern South Africa. The first semester examines historical debates on the Atlantic slave trade and on slave rebellions in the Cape and the Caribbean. The first quarter concentrates on the Atlantic Slave Trade- a forced migration, a mass movement of more than 12 million people that lasted for centuries and has had a deep impact on the history of three continents: Africa, Europe and the Americas. Our teaching methodology is visual and interactive. We introduce to historical films about the Atlantic slaver trade, and how historians might assess the value and authenticity of historical documentaries. In the second quarter, we compare slave rebellions in the Cape and the Caribbean. In the Cape we look at the two relatively small scale and unsuccessful rebellions of 1808 and 1825. In the Caribbean, we will focus on the mass, organized resistance that became the Haitian Revolution.We will look at the history of Haiti, as well as the debates that were taking place amongst anti-colonial and Pan-Africanist activist thinkers across the Caribbean, Americas, Europe, and Africa in the 1940s that underlie the writing of the seminal history of the revolution, CLR James’s Black Jacobins. We will also look at debates on putting emancipation into practice with the victory of the slave rebellion, and at what some of James’s students have then gone on to write- in particular the feminist scholars who subsequently studied the Haitian revolution from the perspective of women and African born slaves involved in the uprising and its aftermath. The final section of the course will reflect on some of the legacies of slave rebellions in the Cape and the Caribbean through the lens of poetry, music, and politics. There will be the opportunity to delve into digital story-telling (DST), as tools for thinking about the traces, relationships, imprints, and living legacies of slave histories in the present. The recent opening up of a DST laboratory on UWC campus offers additional facilities for the development of this dynamic aspect of the course. This course also includes field-trips notably a walking ‘tour’ to Slave Sites in the City Centre of Cape Town.
History 241: Studies in Imperialism and the Making of the Modern South Africa
In the second semester we introduce students to history as narrative through a sustained engagement with competing filmic, photographic and textual representations of three central figures in the making of modern South Africa: David Livingstone, Cecil Rhodes, and Solomon Plaatje. Here we examine history as story-telling as well as the well-established notion of history as debate, and seek to deepen understanding of the concept of historiography. A series of studies of imperialism including a debate about whether the German imperialists were guilty of a “genocide” of the Herero and Nama peoples in South West Africa in 1904-1908, and a study in American imperialism in Vietnam are included to enable students to retain a sense of global interconnections in the modern world.History 223: Gender and African History
The course is about engendering African histories and disclosing the ways in which are often accounts given from masculine perspectives, producing gendered understandings of the world. Engendering African history is also about how accounts of history in Africa have implied and have come to lean on the category of race. Indeed, gender, race and sexuality have been mutually constitute categories that have come to hinge on one another. With its focus on Africa’s colonial history, the course therefore aims to make sense of colonialism through a gendered lens.History 331: Africa, Colonial and Postcolonial
This course offers a cut through the complex history of colonialism, decolonisation and independences in Africa. Film is used as an intuitive pathway to explore these histories, paying attention to their social and emotional dimensions. The course is clustered around six films, each of which offers an entry point in a specific juncture of colonial and postcolonial African history. A set of readings will help students to understand the film in historical context, and will introduce a key historical debate relating to the events that the film explores artistically. Through film students are encouraged to position themselves in these historical debates in a personal way.History 332: Themes in South African History in the 20th Century.
The course focuses on key themes in South African history such as segregation and apartheid, race, class and gender in the shaping of society, resistance histories, and the relationship between the past and the present. This course is divided into two modules: one on Memory and the City and another on the Liberation Struggle post-1960. Memory and the City module topics include: the development of racial, class and spatial divisions in South African society; resistance and labour struggles; women’s histories; popular culture; political/structural/criminal violence; history in the present eg museums, monuments, buildings; the work of the TRC and debates about its work; land restitution; historiography; historical sources eg oral history, visual and documentary sources.The Liberation Struggle module seeks to think outside the boundaries of political movements and parties. It engages with themes and debates in the more recent scholarship on the liberation struggle. These include: Frameworks and narratives of the Liberation Struggle (Problems of concepts, problems of narratives, problems of archives) Armed Struggle & Insurrectionary Violence (Revisiting the turn to armed struggle) Aesthetics of liberation (Liberations songs, Visual representations of the 1976 Soweto uprising) Thinking the Citizen: Who Belongs to The Nation? (Race & Ethnicity, Gender, Xenophobia) Remembering the Liberation Struggle (Biography & Memoir, Memorials & Nation-building, Iconographies of the Missing and Fallen).
History 324: Genocides in the Twentieth Century
The course focuses on a number of cases of genocide in the twentieth century. Examples will be selected from: the Cambodian genocide of the 1970s; Stalin’s policies, as exemplified in the Ukrainian famine, in the Gulag and the purges; Nazism’s “war against the Jews”, culminating in the death camps and the Holocaust; and the Rwandan Genocide in the 1990’s. On completion of this module, students should be able to: to understand the concept of genocide; to demonstrate knowledge of the arguments in the literature on twentieth century genocides; and to draw comparisons from different case studies.
