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Eroding the Past: A Study of the Approaches of Courts towards Oral and Expert Testimony in the Salem Commonage Land Claim
Get PDFSince the Restitution of Land Rights Act 22 of 1994 came into operation, courts have come to attach considerable significance to historian expert testimony when ruling on land claims that made it to court. Therefore, a universal approach had to be adopted. Over the years the Supreme Court of Appeal and Constitutional Court have developed tried and tested methodologies to aid the courts in determining the weight and admissibility of a witness\u27 testimony. In the Salem Commonage case, both the Land Claims Court and the majority of the Supreme Court of Appeal deviated from these precedents by adopting arguably a broader interpretation of the Act than intended. The case is unique in the sense that the dispute involves a commonage that was subdivided via a court order in 1940, resulting in the removal of the remaining black African population from that land. The question therefore was whether or not this group of people fulfilled the requirements for a valid claim as set out in the Act. The Land Claims Court and Supreme Court of Appeal felt that it had. The landowners applied for leave to appeal to the Constitutional Court. The application was granted, but in his judgment, Edwin Cameron agreed with the rationale of both courts, and held that there was a valid claim. This was despite the fact that the testimony of the claimants\u27 \u27star witness\u27, Msile Nondzube, was heavily criticised by the landowners as well as a Supreme Court of Appeal judge. The Constitutional Court emphasised that the Act was an extraordinary piece of legislation and had to be interpreted in such a way so as to address the injustices of the past. This included provisions of the Act which dealt with how oral and expert evidence would be dealt with
Shared Reflections Offered by Listening to Johnny Mbizo Dyani’s Born Under the Heat
Get PDFOriginally written as a lecture-presentation for the 2021 South African Society for Research in Music (SASRIM) conference, this text shares our ongoing collaborative study of Born Under the Heat, an album by Johnny Mbizo Dyani. Our research tracks the record(ings) to mark potential pathways for thinking about networks of sociality and solidarity that underpin the production of such politicised cultural work, as well as how we listen to and/or may read it. We trace how the album, recorded in 1983, was born out of festival-gatherings in Lagos, Gaborone and Amsterdam as well as Dyani’s memories/remembering of home (from Duncan Village to Dorkay House, perhaps) when exiled in Scandinavia. By reiterating literal and symbolic modes of travel which Born Under the Heat took, as an object and as a concept/project, we aim to explore multiple routes and forms archival, repatriation and restitution projects continue to find in the postapartheid present
Domination, Collaboration and Conflict in Cabo Delgado’s History of Extractivism
Get PDFA long history of extractive industries and activities have shaped the societies of northern Mozambique, and the Cabo Delgado province in particular. For centuries, the growing international demand on local resources had a great impact on the northern micro-societies. The demand for cheap labour and natural resources, ranging from ivory and cotton, to timber, rubies, land, gas and more, involved thousands of local actors in its extraction, reproducing systems of local power. The persistence of poverty, inequality and conflicts, as well as simmering and sometimes grand-scale violence, fits into a long-term trend of extractivism. Through a historical approach and field observations, we focus on the political economy of extracting natural resources.We point out the persisting basic patterns of extractivism that accompanied Mozambique’s integration into global markets, and continued or even deepened, in the post-independence period. These activities are oriented towards foreign markets. They are instigated by foreign investment, but invariably carried out in collaboration with a chain of national gatekeepers. In a clientelist system, local elites resort to their proximity to the state to reproduce their power, often at the expense of state expropriation. Weak state institutions have the functional effect of reproducing the elites, also serving the interests of extractivist capital. It is, however, a system with many and profound contradictions, producing conflict and violence, which also recurrently put those interests at risk
Violence and the Voice Note: The War for Cabo Delgado in Social Media (Mozambique, 2020)
Get PDFIn Cabo Delgado, Mozambique, the year of 2020 marked a dramatic escalation of military activities of the Islamist insurgent group locally known as Al-Shabab or mashababe. This intensification was accompanied by a more immaterial phenomenon: the rise in prominence of social media, both as battleground and as public forum. While the insurgents sacked and occupied major towns and district headquarters, the Web 2.0 networks – Facebook and WhatsApp especially – became the central arena in which the war was apprehended and discussed. This essay is an exploration of the entwining of social media with the ‘new war’ in Cabo Delgado, focussing on the events that surround the conquest of the Makonde plateau, mythical cradle of the Mozambican liberation struggle. Building on a budding literature on digital militarism, the essay dwells especially on orality and the use of the voice note as a medium to convey information deemed to be more trustworthy and stable than images. Tracking these media and their interrelations, the essay establishes a narrative, however fragmentary, of the downfall of the Makonde plateau; highlights recurring features of violence in the Cabo Delgado conflict; and provides fresh insight into the formation of the Local Force (Força Local), a State-sponsored militia largely constituted by war veterans
Graphic Histories of Solidarity, in Solidarity
Get PDFRevolutionary experiments require building revolutionary relationships. This praxis of material and social creativity to reorganise power dynamics and weave connections across weaponised divides, are evident in the content, the form and the backstory woven into Janet Biehl’s Their Blood Got Mixed: Revolutionary Rojava and the War on ISIS. Written and illustrated by Janet Biehl, it is a graphic memoir that can be read as both an historical narrative and a blueprint of a contemporary revolutionary experiment that combines political theory and graphic art to tell the story of how ISIS has been driven back in Northern Syria by people fighting for a society based on principles of direct democracy, political secularism, gender equality, and ecological sustainability. Whereas in the past, after the liberation of Rojava in 2012, Biehl spent time interviewing leadership, this book relays her interviews with women across the region and across the various projects of reorganising and defending social, political, cultural and economic life in 2019 after four years of warfare against ISIS and the Turkish state. Reflecting on the relationships that make revolutionary history, and that produce artistic histories of revolutionary experiments, this review article considers the history in this book and of this book, in conversation with recently published graphic non-fiction, and draws on engaged scholarship concerned with the politics of collective knowledge production in and for movements of solidarity urgently needed in the face of the imploding crisis of colonial borders
Cold War Liberation: The Soviet Union and the Collapse of the Portuguese Empire in Africa, 1961-75
Get PDFIntroduction: This absorbing account of relations between the Soviet Union and the leaders of anticolonial movements fighting to liberate Angola, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau from Portuguese rule in the 1960s and 1970s is in part the fruit of Natalia Telepneva’s doctoral dissertation under the supervision of Odd Arne Westad,1 whose own work looms large in the historiography of the Cold War. The book opens like a spy thriller with a Soviet military plane landing in Luanda on the day Agostinho Neto, leader of the Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola (MPLA), is set to be inaugurated as the first president of independent Angola. On board the An-12 is an intelligence officer by the name of Boris Putilin, ‘whose job had been to coordinate arms transfers from the Soviet Union’2 to the MPLA. Putilin is almost shot at by an Angolan solider but is rescued in time to attend the inauguration by the chief of airport security
At Ansha\u27s: Life in the Spirit Mosque of a Healer in Mozambique
No full textIntroduction: At Ansha’s is a world that speaks for itself, a place-based ethnography that travels in and out of binaries of extension – spatial and idiomatic antonyms that converge in the making of history and the human. Trentini locates her main protagonist, Ansha, as a migrant from Mueda, Cabo Delgado in Nampula, and offers a rich descriptive landscape that tells many stories; notably, Ansha’s passage from being under the control of majini (spirits) to becoming a healer – a transition from illness to healing. The ethnography, through Ansha’s memory, is situated at the conjuncture of Mozambique’s socialist era, FRELIMO and RENAMO’s confrontation, and the anti-colonial war. It recognises the aftermath of dispossession and state violence as an open wound
Rabhia
Get PDFIntroduction: The growing interest in Mozambican crime fiction since the early 2000’s reflects a move to portray underexplored characters, stories and spaces of postcolonial life through the lens of the police procedural. This period has not only seen numerous debates in Mozambique surrounding the purported ‘death’ of Mozambican literature, but it has coincided with a significant literary shift towards the crime novel. Works such as Mia Couto’s Under the Frangipani and Lília Momplé’s Neighbours have drawn Anglophone readers and scholars into these conversations.1 Since then, Mozambican writers have continued to expand the boundaries of the crime novel in order to question the status of ‘engaged’ literature and to offer readers nuanced explorations of the genre alongside that of the country’s social inheritances of colonialism, liberation struggle, civil war and ongoing armed conflict
Influence of Socio-Economic Factors on Crime Among International Migrants in South Africa
Get PDFThe presence of immigrants in South Africa has led citizens to believe that migrants are responsible for increased crime rates in the country. This belief is a harmful stereotype that has no basis in reality, as most of the crimes are not committed by the migrants. This study explores the impact of socio-economic factors on crime rates by international migrants in South Africa from 2012 to 2017. Specifically, it focuses on examining the likelihood and association between two key variables: migrants with no formal education and crime, and unemployed migrants and crime. Through chi-square tests and multinomial regression, the study investigated whether these socio-economic factors drove criminal behavior among the international migrant population. This study obtained data from secondary sources. The study’s findings revealed that unemployment has an impact on migrants and crime rates in South Africa. The relationship showed a weak association, attributed to insufficient supporting evidence due to the low statistical power of educational status. The relationship proved to not have a strong association, lacking supporting evidence due to low statistical power on educational status. The level of education among migrants did not play a substantial role in influencing criminal behavior within the South African context. Other factors, such as social networks, cultural integration, and individual characteristics, might have a more prominent influence on criminal activities among migrants. However, addressing unemployment issues among international migrants in South Africa to mitigate the risk of criminal involvement is crucial. Policymakers and stakeholders should focus on developing effective strategies to promote employment opportunities, skills development, and social integration among migrant communities. By addressing these socio-economic factors, it may be possible to reduce crime rates and create a more inclusive society for both migrants and the host population in South Africa
