Doctoral Degrees (History)

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/10413/7191

Browse

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3

No easy walk : building diplomacy in the history of the relationship between the African National Congress of South Africa and the United States of America, 1945-1987.
(2008) Ramdhani, Narissa.; Burns, Catherine E.
This dissertation examines the attempts of the African National Congress
Our victory was our defeat : race, gender and liberalism in the union defence force, 1939-1945.
(2006) Chetty, Suryakanthie.; Du Toit, Marijke.; Burns, Catherine E.
The Second World War marked the point at which South Africa stood at a crossroads between the segregation which came before it and apartheid that came after. Over the past twenty years social historians have placed greater focus on this particular period of the Second World War in South Africa's history. This thesis takes this research as its starting point but moves beyond their more specific objectives (evident in the research on the war and medical services) to explore the South African experience of race and gender and, to some extent, class during the war and the immediate post-war era. This thesis has accorded this some importance due to the state's attempts, during and after the war, to control and mediate the war experience of its participants as well as the general public. Propaganda and war experience are thus key themes in this dissertation. This thesis argues that the war and the upheaval it wrought allowed for a re-imagining of a new post-war South Africa, however tentatively, that departed from the racial and gendered inequality of the past. This thesis traces the way in which the exodus of white men to the frontlines allowed white women to take up new positions in industry and in the auxiliary services. Similarly for the duration of the war black men — and women - were able to take advantage of the relaxation of influx control laws and the new job opportunities opening up to move in greater numbers to the urban areas. As this thesis has shown, black men were able to take advantage of the opportunity to prove their loyalty by enlisting in the various branches of the Non-European Army Services. This allowed them to work alongside white men and was integral in their demands for equal participation which signified equal citizenship. The way in which the war has been remembered and commemorated as well as the expectations and silences around the potential for liberation which the war symbolised for many South Africans, has been largely unexplored. This was pardy due to the memorialisation of the war taking on a private, personal and hence, hidden aspect. This thesis examines this memorialisation in its broadest sense, particularly as it applies to black men, their families and their communities. The thesis concludes by arguing that, by 1948, the possibilities for a new South Africa had been closed down and would remain so for almost fifty years. The Second World War was relegated to personal memory and public commemoration as the "last good war", a poignant reminder of a vision of equality which was not to be.
States of mind : mental illness and the quest for mental health in Natal and Zululand, 1868-1918.
(2004) Parle, Julie.; Burns, Catherine E.
In KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, many of those who search for solace from mental illness draw on one or more of the three vigorous therapeutic traditions of healing to which the region is heir. Western psychiatry and its formal institutions have a long history in this region: in 1868, the Colony of Natal passed southern Africa's first 'lunacy legislation'; and in 1880, the Natal Government Asylum was opened on the Town Hill, Pietermaritzburg. Although founded on the precepts of nineteenth century liberalism, by 1910, the Pietermaritzburg Mental Hospital (as it was now known) increasingly reflected a national concern with a racialised 'mental science' and Natal psychiatry became somewhat marginalized within a broader network of national asylum administration. During World War 1, too, the white citizens of Pietermaritzburg sought to have future expansion of the asylum halted, and its inmates hidden from public view. Although the story of Western psychiatry in Natal and Zululand is important for any history of mental illness in South Africa, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, colonial psychiatry had relatively limited significance for the majority of people. Since the nineteenth century, African understandings of and treatments for illness have proved especially resilient, interacting with and at times adopting - and adapting - elements of Western biomedicine, as well aspects of healing strategies whose origins lie in Indian concepts of health and medicine first brought with indentured workers from the 1860s. For whites, as well as for Africans and Indians, committal to the asylum came, most typically, at the end of a lengthy quest to find a cure for mental illness. Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, other sectors of healing proved to be remarkably flexible, offering new explanations for apparently new forms of illness - including insanity - that accompanied the political, economic and social upheavals of the time, as well as producing new therapies, strategies, and specialists to meet them. It is this variety of responses to mental illness, and ways of attempting to negotiate a path to a state of mind that might be termed 'mental health', that this dissertation traces.

Browse

Browsing Doctoral Degrees (History) by Author "Burns, Catherine E."