Browsing by Author "Parle, Julie."

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Four women, four chiefships : case studies in the divergent choices and negotiations with power of Amakhosikazi in nineteenth-century Natal.
(2014) Jackson, Eva Aletta.; Parle, Julie.
Although women’s status, roles and leadership opportunities in precolonial southern Africa, including within the Zulu kingdom, have been contested amongst historians for several decades, this study focuses specifically on these issues in chiefdoms that by the early colonial period were situated in the Natal region; an empirical gap. While largely focusing on four women who lived in early colonial Natal – Heshepi kaPhakathwayo, Mbalasi Makhanya, Dalida Dube, and Vundlazi MaSenca (of the Qwabe, Makhanya, Qadi and Izinkumbi chiefdoms respectively) – it also considers the experiences of numerous other women in these and other chiefly families (amakhosikazi). Detailing their different contexts and personal experiences, the study also locates them as female members of chiefly elites (whether of large or small chiefdoms) attempting in various ways to re-establish or sustain polities in the difficult context of early colonial Natal. Several of the women considered in the study had migrated southward following military clashes with the Zulu kingdom and the deaths of their husbands and/or fathers, and the chapters consider how the status of widow had vastly different implications across their different contexts. It draws preliminary conclusions regarding thematic threads in these case studies: the (exceptional) opportunities for specific women to own cattle; chiefly women’s opportunities for political influence including through strategic alliances with their sons and daughters; some chiefly women’s experience of simultaneous social prominence and social marginality; and (a previously unresearched area) the few women who became chiefs themselves in and near Natal in this time period. The study therefore provides the first conclusive evidence that Vundlazi was one of at least eight women in and near Natal who took up their deceased husbands’ chiefships (ranging from leadership of a large paramountcy to very small polities). An outline is suggested of the trajectory (and disappearance) of female chiefship in nineteenth-century Natal; and of conflicted colonial stances towards female chiefs within a context of patriarchal hierarchy and indirect rule in Natal. The thesis considers how these case studies relate to debate on precolonial gender relations, and contribute to the ongoing process of understanding how codified customary law was experienced from the 1870s onward.
From both sides of the bed : a history of doctor and patient AIDS activism in South Africa, 1982-1984.
(2004) Mbali, Mandisa.; Parle, Julie.
This thesis explores the history of AIDS activism 'from both sides of the bed', by doctors and gay patients, in the 1980s and early 1990s. Such AIDS activism was formed in opposition to dominant racist and homophobic framings of the epidemic and the AIDS-related discrimination that these representations caused. Moreover, links between both groups of AIDS activists have their origins in this period. This history has emerged through oral interviews conducted with AIDS activists and an analysis of archival material held at the South African History Archive and the Centre for Health Policy at the University of the Witwatersrand. Evidence reveals that AIDS activism was politically overshadowed in the 1980s by the overwhelming need to respond to apartheid. Although the Gay Association of South Africa (GASA) resisted AIDS-related homophobia, it was politically conservative, which later led to its demise, and then the creation of new, more militant anti-apartheid gay AIDS activism. By contrast, the anti-apartheid doctor organisations such as the National Medical and Dental Association (NAMDA) and the National Progressive Primary Health Care Network (PPHC) were militantly anti-apartheid, but did not seriously address AIDS in the 1980s. In the early 1990s, in the new transitional context, AIDS activists framed the epidemic in terms of human rights to combat AIDS-related discrimination in AIDS policy. Simultaneously, doctor activists in NAMDA and PPHC mobilised around AIDS in the early 1990s, but both organisations disbanded after 1994. Meanwhile, gay AIDS activists remained prominent in AIDS activism, as some who were living with HIV adopted the strategy of openness about their HIV status. On the other hand, AIDS-related stigma remained widespread in the transition era with important implications for post-apartheid AIDS activism and policy-making. Ultimately, this history has significantly shaped post-apartheid, rights-based AIDS activism and its recent disputes with the government over AIDS policy.
From Stinkibar to Zanzibar : disease, medicine and public health in colonial urban Zanzibar, 1870-1963.
(2009) Issa, Amina Ameir.; Parle, Julie.
Until recently, scholars of Zanzibar history have not greatly focused on study the history of disease, western medicine and public health in the colonial period. This thesis covers these histories in urban Zanzibar from 1870 to 1963. In addition, it looks at the responses of the urban population to these Western-originated medical and public health facilities during the colonial period. The thesis starts by exploring history of Zanzibar Town during the nineteenth century looking at the expansion of trade and migration of people and how new pathogens were introduced. Local diseases became more serious due to population expansion. I also examine the arrival, introduction and consolidation of Western medical practices. The establishment of hospitals, the training of doctors and nurses and the extension of these facilities to the people are all discussed, as are anti-smallpox, bubonic plague, malaria and sanitation programmes before and after the Second World War. The thesis argues that the colonial government introduced medical institutions in urban Zanzibar with various motives. One of the main reasons was to control disease and ensure the health of the population. The anti-malarial, smallpox and bubonic plague campaigns are an example of how the government tackled these issues. The introduction of preventive measures was also important. The Quarantine Station, the Infectious Diseases Hospital and the Government General Hospitals were established. Other facilities were the Mental Hospitals and Leprosaria. The work of extending medical services was not only done by missionaries and the colonial state but was in great measure through the contribution of Zanzibari medical philanthropists, community, religious and political leaders. Mudiris, Shehas, family members and political parties also played a significant role. In the twentieth century, newspapers owned by individuals and political parties and community associations played a major role too. Zanzibari medical doctors, nurses, orderlies, ayahs, public health staffs were cultural brokers who facilitated the extension of biomedicine and public health measures. By the end of the British colonial rule in Zanzibar in 1963 Western medicine was an important therapeutic option for the people not only in urban Zanzibar but also in both Unguja and Pemba islands.
A historical overview of the origins of anti-shark measures in Natal, 1940-1980.
(2006) Van Oordt, Melissa Joyce.; Parle, Julie.
This thesis studies the origins of anti-shark measures in Natal, highlighting the relationship between beach recreation, anti-shark measures and the important influence of human perceptions of sharks. It focuses on key events such as the "Black December" when seven shark attacks occurred off the South Coast of Natal between December 1957 and April 1958; the rise of beach recreation in Natal; the role of the press (and later the electronic media) in the dissemination of the 'man-eating' shark myth; and the deployment of anti-shark measures off the Natal coast. The increased popularity of the beach in Natal during the 1940s and 1950s meant that the beach was frequently being used for recreational activities. However, with this increase there was an increase in shark attacks off the Natal coast. The relationship between beach recreation and shark attacks is key to this study. The first nets were deployed off the Durban beachfront in 1952. The influence of the press, the increase of popular beach recreational activities in the 1950s and the unfortunate events of "Black December" led to the deployment of the nets off the South Coast in the 1960s, and these are currently still in use. Alongside the deployment of the nets was a rise in scientific research into shark biology and anti-shark measures in the 1960s. This thesis traces shifting trends in shark research from the 1960s to the 1970s. For instance, in the 1960s, shark research focused primarily on shark biology and the ways in which the study of the behaviour of sharks could prevent shark attacks. In. the 1970s, shark research shifted towards the study of anti-shark measures. Both beach recreation and shark research have influenced human perceptions of sharks. This thesis covers a period when the human perception of sharks was more hostile than it would become after the rise of marine conservation and the commercial regard for the preservation of sharks from the 1980s. It also analyses the human fear of sharks and how this fear has developed over time.
Labouring under the law : gender and the legal administration of Indian immigrants under indenture in colonial Natal, 1860-1907.
(2005) Sheik, Nafisa Essop.; Burns, Catherine E.; Parle, Julie.
This study is a gendered historical analysis of the legal administration of Indian Immigrants in British Colonial Natal in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By focusing primarily on the attempts of the Natal Government to intervene in the personal law of especially indentured and ex-indentured Indians, this thesis presents an analysis of the role that gender played in the conceptualization and promulgation of the indentured labour scheme in Natal, and in the subsequent regulation of the lives of Indian immigrants in the Colony. It traces the developments in the administration of Indian women, especially, from the beginning of the indenture system in colonial Natal until the passage of the Indian Marriages Bill of 1907 and attempts to contextualize arguments around these themes within broader colonial discourses and debates, as well as to examine the particularity of such administrative attempts in the Natal context. This study observes the changing nature of 'custom' amongst Indian immigrants and the often simultaneous and contradictory attempts of the Natal colonial administration to at first support, and later, to intervene in what constituted the realm of the customary. Through an analysis of legal administration at different levels of government, this analysis considers the interactions of gender and utilitarian legal discourse under colonialism and, in particular, the complex role of Indian personal law and the ordinary civil laws of the Colony of Natal in both restricting and facilitating the mobility of Indian women brought to Natal under the auspices of the indentured labour system.
A severed umbilicus : infanticide and the concealment of birth in Natal, 1860-1935.
(2011) Badassy, Prinisha.; Parle, Julie.
This dissertation is an historical examination of the crimes of infanticide and the concealment of birth in Natal between 1860 and 1935, where more than thirty such cases were tried before the Supreme, Magistrate, and District Circuit Courts. This study does not look at the crime of infanticide and concealment of birth in isolation, however, but also considers the crime in relation to cases of „child murder,‟ still-births, and abortion, since the term infanticide itself was highly contested and only fully defined in legal terms in South Africa by 1910. Some of the key themes this study covers include the ways in which legislation changed over time (for instance, the concept of “concealment of birth” altered to “infanticide” and the naming of the potential perpetrator from “woman” to “person.”); the problems posed for medical jurisprudence in trying to prove a separate existence of an infant from its mother; and whether a „live birth‟ had occurred before a charge could be proffered. In Natal, it is clear that legislation shaped interpretation and practice, but practice and interpretation, across many social and institutional settings, also shaped legal definitions. Other arguments raised in this study relate to the “instability of the womb” and how puerperal insanity and emotional or psychological mental evidence began to outweigh the physical, bodily evidence in the courtroom. Furthermore, such issues as illegitimacy, baby-farming, infant life protection, mothercraft, miscegenation, incest, respectability, and local cultural practices are integral to understandings of the possible underlying motives for the acts of infanticide and concealment of birth. By tracing the meaning and incidences of infanticide and the concealment of birth across the social spectrum, this study offers insights into a range of issues in social, legal and medical history. These include: the study of the domain of the family; of labour and political economy; of medico-jurisprudence and clinical medicine; of changing gender power and hierarchies; and of gendered discourses of criminality
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.
The voice of women? : the ANC and the rhetoric of women's resistance, 1976-1989.
(2003) Hurley, Kameron.; Parle, Julie.
This thesis is an examination of the African National Congress Women's League publication Voice of Women, from 1976-1989. The Voice of Women was the only regular publication produced in affiliation with the ANC that was directly targeted at -- and primarily produced by -- women. Through an examination of the articles and images within this publication, supplemented with meeting minutes, published interviews, ANC press statements and newspaper articles, this work attempts to understand the relationship between the ANC Women's League as an auxiliary body dedicated to the overall aims of the parent body of the ANC and the Women's League as an organisation capable of forwarding women's rights while putting women's concerns at the forefront of the political landscape. The history of the publication's inception, funding, audience and editorial concerns during the 1971-1979 period are covered in Chapter One of this dissertation, as the language of the publication was honed and refined to a militant pitch. Images of women as mothers and militant fighters are explored in depth in Chapters Two and Four, particularly the use of the term "mother of the nation" as an image promulgated by the ANC as the ideal type of "woman" involved in the liberation movement. Chapter Three covers the negotiation between the ANC Women's Secretariat's desire to launch a campaign against Oepo Provera while simultaneously forwarding the aims of the ANC by altering the scope of the campaign to encompass the National Party's family planning programme. Finally, the epilogue of this dissertation briefly addresses the subsequent failure of the Women's League to enact effective women's campaigns inside the country after the unbanning of the ANC in 1990. The political turmoil that the ANCWL experienced under the leadership of Winnie Madikizela-Mandela can be examined as a dissolution of the carefully negotiated landscape the ANCWL tread with the ANC throughout its period in exile as portrayed in the pages of VOW.