Book Launch: Jeff Guy's Theophilus Shepstone and the Forging of Natal

Theophilus Shepstone and the Forging of Natal: African Autonomy and Settler Colonialism in the Making of Traditional Authority is an account of the life of Theophilus Shepstone, Secretary for Native Affairs in the Colony of Natal from 1846 to 1876 and an examination of the nature of the concept of traditional authority in South Africa today.

Speakers: Keith Breckenridge and Jeff Guy

Tuesday, 1st October 2013 at  6pm in the WiSER Seminar Room, 6th Floor, Richard Ward Building, East Campus, Wits University

Refreshments will be served.  Please RSVP: Najibha.Deshmukh@wits.ac.za

Seminar & Workshop with Keith Breckenridge

You are invited to two events hosted by History Department:

1. History Seminar Rhodes University

"Revenge of the Commons: Tribal title and the crisis in the Platinum Industry."

Presenter: Prof. Keith Breckenridge (WISER)

Date: Tuesday 30 July 2013

Venue: Humanities Seminar Room

Time: 5:00pm

African Studies Reach Out Across The Pond

by Keith Breckenridge, Mail & Guardian

The Andrew W Mellon Foundation recently granted the African Studies Centre at the University of Michigan in the United States and Wiser, the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research, $1.5-million to support a programme of collaboration between the two. Our object in this project is to strengthen the international theoretical significance of academic writing on the humanities that is produced in Africa.

Revenge of the Commons: The Crisis in the South African Mining Industry

By Keith Breckenridge, History Workshop

Most accounts of the Marikana massacre, and the resulting turmoil in the South African mining industry, stress the ongoing importance of structural poverty, and the gross inequalities of life in South Africa after the end of Apartheid. If the writers on this subject (and many other events of contemporary South African politics) are correct, little has changed. But they are not right, at least not straightforwardly. The violent protests on the mines have been prompted by very dramatic changes in the distribution of power on the mines, changes that have brought about conditions of civil war within the mines’ unionised work force. And what that internecine conflict shows is that the long-term structures of political economy that supported the mines, and the distinctive features created by Apartheid South Africa, present an unexpected threat to the union movement, mining capital and the state.

"We Must Speak for Ourselves": The Rise & Fall of a Public Sphere on the South African Goldmines 1920-1931

"We Must Speak for Ourselves": The Rise & Fall of a Public Sphere on the South African Goldmi... by TigersEye99