Articles by Thembisa Waetjen
Thesis Eleven, 2024
Open source, see link: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/07255136231209522
Can a colonial... more Open source, see link: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/07255136231209522
Can a colonial archive render up form-of-life? To what ends? This essay explores these questions through a methodological exercise that casts a specific historical subject in the role of Giorgio Agamben’s ‘unspeakable girl’. The subject is a woman identified in a 1910 Cape Town police report as a habitual opium smoker. The unspeakable girl is a philosophical construction through which Agamben develops a concept of initiated (or initiating) knowledge. At stake in my forensic re/deconstruction of this case is how a concept of the ‘unspeakable’ may help to unsettle the figure of the ‘addict’ as a stigmatised object of knowledge and paternalism, in service of more humane policy and treatment regimes in the present. The transformative potential of initiating knowledge supports current practice as the ‘come as you are’ motto of harm reduction, and as a bridge between academic analysis and the more intimate concerns of the heart.
Journal of Southern African Studies, 2023
Open source see link: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03057070.2023.2351316
After t... more Open source see link: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03057070.2023.2351316
After the South African War (1899–1902), state-makers’ efforts to control ‘dagga’ was controversial on several fronts. But ‘dagga’ also proved a moving target for official classification. Was it a species of Leonotis, common around the countryside? Was it ‘Indian hemp’, understood by some as a habit-forming drug that debilitated wage workers and caused insanity? This paper traces dagga as a multiple object and problematic of governance in South Africa during the years before the formation of the Union of South Africa and into the early decades of the Union period. A focus on three contested boundaries of top-down knowledge-making and policy – botanical taxonomies; colonial geographies; and political-economy – demonstrates dagga’s shifting ontologies across time and space. Together, these empirical snapshots combine as a case study, revealing how the legal reification of a substance as a ‘drug’ involved political processes that were local, dispersed and unresolved. We show how uncertainties and ambivalences about cannabis long remained productive for different brokers and gatekeepers who navigated the frontiers of competing interests. This history is important for understanding the changing politics of cannabis in South Africa, as it became legible for regulation as a ‘dangerous drug’ during the first half of the 20th century.
Yesterday & Today, 2023
https://upjournals.up.ac.za/index.php/yesterday_and_today/article/view/4661
A substantial body... more https://upjournals.up.ac.za/index.php/yesterday_and_today/article/view/4661
A substantial body of history teaching scholarship links student archival engagements and primary source work to various desirable educational outcomes, among them an enhanced capacity for historical thinking and imagination. A related scholarly literature considers the interface between pedagogy and public memory-making. This article enters and links these points of discussion by reflecting on a collaborative classroom project of digital archive-building, using the online Dublin Core-complicit platform Omeka. At the University of Johannesburg, during the first six months of 2021, first-year students in an online world history classroom produced, submitted, and categorised a body of primary sources—both textual and visual. These submissions reflected their own, ongoing experiences of Covid-19 and of lockdown policies. They used photographs and wrote in their home languages to convey the disruptions, innovations, hardships, and resiliences felt as young people within diverse lifeworlds. Aligned to photovoice methodologies, the exercise promoted a reflection of historical consciousness in two ways: first, by situating the pandemic of the present within a broad global history; and, second, by considering ‘future pasts’ as a politics of memory, research, and representation. The article describes the production of the archival database, ‘Joburg21’, and considers the pedagogical challenges and rewards of building a digital ‘archive for the future’.
Historia, 2023
Open source at https://upjournals.up.ac.za/index.php/historia/article/view/4401
Two South Afri... more Open source at https://upjournals.up.ac.za/index.php/historia/article/view/4401
Two South African professional women were early advocates of cannabis
decriminalisation during the second half of the twentieth century. Frances Ames (1920-2002) was a neurologist and psychiatrist based at the Medical School of the University of Cape Town. Helen Suzman (1917-2009) represented the Progressive Party for 36 years as an opposition Member of Parliament. This article documents their individual – later allied – activities and arguments, initially in relation to National Party (apartheid) drug control and then into the democratic era of the African National Congress. A social history approach reveals continuities and changes both in the cannabis policy rationales of successive governments and in challenges to them.
Social History of Alcohol and Drugs, 2022
https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/721253
Social History of Alcohol and Drugs, 2022
see https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/721752
South African Historical Society, 2022
https://doi.org/10.1080/02582473.2022.2128274
This is a short essay that provides an overview of... more https://doi.org/10.1080/02582473.2022.2128274
This is a short essay that provides an overview of national cannabis law-making, from Smut's prohibition to Ramaphosa's State-of-the-Nation promise to develop a cannabis and hemp 'sector' for the SA economy.
South African Historical Journal, 2019
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02582473.2019.1627402
The reach of European empir... more https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02582473.2019.1627402
The reach of European empires and of Indian Ocean trade networks drew Southern Africa into the global politics of opium around the turn of the twentieth century, in the critical decades of its shift from economies of supply to regimes of control. This article outlines key processes and events concerning opium production, circulation and regulation within the colonies of Mozambique and South Africa. It aims both to situate southern Africa within the well known accounts of the Asian opium trade and its suppression and, more directly, to demonstrate how opium figured in local colonial politics, conflict and social change. I highlight how official and subaltern actors shaped and responded to these developments and, in different ways, worked to benefit from them.
Social History of Medicine, 2019
https://academic.oup.com/shm/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/shm/hky004/4911141
Medical Humanities, 2018
This article provides a history of three pharmaceuticals in the making of modern South Africa. ... more This article provides a history of three pharmaceuticals in the making of modern South Africa. Borrowing and adapting Arthur Daemmrich’s term ’pharmacopolitics’, we examine how forms of pharmaceutical governance became integral to the creation and institutional practices of this state. Through case studies of three medicaments: opium (late 19th to early 20th century), thalidomide (late 1950s to early 1960s) and contraception (1970s to 2010s), we explore the intertwining of pharmaceutical regulation, provision and consumption. Our focus is on the modernist imperative towards the rationalisation of pharmaceutical oversight, as an extension of the state’s bureaucratic and ideological objectives, and, importantly, as its obligation. We also explore adaptive and illicit uses of medicines, both by purveyors of pharmaceuticals, and among consumers. The historical sweep of our study allows for an analysis of continuities and changes in pharmaceutical governance. The focus on South Africa highlights how the concept of pharmacopolitics can usefully be extended to transnational—as well as local—medical histories. Through the diversity of our sources, and the breadth of their chronology, we aim to historicise modern pharmaceutical practices in South Africa, from the late colonial era to the Post-Apartheid present.
Journal of Southern African Studies, 2017
http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/IjggE37nbSRVwJMISn3W/full
Journal of African History, 2016
South African Historical Journal, 2016
http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/DQEictikqxnA5pFdmHfK/full
Interventions Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 2016
South African Historical Journal, 2015
(elink offprints still available)
This article examines the attempts in the 1940s of A.I. Kajee a... more (elink offprints still available)
This article examines the attempts in the 1940s of A.I. Kajee and the Orient Islamic Educational Institute to secure a site for a world-class, modern boarding school for Muslim children in Durban. While the Institute would eventually build a school in 1959 that fell far short of its original vision, their struggles highlight several key issues related to Indian minority politics and the racialised South African state in the 1940s. In a context where anti-apartheid historiography is dominated by those aligned to Congress traditions, this article explores the motivations and actions of ‘accommodationists’, who sought concessions from the state through conciliation at a time when their relationship with the central state conceded ground to rising populist politics around white fears of ‘Indian penetration’. Kajee's increasingly frustrated efforts to employ a once-successful cooperative strategy reveal the uneven course of change in the ideologies of racial rule in South Africa, from an incorporationist imperial paternalism to an expulsory race nationalism. The case also exposes competing interests between the different levels of government in the quest for a unified white nation-state, with pressure for segregation more virulent at local level than articulated by the Smutsian cabinet. It offers insight into the experiences of leaders whose basis of authority in politics, rooted in a tradition of patronage, was waning. Struggles for civic recognition were moving towards an emergent new leadership of professionals and trade unionists, who increasingly garnered support from a nascent urban working class.
Kronos
In every British colony that received indentured workers from India, officials recorded personal ... more In every British colony that received indentured workers from India, officials recorded personal and social details for identifying the arriving migrants. In Natal, 152,184 migrants were inscribed into such lists between 1860 and 1911. This article traces the history of this set of documents from their mid-nineteenth-century origins as registers of imperial labour control to their twenty-first century digitisation by an amateur historian in a relational database, available online. Against the backdrop of transforming informational technologies, the story of the shipping lists is the story of their changing social and political meanings in relation to the circumstances of the Indian diaspora in South Africa over one hundred and fifty years. Now held at the Durban Archives Repository, these records are regularly drawn upon by South Africans of indentured ancestry to establish family origins for the purposes of applying for the status of ‘Person of Indian Origin’ or ‘Overseas Citizen ...
New Contree no. 71, 2014
This article examines local contestations over Ramadan moon sightings among Muslims in twentieth ... more This article examines local contestations over Ramadan moon sightings among Muslims in twentieth century Natal, South Africa, as a window to debates about authority, identity and Muslim unification. The issue was the question of whether -in terms of the rulings in the Qur'an and the practices established by the Prophet Muhammad -the basis for determining the beginning of the lunar month should be vested in local physical sighting of the moon crescent or in astronomical calculations. While sighting the moon with the naked eye has historically been the practice of most Muslims, some have considered the project of Muslim unity served by knowledge derived from astronomy. The "moon controversy" provides a lens through which to examine the broader debate in Islamic societies around the role of science and technology in Islam, "traditionalism" versus "modernity", authority in Islam, and Muslim unity.
Yesterday & Today No 10, Dec 2013
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Articles by Thembisa Waetjen
Can a colonial archive render up form-of-life? To what ends? This essay explores these questions through a methodological exercise that casts a specific historical subject in the role of Giorgio Agamben’s ‘unspeakable girl’. The subject is a woman identified in a 1910 Cape Town police report as a habitual opium smoker. The unspeakable girl is a philosophical construction through which Agamben develops a concept of initiated (or initiating) knowledge. At stake in my forensic re/deconstruction of this case is how a concept of the ‘unspeakable’ may help to unsettle the figure of the ‘addict’ as a stigmatised object of knowledge and paternalism, in service of more humane policy and treatment regimes in the present. The transformative potential of initiating knowledge supports current practice as the ‘come as you are’ motto of harm reduction, and as a bridge between academic analysis and the more intimate concerns of the heart.
After the South African War (1899–1902), state-makers’ efforts to control ‘dagga’ was controversial on several fronts. But ‘dagga’ also proved a moving target for official classification. Was it a species of Leonotis, common around the countryside? Was it ‘Indian hemp’, understood by some as a habit-forming drug that debilitated wage workers and caused insanity? This paper traces dagga as a multiple object and problematic of governance in South Africa during the years before the formation of the Union of South Africa and into the early decades of the Union period. A focus on three contested boundaries of top-down knowledge-making and policy – botanical taxonomies; colonial geographies; and political-economy – demonstrates dagga’s shifting ontologies across time and space. Together, these empirical snapshots combine as a case study, revealing how the legal reification of a substance as a ‘drug’ involved political processes that were local, dispersed and unresolved. We show how uncertainties and ambivalences about cannabis long remained productive for different brokers and gatekeepers who navigated the frontiers of competing interests. This history is important for understanding the changing politics of cannabis in South Africa, as it became legible for regulation as a ‘dangerous drug’ during the first half of the 20th century.
A substantial body of history teaching scholarship links student archival engagements and primary source work to various desirable educational outcomes, among them an enhanced capacity for historical thinking and imagination. A related scholarly literature considers the interface between pedagogy and public memory-making. This article enters and links these points of discussion by reflecting on a collaborative classroom project of digital archive-building, using the online Dublin Core-complicit platform Omeka. At the University of Johannesburg, during the first six months of 2021, first-year students in an online world history classroom produced, submitted, and categorised a body of primary sources—both textual and visual. These submissions reflected their own, ongoing experiences of Covid-19 and of lockdown policies. They used photographs and wrote in their home languages to convey the disruptions, innovations, hardships, and resiliences felt as young people within diverse lifeworlds. Aligned to photovoice methodologies, the exercise promoted a reflection of historical consciousness in two ways: first, by situating the pandemic of the present within a broad global history; and, second, by considering ‘future pasts’ as a politics of memory, research, and representation. The article describes the production of the archival database, ‘Joburg21’, and considers the pedagogical challenges and rewards of building a digital ‘archive for the future’.
Two South African professional women were early advocates of cannabis
decriminalisation during the second half of the twentieth century. Frances Ames (1920-2002) was a neurologist and psychiatrist based at the Medical School of the University of Cape Town. Helen Suzman (1917-2009) represented the Progressive Party for 36 years as an opposition Member of Parliament. This article documents their individual – later allied – activities and arguments, initially in relation to National Party (apartheid) drug control and then into the democratic era of the African National Congress. A social history approach reveals continuities and changes both in the cannabis policy rationales of successive governments and in challenges to them.
This is a short essay that provides an overview of national cannabis law-making, from Smut's prohibition to Ramaphosa's State-of-the-Nation promise to develop a cannabis and hemp 'sector' for the SA economy.
Phumla Nkosi, Richard Devey and Thembisa Waetjen
The reach of European empires and of Indian Ocean trade networks drew Southern Africa into the global politics of opium around the turn of the twentieth century, in the critical decades of its shift from economies of supply to regimes of control. This article outlines key processes and events concerning opium production, circulation and regulation within the colonies of Mozambique and South Africa. It aims both to situate southern Africa within the well known accounts of the Asian opium trade and its suppression and, more directly, to demonstrate how opium figured in local colonial politics, conflict and social change. I highlight how official and subaltern actors shaped and responded to these developments and, in different ways, worked to benefit from them.
This article examines the attempts in the 1940s of A.I. Kajee and the Orient Islamic Educational Institute to secure a site for a world-class, modern boarding school for Muslim children in Durban. While the Institute would eventually build a school in 1959 that fell far short of its original vision, their struggles highlight several key issues related to Indian minority politics and the racialised South African state in the 1940s. In a context where anti-apartheid historiography is dominated by those aligned to Congress traditions, this article explores the motivations and actions of ‘accommodationists’, who sought concessions from the state through conciliation at a time when their relationship with the central state conceded ground to rising populist politics around white fears of ‘Indian penetration’. Kajee's increasingly frustrated efforts to employ a once-successful cooperative strategy reveal the uneven course of change in the ideologies of racial rule in South Africa, from an incorporationist imperial paternalism to an expulsory race nationalism. The case also exposes competing interests between the different levels of government in the quest for a unified white nation-state, with pressure for segregation more virulent at local level than articulated by the Smutsian cabinet. It offers insight into the experiences of leaders whose basis of authority in politics, rooted in a tradition of patronage, was waning. Struggles for civic recognition were moving towards an emergent new leadership of professionals and trade unionists, who increasingly garnered support from a nascent urban working class.
Can a colonial archive render up form-of-life? To what ends? This essay explores these questions through a methodological exercise that casts a specific historical subject in the role of Giorgio Agamben’s ‘unspeakable girl’. The subject is a woman identified in a 1910 Cape Town police report as a habitual opium smoker. The unspeakable girl is a philosophical construction through which Agamben develops a concept of initiated (or initiating) knowledge. At stake in my forensic re/deconstruction of this case is how a concept of the ‘unspeakable’ may help to unsettle the figure of the ‘addict’ as a stigmatised object of knowledge and paternalism, in service of more humane policy and treatment regimes in the present. The transformative potential of initiating knowledge supports current practice as the ‘come as you are’ motto of harm reduction, and as a bridge between academic analysis and the more intimate concerns of the heart.
After the South African War (1899–1902), state-makers’ efforts to control ‘dagga’ was controversial on several fronts. But ‘dagga’ also proved a moving target for official classification. Was it a species of Leonotis, common around the countryside? Was it ‘Indian hemp’, understood by some as a habit-forming drug that debilitated wage workers and caused insanity? This paper traces dagga as a multiple object and problematic of governance in South Africa during the years before the formation of the Union of South Africa and into the early decades of the Union period. A focus on three contested boundaries of top-down knowledge-making and policy – botanical taxonomies; colonial geographies; and political-economy – demonstrates dagga’s shifting ontologies across time and space. Together, these empirical snapshots combine as a case study, revealing how the legal reification of a substance as a ‘drug’ involved political processes that were local, dispersed and unresolved. We show how uncertainties and ambivalences about cannabis long remained productive for different brokers and gatekeepers who navigated the frontiers of competing interests. This history is important for understanding the changing politics of cannabis in South Africa, as it became legible for regulation as a ‘dangerous drug’ during the first half of the 20th century.
A substantial body of history teaching scholarship links student archival engagements and primary source work to various desirable educational outcomes, among them an enhanced capacity for historical thinking and imagination. A related scholarly literature considers the interface between pedagogy and public memory-making. This article enters and links these points of discussion by reflecting on a collaborative classroom project of digital archive-building, using the online Dublin Core-complicit platform Omeka. At the University of Johannesburg, during the first six months of 2021, first-year students in an online world history classroom produced, submitted, and categorised a body of primary sources—both textual and visual. These submissions reflected their own, ongoing experiences of Covid-19 and of lockdown policies. They used photographs and wrote in their home languages to convey the disruptions, innovations, hardships, and resiliences felt as young people within diverse lifeworlds. Aligned to photovoice methodologies, the exercise promoted a reflection of historical consciousness in two ways: first, by situating the pandemic of the present within a broad global history; and, second, by considering ‘future pasts’ as a politics of memory, research, and representation. The article describes the production of the archival database, ‘Joburg21’, and considers the pedagogical challenges and rewards of building a digital ‘archive for the future’.
Two South African professional women were early advocates of cannabis
decriminalisation during the second half of the twentieth century. Frances Ames (1920-2002) was a neurologist and psychiatrist based at the Medical School of the University of Cape Town. Helen Suzman (1917-2009) represented the Progressive Party for 36 years as an opposition Member of Parliament. This article documents their individual – later allied – activities and arguments, initially in relation to National Party (apartheid) drug control and then into the democratic era of the African National Congress. A social history approach reveals continuities and changes both in the cannabis policy rationales of successive governments and in challenges to them.
This is a short essay that provides an overview of national cannabis law-making, from Smut's prohibition to Ramaphosa's State-of-the-Nation promise to develop a cannabis and hemp 'sector' for the SA economy.
Phumla Nkosi, Richard Devey and Thembisa Waetjen
The reach of European empires and of Indian Ocean trade networks drew Southern Africa into the global politics of opium around the turn of the twentieth century, in the critical decades of its shift from economies of supply to regimes of control. This article outlines key processes and events concerning opium production, circulation and regulation within the colonies of Mozambique and South Africa. It aims both to situate southern Africa within the well known accounts of the Asian opium trade and its suppression and, more directly, to demonstrate how opium figured in local colonial politics, conflict and social change. I highlight how official and subaltern actors shaped and responded to these developments and, in different ways, worked to benefit from them.
This article examines the attempts in the 1940s of A.I. Kajee and the Orient Islamic Educational Institute to secure a site for a world-class, modern boarding school for Muslim children in Durban. While the Institute would eventually build a school in 1959 that fell far short of its original vision, their struggles highlight several key issues related to Indian minority politics and the racialised South African state in the 1940s. In a context where anti-apartheid historiography is dominated by those aligned to Congress traditions, this article explores the motivations and actions of ‘accommodationists’, who sought concessions from the state through conciliation at a time when their relationship with the central state conceded ground to rising populist politics around white fears of ‘Indian penetration’. Kajee's increasingly frustrated efforts to employ a once-successful cooperative strategy reveal the uneven course of change in the ideologies of racial rule in South Africa, from an incorporationist imperial paternalism to an expulsory race nationalism. The case also exposes competing interests between the different levels of government in the quest for a unified white nation-state, with pressure for segregation more virulent at local level than articulated by the Smutsian cabinet. It offers insight into the experiences of leaders whose basis of authority in politics, rooted in a tradition of patronage, was waning. Struggles for civic recognition were moving towards an emergent new leadership of professionals and trade unionists, who increasingly garnered support from a nascent urban working class.
From the late nineteenth century, Gujarati Muslim traders settling in the colony of Natal built mosques and madressas; their progeny carried on the strong traditions of community patronage and leadership. Aligned to Gandhi’s Congress initiatives for Indian civic recognition, they worked across differences of political strategy, economic class, ethnicity and religion to champion modern education for a ghettoised Indian diaspora. In common was the threat of a state that, long before the legal formation of apartheid, managed diversity in deference to white racial hysteria over ‘Indian penetration’ and an ‘Asiatic menace’.
This is the story of confrontation, cooperation and compromise by an officially marginalized but still powerful set of ‘founding fathers’ who shaped local education and urban space as they integrated this region of Africa into the Indian Ocean world.
In this compact, powerful new study Thembisa Waetjen explores how gender structured the mobilization of Zulu nationalism in South Africa as antiapartheid efforts gained force during the 1980s. Undercutting assumptions of male power and nationalism as monolithic, Workers and Warriors demonstrates the ways that masculinities may be plural, conflict-ridden, and crucial not only to the formation of loyalty but also to why some nationalisms fail.
"Thembisa Waetjen has written a dramatic and illuminating study of masculinity and politics, with relevance far wider than the remarkable case of Zulu nationalism. This book casts fresh light on ethnic appeals, nation-building, authority, and gender identities. It develops a new line of thought about the limits of masculine ideology in overcoming social divisions. This is an important contribution to our understanding of gender, development, and nationality."--R. W. Connell, author of Masculinities and Gender and Power: Society, the Person and Sexual Politics