Thembisa Waetjen

Measures of redress: Defining disadvantage in a university access programme

Abstract Creating alternative avenues to higher education for learners from disadvantaged educational contexts is one of several official redress objectives for South African universities attempting to rectify the injustices of apartheid. Yet how disadvantage is to be defined in a nation characterised by profound economic inequalities and the legacy of racialised political domination is not straightforward. This article presents a case study that documents the effects of two definitions of disadvantage — one racial, the other economic — informing the admissions policies of a university access programme operational on two campuses. It compares respective student cohorts by three sets of variables affecting access to higher education: educational background, household resources, and personal difficulties experienced during the matric year. The study suggests that economic and racial definitions of disadvantage produce student profiles with different levels of educational and socio-economic disadvantage, yet parallels in the frequencies of personal difficulties reported by respective groups suggests that new conceptions of disadvantage (accounting for the effects of HIV/AIDS on schooling) merit further investigation. I argue that targeted disadvantaged populations for access to higher education should be identified without evoking and entrenching the anachronistic language of race.

Kitchen publics: 'Indian delights', gender and culinary diaspora

Abstract This article examines the compilation, publication and international marketing of the best-selling cookbook, Indian Delights, by the Womens Cultural Group of Durban – a mostly Muslim, womens philanthropic association. On the market from 1961, and with subsequent editions and new recipes reflecting ongoing changes in family roles and culinary technologies, the history of this text reveals how gendered spaces and identities have shaped transoceanic print cultures in the formation of diasporic identity. With hundreds of thousands copies sold, Indian Delights has become both a household reference for Indian cultural authenticity as well as a reflection of changes in cultural meanings, locally and globally. The article also demonstrates how the production of this successful literary work secured a public role and presence for its creators, self-described ‘housewives’ whose community-service work and reputation has endured for more than half a century.

Sputnik from below : space science and public culture in cold war southern Africa

The global space race of the Cold War has largely been written as a drama between state bodies of the northern hemisphere. This essay decentres that narrative by considering the production of popular meanings and local responses of Southern African publics to the 1957 launching of the Sputnik satellites, as articulated in a selection of mostly South African newspapers targeting various linguistic and cultural readerships. Newspapers were the most important points of contact between experts and laypersons, but were also the primary medium through which the authority of expertise could be contested and appropriated. The circulation of space science news occasioned debates about modernity and progress in relation to the issues of rights and racial politics. Cold war science innovations, aligned to projects of state, presented opportunities for publics to challenge discriminatory practices, yet could also be leveraged in local practices of social differentiation, to mark out and delegitimize certain groups or ideas as ‘backward’.

Shifting Grounds: A.I. Kajee and the Political Quandary of ‘Moderates’ in the Search for an Islamic School Site in Durban, 1943–1948

Abstract 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’. Kajees 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.