Cape Breton: The photographs

This paper considers the need for an image‐based research methodology. The term ‘image‐based’ is meant to reflect the use of a wide range of visuals, for example, film, video, photographs and cartoons, within a qualitative research context. It is also meant to apply generically to encompass a wide range of fields of study including sociology, anthropology, education and health studies. There are principally two reasons why an image‐based methodology is needed: in order to enhance the status and acceptability of image‐based research in the wider research community; and to provide a critical platform from which to examine and refine visual methods. A common methodology would improve the status of image‐based research in the eyes of orthodox word orientated qualitative researchers and go some way to avoiding damaging divisions within image‐based research. The paper explores three areas: How do writers of research methodology view image‐based research?; what constitutes a methodological framework?; and some important elements of a visual methodology.     

Physical abuse in early childhood and transition to first sexual intercourse among youth in Cape Town, South Africa

This study examined the relationship of physical abuse in early childhood and timing of first sexual intercourse among young South Africans aged 14 to 22 in Cape Town. Using the Cape area panel survey and applying log-normal models, time ratios were estimated to show how rapidly or slowly youth experience first sexual intercourse. Results indicated that boys who experienced physical abuse in early childhood had faster timing to first sex. Boys and girls with violent school environments had faster timing to first sex. Race moderated the effects of physical abuse. Compared to Blacks, Coloreds who experienced higher levels of physical abuse in early childhood had faster timing to first sex. Youth with greater knowledge about HIV/AIDS and those with greater risk perception of contracting HIV/AIDS delayed first sex. On the basis of these findings, policy makers are encouraged to consider the early childhood experiences of youth when designing policies toward HIV/AIDS prevention in South Africa.     

Cartographies of Cape Verdean transnationalism

In this article I explore the geographical structure of transnational practice by means of cartographic representations of statistical data. Using the case of Cape Verde, data on emigrant relatives, remittances, and migration aspirations are combined to produce a visual representation of a transnational social field. A second figure employs remittance statistics to show how the geography of transnational connections varies from island to island within the archipelago.     

Cape Verde at the End of Atlantic Slavery

This article situates the Cape Verde islands in the last half-century of Atlantic slavery. It concentrates on the final decades of bondage in Cape Verde, abolished selectively in 1857 and in totality in 1878, set within a longer period that began with international conventions prohibiting slave trafficking north of the equator and ended with the imperfect end of Atlantic slavery in the 1880s. Several dynamic forces, I argue, gave the Cape Verde archipelago an outsized role in Atlantic slavery's uneven decline and destruction. Some of these forces – the enforcement of anti-trafficking conventions, British abolitionist activity, the eclipsing of enslaved by free-labour in transatlantic labour flows – should be categorised as local echoes of a larger Atlantic narrative. Yet, in Cape Verde, we also find a dynamic admixture of phenomena – ecological crisis, epidemic disease, the advent of South Atlantic steamship service, experimentations in free soil, and imperial renewal – that projected the archipelago into and onto a wider nineteenth-century world made by enslavement and its destruction.     

Cape Verde: Rethinking Diaspora in Development Policy

In today's global economy, small developing countries like Cape Verde have very few options to spur growth and sustain long term socioeconomic development. Small size, poor resource endowment, declining foreign aid, and decreasing opportunities in the world economy have sharply reduced their options for growth and competitiveness. In response, Cape Verde and other small states have been placing increasing focus on migration as a development resource. For a country with a centuries long history of migration and a diaspora estimated to be twice the size of the resident population, harnessing the diaspora is a viable option for Cape Verde. But under what conditions is such an option effective? This article analyses the evolution of the diaspora's economic role, and assesses the conditions that enable or obstruct the diaspora's role as a development resource.     

Addressing multi-dimensional child poverty: The experiences of caregivers in the Eastern Cape,South Africa

This paper explores the experiences of caregivers in the Eastern Cape Province regarding the alleviation of child poverty, and presents a case for the expansion of monetary support to effectively address the multi-dimensional focus of child poverty in South Africa. The Social Development Approach (SDA)¹ was used together with the Child Focused Multi-dimensional Model (CFMDM)² to explore the research problem. A phenomenological research design was followed by conducting semi-structured interviews and a focus group discussion with 20 participants who were purposively drawn from four urban and rural areas in the Eastern Cape. The findings concur with the view that the Child Support Grant (CSG)³ monetary support should be increased to better accommodate the multi-dimensional child poverty needs of the CSG recipients.     

Ethnography in rural Cape Breton: coping with postmodernism

La critique post-moderne de l'ethnographie nous a amenés àévaluer le travail que nous avons déjà effectué dans une localité rurale de lîle du Cap-Breton. Dans cette article, nous étudions l'ethnographie sous ses deux aspects: travail sur le terrain et production culturelle. L'observation participante classique s'effectue dans le contexte de relations asymétriques entre l'ethnographe et les membres des ‘autres' cultures. La monographie ethnographique classique a tendance à aggraver le problème en considérant les ‘autres' à la fois comme sujets et comme public. Cet examen nous amène à recommander qu'on mette davantage l'accent sur la participation de l'ethnographe à la vie de la collectivité, sur la réciprocité des relations et sur la responsabilisation. La participation des membres de la collectivitéà l'étude ethnographique, grâce à l'enregistrement des entrevues portant sur les histoires de vie, constitue la base de monographies à caractère polyphonique où se mêlent les récits des ethnographes et ceux des sujets. The postmodernist critique of ethnography has led us to evaluate our work in rural Cape Breton Island. In this paper we examine ethnography in terms of its duality: ethnographic fieldwork and cultural production. Traditional participant-observation proceeds in the context of asymmetries in the relationships between ethnographer and cultural ‘Others’. The traditional ethnographic monograph tends to compound the problem in the context of ‘Others' as both subject and audience. Our examination leads us to advocate increased emphasis on participation by the ethnographer in community life, on reciprocity and accountability. Participation by community members in the ethnographic process through recorded life history interviews provides a basis for a monograph formed by a polyphony of narratives by ethnographer and subjects.     

Sovereign Force and Crime-focused Law at the Cape Colony

This paper shows how law enables right-based versions of the sovereign to take root by studying how British sovereignty was fashioned over the Cape of Good Hope since its occupation in 1795. Challenging notions that sovereignty is predicated on an ability to except itself from law, the analysis shows how the emerging Cape sovereign was authored into being through its active insertion into crime-focused legal practices.     

Implanting racial ideology: Bus apartheid in Cape Town

Cape Town's buses were the last in South Africa to be segregated forcibly on racial lines. Bus apartheid was not imposed overnight however. In the hostile environment of the late 1950s, it was enforced by degrees only. Organised resistance waned gradually and was deflected. A new norm of bus travel was allowed to take root and social cleavages became accentuated. With a foot in the door, apartheid did its own work and was rewarded by a remarkable surge of white opinion in favour of even more thorough racialism as from the late 1960s. Slow racial desegregation of buses a decade later owed little, if anything, to pressure from individual Capetonians who by then were firmly under the apartheid spell.     

The mystery of women's early adulthood

This pilot study was constructed to ascertain the possible applicability to women of the constructs developed by Levinson for men in early adulthood. Using projective testing, a questionnaire, and interview data this project aimed at generating some theoretical concepts about women's early adulthood which would be empirically tested in subsequent research. Results indicate that women may differ from men in their modes of attempting to integrate affiliative and achievement motives in this period of life.     

The problem of early English sociology

A brief survey is attempted of the recent literature relating to the ‘problem’ of early English sociology, i.e. its apparent failure to produce in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries a body of thought comparable to the ‘classical’ sociological tradition which emerged in France and Germany during the same period. It is argued that the absence of such a tradition in England cannot be linked to the supposed failure of the English middle class to develop a corporate identity, as certain contemporary Marxist theorists have suggested. If the continental ‘classical’ tradition reflects the ideology of any social stratum, it is that of the educated middle class, linked to the central state apparatus, which developed in a number of European countries during the nineteenth century. The failure of such an intelligentsia to emerge in England in the same period is reflected in the specific development of English social thought.     

The Scalability of the Shack/Slum Dwellers International Methodology: Context and Constraint in Cape Town

Shack/Slum Dwellers International (SDI) was created by the Indian Alliance and South African partners. SDI has affiliates in 33 countries and is probably the world's largest network of community peer‐to‐peer knowledge exchange in the area of slum/informal settlement upgrading. Common to the Indian Alliance's ‘Federation Model’ and the SDI methodology are a commitment to community organization and community‐led upgrading that is undertaken in partnership with local government. In a context where it is projected that there will be two billion slum dwellers by 2030, the ambition is to enable tens of millions of households to obtain upgraded housing and services. This article questions the scalability and universality of the SDI methodology in Cape Town, where the SDI Secretariat is located.     

Negotiating Abolition: Cape Town and the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade

The city of Cape Town owes its origins to its role as a refreshment station for Dutch East India Company (VOC) vessels. Yet ‘the fairest Cape’ was also a half-way station for slave ships making their way from the south-western Indian Ocean to the Americas. This article examines the role of the Cape in the slave trade from Mozambique to the Americas during the 17 years following the Act of Abolition. While the Act effectively ended the importation of slaves to the Cape, it initially had little or no impact on the movement of slave ships through Table Bay. Despite Britain's opposition to the slave trade, the frequency with which slave vessels stopped at the Cape in the first few years after the implementation of the Act almost equalled the frequency with which they had called at the port in the last years of VOC rule. It was only when Britain tightened restrictions on the trade that the number of slavers visiting Table Bay declined and then finally halted in 1824. The conflicting interests of different branches of the British state limited the suppression of the trade, particularly in wartime. But the implementation of abolition was also retarded by negotiations over the parameters of international law and by the equivocations of a slave colony and its administration. This article aims both to bring the Cape into the history of the ‘Trans-Atlantic’ slave trade and to contribute to the broader history of the legal provisions behind abolition.     

Making sense of the politics of sanitation in Cape Town

Abstract

The paper examines the history and politics of sanitation and urban belonging and citizenship in Cape Town. It traces the cultural histories of waste and odour in order to reveal the embedding of liberal citizenship, as well as technology, in the body. We do this to make sense of why and how toilets and waste have become recent objects and instruments of struggle in Cape Town, and elsewhere. The paper shows that these political struggles did not arise from nowhere; their emergence is the outcome of historically and materially sustained contradictions that are fundamental to liberal governance.