AFRICAN RESEARCH PROGRAM I - •• ~ ~ Newsletter #12 I ~ I
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•r _. -=---- I • l• ■ - ■ - ■ ~ ■■ - Yale-Wesleyan - ■ ~ ■ I ~ I SOUTHERN AFRICAN RESEARCH PROGRAM I - •• ~ ~ Newsletter #12 I ~ I I June 1987 I I I I CONTENTS I I page I Directors' Report 2 I Directors of the Program 4 Visiting Fellows 6 I Associate Fellows 10 Research Seminar 11 I Lunches 14 I Workshops 15 The Library 17 I I I * * * I I I I I I SOUTHERN AFRICAN RESEARCH PROGRAM I I Acting Director~ Diana Vylie, History, Yale University Associate Directors: Jeffrey Butler , History, Wesleyan University I Leonard Doob, Psychology, Yale University I William Foltz, Political Science, Yale University Stanley Greenberg, Political Science, I Yale University Leonard Thompson, History, Yale University I Librarian: Moore Crossey I Administrative Assistant: Pamela Baldwin I Program Address: 89 Trumbull Street, Room 204 Box 14A Yale Station I New Haven, Connecticut 06520 I USA Telephone: 203-432-3271 I I * * * I I I DIRECTORS' REPORT This newsletter marks the close of the Southern African Research Program's fine first decade and the beginning of its second. Since our inauguration in 1977, our customary activities have been weekly seminars, bi-weekly luncheons and bi-annual workshops. In 1986-87, these activities and the presence of five research fellows were funded by the Ford Foundation the Carnegie Corporation and Yale University. We are deeply grateful for their support . We were fortunate to have five southern Africanist scholars in resi dence per term during the past academic year. Victor Machingaidze brought bis historical expertise from the University of Zimbabwe. Mbulelo Mzamane, author of short stories, novels, literary criticism and editor of poetry anthologies, has come to us from South Africa via Nigeria where he currently teaches in the English Department at Ahmadu Bello University. Halton Cheadle, a labor lawyer, came from the Centre for Applied Legal Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand and from a legal practice representing, among others, the National Union of Mine~orkers. Jacob Mohlamme spent the academic year with us on leave from Vista University, Soweto, where he teaches in the History Department. Merle Lipton, an economic historian, visited us for the fall term from the University of Sussex where she has been a visiting research fellow. Johann Groenewald, a sociologist from the University of Stellenbosch, arrived in January for the calendar year. In addition, we were pleased to welcome two Chinese researchers in southern African affairs. Ding Shunzhen, Deputy Head of Group for African Studies, Division of West Asia and Africa, Institute of Contemporary Inter national Relations, spent the year at SARP as an associate fellow. She was joined for two months in the spring by Professor Pan Wei-Kang, who does research on South African politics, from the same Institute. Gerald Thomas, a Yale Ph.D. in History who was a Rear Admiral (Retired) in the US Navy and until December US Ambassador to Kenya, also graced our seminar as an associate fellow this year. Jeannette Groenewald from the Faculty of Educa tion at the University of the Western Cape was our third associate fellow. Occasional visitors to the seminars and lunches included: Siba Grovo qui, a lawyer from Guinea doing graduate work at the University of Wiscon sin, Madison; Johan Kinghorn, Department of Biblical Studies, University of Stellenbosch; Fred Morton, History Department, University of Botswana; -2- Nthoana Mzamane, an animal husbandry expert from Ahmadu Bello University, originally from Lesotho; Benjamin Beit-Hallachmi, Department of Psychology, Haifa University; and Robin Winks and Gaddis Smith, both from Yale's History Department. In the fall we sponsored a public lecture by Albie Sachs entitled ''Post Revolutionary Southern Africa." He is a legal adviser to the government of Mozambique and is currently working with the African National Congress on a constitution for a post-revolutionary South Africa. The weekly seminar was impressively strong throughout the year. Diana Wylie organized it in the fall and Leonard Thompson organized it in the spring. Attendance averaged 25 people. See pages 11-13 below. In addition to their work within SARP, the Fellows generously gave talks on their areas of professional expertise to groups wishing to learn more about southern Africa, at Yale, in the New Haven area and farther afield. For the 1987-88 academic year, we will be pleased to welcome the following new Fellows: Alan Mahin, Department of Town and Regional Plan ning, University of the Witwatersrand: and Gwen Malahlehla, Sociology Department and Director, Institute of Southern African Studies, and Bethuel Setai, Department of Economics, will join us from the University of Lesotho. Johann Groenewald and Mbulelo Mzamane will stay on as Fellows until the end of the calendar year. Because the future housing of SARP, and of the Yale Center for Inter national and Area Studies generally, remains in question, we know only that we will be at our new home--89 Trumbull Street--for another year. To make our temporary quarters as welcoming to the new Fellows as possible, we have outfitted a coffee room on the first floor. Possessing a tea kettle, coffee maker, and art ranging from feminist to roccoco, the room should serve as a SARP social center. Come visit us there. Diana Wylie Leonard Thompson Acting Director Senior Research Scholar -3- ~HIN·WRtiii DIRECTORS JEFFREY BUTLER is currently working to complete "South African Small Town: Cradock 1926-1960." With Richard Elphick and David Welsh, he organized a conference on South African liberalism held at Rouw Hoek, near Cape Town, in July, 1986. The edited papers from that conference will be published by Wesleyan University Press in July 1987. LEONARD DOOB continues as editor of the Journal of Social Psychology; co-editor of the Journal of Psychology and associate editor of Psychology Monographs. Be is also the editor of books on Contributions in Ethnic Studies for Greenwood Press (this includes "The South African Society: Realities and Future Prospects", HSRC, Pretoria). "Slightly Beyond Skepticism: Social Science and the Search for Morality" was published this year by Yale University Press. In slow preparation is "Inevitability: Determinism, Fatalism, and Destiny" . WILLIAN FOLTZ has been on leave in Chad for the academic year. He is doing research on the current political situation there and will be returning to Yale in August. STANLEY GREDBERG's new book, Legitimating the Illegitimate: State, Markets, and Resistance in South Africa, was published by University of California Press. He is presently working on a booklength essay with Hermann Giliomee, entitled The Modern Lazarus. The Death and Life of Apartheid. Greenberg testified before the Africa Subcommittee of the House Foreign Affairs Committee on the "Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act of 1986." -4- LEONARD THOMPSON is writing a general history of South Africa for the Yale University Press. He published three review articles in the New York Review of Books: "Diamonds Forever" (July 17, 1986), "What Is To Be Done?" (October 23, 1986), and "Before the Revolution" (June 11, 1987). In June 1986 he conducted a seminar at the University of Zimbabwe. In September/October he conducted a seminar at the Economic Development Institute in Tokyo and then spent three weeks in China, giving seminars and lectures at the University of Peking, the Academy of the Social Sciences, the Institute of Contemporary International Affairs, and universities in Xian and Nanjing. During the year he also accepted invitations to lecture at nine American universities and colleges and was a member of a committee that reviewed the history department at Northwestern University. DIANA WYLIE initiated a new project while continuing to revise an old one during the past year. The latter is her Ph.D. dissertation, a study of politics and law in a colonial Tswana chiefdom. The former is an enquiry into the political economy of hunger in southern Africa; last August she spent a month in archives in Cape Town, Pretoria, Johannesburg and Gaborone coilecting material for this new project. The text of a SARP lunch talk which she gave in 1985 appeared in an Italian journal, Politica ed Economia, this past fall. In addition, she has given several talks on southern Africa to various organizations and clubs at Yale and in Connecticut generally. For the past two years, she has enjoyed serving as an external examiner in African history for the Honors program at Swarthmore College. At Yale, her responsibilities include being Director of Graduate Studies for African Studies and a member of the Yale Advisory Committee for Educational Initiatives in Southern Africa. Finally, she is pleased to report that two of the Yale seniors whose senior essays she has advised have won prizes for their essays. -5- I VISITING FELLOWS HALTON CHEADLE It is with some regret that I find myself completing this last task- writing a brief summary of my year at Yale . For SARP is one of those rare academic institutions that dispense not only time for research and writing, but also a stimulating and critical environment for testing one's own ideas and challenging those of others. The extensive library, the weekly seminars, the workshops, the students, the scholars, and Moore Cressey, of course, have all contributed to SARP 1 s j ust reknown. I have used the time to pursue my own arcane concerns. I have collected legal materials on the US concept of the unfair labour practice in order to develop a similar jurisprudence in South Africa, both in legal argument before the courts and in legal articles. The full array of South African legal texts and law reports in the Law Library gave me the sought after opportunity to research and write a long overdue chapter on the "Contract of Employment" for the encyclopaediac 'Laws of South Africa. ' The influence of historians, of which SARP liberally abounds, deflected my original intention to concentrate on legal research.