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20 results

  • FORGETTING APARTHEID: HISTORY, CULTURE AND THE BODY OF A NUN – CORRIGENDUM

  • Leslie J. Bank, Benedict Carton
  • Journal:
    Africa / Volume 86 / Issue 4 / November 2016
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    24 October 2016, p. 723
    Print publication:
    November 2016
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  • FORGETTING APARTHEID: HISTORY, CULTURE AND THE BODY OF A NUN

  • Leslie J. Bank, Benedict Carton
  • Journal:
    Africa / Volume 86 / Issue 3 / August 2016
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    07 July 2016, pp. 472-503
    Print publication:
    August 2016

  • In 1952, the African National Congress (ANC) initiated its Defiance Campaign, opposing apartheid laws through organized civil disobedience and African nationalism. On Sunday 9 November, the city of East London became a site of political mobilization when 1,500 Xhosa-speaking ANC sympathizers peacefully protested in Bantu Square, the hub of a township named Duncan Village. Police arrived and fired on the crowd, igniting ‘spontaneous riots’. An Afrikaner salesman and an Irish nun were killed in the ensuing unrest. Rumours circulated that a mob ate the white woman; troop reinforcements then fanned into the township to wage a retaliatory war, shooting and bayoneting their victims. Upwards of 200 Africans may have died but only nine fatalities were recorded. If the revised toll is credible, the bloodshed exceeds that of Sharpeville, the worst one-day massacre in apartheid South Africa. Oral sources explain why the slaughter in Duncan Village is not widely known. Township residents secretly carted the dead to rural graves, fearing to report their losses as people mourned the tragic slaying of the nun named Sister Aidan. Today, ANC rulers of East London seem content to silence the memory of a mass killing reputedly spawned by chaos and cannibalism. At the centre of this incident is Sr Aidan's mutilation for the purpose of making muthi, a shocking incident that dominates the story of violence on Black Sunday. Using archival documents and oral histories, and incorporating the methodologies of Jennifer Cole, Donald Donham and Veena Das, this article reconstructs a narrative of ‘critical events’ surrounding the nun's muthi murder. The scrutinized witness testimonies relay how township residents framed their fierce encounters with a symbolic (white person) and ubiquitous (militarized police) enemy. Oral sources reject the notion that an aimless ‘riot’ occurred on 9 November. Instead, they reflect on cultural enactments of purposeful violence through scripted assaults and muthi ritual. Ultimately, they view the fatal attack on Sr Aidan as an evolving customary act of defensive retribution and symbolic warning, submerging truths in apartheid and hindering reconciliations in democracy.

Inside African Anthropology
  • Monica Wilson and her Interpreters
  • Edited by Andrew Bank, Leslie J. Bank
  • Published online:
    05 April 2013
    Print publication:
    08 April 2013
  • Inside African Anthropology offers an incisive biography of the life and work of South Africa's foremost social anthropologist, Monica Hunter Wilson. By exploring her main fieldwork and intellectual projects in southern Africa between the 1920s and 1960s, the book offers insights into her personal and intellectual life. Beginning with her origins in the remote Eastern Cape, the authors follow Wilson to the University of Cambridge and back into the field among the Mpondo of South Africa, where her studies resulted in her 1936 book Reaction to Conquest. Her fieldwork focus then shifted to Tanzania, where she teamed up with her husband, Godfrey Wilson. In the 1960s, Wilson embarked on a new urban ethnography with a young South African anthropologist, Archie Mafeje, one of the many black scholars she trained. This study also provides a meticulously researched exploration of the indispensable contributions of African research assistants to the production of this famous woman scholar's cultural knowledge about mid-twentieth-century Africa.