Search

This paper examines the life history narratives of a group of 12 black and white male and female undergraduate students at a historically white Afrikaans medium university, now undergoing its own transformation in post-apartheid South Africa. Conceptualizations of identity and discourse across four elements of context, setting, situated activity and self are employed to examine their accounts. Three framing discourses, comprising the official storyline of a rainbow nation and new higher education policies, the formal storyline of institutional change, and the informal space of relationships and interactions are used to analyse student narratives in terms of how they produce, reproduce and transform race and identity. What emerges is a complicated picture in which identities cannot be simply read off either from the official discourse or from colour and culture as the levels of discourse articulate and collide with a history of racial separateness and context and setting, with particular identity effects. What varieties of men and women now prevail in this society and in this period? And what varieties are coming to prevail? In what ways are they selected and formed, liberated and repressed, made sensitive and blunted? ( Mills, 1959 , p. 7)

This paper traces the research undertaken in order to reconstruct a biography of the governance period of the first king of the Zulus. In 1823-28, during the establishment of a British trading outpost and harbor facility at Port Natal, a boy apprentice, John Ross, spent a considerable period at the court of Shaka, first king of the Zulus. He was the only white eyewitness to affairs in Zululand. The John Ross story has been used as a popular episode in larger projects devised to justify the rightness of white control in early Natal, in its outpost, settlement, annexed and colonial, union and Afrikaner nationalist phases.

Comments on Ido H. Enklaar's biography of Doctor J. Th. Van der Kemp entitled `Life and Work of Dr. J. Th. Van der Kemp, 1747-1811: Missionary Pioneer and Protagonist of Racial Equality in South Africa.' Illustration of some of the reasons for the relative marginalization of missionary history; Enklaar's lack of awareness of the ambiguity and complexity of missionary activity.