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Purpose: Little is known about the impact external Viva examiners coming from the international community of scholars have on the quality of PhD research. This study aims to argue that the encounter between local and international examiners (IEs) is subject to various complexities, raising doubts about whether IEs' participation and approval of the Viva may indicate for the quality of PhD research, and, therefore, serve to promote a university's prestige. Design/methodology/approach: A qualitative analysis of interviews conducted with IEs who served as examiners in six European countries, two African countries, two South American countries and one in the Commonwealth of Australia. Findings: Findings show that structural features, cultural qualities and personal contacts restrict IEs' ability to introduce significant changes in students' research, turning the Viva into a ritual with confined academic significance. Originality/value: The findings reveal that the Viva is mostly a ritual confined by structural and cultural barriers. While rituals are considered significant due to their consolidating and socializing functions, it appears that a Viva is mostly a ceremonial event that has little impact on the quality of PhD research or on shaping the research culture of the hosting universities according to international standards. Implications are further discussed.

Metasomatized peridotites entrained by kimberlites are of great importance in understanding the geochemical changes occurring in the sub-continental lithospheric mantle (SCLM) during percolation and interaction of various fluids with the harzburgitic mantle. To simulate a scenario where slab-derived silicic fluid infiltrates the SCLM, high-pressure, high-temperature experiments were performed on a harzburgite + silicic fluid system at an 80:20 rock:fluid ratio (bulk ∼4.5 wt% H 2 O and ∼3 wt% CO 2). Experiments were performed at 3–6 GPa and 900–1200 °C on a rocking multi-anvil apparatus, conditions corresponding to the deep SCLM. The compositions of the mineral assemblages were analyzed in order to evaluate the formation of the metasomatic rocks at these conditions. At 3–6 GPa between 900–1000 °C, phlogopite-K-richterite- peridotites (PKP) were formed, at 3–5 GPa and 1100 °C, phlogopite-peridotites (PP), and at 6 GPa between 1100–1200 °C, garnet-phlogopite peridotites (GPP) were formed. Similar mineral assemblages and mineral chemistry are found in metasomatic xenoliths from Kimberly, South Africa, and surrounding localities, registering similar P-T conditions. The results presented in this study, together with previous studies on various peridotite + H 2 O ± CO 2 systems, clarify the relationship between bulk composition characteristics (e.g., K 2 O/H 2 O, peralkalinity) and the stability of different aluminum-bearing hydrous phases (e.g., phlogopite and amphibole). Fluxing harzburgite with silicic high-density fluids (HDFs) resulted in a peralkaline system, stabilizing both phlogopite and K-richterite. The stabilization of these Al-bearing hydrous phases led to the formation of a Cr-rich spinel, shifting the spinel to garnet transition to higher pressures. In addition, fluxing the harzburgite with silicic HDF led to the oxidation of the SCLM by one log unit, similar to the f O 2 registered by natural metasomatic xenoliths. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: In contrast to alarming reports of exhaustion and burnout amongst healthcare workers in the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, we noticed surprisingly positive staff experiences of working in a COVID-19 field hospital in South Africa. The 862-bed "Hospital of Hope" was established at the Cape Town International Convention Centre specifically to cope with the effects of the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in Cape Town. Methods: We aimed to systematically describe and assess the effects on staff and the local health system. A cross-sectional descriptive study design was employed using mixed methods including record reviews and interviews with key informants. Results: Quantitative results confirmed high job satisfaction and low staff infection rates. The emerging themes from the qualitative data are grouped around a "bull's eye" of the common purpose of person-centeredness, from both patient and staff perspectives, and include staff safety and support, rapid communication, continuous learning and adaptability, underpinned by excellent teamwork. The explanations for the positive feedback included good disaster planning, adequate resources, and an extraordinary responsiveness to the need. Conclusions: The "Hospital of Hope" staff experience produced valuable lessons for designing and managing routine health services outside of a disaster. The adaptability and responsiveness of the facility and its staff were largely a product of the unprecedented nature of the pandemic, but such approaches could benefit routine health services enormously, as individual hospitals and health facilities realize their place in a system that is "more than the sum of its parts". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we trace the transnational cultural flows that shaped the recognition of sexual rights as human rights during the transition to democracy in South Africa. Through a close reading of Beverley Ditsie and Nicky Newman's documentary film, Simon & I (2002), we investigate the contested history of postapartheid sexual rights in which local cultural politics overlap and intersect with transnational agents, ideologies, and affect. Ditsie and Newman's documentary centres on the figure of Simon Nkoli, a prominent gay rights and anti-apartheid activist. The film traces the complexities, contradictions and transnational connections that produce an expanded understanding of rights as indivisible and universal. Focusing on the contesting local and transnational imaginaries in which the sexual rights regime was constituted, we resist discourses suggesting that the constitutional codification of sexual rights in South Africa was inevitable. Far from being inevitable, we argue, the recognition of gay and lesbian rights as human rights was located within the crosshairs of an uncertain and volatile historical moment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The years following the Marikana massacre were tumultuous ones in South Africa, characterized by corruption scandals, economic downgrades, rising unemployment and increasing resistance to Jacob Zuma's presidency from South Africans across race, class, regional and political lines. The country's outlook was pessimistic with dystopian predictions circulating widely as the Zuma regime slowly attempted to erode hard-won democratic processes and poverty skyrocketed. As we write this article, South Africa has once again shifted with the election of Cyril Ramaphosa as president, the removal of Zuma allies from key ministerial posts, the Gupta empire under threat and state capture investigations taking off. The South African cultural imaginary has swiftly shifted again with optimistic narratives emerging and confidence growing amidst the grace and dignity of a new president who once again embodies the liberation movements' more glorious years after the first elections (despite Ramaphosa's association with Marikana). This trajectory though is not a new one for South Africa that tends to swing between fear and optimism, pessimism and hope, on a very regular basis. This yo-yo effect is characteristic of the South African cultural imaginary with its consistent peaks and troughs that results in a rather resilient, interesting and highly politicised population despite its differences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article we investigate how same-sex intimacies are represented in K. Sello Duiker’s second novel,The Quiet Violence of Dreams(2001). We engage with the limitations of existing scholarship around Duiker’s work, much of which tends to exaggerate the relevance of identity politics and allegory in the novel, or which sidelines the representations of same-sex intimacies altogether. We argue that the novel marks an important intervention in discourses on non-heteronormative sexualities in South African fiction as Duiker disarticulates polarized taxonomies of sexual identities, thereby problematizing the frame of identity politics and categories such as heterosexual and homosexual. In addition to recognizing the fluidity of sexual desire and identity in the novel, the article also examines how Duiker interrogates conceptual configurations of what constitutes sex and shows how his text is critical of the way in which certain forms of intimacy have greater discursive and symbolic currency than others. We argue further thatThe Quiet Violence of Dreamsis a significant novel because of the way in which it challenges the cultural invisibility of black practitioners of same-sex intimacies in South Africa. Finally, we examine the way in which Duiker constructs and legitimizes public spaces of eroticized masculinity in the novel in a manner that contests the imperatives of political mobilization. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Background: Recent studies have described the burden of disease in South Africa. However these studies do not tell us which of these conditions commonly present to primary care providers, how these conditions may present and how providers make sense of them in terms of their diagnoses. Clinical nurse practitioners are the main primary care providers and need to be better prepared for this role. This study aimed to determine the range and prevalence of reasons for encounter and diagnoses found among ambulatory patients attending public sector primary care facilities in South Africa. Methodology/Principal Findings: The study was a multi-centre prospective cross-sectional survey of consultations in primary care in four provinces of South Africa: Western Cape, Limpopo, Northern Cape and North West. Consultations were coded prior to analysis by using the International Classification of Primary Care-Version 2 in terms of reasons for encounter (REF) and diagnoses. Altogether 18856 consultations were included in the survey and generated 31451 reasons for encounter (RFE) and 24561 diagnoses. Women accounted for 12526 (66.6%) and men 6288 (33.4%). Nurses saw 16238 (86.1%) and doctors 2612 (13.9%) of patients. The top 80 RFE and top 25 diagnoses are reported and ongoing care for hypertension was the commonest RFE and diagnosis. The 20 commonest RFE and diagnoses by age group are also reported. Conclusions/Significance: Ambulatory primary care is dominated by non-communicable chronic diseases. HIV/AIDS and TB are common, but not to the extent predicted by the burden of disease. Pneumonia and gastroenteritis are commonly seen especially in children. Women's health issues such as family planning and pregnancy related visits are also common. Injuries are not as common as expected from the burden of disease. Primary care providers did not recognise mental health problems. The results should guide the future training and assessment of primary care providers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates contemporary South African Indian fiction in order to examine how this literature gives rise to new ways of thinking about South African culture. The dramatic changes that South Africa has experienced in recent years have prompted fresh ways of understanding its cultural history, which move beyond ideas based on difference, into ideas based on integration. South African Indian fiction offers a different lens through which to view the tangled and complex forms of interdependency that mark both South African and transnational cultures more broadly. I read South African Indian fiction as a model for an intellectually integrated cultural formation. Instead of focusing on ideas of embodiment and difference, South African Indian fiction pivots on the conception of race as a social category shaped by its historical routes. South African Indian fiction explores the movement of Indians to South Africa during the nineteenth century, covering issues of migration, diaspora, transnationalism, hybridity, difference, cultural undecidability, and a blurring of boundaries in the postapartheid fiction of Imraan Coovadia, Achmat Dangor, Farida Karodia, Beverley Naidoo, Shamin Sarif, and Ishtiyaq Shukri. I argue that these narratives focus on the tensions between race, place, and history in a South African and a transnational context in a way that suggests revisions to current postcolonial theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the relationship between race, memory and apartheid constructions in Achmat Dangor's novels Kafka's Curse (1997) and Bitter Fruit (2001). Questions of history, identity, sexual transgression, and transformation emerge in both texts' treatment of ambiguity. Kafka's Curse, dealing with the inconsistencies of identity during South Africa's transition to a democracy, highlights the janus-faced nature of race where representation, physicality, and history form a tenuous relationship. What occurs to this uncertainty in a postapartheid context is traced by Dangor in Bitter Fruit where history, memory, and the truth and Reconciliation Commission are of central concern. Dangor narrates a complex alternative to a bifurcated logic where South Africa is characterized by black and white, good and bad, past and present. in highlighting the intermixture and ambiguity of cultural formations, he reveals a radical heterogeneity that apartheid failed to destroy. I argue that racial identities in South Africa are complex cultural sites that lie at the interstices between apartheid taxonomies, nonracialism, Black Consciousness, and on-going poverty that is racially marked; this exists alongside postapartheid freedoms within a larger context of global resurgences of ethnic identification and increasingly recognized transnational connectivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) as a form of cultural articulation in dialogue with Farida Karodia's Other Secrets and Beverley Naidoo's Out of Bounds. I situate the TRC as an opening device that is inherently limited in terms of being only one (polemical) narrative of the past—literature is another. Narrative in post-Apartheid South Africa therefore forms a dialogue with both the silences of Apartheid and those of the TRC, by occupying seemingly contradictory positions simultaneously. The opening of narrative space and the eschewal of certain oppositions are central in terms of the theoretical shifts that the TRC has engendered—shifts that can be seen in contemporary post-Apartheid narratives such as Other Secrets and Out of Bounds. In crossing and erasing thresholds of meaning between public and private, insider and outsider, history and fiction, memory and story, silence and articulation, through a freeing of narrative form, Karodia and Naidoo are re-narrating the cultural boundaries of the nation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We report results of a systematic search for fluid/melt microinclusions (<1 μm) in "dusty" garnets from a heavily metasomatized Type-I kyanite-bearing eclogite from the Roberts Victor mine, South Africa. FTIR analyses of "dusty" zones indicate the presence of molecular water, CO 2 and carbonate in the inclusions and of hydroxyl groups in the garnet. EPMA analysis of 136 microinclusions reveals the bulk composition of the microinclusions. Relative to the host garnet, they are enriched in TiO 2 , FeO, CaO, Na 2 O and K 2 O and depleted in SiO 2 , Al 2 O 3 and MgO. Most of the elements form compositional mixing arrays of microinclusion + clear garnet. The arrays trend away from the compositions of large melt pools or secondary minerals found in the xenolith. They point, with some notable differences, towards the array of silicic to low-Mg carbonatitic high-density fluids trapped in diamonds. The main differences are the presence of molecular CO 2 in addition to carbonate, the lower concentration of incompatible major constituents such as water, K 2 O and TiO 2 and higher levels of Al 2 O 3 and FeO. Still, the resemblance is close, indicating the role of diamond forming fluids in mantle metasomatism in general. The trapped melts are secondary and penetrated late in the history of the eclogite. They did not take part in the main metamorphic or metasomatic reactions, however they can account for introduction of Al 2 O 3 , FeO and incompatible trace elements into the ecologies. • First determination of the composition of microinclusions (<1 μm) in mantle-derived mineral, other than diamond. • The microinclusions are secondary and were trapped after the main metamorphic and metasomatic reactions. • The composition of the trapped melt resembles those of silicic to low-Mg carbonatitic high-density fluids in diamonds. • The trapped melt can account for the introduction of Al 2 O 3 , FeO and incompatible trace elements into the eclogite. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]