Masters Students
Ilyaas Combrink is an Historical Studies Honours student at the University of Cape Town and a History Access fellowship recipient for the 2021 academic year. Ilyaas majored in English and History in his BA undergraduate degree, and in 2020, completed his Postgraduate Certificate in Education (PGCE) specializing in these subjects at Stellenbosch University.
As a qualified educator, he is particularly interested in decolonization theories and the need for reform and revision of the current History curriculum. Ilyaas’ proposed areas of research reflect this passion, and his Honours thesis will be an evaluation of the methodology of which the history of Southern Africa before colonialism is taught in schools. He decided to focus on this specific topic after noting that history educators often overlook themes that deal with the histories of the indigenous populations in South Africa in favor of traditional colonial histories covered in the CAPS curriculum. He will be working in close conjunction with his supervisor, Carolyn Hamilton, the Archive and Public Culture (APC) initiative, as well as the digital 500 Year Archive and hopes to curate and develop a digital media resource that may aid educators in teaching this complex and intricate topic in a more innovative manner.
Outside of his research, Ilyaas enjoys hiking, watching football and Formula One, and exploring museums and art galleries in his free time. He also founded an Instagram page, @HometownHistory.CT, which is in alignment of the Everyday Archives cluster at History Access, where he encourages others to learn history while scrolling. He aims to stimulate public viewers into learning about Cape Town’s colonial past and their cultural heritage through the use of striking images and well-researched captions in a technologically contemporary and innovative manner.
His page can be found here:
My passion for history really began in high school, which was Michael Oak Waldorf School, based in Cape Town. My history teacher, Mr. Richard Cox, had a gift for storytelling, which in a way is what history is about. My interest in history then became centred around World War 2 and all the humanitarian crises that occurred around that. Subsequently, this then became the launchpad for a very broad interest in history.
After high school I took up studies at UCT, with majors in Anthropology and History. Throughout my period as an undergraduate (as I am now a postgraduate) I began to develop an affiliation for histories that were extremely vital but perhaps not recognized as such by the wider public for a variety of reasons. Take the history of the Mongols, for example, who revolutionized global trade and must perhaps be credited with beginning the concept of globalization, but are generally viewed by the wider public as being militarily destructive and possessing insatiable sexual appetites, with these views being epitomized by Genghis Khan. It is thus with the aim of challenging dominant notions such as these that I have decided to do my thesis on South African slavery, a horrific aspect of South African history perhaps slightly overlooked by the other horrific aspect of South African history which is Apartheid. My thesis will thus focus on slavery in South Africa, with the aim of producing slave microhistories. These microhistories will hopefully serve to animate slavery that occurred in this country, with the microhistories putting a more human face on the slavery that occurred here, making it more relatable and understandable for the general public.
Outside of academia I enjoy being creative, with passions for art and creating music. I am also an avid sports fan, with football, cricket and tennis forming my holy trinity of sports. I also enjoy being active myself: with activities such as playing football and swimming.
Siyabulela Tonono completed his undergraduate studies at the University of KwaZulu Natal, majoring in political science and philosophy, and law. His research publications have broadly focused on understanding the role that nineteenth-century Christian missionaries have played in shaping contemporary discourses of Black Masculinities in South Africa.
Siyabulela’s broad research interests are on casting a decolonial light in the understanding of South African history. To that effect, his work seeks to explore the historical archive that is embedded within isiXhosa and to unpack the historical narratives that are laden within Xhosa idiomatic and linguistic expression.
I am currently a Masters candidate in the Historical Studies Department. In 2019, I completed my Honours in Historical Studies at UCT and I hold a Bachelor of Arts in Historical Studies, Politics and Governance and French Language and Literature. I have had a deep interest in history, language, as well as current affairs and politics. My research interests lie in the intersection between language, history, and identity (-making). Language is an expression of life and is a space of coalescing identities, subjectivities and practices.
My Honours project explored intersections between language and race in the discursive philological discourse “the Kafir language”. Instead of utilizing modern categories, I traced how this category revealed shifting boundaries and assumptions of language from 19th century missionary philology to 20th century ‘linguistic science’ in Southern Africa. In my Masters project I intend to further study themes of language, race as well as institutionalization and territory in 20th century Southern Africa. I am excited to form part of the History Access 2020 Fellowship, and believe the program responds to a pressing need to reshape normative ideas around historical knowledge production and concepts in a Southern Africa context. I am excited to form part of a research community that centers alternative knowledge forms in a society shaped by colonial pasts, and seeking new modes of expression and critical solutions.
I obtained my Honours degree in History at the University of KwaZulu Natal, where I had previously pursued my undergraduate degree in History and Psychology.
During my time at UKZN, I was selected for a student exchange programme to the United States of America and attended Roosevelt University where I was introduced to gender studies and gender history. This exposure influenced my Honours thesis which examined the life of Beverley Ditsie, a South African black woman who was greatly influential in the LGBTQ liberation struggle in South Africa during the 1990s.
I am passionate about creating historical scholarship that is more inclusive of ordinary people who have been marginalized by society, particularly through using a gendered and social historical narrative as well as modern technology. I think that history should be more accessible to everyone and this can be done by utilizing technology such as open source forums and online archives to fill in the gaps that archives and other historical research sources inadvertently create.
Outside of academia, I enjoy travelling and learning about other cultures. Currently, I am interested in the Korean entertainment industry and culture and have begun learning Korean as well.
Mumba’s current research focus deals with the birth of the mobilization of ethnic constituencies in the Zambian tribe-scape.
The research addresses aspects of the colonial-postcolonial dialectic that impacted social identity shaping processes of the late 19th and early twentieth centuries. In this regard, it engages the ‘amateur’ anthropology of the political and religious colonial milieu. The main focus however is on the ‘professional’ anthropology of the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute.
Mumba believes that the focus on identity construction is incredibly important because there is very little that we do or say that is not related to who (we think) we are.
It is exciting to be a part of the History Access intellectual project that allows for critical engagement and conceptual historical research.
Outside of academics, Mumba enjoys being a family man, running, soccer, and listening to music.
My interest in history began at a very young age with family excursions to local museums and heritage sites. As I matured, I became more keenly interested in the mercurial nature of historical interpretation, and in divulging “unofficial” histories – the histories of those marginalised and silenced in colonial historiography. My objective, as a historian, is to make these histories more easily available and accessible not only to scholars, but to ordinary South Africans in order to render a more inclusive and engaging representation of our collective past.
I completed by Bachelor of Arts degree at the University of the Witwatersrand in 2018, majoring in English Literature and History. In 2019 I obtained my Bachelor of Arts Honours degree in History, also from the University of the Witwatersrand. My dissertation, titled “A New Movement for Bo-Kaap: The Boorhaanol Islam Recreational Movement, 1966-1976”, considered the social cohesion of Bo-Kaap during the height of the Apartheid regime from the novel perspective of a community organisation. My interactions with the inhabitants of Bo-Kaap stimulated a fascination with the early history of the Western Cape, particularly in tracing the lives of enslaved people and their descendants.
My Master of Arts research project will focus on a group which existed on the peripheries of colonial Cape society during the 17th and 18th centuries, namely the vrijzwarten (free blacks). The term is applied by most historians to refer to formerly enslaved peoples, deportees, and political exiles who, theoretically, enjoyed the same rights as their European counterparts once they had obtained their freedom. My thesis will focus on the free blacks who established themselves as farmers in the area of Stellenbosch during the late 17th century, and attempt to determine why they failed to emerge as a successful agrarian class. By using the free black farmers of Stellenbosch as a case study, I hope that my research project can supply an informed historical lens which might help to nuance ongoing debates around land ownership in South Africa.
In my MA programme, I am looking at Mazisi Kunene’s epic poem, Emperor Shaka The Great (1979). Research themes broadly include the epic’s status in public life and exemplary African ancestors in the construction of Zulu history, identity formation, mythmaking, indigenous vocabularies of valour, and the role of poetry as a rhetorical and aesthetic gesture in resistance history narratives.
I am interested in historicising the centrality of violence on black people because of varied, but deliberate socio-political systems of hegemonic thought, profit-making, oppression, class exploitation and exclusion. I am drawn towards interdisciplinary scholarship that advances rigorous counter-responses to the supercharged global systems of human degradation towards black people.
Inspired by the work of Lewis Nkosi, among others, my desire is to contribute to critical scholarship that recognise the historical traumas of Western modernity on black people in Africa and in the African Diaspora.
In 2018, I published a poetry chapbook, You Can’t Tell Me Anything Now (Mahlephula Press). I am a founding fellow of the Mapungubwe Society of Researchers, and regularly write on arts and South African politics.
At the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, in 2020 to early 2021, I co-wrote short Twitter poems with leading Japanese poet, journalist and filmmaker, Yuri Kageyama, resulting in an Twitter collection titled, Magic 50 of Covid 19 Poems.
Together with Innocentia J. Mhlambi, I edited Mintirho ya Vulavula: Arts, national identities and democracy in South Africa, published by the Mapungubwe Institute for Strategic Reflection (MISTRA).
Ngingumfana waseMahlongwa eMkhomazi ogcwala ngomoya. Ngizalwa yintombi yakwaMzotho nensizwa yakwaNgidi, koHlomuka, koLudloko Lwendlovu.
Chavonne Cupido is a third year PhD candidate in the History Access Scholarship Program at the University of Cape Town. She obtained her undergraduate degree in History and English at the University of Stellenbosch and received her Masters degree in History at the University of the Witwatersrand. During her first year of her Masters Chavonne was fortunate to work as an archival intern at the South African History Archives (SAHA). Her responsibilities included accessing, processing and maintaining physical and digital archival materials according to archival standards; updating and standardising metadata relating to SAHA collections; and assisting in the implementation of various special projects, including digitisation, publication development, and exhibition preparation, as and when required.
Chavonne then joined the Non-Racial Sports History Project as part of a group of interviewers. These interviews formed part of a larger mission for the Non-Racial Sports History Project to record the histories of forgotten voices which were exhibited at the apartheid museum and has recently been published into a book by the NRSHP.
She then worked as a part-time researcher for the National Heritage Monument’s Long March to Freedom project which was displayed at Fountains Valley in Pretoria and now in Century City, Cape Town. These work experiences have increased her passion for the archives, historical monuments and oral history, which also helped shape her Masters research.
Chavonne’s Masters research examined the crimes of mariticide, attempted murder and assault with intent to murder in the Transvaal between 1917 and 1935. By exploring cases of mariticide before and after the union of South Africa and focusing on the female criminal subject and their agency, Chavonne wanted to explore how these women’s histories were narrated through court cases and the media. This inspired her to continue with her research by exploring cases of mariticide and filicide in the Cape Province from 1910-1948 for her PhD research. She would like to strengthen the research field of South African female criminality.
Although History is one of Chavonne’s main passions, she also enjoys reading, music, movies, baking, painting and exploring historical sites.
My university studies began at what is currently known as Rhodes University, where I completed a Bachelor of Arts in Politics and English Literature. I then went on to complete my Honours in Politics. Years later, after some disillusionment with the academy, I registered for a Post-Graduate Certificate in Education (PGCE) at the University of Cape Town, which led to an interest in teaching, particularly in History curriculum revision. I am a qualified high school History and English teacher.
From this, I was lucky enough to be absorbed into the Archive & Public Culture initiative (APC), where I had the opportunity to work between the UCT History Department and School of Education, reading for a Masters in Arts. My MA thesis focused on the public production of Mapungubwe as an historical event, and, more generally, the production of the problematic concept of the ‘precolonial’. The work spans between various disciplines, including archaeology, education and curriculum theory, the broad expanse of History as a discipline, and critical literary studies.
During this time, I have had the opportunity of contributing to various APC workshops, the Precolonial Catalytic Conference (held at Nelson Mandela University), and a focus group on ‘Public Discourses on the Past Before Colonial Times’ (coordinated by the Nelson Mandela Foundation and the Harvard University Centre for African Studies). I have written a chapter titled, ‘Allegorical Critiques and National Narratives – Mapungubwe in South African history education’, which was published in Whose History Counts (2018), edited by June Bam, Lungisile Ntsebeza and Allan Zinn. Another chapter, generally outlining the political history of Mapungubwe-related research, is in the works.
My PhD work keeps with my interdisciplinary interests, as well as the peculiar continuities and transformations between ‘precolonial’, colonial, and postcolonial periods. The work sets the histories of Nongqawuse and the Xhosa cattle-killing at its centre, looking at how the histories of the nineteenth and early twentieth century have endured and transformed with politics and time. At its core, the PhD is about the future-orientation of history, and how, always, there is a future imagined, and a future produced when history is written. The theory here works with the writings of thinkers like Karl Lowith, Kathleen Davis, Reinhardt Koselleck, Barbara Cassin, Emily Apter, and Walter Mignolo, as well as the work of Jeff Opland, Pamela Maseko, W.W. Gqoba, SEK Mqhayi, DLP Yali-Manisi, Walter Rubusana, AC Jordan, Jeff Peires, and Helen Bradford, among others. At the moment, my focus is on the endurance of the initial contribution Gqoba, in abridgements (by Rubusana), and translations (by Jordan, Opland and Bradford), and how meaning shifts and changes in these processes.
Currently, I am working on a prospective journal article which will deal with the concept of “prophecy” in the histories of Nongqawuse and the Xhosa cattle-killings, focusing on how the concept was initially imposed in Englished histories, and how it has, over time, come to shape the politics of this historic event.
Sanele KaNtshingana is a PhD candidate in Historical Studies at the University of Cape Town. His research project looks at intellectual discourses of the Xhosa political life and how ideas of umbuso, ubukhosi and rule in the ‘deep’ past are mobilized and debated by amaThwasa ooNcwadi in the early nineteenth and twentieth century Cape Nguni region.
Sanele also facilitates isiXhosa for historical research seminars for post-graduate students that are part of the History Access programme in the same department. The programme aims to equip young researchers with multilingual research methodologies including the centering of African epistemologies and intellectual texts through weekly isiXhosa sessions.
Outside of the ivory towers, Sanele is engaged various collectives that are dreaming and building a (Black) conscious, confident, bold, self-assertive, and thinking generation of young people. In Makhanda, Sanele does this through his involvement with Makhanda Black Kollective (MBK). Among other things MBK does is re-educating the youth in Makhanda of long traditions of African intellectual thought and activism through creative forms that center the agency and the voice of the youth. Sanele believes that intellectual work should not only be divorced from the communities that surround them, but should center them, translate and reflect aspiration of those who are being oppressed.
Sanele is a Mandela-Washington Fellow and completed his Leadership in Civic Engagement Course at the University of Georgia- Fanning Institute for Leadership.
I come from the East of Johannesburg in a township called Vosloorus. I am 26 years old. I am adventurous, I love going on vacations and exploring new places and trying new things. I am obsessed with gym, I spend most of time working out when I am not too busy with work. I like watching documentaries and reality shows.
After my M.A I have managed to complete a PGCE via UNISA. I have a published paper with Historia titled "Cannabis Policing in Mid-century South Africa" (2020) where I have collaborated with Prof. Thembisa Waetjen and UJ statistician Richard Devey.
I am currently working as a History lecturer at the University of Free State (Qwa-Qwa Campus). I am working on my second paper that is undergoing revision with an international journal known as SHAD (Social History of Alcohol and Drugs). I am a PhD student at UCT where I continue my research in the social history of dagga in South Africa. I plan to focus on the trafficking of dagga into Qwa-Qwa from Lesotho, and the impact it had towards encouraging/ establishing a lucrative dagga business as a form of livelihood in this poor area. I am also interested in identifying the role(s) of women in the agribusiness of dagga.
Wade Smit is a first-year PhD candidate in the History Access programme at the University of Cape Town. His thesis focuses on the conceptual history of umbuso in isiZulu literature from 1834 to 1975. His other research interests include histories of place, language and decolonisation, and 'deep histories' of the earth. Wade was the founder of isiZulu publishing company, Kwasukela Books, and currently runs a new online magazine of isiZulu literature and visual art, Kumilani. He is also a writer of poetry and fiction in English, Afrikaans, and isiZulu.
Dr Hayley Hayes-Roberts is a Design Historian, NIHSS peer mentor and was awarded an interdisciplinary PhD in History from UWC in 2020. Her thesis ‘Frameworks of Representation: A Design History of the District Six Museum in Cape Town’ related to how the museum utilised design as a strategic and political tool to navigate and negotiate its presence and the legacies of apartheid forced removals in the city. Her areas of expertise and experience include Museum and Heritage studies, exhibition curatorship, Art History, Design Thinking, Design, Social, Textile, Fashion and Oral History. Hayley began her career as a Graphic and Textile designer, later completing a B: Tech Degree in Post school Education and lectured in Textile History, Design and Visual Art. Hayley holds a Postgraduate Diploma in Museum and Heritage studies, UWC (2010) and a MA in History with a specialization in Museum and Heritage studies, cum laude, UWC (2012) that surfaced social, design and architectural histories through the Sacks Futeran & Co buildings in Cape Town. As a senior researcher, (2011-2013) headed the Two Rivers Project, a District Six Museum initiative to work with the memories of forced removals at six sites in the southern suburbs of Cape Town. A collaged visual memory box archival system was designed for the museum. Her most recent position was at Iziko Museums of South Africa (2014-2020) in Social History education resource development and facilitated a Fashion History, Textile studies and Design History student mentorship programme enabling a critical awareness of design while fostering archival research skills and design studies within a museum context. Research interests include post-apartheid museum design and curation, cultural branding, memory methodologies, gender and design, interdisciplinary research, visual history, intangible cultural heritage, cultural tourism, craft skills, expressive arts in healing trauma, and regeneration of the social self. Recipient of DAC and NIHSS scholarships (2010-2020).
Dr Lloyd Melusi Maphosa is a Business/Economic Historian who completed his PhD at Stellenbosch University in 2020. His area of focus is the history of joint stock companies in colonial South Africa. Using micro-data from Limited Companies records, he explores various themes about the impact of joint stock companies in South African history as well as how they affected capitalist relations. His work mostly uses both quantitative and qualitative sources. This is partially because of his association with the Laboratory of Africa’s Economic Past (LEAP), and Frontiers of Finance (both entities of the Stellenbosch Economics Department) during his PhD studies. During his tenure as a postdoc, he intends to write about less acknowledged financiers of joint stock companies in South African history – namely women and Africans. Informed by Schumpeter’s notion that capitalism is a changing machine, he argues that the emergence of modern companies enabled these individuals to venture into entrepreneurial capitalism – an activity that was often dominated by the elite. Apart from his field of study, he is fascinated by cultural histories, African philosophy, studies of gender, inequality, and development in Africa.
Thembi Luckett submitted her PhD in Sociology at the University of the Witwatersrand. Her thesis, ‘Hope and Utopianism in Everyday Life in an Aspiring City of Coal’, explores the historical production of the space of the Waterberg (Limpopo) and manifestations of hope and relations to time and space in everyday life in the context of coal extraction and coal energy production in Lephalale. The project explores the different manifestations of hope and functions of attachments to particular futures in a contradictory context of both the production of hopeful attachments to waged work and modernity’s industrial mega-projects and the destruction of histories, livelihoods and futures through the violent and colonial nature of extractivist industries. Before her PhD, she completed an MA at Sussex University in Social and Political Thought with a research focus on Benjaminian historiography and South African liberation history. She has worked on various research projects, including the history and traditions of popular education in South Africa (University of Western Cape), the effects of mega-events on the working poor (Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing). She also worked for two trade unions in the clothing and textile and agricultural sectors, and has been active in worker and student struggles for more than a decade. Her postdoctoral research aims to deepen her work in the Waterberg region by exploring in greater depth the gender-nature-capital nexus in the historical development of coal production. Her research interests include critical and social theory, gender and feminist theory, political ecology, sociology of work, and radical pedagogies.