scholarly journals Beyond denial and exclusion: The history of relations between Christians and Muslims in the Cape Colony during the 17th–18th centuries with lessons for a post-colonial theology of religions

Author(s):  
Jaco Beyers

Learning from the past prepares one for being able to cope with the future. History is made up of strings of relationships. This article follows a historical line from colonialism, through apartheid to post-colonialism in order to illustrate inter-religious relations in South-Africa and how each context determines these relations. Social cohesion is enhanced by a post-colonial theology of religions based on the current context. By describing the relationship between Christians and Muslims during the 17th–18th centuries in the Cape Colony, lessons can be deduced to guide inter-religious relations in a post-colonial era in South Africa. One of the most prominent Muslim leaders during the 17th century in the Cape Colony was Sheik Yusuf al-Makassari. His influence determined the future face of Islam in the Cape Colony and here, during the 18th century, ethics started playing a crucial role in determining the relationship between Christians and Muslims. The ethical guidance of the Imams formed the Muslim communities whilst ethical decline was apparent amongst the Christian colonists during the same period. The place of ethics as determinative of future inter-religious dialogue is emphasised. Denial and exclusion characterised relationships between Christians and Muslims. According to a post-colonial understanding of inter-religious contact the equality and dignity of non-Christian religions are to be acknowledged. In the postcolonial and postapartheid struggle for equality, also of religions, prof Graham Duncan, to whom this article is dedicated, contributed to the process of acknowledging the plurality of the religious reality in South Africa.

2022 ◽  
Vol 27 ◽  
pp. 727-746
Author(s):  
Hendrick Puleng Motlalekgosi

Colonialism has had an influence on many sectors across the board in South Africa including the prison system among others. Its impact could be seen in the way prisoners were treated during the post-colonial era and apartheid era. This paper seeks to demonstrate the relationship between the colonial, post-colonial and apartheid penological practices by examining the treatment of prisoners during the said periods. Examination of this relationship may be useful in understanding what really informed the promulgation of racist policies during the post-colonial period and apartheid period. This paper contends that the legislation that was promulgated during the post-colonial and apartheid periods, which were  legislative instruments on how prisoners were treated, were in fact a formalization and continuation of what had already being practiced during the colonial era. The following themes are central to this discourse: The colonial period between the 1840s and 1909; The post-colonial period between 1910 and 1948 and; The National Party era (apartheid era): 1948 – 1993.


Author(s):  
Will Kynes

This chapter introduces the volume by arguing that the study of biblical wisdom is in the midst of a potential paradigm shift, as interpreters are beginning to reconsider the relationship between the concept of wisdom in the Bible and the category Wisdom Literature. This offers an opportunity to explore how the two have been related in the past, in the history of Jewish and Christian interpretation, how they are connected in the present, as three competing primary approaches to Wisdom study have developed, and how they could be treated in the future, as new possibilities for understanding wisdom with insight from before and beyond the development of the Wisdom Literature category are emerging.


2018 ◽  
Vol 44 (4) ◽  
pp. 253-262 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julie Parle ◽  
Rebecca Hodes ◽  
Thembisa Waetjen

This article provides a history of three pharmaceuticals in the making of modern South Africa. Borrowing and adapting Arthur Daemmrich’s term ‘pharmacopolitics’, we examine how forms of pharmaceutical governance became integral to the creation and institutional practices of this state. Through case studies of three medicaments: opium (late 19th to early 20th century), thalidomide (late 1950s to early 1960s) and contraception (1970s to 2010s), we explore the intertwining of pharmaceutical regulation, provision and consumption. Our focus is on the modernist imperative towards the rationalisation of pharmaceutical oversight, as an extension of the state’s bureaucratic and ideological objectives, and, importantly, as its obligation. We also explore adaptive and illicit uses of medicines, both by purveyors of pharmaceuticals, and among consumers. The historical sweep of our study allows for an analysis of continuities and changes in pharmaceutical governance. The focus on South Africa highlights how the concept of pharmacopolitics can usefully be extended to transnational—as well as local—medical histories. Through the diversity of our sources, and the breadth of their chronology, we aim to historicise modern pharmaceutical practices in South Africa, from the late colonial era to the Post-Apartheid present.


2016 ◽  
Vol 58 (2) ◽  
pp. 432-462 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laurence Monnais ◽  
Noémi Tousignant

AbstractColonial pharmacists bio-prospected, acclimatized, chemically screened, and tinkered with plants and their parts, hoping to create products to supply colonial public health care, metropolitan industries, and imperial markets. This article's approach is to examine the trajectories of expertise of two French colonial pharmacists, Franck Guichard and Joseph Kerharo, to illuminate the history of modern medicinal plant research. Both men studied medicinal plants as part of their colonial duties, yet their interests in indigenous therapies exceeded and outlived colonial projects. We take this “overflow” as our point of departure to explore how science transformed medicinal plant values in French colonial and postcolonial contexts. Our focus is on the relationship between value and space—on the processes of conceptual and material (de-/re-)localization through which plant value is calculated, intensified, and distributed. We study and compare these processes in French Indochina and French West Africa where Guichard and Kerharo, respectively, engaged in them most intensively. We show that their engagements with matter, value, knowledge, and mobility defy easy categorizations of medicinal plant science as either extractive or neo-traditionalist. By eschewing simple equations of scientists' motivations with political projects and knowledge-production, we argue that approaching plant medicine through trajectories of expertise opens up grounds for finer analyses of how colonial power and projects, and their legacies, shaped scientific activity.


Author(s):  
Л.А. Беляев ◽  
С.И. Баранова

Задача статьи – понять, где, сколько и каких сохранилось археологических материалов по истории наиболее известного из гражданских дворцовых соо­ружений, срубленных из дерева, – дворца в Коломенском. Дворец использовался как летняя государственная резиденция в основном царем Алексеем Михайловичем и его сыновьями, Федором и Петром I (в юности), а позже эпизодически правительницами России XVIII в. После разборки в 1760-х гг. от него сохранились описания, обмеры и даже модели. За столетие (с 1920-х гг.) остатки усадьбы не раз исследовались археологически, материалы фиксации отложились в ряде архивов и музеев, в основном московских. На будущее ставится задача свести эти материалы воедино и заново проанализировать их вместе с другими видами источников. The paper is aimed at shaping a clear idea on what, where, and how much of archaeological materials on the history of the Kolomenskoye Palace, which is the most famous civil palace construction made from logs, has been preserved. The palace was used as a summer state residence, mostly, by tsar Aleksey Mikhailovich and his sons – Fyodor and Peter I (in his childhood), and in the subsequent period in the 18th century from time to time by female rulers of Russia. In the 1760s the palace was dismantled; its descriptions, measurements and even models were preserved. Over a hundred years (since the 1920s), the remains of this estate have been repeatedly excavated, and the records have been stored in a number of archives and museums, mostly, in Moscow. The future task is to consolidate these materials and analyze them along with other types of sources.


Author(s):  
Ismail Ismail

There have been a lot of studies on the history and development of Islamic education in Indonesia conducted by various groups. At least, there are three important aspects that should be noted in this study. First, from the aspect of the region, the history of Islamic education in South Sumatera which has never been comprehensively studied since the colonial era. Second, related to theoretical assumption, the question of whether the development of the system and the modern Islamic institution in Palembang during colonial era tend to be dominated by Muslim reformers or Muslim traditionalists. Third, from the point of view of methodology which tends to be descriptive and chronological, though recently there arises an analytical approach in which the system and the institution are not seen as things that can stand on their own, but are attached to social, religious, cultural, and political aspects. It is this approach which will be used in this study. Therefore, this study will try to look into the relationship between various social changes in Palembang and the system and Islamic educational institutions in the colonial era.


Author(s):  
فؤاد بوعلي

أثارت الكتابة الإبداعية باللغات الأجنبية العديد من المواقف المتعارضة في الحقلين: الأكاديمي، والثقافي. فقد عرف تاريخ المغرب الحديث سجالاً قوياً بخصوص هوية الكتابات الإبداعية باللغات الأجنبية، بين مَن يرى فيها استلاباً ثقافياً، ومَن يرفض ربط الجنسية الأدبية بالانتماء اللغوي، بل وربطها بالمتخيّل الجماعي أكثر من أيّ شيء آخر، ثمّ بالمنتوج الأدبي بوصفه تجسيداً لهذا المتخيّل. فالتعبير عن الذات بلغة أجنبية يطرح للنقاش مفاهيم، مثل: الهوية الثقافية، والسلطة، والخصوصية، والعلاقة بالآخر. وباستخدام القراءة التراتبية التي ظهرت في الدراسات بعد الكولونيالية أمكننا إثبات التلازم بين استعمال اللغة الفرنسية في الإبداع ومسار الفرنكفونية بوصفها إيديولوجيا استعماريةً تفرض لغتها على الشعوب والفضاءات الذيلية. The debate over literary writing in a foreign language has instigated a lot of dichotomous points of view in Moroccan academic and cultural circles. History of modern Morocco has witnessed strong ongoing debates about the identity of creative writings in foreign language. There are those who would consider such writings as cultural alienation. Contrary to that, there are those who refuse to link literary text to language belonging, and link it instead to the collective imaginary and to the literary product as a manifestation of this imaginary. In fact, expressing the self by using a foreign language puts into question notions such as cultural identity, authority, nation-building, and otherness. By applying the theory of hierarchical reading which appeared in the post colonial studies, we have established the relationship between using French in creative writings and La Francophonie as a colonial ideology imposed on people and annexed spaces.


2015 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ockie C. Vermeulen

In good times and in bad: The tumultuous relationship between the church and the organ - is divorce inevitable? Through the ages, a delicate relationship has existed between the church and the pipe organ. Since the 10th century, the organ established itself as a unique instrument in service of worship. This relationship was not always a steady one, and this article investigates the tumultuous affair between the two parties. In part one of the article, which is a historic perspective, the relationship is discussed by looking at different cultures and uses of the organ in the worship service. This gives a sense of when and how the relationship came into being and developed or deteriorated. In part two, the current situation in the Afrikaans Reformed service is explored by conducting several unstructured interviews with key role players in the theological and musical world of South Africa. In part three, the study ventures into speculating about the future of the organ in the worship service by briefly looking at the attitude of the organist and spirituality of the postmodern church goer. In essence, this article reflects on whether the marriage between church and music instrument is solid or on its way to the divorce court.Intradisciplinary and/or interdisciplinary implications: The relationship between organ and church has to be reconsidered. The use of the organ in the worship service has to be taken under scrutiny, and a new relationship agreement between the two partners has to be formulated.


2017 ◽  
Vol 16 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 14-30
Author(s):  
Ali A. Mazrui

The author’s interest in Africa’s relations with India goes back to his doctoral thesis at Oxford University, published under the title of Towards a Pax Africana. The impact of India upon twentieth century Africa has a special place for Gandhi’s strategies of civil disobedience and Nehru’s principle of nonalignment. Gandhi’s satyagraha (soul force) inspired African political figures as diverse as Nobel laureate Albert Luthuli of South Africa and Ivorian president Houphouet-Boigny. Nehru’s ideas about what used to be called “positive neutralism” helped to shape African approaches to foreign policy in the entire post-colonial era. The essay, published almost two decades ago, explored these historical dimensions in this prescient analysis.


Author(s):  
Martin Eisner

This study uses the material transmission history of Dante’s innovative first book, the Vita nuova (New Life), to intervene in recent debates about literary history, reconceiving the relationship between the work and its reception, and investigating how different material manifestations and transformations in manuscripts, printed books, translations, and adaptations participate in the work. Just as Dante frames his collection of thirty-one poems surrounded by prose narrative and commentary as an attempt to understand his own experiences through the experimental form of the book, so later scribes, editors, and translators use different material forms to embody their own interpretations of it. Traveling from Boccaccio’s Florence to contemporary Hollywood with stops in Emerson’s Cambridge, Rossetti’s London, Nerval’s Paris, Mandelstam’s Russia, De Campos’s Brazil, and Pamuk’s Istanbul, this study builds on extensive archival research to show how Dante’s strange poetic forms continue to challenge readers. In contrast to a conventional reception history’s chronological march, each chapter analyzes how one of these distinctive features has been treated over time, offering new perspectives on topics such as Dante’s love of Beatrice, his relationship with Guido Cavalcanti, and his attraction to another woman, while highlighting Dante’s concern with the future, as he experiments with new ways to keep Beatrice alive for later readers. Deploying numerous illustrations to show the entanglement of the work’s poetic form and its material survival, Dante’s New Life of the Book offers a fresh reading of Dante’s innovations, demonstrating the value of this philological analysis of the work’s survival in the world.


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