Natasha Erlank

• Professor
• Professor at University of Johannesburg

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Studies of Cape Town in the nineteenth century are fairly extensive, and represent a concerted effort on the part of scholars to reconstruct the past of the city. I This work, in contributing to the social and economic history of the town, has cast male figures as its actors, or based its findings only on the activities of men. This is the case, fo...

The history of African Christianity in South Africa in the 19th century would be incomplete without a discussion of Tiyo Soga, the first Xhosa man to be ordained a minister in South Africa. His work as a preacher and translator was key to the spread of African indigenous Christianity in the Cape. In 1866 he completed his translation of The Pilgr...

Umteteli wa Bantu, launched in 1920, was much more than the moderate, black newspaper most of its contemporaries assumed it to be. Established by the Native Recruitment Corporation as an exercise in “soft power” through propaganda, the split created between its business and editorial functions facilitated editorial autonomy. Umteteli form, a term t...

This chapter explores the revival of the town of Sophiatown in South Africa, and the role of historians and community activist in recovering, archiving, and representing the history of a fractured community. Based on extensive oral history research, this chapter raises important questions about history, memory, heritage, and shared authority.

This article charts recent developments in the history of Christianity in South Africa, while also offering a corrective to some of the orthodoxy on the history of Christianity. It begins with an account of two workshops in Cambridge and Johannesburg, where all the authors in this special issue presented. The article calls for a move away from over...

Public space in South Africa often feels overwhelmingly male-focused. Nevertheless, some municipalities, in the wake of post-apartheid transformation, have consciously attempted to commemorate women in the renaming that has taken place since 1994. In this article I examine some of these impulses, and their implication for the public commemoration o...

This article concerns African Christians’ attempts to accommodate traditional practices – in this instance male initiation – within their evolving Christianity. It speaks to an on-going concern around the place of custom in modern Africa and the uses to which custom and its invocation are put. Contrary to the literature, which locates the adaption...

A MISSED SHOT - Light on Darkness? Missionary Photography of Africa in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries. By T. Jack Thompson. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2012. Pp. xviii + 286. $45, paperback (ISBN 978-0-8028-6524-3). - Volume 56 Issue 2 - NATASHA ERLANK

What is Sophiatown? Is it a vibrant black, urbanity, or a more tragic recollection: the suburb that was destroyed by the apartheid state's forced removals of black South Africans from areas proclaimed white from the 1950s onwards. Both of these representations have considerable contemporary traction. The former lends itself to a very nostalgic view...

Discussions of church weddings are not standard in accounts of African marriage in South Africa in the early twentieth century. However, from the 1890s onward, church weddings were becoming more common, and by the 1930s more Africans married in church than elsewhere. Indeed, these wedding ceremonies provide insight into how black families experienc...

Bringing together an international range of academics, Gender, Sexualities and Law provides a comprehensive interrogation of the range of contemporary issues – both topical and controversial – raised by the gendered character of law, legal discourse and institutions. The gendering of law, persons and the legal profession, along with the gender bias...

In this study we interviewed members of a small, predominantly Muslim community in Johannesburg, South Africa, in order to ascertain attitudes towards people who engage in same-sex practices. We were interested in ascertaining whether community perceptions of homosexuality match the common (Western) assumption that Islam is profoundly homophobic. O...

A symposium entitled In the Presence of Faith: An Interdisciplinary Symposium on Southern African Studies of Religion was held in Johannesburg from 24 to 26 February 2010.1 This review essay outlines our rationale for the symposium, highlights its most pressing debates, and introduces the papers included in this special edition of the Journal for t...

Active citizenship is a concept which has become increasingly topical as governments seek ways of fostering proactive participation by empowered citizens and communities. An overview of the literature reveals that, despite the breadth of research on active citizenship and substantive participation, well-documented examples of mechanisms that result...

In this article I examine two parallel and connected processes. The first process concerns the growth of local ecumenism before 1940, understood as inter-racial unity and equality in the Church. The emergence of transnational ecumenism in the twentieth century, especially its evangelical expression, had a critical impact on processes and events in...

Bonthuys, E. and Albertyn, C. (eds). 2007. Gender, Law and Justice. Cape Town: Juta. Lxii þ 424 pages. ISBN 9780702176647. Britton, H.E. 2005. Women in the South African Parliament: From Resistance to Governance. Champaign: University of Illinois Press. Xxii þ 198 pages. ISBN 0252030133. Geisler, G. 2004. Women and the Remaking of Politics in South...

‘Sexuality in South Africa and South African Academic Writing’ has two goals. Its first is to examine and account for the existence of a particular discourse around black sexuality in contemporary academic writing, where that discourse is productive of a view that black sex is almost always problematic. Here I look at the emergence of writing about...

In this article I focus on two central tensions around gender. In the first place there exists a tension between the broad, sometimes vague commitments to women's liberation that are rooted in the ANC's history as a national liberation movement and the specific policy directions that it adopts as a party in government. In the former strand there is...

This focus engages with what I see broadly as two (there are more) different discourses around African sexuality in the 1920s and 1930s. In one, concern for sexuality was linked to a moral panic around the behaviour of young girls and boys who were attempting to assert their independence from what were essentially patriarchal forms of control. In c...

Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the Cape Colonial government attempted to formalise African law and custom within its native territories. This process, particularly apparent in the Commission on Native Law and Custom (1878–1883), involved much discussion between colonial representatives and African men in the Eastern Cape about the origi...

Tensions over the control of improper sexuality were a key concern of African converts and Scottish missionaries in Xhosaland, South Africa, in the first part of the nineteenth century. Missionary preoccupations with sexual behaviour meant that sexual acts became key sites for the negotiation of status and identity. Reading the case of Jan Beck, wh...

COLLEEN DRYDEN, NATASHA ERLANK, YOUMNA HAFFEJEE, KATHY HARDY, SIZA NHLAPO, SHELLEY TONKIN and HUMBULANI TSHAMANO come together to talk about the meaning of African feminisms

This article examines how European missionaries understood their own and, as a consequence, African sexuality in Xhosaland in the nineteenth century.

In the early 1820s Scottish missionaries arrived in Xhosaland. The inseparability in their minds of Christianity and civilisation meant that their approach to their work consisted of two strategies focused on behavioural and spiritual reformation. These attempts were only ever partially successful, as they occurred within a society subject to its o...

0nly preliminary results are available cores from the analysis of the three cores (GD3/GDN/GDS) drilled ar Verlorenvlei. Figures show the majority of all three cores to be mainly composed of sand. There are a few substantial clay/silt incursions, and gravel is present in small quantities. Friedman curves for mean grain size vs skewness, and standar...

As many researchers have already documented, Christianity has played a pivotal role in shaping both the history of the Eastern Cape since the early 1800s, as well as the history of South Africa more broadly. Generally speaking, these studies have documented either the effects of mission-style Christianity and missionaries on African societies1, or...

Summary in English. Word processed copy. Thesis (M.A.(History))--University of Cape Town, 1995. Bibliography: leaves 209-219.