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Book Reviews
Banking bioscience for the future
BEFORE THE 1990s, field research in human biosciences involved researchers gathering samples from volunteers for later study in the laboratory. Depending on the resources of the institution, the valuable samples were usually stored for no longer than the duration of the study, after which researchers disposed of them according to the ethical rules of their institution or applicable legislation. Usually, other scientists had no access to the samples and were entirely reliant on the rigour and accuracy of the researchers, as reflected in their published results.
This methodology is often costly, inefficient and slow, limits upscaling and can affect an experiment’s reproducibility (that is, another researcher getting the same results by repeating the experiment).
Thanks to the rapid development of bioinformatics (a specialist discipline involving biology, mathematics and computer science) and biobanking, institutions such as UWC’s South African National Bioinformatics Institute (SANBI) have vastly expanded access to collected samples for research and to the data derived from such study.
A biobank is a secure storage facility that functions as an archive of organic samples collected for research. Given that many of the samples are human (blood, tissue, saliva, urine, DNA), there are ethical questions involved in biobanking, not least of which are who owns the sample once it is collected, how it is stored and used and, was the donor able to give informed consent.
After recognising the need for public engagement and education regarding these issues, SANBI recently published Biobanking and Me, a bilingual audio book (English-Xhosa and English-Afrikaans versions) and accompanying video. Using simple illustrated texts, the book aims to educate children and adults about the ethics, purpose and importance of biobanking. Before the project was finalised, the language content was critiqued by about 100 native speakers of the three regional languages, who were all non-academic UWC staff members.
“Members of communities who are donors of biological samples are essential stakeholders in health research, and meaningful engagement which increases knowledge allows these donors to make informed decisions,” says SANBI’s Director, Professor Alan Christoffels. “The value of creating and increasing public understanding of science through such engagement platforms cannot be overestimated.”
Memoir journeys to a mother’s childhood
PUBLISHED IN 2019, THE BLACKRIDGE HOUSE: A MEMOIR is described by publisher Jonathan Ball as a “meditation on belonging, of the stories we tell of home and family, of the precarious footprint of life”. Its author, Professor Julia Martin of the UWC English Department, undertook a deeply personal journey from Cape Town to find her mother’s house in Blackridge, a suburb on the outskirts of Pietermaritzburg in KwaZulu-Natal.
Elizabeth Madeline Martin is 92, bedridden in a nursing home and longs for the woodand-iron home of her childhood which she vividly remembers, although she no longer recalls exactly where it was.
For Martin, the journey becomes more than just about finding the physical home of her mother, or returning with the requested “photograph, and something growing from the garden”. It opens up questions about the many meanings of ‘home’.
As Martin writes: “Then one day she [her mother] told me, ‘This place is . . . I’m trying to find the right word for lonely. I just want to go Home now. I don’t mean ‘home’ with a small ‘h’. I mean the great Home. But God obviously doesn’t want me.’”
Martin journeys back through her grandparents’ lives, signposted in letters, forgotten documents, old photographs and maps, and is aided by many strangers who help her search for her mother’s home.
As she discovers her family history, finding the Blackridge house becomes an act of reconnection as much for the daughter as the mother. The book is eloquently written and has received praise from other South African writers. Describing the book as a “finely crafted text”, Antjie Krog says, “The narrative keeps sharpening its lenses until one experiences what is hardest to grasp: everything is irrevocably interwoven – but miraculously so.”
Martin previously authored a travel memoir, A Millimetre of Dust: Visiting Ancestral Sites (Kwela Books, 2008) that was long-listed for the Sunday Times Alan Paton Award, and Nobody Home: Writing, Buddhism, and Living in Places (Trinity University Press, 2014), a collection of 30 years of correspondence and interviews with co-author, US poet and essayist, Gary Snyder.
Patriarchy confronted in a tale of losing and finding love and faith
SET IN THE TRADITIONAL CAPE TOWN MUSLIM COMMUNITY, Called to Song is a novel that portrays a woman’s journey of self-discovery while navigating life with an unfaithful husband.
Published by Kwela (2018), the novel by University of the Cape Town social anthropology lecturer, Kharnita Mohamed, feels authentic with its use of colloquial speech and insider knowledge. The main character, Qabila, is a Muslim woman whose husband Rashid has been having an affair with another woman. Qabila feels she has been living a 17-year-long farce instead of enjoying a loving marriage and wants a divorce but Rashid resists.
Qabila’s determined resolve leads her to reconnect with family and her Muslim faith, while meeting musicians who might answer her puzzling dreams of strange songs.
Mohamed’s tale of family intricacies, betrayal and heartache is compelling and beautifully written. Her personal background, having been raised on the Cape Flats, is referenced in the setting of this novel, with Mitchell’s Plain a backdrop to some of the book’s scenes.
Patriarchy looms large in Called to Song, which interrogates race, gender and relationships from Mohamed’s feminist perspective without being politically strident, as when, for example, the author highlights the shame that women and not men carry for a pregnancy outside marriage.
Mohamed’s characters speak directly to a world where women are often spoken about, instead of speaking for themselves. The characters share the problems of real-world women, such as how women navigate sex and intimacy with men who use them and who never really love them the same way.
Mohamed has a master’s degree in anthropology from the University of Chicago and is pursuing a PhD in Women and Gender Studies at UWC. Called to Song is her first novel.
Hout Bay politics: a microcosm of global urban politics
AROUND THE WORLD, relentless urbanisation is producing crowded cities governed under strain, with the poorest citizens excluded from full participation in democracy and even the wealthiest residents frustrated with the state.
These are the findings of Democracy Disconnected: Participation and Governance in a city of the South, a book co-authored by UWC Professors Fiona Anciano and Laurence Piper. Prof Anciano is a social science researcher with a broad interest in democratisation, civil society and urban governance, while Prof Piper is a political scientist at UWC and at University West in Sweden. The book discusses how citizens are disconnected from democracy, using Hout Bay, a Western Cape suburb, as its case study.
The authors argue that “Democracy is more in demand and supply than ever in human history”, and yet dissatisfaction with democratic rule is growing.
“Hout Bay, our case study site, captures this sentiment of democratic deficit almost exactly. Despite active engagement through democratic means, including new participatory spaces, most residents feel frustrated with the response of the state.”
There are three reasons for this disconnect. First, the institutions of local democracy work at the level of the city, not the neighbourhood. This means local residents cannot control what happens in their area.
Second, the power of the City Hall is limited, with provincial and national government responsible for many key aspects of daily life like education, health and security.
Third, the power of the state is limited through policy choices to privatise public functions to business or share power with local networks. It is also limited through lack of resources and poor governance. All of this removes decision-making further from local residents.
“This is important to do because it alerts us to possible reasons why local democracy is disappointing residents of cities of the South,” write the authors. The “paradox of more participation and less satisfaction with democracy” for most Hout Bay residents is made explicit through the division of the book’s chapters according to the key issues that have dominated protest politics in Hout Bay over the many years of their fieldwork. These include environmental issues; property ownership and rights; transport (taxis and the Chapman’s Peak Drive toll); education and public development; fishing, employment and the ethics of poaching; safety and security; and unity, race and nationality.
Consequently, apartheid spatial planning lives on in Hout Bay as residents remain divided and largely confined within a wealthier white neighbourhood, a coloured area called Hangberg and Imizamo Yethu, a mostly African informal settlement.
The book was published by Routledge in 2019 and pre-print chapters can be downloaded for free on the website http://democracydisconnected.com/book/
Exposé – A Blessing in Disguise
EXPOSÉ – A BLESSING IN DISGUISE is the debut novel of Mokone Mmola, a PhD in Pharmaceutical Sciences student at the University of the Western Cape. Written in a simple and conversational style, Mmola’s novel tells the story of Kagiso, a first-year student at the University of Limpopo (UL), coming to terms with his sexuality through the friendships he builds with a group of gay male students.
Kagiso is introduced to Kay-Tee, Beekay and Kamo by Karabo, a male student who is involved in a secret sexual relationship with Kagiso’s roommate Mike, while Mike is also dating Mary.
We see the different personalities, from friends to family to welcomed and unwelcomed lovers, through the eyes of Kagiso. A keen observer of others, Kagiso ironically denies his attraction to men initially and is unable to identify why he feels jealous, irritated or attracted by Mike. That is, until he meets and falls in love with Bradley, a final-year BComm Accounting student, who is not only comfortable with his sexuality but unconsciously helps Kagiso ease into his.
The reader follows Kagiso from UL’s Turfloop campus to his parents’ home in Lorraine Village, Ga-Sekororo, witnessing the discrimination, betrayal and rejection he suffers from fellow students, friends, his boyfriend, his mother and community members. Although fictitious, the novel creates awareness of the current struggles faced by the LGBTQI community in South Africa, particularly in rural towns and communities.
The novel not only highlights the interconnectedness between diverse people but reveals the hypocrisy among the self-proclaimed traditional gatekeepers of societal norms. At the same time, it celebrates Kagiso’s becoming the master of his own destiny as he starts tackling prejudices.
Mmola is currently working on his second novel, which continues the story of Kamo.
He says, “After people read Exposé, many asked me why Kamo, who is this amazingly caring character who seemed to have been through so much in his past, was not given the opportunity to tell his own life story. It clearly needs to be told.”
Hostels were more than residences
PROF HEIN WILLEMSE (DLITT, UWC), a former UWC lecturer and current Professor of Literature and Literary Theory in the Department of Afrikaans at the University of Pretoria, has co-edited a publication with alumnus Dr William Murray titled Hostel: Autobiographical narratives of the 1975–1980 University of the Western Cape Student Generation. The inspiration for the book emerged from the formation of a WhatsApp group by 1970s alumni and coincided with the hosting of a reunion of ‘hostelites’ on campus.
Although earlier students conducted occasional protests, most notably the walk-off and boycott in 1973 that followed the expulsion of the SRC, the 1975–1980 generation can rightfully be regarded as the first activist generation of UWC students.
In their creation of UWC, the architects of apartheid deliberately located the drab collection of buildings in the bushes of Bellville, neighbouring squatter camps, a railway yard and an ersatz ‘coloured’ representative council. Quite accidentally, their design made a significant contribution to nationalising the anti-apartheid struggle.
Since the hostels were meant to accommodate students from across the country who could not commute, the authorities drew together some of the brightest coloured youth, most of them from politically conservative, fairly sheltered Christian backgrounds. Without reliable transport or cash to spare, the 550 or so hostelites were the core around which much of the campus social calendar evolved in the mid-1970s.
But they were also targeted for recruitment and politicising by student activists and leaders and, as many of the personal accounts in the book indicate, the hostels became a hotbed of political ‘action’ and ‘conscientising’. The writings of Franz Fanon and Steve Biko were particularly influential in radicalising students.
The hostels were often the centre of police thuggery, as students retreated there during protest actions. Willemse, himself a hostelite, was severely assaulted by police at one of the hostels, despite not being a participant in that day’s protest.
After graduating, most of the hostelites became school teachers in their home communities, if not radicalised then more politically ‘conscientised’ to play a meaningful role in community and social development.
