African traditional widowhood rites and their benefits and/or detrimental effects on widows in a context of African Christianity

Manala, Matsobane J.

doi:10.4102/hts.v71i3.2913

Cited by 29 publications

(29 citation statements)

References 20 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…Considered as still being married to her deceased man, the widow stays in an ambiguous state characterised by impurity and negative beliefs. A widow is said to possess negative spirits and even to embody the cause of her own man's death (Manala, 2015). Hence, this liminal status is expressed in variable and often ritualized customs in which the widow's body is turned into a focal point.…”

Section: South African Widowhoodmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Scholars have acknowledged the beneficial effect of these often ritualized customs as it heals grief (Makatu, Wagner, & Ruane, 2008;Nowye, 2005), removes bad luck or senyama, and consequently facilitates the integration of the widow within the community (Manala, 2015). Yet, analysing the treatment of these South African widows in the light of the Ubuntu principles of community, Manala (2015) points out that these customs are also "deliberate uncaring, disrespectful, discriminatory, impolite and unjust" (1).…”

Section: South African Widowhoodmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

As the body must appear: contemporary performances in post-Marikana South Africa

Smet

Breyne

2017

AFOC

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

On the 16th of August 2012 34 Lonmin miners lost their lives at Marikana in South Africa. Marikana bears witness to the socio-economic inequality and precarious work and living conditions in South Africa’s new globalized state. Two site-specific contemporary performances Mari and Kana (2015) and lqhiya Emnyama (The black cloth, 2015) voice this sad event in a remarkable way. In this article we critically reflect on the performances’ avenues of creating transformative encounters between performers, spectators and the performance sites in South African society. Both performances invoke for the audience members a remarkable awareness of the performance site as the spectator is obliged to navigate him- or herself in a politically induced public landscape in Cape Town’s Company Garden. We concur that Mari and Kana and Iqhiya Emnyama both elicit a profound reflection on the daily life struggle of mourning women against inhumanity and socioeconomic inequality in a neoliberal South Africa. Unsettling the dominant focus on resilient subjects, the omnipresence of women’s vulnerability in the two performances nurtures a rethinking process on structural justice. In doing so, we more closely analyse the performances’ intention to subvert the constructed category of ‘the mourning South African woman’ via multiple representations of mourning precedents as cultural elements. We conclude that both performances entail unique driving forces that question existing power systems that impact on SA and the problematic structural injustice at the heart of the massacre.

show abstract

Section: South African Widowhoodmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: South African Widowhoodmentioning

confidence: 99%

As the body must appear: contemporary performances in post-Marikana South Africa

Smet

Breyne

2017

AFOC

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

Section: South African Widowhoodmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Yet, analysing the treatment of these South African widows in the light of the Ubuntu principles of community, Manala (2015) points out that these customs are also "deliberate uncaring, disrespectful, discriminatory, impolite and unjust" (1). According to Manala's fieldwork in South Africa, many widows feel encouraged by the internal and external support systems.…”

Section: South African Widowhoodmentioning

confidence: 99%

As the body must appear: contemporary performances in post-Marikana South Africa

Breyne

Smet

2017

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

34 Lonmin miners lost their lives at Marikana in South Africa. Marikana bears witness to the socio-economic inequality and precarious work and living conditions in South Africa's new globalized state. Two site-specific contemporary performances Mari and Kana (2015) and Iqhiya Emnyama (The black cloth, 2015) voice this sad event in a remarkable way. In this article we critically reflect on the performances' avenues of creating transformative encounters between performers, spectators and the performance sites in South African society. Both performances invoke for the audience members a remarkable awareness of the performance site as the spectator is obliged to navigate him-or herself in a politically induced public landscape in Cape Town's Company Garden. We concur that Mari and Kana and Iqhiya Emnyama both elicit a profound reflection on the daily life struggle of mourning women against inhumanity and socioeconomic inequality in a neoliberal South Africa. Unsettling the dominant focus on resilient subjects, the omnipresence of women's vulnerability in the two performances nurtures a rethinking process on structural justice. In doing so, we more closely analyse the performances' intention to subvert the constructed category of 'the mourning South African woman' via multiple representations of mourning precedents as cultural elements. We conclude that both performances entail unique driving forces that question existing power systems that impact on SA and the problematic structural injustice at the heart of the massacre. Key words: Marikana, South Africa, Infecting the City, performance, gender inequality, neoliberalism, widowhood IntroductionOn the 16th of August 2012 thirty-four Lonmin miners lost their lives at Marikana in South Africa. They were killed by the police who -after failed, ignored or impeded negotiations between the striking miners -were assigned by the Lonmin Board of Directors and the mining unions to de-mobilize and dismantle the striking mass present at the Marikana area. The Marikana event, as a traumatic culmination of distorted socioeconomic power, demonstrated that South Africa's road to resolving conflict, structural inequality and injustice still remains to be travelled. It demonstrated that organized violence, as it was previously conducted under apartheid, is still operative in the post-apartheid South Africa's globalized state within the context of transnational neoliberalism. This state of affairs has, in turn, led to numerous theatre makers to take up this shocking event, which is now known as the Marikana massacre.The site-specific performances Mari and Kana (2015) and Iqhiya Emnyama (2015), presented at the public arts festival Infecting the City 2015 in Cape Town at a remarkable distance from the Marikana area, take the Marikana killings as their starting point.Every South African autumn Cape Town's buzzing city centre is transformed into an art scene through the annual public arts festival, Infecting the City. This festival, which welcomed over 50 productions and 290 artists in ...

show abstract

“…In a recent article Matsobane Manala (2015) remarks on what appears to be the reluctance of scholarship to engage with the issue of cultural practices around widowhood in Africa. Manala usefully summarises the findings of what literature there has been, pointing to a great degree of commonality in the treatment of widows, not only in Southern Africa but in Africa more broadly across different linguistic communities and irrespective of urban or rural locations.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

"We do not want the Commission to allow the families to disappear into thin air" A consideration of widows' testimonies at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the Fariam (Marikana) Commission of Inquiry

Kros

2017

PINS

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Using Gayatri Spivak's famous question about whether the "subaltern" can speak, this article addresses the testimonies given to the Farlam Commission of Inquiry by the widows of miners who had been killed in police shootings while engaged in an unprotected strike at Lonmin's platinum mine at Marikana in August 2012. The widows were required to face down the dominant narrative disseminated by mine management and other business as well as state interests, which held that the police had acted in self-defence after the strikers had threatened to attack them. I argue that the widows consciously sought to undo the dominant narrative through their testimonies, assuming the role of a new kind of "political widow" as theorised by Mamphela Ramphele (1996). The article begins with a detailed consideration of the testimony of Sepati Mlangeni whose husband had been murdered by an agent of the apartheid state, delivered to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in the 1990s. This sets the scene for the questions that might be asked and the observations made of the Marikana widows' testimonies presented to the Farlam Commission almost twenty years later.

show abstract

African traditional widowhood rites and their benefits and/or detrimental effects on widows in a context of African Christianity

Cited by 29 publications

References 20 publications

As the body must appear: contemporary performances in post-Marikana South Africa

As the body must appear: contemporary performances in post-Marikana South Africa

As the body must appear: contemporary performances in post-Marikana South Africa

"We do not want the Commission to allow the families to disappear into thin air" A consideration of widows' testimonies at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the Fariam (Marikana) Commission of Inquiry

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About