Livelihood Strategies of Dock Workers in Durban, c. 1900-1959

This dissertation examines the livelihood strategies of African dock workers in Durban, South Africa, between the Anglo-Boer War and the 1959 strikes. These labourers did not conform to common conceptions of radical dock workers or conservative African migrant workers. While Marxist scholars have been correct to stress the working class consciousness of Durban’s dock workers, this consciousness was also more ambiguous. These workers and their leaders displayed a peculiar mix of concern for workers’ issues and defences of the rights and interests of African traders. Many of Durban’s dock workers were not only wage labourers. In fact, only a minority had wages as their only source of income. The Reserve economy played a role in sustaining the consumption levels of their households and, more importantly, more than half of the former dock workers interviewed for this research engaged in some form of commercial enterprise, often based on the pilferage and sale of cargoes. Some also teamed up with township women who sold pilfered goods while the men were at work. This combination of commercial strategies and wage labour has often been overlooked in the literature. By looking at these livelihood strategies, this dissertation considers how rural and urban economies interacted in households’ strategies and reinterprets the reproduction of labour and the household in order to move beyond dichotomies of proletarian versus rural consciousness. The dock workers’ households were neither proletarian households that were forced to reside in the countryside because of apartheid, nor traditional rural homesteads with a missing migrant member. The households were reproduced in three geographically separate spheres of production and consumption, none of which could reproduce the household on its own. These spheres were dependent on each other, but also separate, as physical distance gave the different household members some autonomy. Such multi-nodal households not only bridged the rural and the urban, but equally straddled the formal/informal divide. For many, their employment on the docks made their commercial enterprises possible, which allowed them to retire early from urban wage labour. Consequently, the interests of wage labourers could not be divorced from those of African small-scale entrepreneurs.

The Afroporteña press and Afro-Argentine’s thought in the late nineteenth century

The journalistic boom that occurred in Argentina from the second half of the nineteenth century saw the emergence of an active afroporteña press that defend the interests of the black community. This paper, in addition to reviewing the history of the Afro-Argentines newspapers, emphasizes the role played by the elite of African descent in the promotion of modernity among his brothers, while exploring the possible bases for an identity in the ideas spread.

Spatial characterization of salt accumulation in early stage limestone weathering using probe permeametry

This research characterizes the weathering of natural building stone using an unsteady-state portable probe permeameter. Variations between the permeability properties of fresh rock and the same rocks after the early stages of a salt weathering simulation are used to examine the effects of salt accumulation on spatial variations in surface rock permeability properties in two limestones from Spain. The Fraga and Tudela limestones are from the Ebro basin and are of Miocene age. Both stone types figure largely in the architectural heritage of Spain and, in common with many other building limestones, they are prone to physical damage from salt crystallization in pore spaces. To examine feedbacks associated with salt accumulation during the early stages of this weathering process, samples of the two stone types were subjected to simulated salt weathering under laboratory conditions using magnesium sulphate and sodium chloride at concentrations of 5% and 15%. Permeability mapping and statistical analysis (aspatial statistics and spatial prediction) before and after salt accumulation are used to assess changes in the spatial variability of permeability and to correlate these changes with salt movement, porosity change, potential rock deterioration and textural characteristics. Statistical analyses of small-scale permeability measurements are used to evaluate the drivers for decay and hence aid the prediction of the weathering behaviour of the two limestones.

Decadence in the Forest: Smyth's Der Wald in its Critical Context

Ethel Smyth’s opera, Der Wald, met with mixed reactions at its premiere in Berlin in 1902. Many factors contributed to this, not least, as Smyth herself observed, anti-British sentiment in Germany following the second Boer War. One might have expected that the reception of the opera at its British premiere on 18 July at Covent Garden might have been more positive, but even here critical opinion was divided. Even positive reviews were not free from gender discrimination, and other reviews condemned the opera for being too German or Wagnerian. What was meant by ‘Wagnerian’? This article answers the question in three ways. Firstly, I argue that ‘Wagnerian’ meant not a leitmotif-filled, through-composed work (as distinct from a number opera), but simply a lyrical drama; for British audiences the model for this was Tannhäuser or Lohengrin, not the Ring or Tristan. Secondly, taking this definition on board, I analyse the musical language of the opera, in particular the key structure. The central duet sung by the doomed lovers, Heinrich and Röschen, is in F major, almost the furthest possible distance from the home key of the opera (E major), which characterizes the forest and ‘nature’ in general; by contrast, the next scene, where the Kundry-like Iolanthe attempts to seduce Heinrich (a crucial reversal of the more conventional power relations of the love duet), sees a return to the home key. Thirdly, I set the hermeneutical implications of this reversal in the context of the decadent movement, with which late nineteenth-century Wagnerism was associated, and which, following the conviction of Oscar Wilde in 1895, was discredited. Der Wald thus failed because of its ‘guilt by association’ with an aesthetic that had fallen into disrepute.