This book is based on Tamia Botes’s Master’s thesis ‘Where Have the Midwives Gone? Everyday Histories of Voetvroue in Johannesburg’, winner of the African Studies Centre, Leiden’s 2021 Africa... Show moreThis book is based on Tamia Botes’s Master’s thesis ‘Where Have the Midwives Gone? Everyday Histories of Voetvroue in Johannesburg’, winner of the African Studies Centre, Leiden’s 2021 Africa Thesis Award. This annual award for Master’s students encourages student research and writing on Africa and promotes the study of African cultures and societies. At the heart of a complex network of knowledge sits the Voetvrou — a black autonomous midwife who looks after the health of and nurtures new life in her community. She mentors others in these practices and, in this way, shares her knowledge across communal lines. But who is the Voetvrou? What is her history? What constitutes being a Voetvrou? How does one become a Voetvrou? Harriet Deacon (1998) identifies a broad shift in power relations between medical men and black autonomous midwives in the nineteenth-century Cape Frontier. These relations were underpinned by growing racialism at legal and institutionalised levels and effectively squeezed black women out of the practice of midwifery — hence their apparent disappearance from public archives from 1865 onwards. However, these black autonomous midwives have not disappeared. This research asks: Where have the midwives gone? Show less
The Khoisan of the Cape are widely considered virtually extinct as a distinct collective following their decimation, dispossession and assimilation into the mixed-race group ‘coloured’ during... Show moreThe Khoisan of the Cape are widely considered virtually extinct as a distinct collective following their decimation, dispossession and assimilation into the mixed-race group ‘coloured’ during colonialism and apartheid. However, since the democratic transition of 1994, increasing numbers of ‘Khoisan revivalists’ are rejecting their coloured identity and engaging in activism as indigenous people. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Cape Town, this book takes an unprecedented bottom-up approach. Centring emic perspectives, it scrutinizes Khoisan revivalism’s origins and explores the diverse ways Khoisan revivalists engage with the past to articulate a sense of indigeneity and stake political claims. Show less
