Lect 5

Pass Laws

  • colored people required to have these pass to travel anywhere in south africa

    • stamped by employer to be allowed in that area

Biblical bugs

  • “Cease biting. The jailbugs have bugged him enough” (5)

  • uses bugs to address inequality…small incidents to jail them

Buggie New Year

  • resolve no bug will hitchhike on new suit

  • the pass control of people based on their race based on where the can live, work, love, etc.

Dompas (dumbpas)

  • colored people not considered citizens of south africa

On the Beat

  • urban township around

  • American Accent

    • worriation = consternation

    • Cherie” which becomes “cherry” or" “cherrie”

      • refered to woman

    • “brainpan” (“head)

    • “swellegant” (swell+elegent)

Guys and Dolls

  • such boodle and booze humor is not an effective medium for political comment. Motsisi’s comic bums are bums because of the frailty of man instead of the frailty of society. There is no social analysis. When Motsis verges on a political statement, it lacks bite of bitterness. Throughout life he loses and laughs

Political Context

  • became more repressive

  • prime minister “architect of archetype”

  • a lot of censorship

1961 letter to Hughes

  • letter from Casey Motsisi to Langston Hughes

  • talks about ways he’s been trying to get his work published, asks Hughes for help to find publisher to publish his ‘Township’ book

Shebeens

  • underground bars?

  • mostly ran by women

Sophiatown

  • “sophiatown got me beat. I’m so permit-flogged and landlord-ridden”

The best of Simple - Langston Hughes

  • role of woman in space of man

Nxumalo to Hughes

  • Was quite a happy little affair and we spent the time eating and drinking and being merry while talking books and stories, art, poetry, music, and that great old one and only subject, women

Magazines like drum part of a signifying system whereby patriarchy

Aunt Peggy (on the beat)

  • nationalist figure

    • using system and fighting against it

  • reference to potato boycott in 1959 to protest poor treatment of African farmers

  • “a true daughter of African and wouldn’t touch a potato even to throw it at a cop batoning her.”

  • uses banana peel rather than potato to produce beer

  • What aunt peggy doesn’t know about this man’s burg is not worth knowing

  • she is very knowledgable

  • not sexualized

    • Miss fur coat: a cherrie with lips like two bananas

African Parade (Magazine)

  • modeling itself on Drum

Laurence Vambe

  • Harare was the biggest, most vital and explosive ghetto in Mashonaland, if not in all Zimbabwe

  • Harare possessed by some of hottest head this isde of the solar system. Cream of Harare like the molten lave of a volcano; scum is like the particles that scatter as soon as the volcano erupts

Mahobo parties

  • you will find ladies with cute faces asking you whether you would like to drink gin, brandy, whisky, or champagne

  • access to woman, booze

  • ways humorous, vapid, purely entertaining column, contain critiques of racial structures in South Africa