Research

I conduct research on modern African history, focusing on southern African history, especially working-class cosmopolitanisms and identities in African port cities, transnational cultural exchange through maritime connection, dockside prostitution, and post-apartheid memory in Cape Town.

South African Port Culture

I am currently finishing up my dissertation at Yale titled “Port Culture: Cape Town’s Dockside World Since 1945.” It offers scholars a new perspective on African ports as sites of cultural transmission. Using diverse research methods and sources, it explores the lives of sailors, dock workers, sex workers, cab drivers, passengers, immigrants, and other port personnel whose worlds connect in the ship/port nexus.

In postwar South Africa – where racist governments segregated the races, restricted Black rights, and demonized “foreign” ideas – ports were potential hotbeds of subversion. Foreign sailors flouted laws prohibiting interracial sex, smuggled banned James Brown records to local dancehalls, and spread the gospel of civil rights. Local Black seafarers sailed on ships beyond state surveillance, experiencing democratic vistas abroad. Meanwhile, local dockers pilfered cargo, ran illicit rackets, and organized strikes, while sex workers monetized their engagements with the passing seamen.

These images characterize Cape Town’s port culture up until the 1970s when dockside social dynamics were radically transformed by technological, political, and economic changes, reducing sailors’ time in port, residents’ ability to profit from the sailors and passengers, and dockers’ capacity to manually access cargo for their own purposes.

Based on a range of research methods (archival, interviewing, and participant-observation on cargo ships and in dockside nightclubs), my dissertation analyzes the history of this transformation and the impact that it has had on Capetonians’ lives. It is a multi-racial, comparative, inclusive, transnational history informed by revolutions in global maritime history, yet rooted in local African reality.

I have already published a book and numerous articles and chapters based on my dissertation research.

Post-Apartheid Memory

I started looking into post-apartheid memory in 1999 when I was in the MA African Studies program at Yale. During the program, I spent a year in Cape Town as a Rotary Ambassadorial Scholar doing research on the impact of apartheid-era forced removals on the Cape coloured community. I interviewed over 100 victims of Group Areas evictions. My research resulted in a 330 page thesis called Removals and Remembrance: Commemorating Community in Coloured Cape Town. I returned to Cape Town in 2003-2004 to conduct further research on the removals’ impact on African communities. I am currently revising this manuscript for (hopeful) publication.

The thesis has expanded since I first wrote it, taking in a more complete picture of the impact of forced removals on Cape Town’s black communities. With those revisions in mind, I hope my study can offer a comparative example for other scholars who research similar matters.