South African Literature Research Articles

Direct-to-Consumer Genetic Testing in South Africa: Stumbling Over the First Legal Hurdle?

Despite the growing popularity of direct-to-consumer genetic testing, there is minimal South African literature on the topic. The limited available research suggests that direct-to-consumer genetic testing is unregulated. However, we suggest that direct-to-consumer genetic testing is indeed regulated, and unusually so. The first step in the process – the collection of a saliva sample by consumers themselves – is unlawful on a plain reading of the National Health Act 61 of 2003 and the Regulations Relating to the Use of Human Biological Material. This is because these statutes require that certain healthcare professionals must remove saliva for genetic testing. Yet, on closer analysis, such an apparent ban on the self-collection of saliva is neither aligned with a purposive interpretation of the relevant legislation, nor would it survive constitutional scrutiny – as it impedes an individual's autonomy. It is concluded that, contrary to a plain reading of the relevant statutes, individuals can lawfully collect their own saliva for direct-to-consumer genetic testing. To provide legal clarity we recommend that the relevant provisions of the National Health Act 61 of 2003 and the Regulations Relating to the Use of Human Biological Material be amended to allow individuals to collect their own saliva samples.

The development of research competence among specialist registrars in South Africa: Challenges and opportunities for research education and capacity development

To equip physicians with the competencies that support evidence-based healthcare, curriculum frameworks for medical education often promote scholarly activity as an essential component of training. Many medical schools worldwide expect medical trainees to participate in some form of research during their undergraduate and postgraduate training. This requirement is especially important in Africa, where there is also much need to develop clinical research capacity and an evidence base that is contextualised to the specific healthcare challenges on the continent. In South Africa, the requirement for specialist trainees to complete a research project (as part of a Master of Medicine, MMed) was made mandatory from 2011 and has introduced several difficulties for many training centres. There is concern that institutions are failing to develop medical specialists who are competent in their role as scholars, particularly in their ability to conduct research. In this article, I review the South African literature that discusses the research component of medical specialist registration. In addition to summarising the challenges associated with MMed projects and recent efforts to address them, I interrogate whether the current status of MMed research education is likely to be contributing to the successful development of research competence among this unique group of postgraduates. By consolidating the current debate, I hope to encourage a point of departure between criticising the challenges and adopting proactive strategies to address them. There is a great need for medical educators to design innovative and learner-centred research education strategies that can better develop research competence among African healthcare professionals.

AFRICAN STEREOTYPES IN AMERICAN TEEN MOVIE MEAN GIRLS

<p>Movie has emerged to be a powerful device in shaping perspectives of culture, society and history. The power of visual stimulation can be manifested and exploited politically, socially and economically. The movie Mean Girls, which premiered in the United States in 2004 actualized the racial stereotypes lobbed at Africans, but with a soft ignorance. The present study aims to observe African stereotypes in American teen movie Mean Girl. This study employed qualitative descriptive method, which is a method of research that attempt to describe and interpret the objects in accordance with reality. The data of this study were collected from scenes and excerpts which contained African stereotypes based on its scripts. The study draws on Doh’s (2009) Stereotyping Africa: surprising answers to surprising questions and February (2019) Mind your colour: The “coloured” stereotype in South African literature. Findings have shown that the African stereotypes are black-skin coloured, wild and savage, financially poor, doing voodoo, and having impolite attitude. These stereotypes indicate the movie Mean Girls tends to perpetuate negative stereotypes about Africans more than the positive ones.</p><p><strong>Keywords</strong>: <strong>African stereotype; American teen movie; Mean Girls’s movie</strong></p><p><em> </em></p>

An Exploratory Study on Value-Added Tax Consequences of a Residential Property Lottery in South Africa

To dispose of a residential property in terms of a lottery transaction is a change in the business manner how residential properties are usually being disposed of, namely either through an estate agent or a private sale. A number of these transactions have occurred in South Africa in the last six years. This article considers a scenario where the main parties who participate in the lottery transaction are: the seller of the property, the winner of the property (multiple persons can purchase a lottery ticket, but only one person wins the property) and the attorney who oversees the lottery and is a non-resident of South Africa for tax purposes. Since a lottery transaction is seen as a different way of how residential properties are normally being sold, the main objective of this article is to explore the possible value-added tax (VAT) consequences for the different parties, depending on whether the parties are registered for VAT in South Africa or not. To meet this objective, a doctrinal research approach was followed by analysing South African and international literature to determine the recommended VAT treatment of these property lottery transactions, as no clear guidance can be found on this. It is suggested that the South African Revenue Service should consider issuing clear guidelines in respect of the VAT consequences of property lottery transactions.

At Penpoint: African Literatures, Postcolonial Studies, and the Cold War

At Penpoint: African Literatures, Postcolonial Studies, and the Cold War

Reconsidering Literatures: Directions in South African Literary Studies

Introduction

Stories of Fathers, Stories of the Nation: Fatherhood and Paternal Power in South African Literature (Grant Andrews)

Tydskrif vir Letterkunde is an online, peer-reviewed, accredited scholarly journal which publishes original, previously unpublished research and overview articles on theoretical, applied or comparative aspects of African literatures and cultural practices.

Practice Change Needed for the Identification of Pediatric Hypertension in Marginalized Populations: An Example From South Africa.

Introduction:Hypertension in children has increased globally over the past 20 years; yet, little is known about this issue among disadvantaged communities from low- and middle-income countries. Age-, sex-, and height-adjusted normative tables are the “gold” standard for the diagnosis and estimation of pediatric hypertension worldwide, but it is unclear whether the use of international standards is appropriate for all contexts. The purpose of this study was to evaluate and compare different international references to identify hypertension among South African school-aged children from disadvantaged communities.MethodsBlood pressure, weight, and height were measured in a cohort of 897 children aged 8–16 years from eight peri-urban schools in the Eastern Cape of South Africa. Cross-sectional prevalence of hypertension was calculated according to American, German, and global normative tables, as well as pseudo-normative data from the own study population. Isolated systolic hypertension and body mass index (BMI) were considered markers for cardiovascular disease. Multinomial logistic regression was used to compare the likelihood of blood pressure categorization with increasing BMI levels.ResultsHypertension prevalence ranged from 11.4% with the pseudo-normative study tables to 28.8% based on the German reference. Global guidelines showed the highest agreement both among international standards (92.5% with American guidelines) and with the study reference (72.5%). While the global and the American references presented higher systolic over diastolic hypertension rates (23.6 vs. 10.6% and 24.2 vs. 14.7%, respectively), the American guidelines predicted the highest increased risk for hypertension stage 2 [odds ratio, 1.72 (95% confidence interval: 1.43–2.07)] with raising levels of BMI.ConclusionOur results support the heterogeneity of blood pressure estimates found in the South African literature, and highlight the underrepresentation of African children in international guidelines. We call for caution in the use of international standards in different contexts and advocate for the development of normative tables that are representative of the South African pediatric population necessary to ensure an accurate identification of hypertension both from the clinical and epidemiological perspective.

Penetrating Cardiac Injuries: Outcome of Treatment from a Level 1 Trauma Centre in South Africa

Background: Penetrating cardiac injuries are rare in South African and international literature. Penetrating cardiac injuries are regarded as one of the most lethal injuries in trauma patients. The mechanism of injury varies across the world. In developing countries, stab wounds cause the majority of penetrating cardiac injuries. These injuries remain clinically challenging and are associated with high mortalities. Aim: To describe our experience with penetrating cardiac injuries and the outcome of their management at a level 1 trauma unit in Johannesburg, South Africa. Materials and methods: We retrospectively reviewed all patients who presented with penetrating cardiac injuries over a period of four years (1 January 2016 to 31 December 2019). The patients were identified using the hospital database. The patient’s demographics, mechanism of injury, injury severity score, vital signs, investigation findings, final diagnosis, type of operation, length of hospital stay, morbidities, and mortalities were recorded. Results: There was a total of 167 patients with penetrating cardiac injuries identified. There were 151 (90.4%) males, with an overall median age of 29 years (IQR 24–34). Stab wounds accounted for 77.8% of the injuries, while gunshot wounds (GSW) accounted for 22.2%. The median injury severity score (ISS) and revised trauma score (RTS) were 25 and 7.1, respectively. The right ventricle was the most injured chamber (34.7%), followed by the left ventricle (29.3%), right auricle (13.2%), right atrium (10.2%), and combined injuries accounted for 7% of injuries. A commonly used incision was a sternotomy (51.5%), left anterior-lateral thoracotomy (26.9%), emergency room thoracotomy (19.2%), and clamshell thoracotomy (2.4%). The overall mortality rate was 40.7%, with a 29.2% mortality in the stab wounds. Twenty-four (14.4%) patients died in the emergency department, sixteen (9.6%) patients died on the table in theatre, and the remaining twenty-eight (16.7%) died in the intensive care unit or wards. Gunshot wounds, other associated injuries, right ventricle injuries, a high ISS, low RTS, and low Glasgow coma scale were all significantly more likely to result in death (p < 0.001). Conclusions: Penetrating cardiac injuries are often fatal, but the mortality can be improved with appropriate resuscitation and a work-up. The injuries to the heart can be safely managed by trauma/general surgeons in our setting. The physiology in presentation and other associated injuries determines outcomes in patients with penetrating cardiac injury.

Factors influencing adherence to chemotherapy amongst breast cancer patients at a tertiary hospital: Healthcare workers' perspectives

In South Africa, breast cancer is the most commonly diagnosed cancer amongst women. Adherence to cancer therapy such as chemotherapy is essential for the achievement of optimal treatment benefits and treatment efficacy, which requires patients to receive 100% of their intravenous chemotherapy doses. However, factors such as beliefs regarding breast cancer complicate adherence to treatment. In contexts like South Africa, geographic and socio-economic disparities as well as cultural factors impact on adherence to cancer therapy, yet little is documented and understood about these factors in the South African literature.

Determinants of attrition between Waves 1 and 2 of South Africa's National Income Dynamics Study – Coronavirus Rapid Mobile Survey (NIDS‐CRAM)

AbstractWe introduce a new approach to the analysis of attrition in South African longitudinal surveys by supplementing the public‐use data with paradata about the survey process and interview experience. The number of successfully interviewed respondents reduced from 7,073 in Wave 1 of NIDS‐CRAM to 5,676 in Wave 2—a level of attrition of almost 20%. We fit probit regression models to predict the determinants of attrition. In the fully specified model, attrition was most affected by contact effort by the survey organisation, the sample batch the respondent was in during Wave 1, employment status and whether they had a missing value for household income. Another important finding was that respondents who underwent COVID‐19 tests were 3% more likely to attrite, a trend that could negatively affect the efficacy of the survey to track COVID‐19 testing behaviour in future waves. Attrition was not influenced by how often respondents previously participated or refused in NIDS, the interviewer‐interviewee experience in the interview or by the respondent's observable demographic characteristics. This is a new contribution to the South African literature on attrition and shows the importance of using paradata to understand nonresponse.

Inclusive education in South Africa: path dependencies and emergences

ABSTRACT Inclusive education is a fundamental right of all students. Despite international policy initiatives, educational exclusion is pervasive, especially in the Global South, and disproportionately affects disabled students. Barriers to inclusive education have been itemised in the literature, but in this conceptual paper that offers a novel perspective on the topic, we argue for a complexity approach to understand its evolution. Using a qualitative deductive content analysis of South African laws, policies, reports and scholarly literature, we explore three path dependencies from colonial/apartheid times that lock the country into historical patterns of categorisation and segregated schooling. These operate alongside the emergence of new and inclusive practices by actors at a system-wide and local level, made possible by inputs into the policy ecology. South Africa represents a complex, contradictory educational environment that confounds the expectation of linear progression towards greater inclusivity. Instead of identifying barriers to inclusive education, we argue for a nuanced understanding of the imbrications of historical investments and drivers of inequality, with policy possibilities and the impetus for transformation among system actors.

In-between spaces in Klara du Plessis’s Ekke: Identity, language and art

In this review article, we focus on the depiction of the transnational and translingual as a state of being in-between in Klara du Plessis’s debut poetry collection, Ekke (2018). This in-between state has implications for how identity, place and visual art feature in the collection. Ekke contains fragments of German and French, but consists mainly of English interspersed with Afrikaans. The creation of meaning through this linguistic slippage reflects the idea of identity as always in-process that comes to the fore throughout the collection. Ekke also represents an intervention in South African urban literature, as Bloemfontein, a city not much featured in literature, is represented in several poems. In these poems, the poet/speaker struggles to situate Bloemfontein and its surrounding areas’ histories and symbolism in the transnational networks that she is a part of. The conception of identity and language being constantly in-progress is also conveyed in the collection’s poems about visual art. In these poems, meaning is created through the interaction of language with visual art, a process the poet calls ‘intervisuality’. Keywords: transnationalism, transnational identity, translingualism, multilingual poetry, Klara du Plessis, Bloemfontein in literature, ekphrasis.

Waiting for a Hero: Dramatism Analysis of South Africa’s ICT Development

ABSTRACT A critical and comprehensive reflection of information and communication technology (ICT) is needed to prepare South Africa for the fourth industrial revolution (4IR). Through one uncommonly used theoretical framework in analysing ICT development—dramatism analysis—this article examines South Africa’s ICT development. By examining the nature and features of the development through this framework, this article highlights the multitude of South Africa’s ICT role players, the tensions among them and the unfulfilled roles from any potential hero in South Africa’s ICT drama. The analysis also exposes a shortcoming in current South African ICT literature, which privileges certain aspects of supply-side analysis over other critical supply side as well as demand-side analysis. The article finds that South Africa’s ICT development has largely been unsuccessful due to lack of strong leaders who are able to fulfil the role of a hero, which in turn impedes the country’s ability to take advantage of the opportunities and respond to the challenges presented by the 4IR.

Campus Fiction and Critical University Studies from Below: Disgrace, Welcome to Our Hillbrow, and the Postcolonial University at the Millennium

AbstractTwo of South African literature’s best-known titles from the turn of the twenty-first century are works of campus fiction that rarely get recognized as such. In this article I read J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace (1999) and Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow (2001) as novels whose figuration of the university is far more central to their treatment of the contradictions and ambiguities that characterize postapartheid South Africa than is generally acknowledged. In the course of narratives that seem largely focused on other things, these texts offer up a distinctly South African but also distinctly postcolonial variety of campus fiction, and a critical engagement with the neoliberal university and the conditions under which upward mobility and intellectual inquiry take shape in the twenty-first-century global south. Coetzee and Mpe suggest capacious and transformative, if also deeply ambivalent, ways of imagining an as-yet unrealized decolonial future for universities.

Table of Contents Vol 42 Issue 1

Literator publishes research articles and essays on linguistics and literature in general, but focuses in particular on the (comparative) study of South African languages and literatures and other cultural phenomena across language, media and cultural boundaries (examples of topics would be: different manifestations of Post-Modernism, the interaction between visual arts and literature, the representation of the South African War in literature, language attitudes and language policy).

Chinese South African Navigations of the (Post-)Apartheid City in Ufrieda Ho’s Paper Sons and Daughters

Drawing on Michel de Certeau’s conceptualisation of the city space in The Practice of Everyday Life, in conversation with AbdouMaliq Simone’s approach to the African city, this article explores the problem of belonging in Ufrieda Ho’s Paper Sons and Daughters: Growing Up Chinese in South Africa (2011). The text’s navigation of the manifold ascribed and asserted identities of the autobiographical self is made prominent through Ho’s tracing of the traversals of both her father and herself across Johannesburg. In particular, the illegal gambling game of fahfee and its operation become emblematic of the imbrication of Chinese immigrants within the urban space, positioning the figures in the text within the broader historical and literary archive of Johannesburg and thereby asserting a rootedness within the (post-)apartheid city. It highlights the complexity of the relationship between the self and the (post-)apartheid city and the formulations of belonging that arise as a result.
 Keywords: Ufrieda Ho, Paper Sons and Daughters, East Asian South African literature

Exploring the caring of fathers in low-income, rural communities in South Africa

ABSTRACT Early research on fatherhood in South Africa emphasize the prevalence of absent fathers and the detrimental impact thereof on families. More recent research on fatherhood, however, has shown a shift in fathering practices, where contemporary men engage in more involved and complicated fathering practices, which include nurturing and caring activities. Although local studies have begun to identify nurturing and caring activities in fathering, they have not comprehensively explored these caring ideas and practices. Furthermore, there has been a call for research providing more contextual knowledge on fathering practices across diverse groups of fathers locally and globally. This study, therefore, explored the ideas and practices of paternal care in a group that is especially under-represented in South African fatherhood literature. We draw on the data of fifteen families, each consisting of a father-figure, a mother-figure and an adolescent child. These 45 individuals were interviewed separately. The thematic analysis of participants’ accounts revealed complicated notions of paternal care. Although more contemporary caring ideas and practices of fathering behaviour were reported, these caring masculinity ideas remained intertwined with traditional hegemonic masculinity ideals. Nevertheless, these findings indicate that traditional ideas about fatherhood and masculinity have expanded to incorporate more nurturing, caring and expressive qualities.

Identifying key risks to the performance of privately protected areas (PPAs) through theory of change (ToC)

Privately protected areas (PPAs) are internationally considered to be important policy implementation instruments to augment and strengthen protected area networks. However, there has been limited reflection on the performance of PPAs over time. This paper aims to identify key risks to the performance of PPAs as policy implementation instruments through the application of Theory of Change (ToC). Identifying and understanding these risks are important to allow for the evaluation and monitoring of PPA performance. The ToC method was applied to a specific PPA policy instrument namely, private nature reserves (PNRs) in the South African context. The research results produced 29 key assumptions translated into 29 key risks. These risk are critically discussed against existing South African and international literature. To test and refine the risks further it is recommended that they be applied to PPA case studies in different contexts.

An analysis of the impact of technological innovation on productivity in South African manufacturing firms using direct measures of innovation

AbstractWhile manufacturing is regarded as important for economic growth, there is evidence that productivity in the South African manufacturing sector has been relatively low compared to international standards. As the international literature shows a positive correlation between innovation and productivity, it is pertinent to investigate the role that innovation plays in this sector. South Africa is lagging behind other emerging market countries in terms of technological progress, and innovation efforts are deemed insufficient particularly in private firms. While there have been studies that measure the impact of R&D (as an innovation input) on productivity, the direct impact of innovation success on productivity has not been estimated in South Africa before. The business innovation survey (BIS) provides data that allow us to estimate these direct effects, thereby enabling this study to make an important contribution to the South African literature in this area of research. We estimate the effect of technological innovations on firm productivity using a sample of manufacturing firms from the BIS 2014–2016 data. Using a variation of the CDM model, we find that the introduction of product or process innovations has significant positive effects on productivity in South African manufacturing firms.