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People
The following people have either written on or studied the Cattle-Killing. (If your name does not appear here, and you would like to be included on this list, please contact Andrew Offenburger).
| John Stafford Anderson is a graduate student in African Languages & Literature at UW-Madison who researches African diaspora interpretive forms--festivals, orality, drama-–with a particularly focus on South Africa. He is writing an article on the Cattle-Killing about oral performances that assign "Xhosa conditions," ranging from poverty to AIDS, to the Prophetess Nongqawuse. John received the FLAS fellowship to study Xhosa and Swahili, he recently received the FLAS to study Afrikaans and is the Ibrahim Hussein Fellow in African Literature. |
| Chris Andreas is completing a PhD on the epizootics of lungsickness and African horsesickness in the Cape in 1853-57 at St Antony's College, University of Oxford. He is currently based at the Department of Historical Studies, University of Cape Town. The lungsickness outbreak he is researching for the larger region has been identified as an important factor in the emergence of the "Xhosa Cattle-Killing." Andreas questions some of assumptions in the historiography about the epizootic and the Xhosa response it evoked. For example, the mortality rates of up to 95% that allegedly occurred among Xhosa cattle seem to be refuted by veterinary epidemiology and contemporary statistics from the adjacent Cape Colony. He has explored this in "The Spread and Impact of the Lungsickness Epizootic of 1853-57 in the Cape Colony and the Xhosa Chiefdoms," South African Historical Journal, 53 (2005), pp. 50-72. |
| Adam Ashforth is currently at the Center for Afroamerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan. His books include Witchcraft, Violence, and Democracy in South Africa; Madumo, A Man Bewitched; and The Politics of Official Discourse in Twentieth Century South Africa. He is currently working on projects relating to HIV/AIDS in everyday life in rural Malawi and Kalenjin nationalism in Kenya, as well as other research in South Africa. |
| Tanya Barben is Rare Books Librarian at the University of Cape Town Libraries. She presented her article, "Victim, Villian or Vamp, etc?: Nongqawuse and 'The cattle-killing delusion' as represented in some works of fact and fiction," at the April 2007 conference on the Cattle-Killing. |
| Sheila Boniface Davies is completing her PhD on the Cattle-Killing at St John's College, Cambridge. Previously she was the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. Her paper, "Raising the Dead: The Xhosa Cattle-Killing and the Mhlakaza-Goliat Delusion" has been published in the Journal of Southern African Studies 33:1 (March 2007), pp. 19-41. |
| Helen Bradford's historical work has focused on rural and feminist issues in South Africa, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She has worked at the Universities of Cape Town and the Witwatersrand, and is currently attached to the African Gender Institute at the University of Cape Town. |
| Zukile Jama is involved in researching African Languages and Literature at the University of Cape Town. He has great interest in traditional African literature including language and culture for which he is an independent consultant. He is doctoral student on a project on language, migration and identity for SANPAD. |
| Andrew Offenburger recently earned his Master's degree through Yale University's Council on African Studies, and he will commence studies toward the PhD in African history at Yale later this year. His thesis examines the literature and historiography of the Xhosa Cattle-Killing. Offenburger co-edited a special issue of African Studies focused on the movement, and he has also authored two articles: "Smallpox and Epidemic Threat in Nineteenth-Century Xhosaland," and "Duplicity and Plagiarism in Zakes Mda's The Heart of Redness." He is the founding editor of Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies, published by Routledge. |
| Jeff Peires wrote The Dead Will Arise while still a lecturer at Rhodes University. He subsequently became Professor of History at the University of Transkei, Member of the National Assembly for Ngcobo, and Regional Director of Economic Affairs in Queenstown. He now lives in King William's Town where he runs a small bookshop and writes a little history. |
| Renée Schatteman teaches postcolonial literature at Georgia State University in Atlanta, GA. Her article "The Xhosa Cattle Killing and Post-Apartheid South Africa: Sindiwe Magona's Mother to Mother and Zakes Mda’s The Heart of Redness" was published in the African Studies special issue on The Xhosa Cattle Killing (volume 67, number 2, August 2008). She has also published two interviews with Sindiwe Magona—one entitled "The Stories She Writes: An Interview with Sindiwe Magona" found in Sindiwe Magona: The First Decade (edited by Siphokazi Koyana, University of Natal Press, 2004.) and one entitled "Interview with Sindiwe Magona" published in Scrutiny2 (volume 12, number 2, 2007). She also has an interview with Zakes Mda that is forthcoming in Connecticut Review. Dr. Schatteman is also the co-writer of a three-volume curriculum guide to African literature entitled Voices from the Continent with Africa World Press. The third volume—subtitled A Curriculum Guide to Selected Southern African Literature—includes a chapter on Sindiwe Magona. She is also the editor of Conversations with Caryl Phillips, which will be forthcoming from the University Press of Mississippi in the spring of 2009. |
| Niels Strobbe is preparing to start his last year of classes at the University of Ghent in Belgium. He got 'involved' in the Cattle-Killing when he was looking for a subject for his bachelor's paper during the third year of his education. He wrote a survey of the secondary literature related to the Cattle-Killing, combined with a critical view on its sources/authors. Strobbe is currently starting research for his thesis, to be completed in June 2009, on the concept of Political Religion. Strobbe is now writing on the Vlaams Nationaal Verbond (Flemish National Union), a political party in Belgium which collaborated with the occupying forces (NSDAP). |
| Jennifer Wenzel is an assistant professor of English at the University of Michigan, where she teaches courses in world literature and postcolonial theory. She has published essays in Research in African Literatures, Modern Fiction Studies, Cultural Critique, Postcolonial Studies, and Alif. Her book on the Xhosa Cattle-Killing, Bulletproof: Afterlives of Anti-colonial Prophecy in South Africa and Beyond, is forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press. |
| Laurence Wright is Director of the Institute for the Study of English in Africa at Rhodes University. His research interests include Shakespeare and the history of Shakespeare in South Africa, South African Language Policy, African literature in English and language education for teachers. He is Honorary Life President of the Shakespeare Society of Southern Africa. Recent work includes "A Research Prospectus for the Humanities" in Shifting the Boundaries of Knowledge, University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2006; "Shakespeare in South Africa" in Shakespeare's Local Habitations, Lodz University Press, 2007; and "Ecological Thinking: Schopenhauer, J.M. Coetzee and who we are in the world" in Toxic Belonging?: Identity and Ecology in Southern Africa, Cambridge Scholar's Press, 2008. Stimela: Railway Poems from Southern Africa is forthcoming from Echoing Green Press. |
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