Dr David Dorward, Director

Executive Committee:

John Horacek (Library Representative),
Dr Sue Thomas (English),
Professor Martin Chanock (Legal Studies),
Elizabeth Dimock (Postgraduate Representative)

Thenjiwe Mthintso, M.P. (Member of the ANC Women's Causus, of the South African Communist Party politburo, former commander of the ANC's military structure in Botswana), delivering an address to the Institute on "Women in the New South Africa"

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Major Activities

The main efforts of the African Research Institute during 1994 were focused on a major international conference under the theme `Women in Africa and African Literature', organized by Sue Thomas of the Department of English. Held at La Trobe University, in conjunction with the African Studies Association of Australia and the Pacific, the conference attracted a large number of Australian and international participants. The conference was dedicated to the memory of the distinguished Nigerian author and publisher, Flora Nwapa, the invited keynote speaker who died tragically shortly before the conference.

One of the highlights of the conference was the opportunity to hear three leading African female authors discussing their writing and the creative process. The three authors were Fatima Dike (South African), Jane Tapsubei Creider (Kenyan) and Rose Zwi (South African).

In addition to the thematic papers, there was a non-thematic section devoted largely to contemporary issues and a panel on the 1994 South African election. The Eritrean community of Melbourne provided traditional musuc and dancing in the interlude before the conference dinner.

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`Women in Africa and African Literature'
Paper presenters at the Conference included:

Victoria Carchidi (English dept., Massey University), `A Voice in the Wilderness: African Women Speaking"

Yvette Christiansë (English dept., University of Sydney), "Sculpted into History- The Voortrekker Woman and the Gaze of the Invisible Servant: Recuperation and Problematisation of Self-Representation and Motherhood/nationhood in Afrikaner South Africa

Denise Dark (English Dept., Monash University), "Dark (In)Continents: Representing the British Woman in Africa, A Study of Two Film Texts, Simba (1955) and Born Free (1966)

Phillip Darby (Political Science, University of Melbourne), "Gendering Other Peoples and Continents"

Liz Dimock (History Dept., La Trobe University), "Gender and Imperialism: Missionaries in the Uganda Mission after 1895"

Penelope Hetherington (History dept., University of Western Australia), "The Politics of the Clitoris: Contaminated Speech, Feminism and Female Circumcision"

Derek Hornsey (English Dept, University of Sydney), "Bessie Head, Sol Plaatje and the God with No Shoes"

Jill Jamison (International Women's Development Agency), "Women and Development in Eritrea"

Sue Kossew (English Dept., University of New South Wales), "A White Woman's Words: Some Problems of Representation"

Dele Layiwola (University of Ibadan, Nigeria), `Matriarchy as a Theory of Culture"

Bernard Leeman (Canberra), `The Queen of Sheba and Africa: A Re-assessment of the Sheba-Menelik Cycle Narrative of the Kebra Nagast in the light of the Salibi hypothesis"

Kristy Major (Political Science, University of Melbourne), "Feminist Criticism and Africa: Troubling Re-constructions of Western Feminine'

Catherine MacDonald (History Dept., University of Western Australia), "African Adulteresses- Objects of Seduction or Active Participants ? Tanganyika, 1920- 1985"

Jock McCullock (Australian and International Studies, Deakin University), "Black Peril and White Settler Women in Colonial Zimbabwe"

Pedzisai Mashiri (African Languages and Literature, University of Zimbabwe), `The Rise of the Feminist Tradition in Zimbabwean Literature: A Critical Survey"

Margaret Miller (English Dept., University of Queensland), "Representations of Black Women in Siddiwe Magona's Living, Loving and Lying Awake at Night"

Gaele Mogwe (English Dept., University of Botswana) and Nhlanhla Maake (School of Oriental and African Studies, London), "Wozanazo (Tell Us/ Bring Forth): A Reading of Three Early Black South African Women Writers".

Cecilia Moretti, (Women's Studies, Flinders University), "Black Women and the Protest Tradition in South Africa: A Study of the Short Stories in Miriam Tlali's Footprints in the Quag (1989)

Ernesto Okello Ogwang (Literature Dept. Makerere University, Uganda), "The Storytellers and the Different Trajectories: The Women in African Oratures"

Maggi Phillips (English Dept., Northern Territory University), `The Certified Insane and the Poet: Bessie head and Nuruddin Farah: Gifts from Two Mothers"

Rosaleen Smyth (Literature and Journalism Dept., Deakin University), `African Literature in Colonial Zambia"

Pam Stavropoulos (Politics, Macquarie University), "African Women's Fiction and the Politics of the Everyday".

Jane Widdess (External Studies, Edith Cowan University), "Making Paper Speak: Mammy Wata and the African Cosmology in Toni Morrison's Beloved"

Non-thematic conference papers:

Jocelyn Armstrong (African Information Centre, Wellington, New Zealand), "GATT and Africa in the Year of the Family"

Russell Ally (Institute for Advanced Social Research, University of Witwatersrand, South Africa), "Gold, The Pound Sterling and the Witwatersrand, 1886-1914"

Paul Cox, (Sociology and Anthropology, La Trobe University), "Malinowski and Swaziland"

David Dorward (History Dept., La Trobe University), `Ethnic Conflict' in Rwanda and Burundi"

Bernd Heine (African Institute, University of Cologne, Germany) `Linguistic Contributions to the Study of African History

Nyambura Mwaniki (Urban and Regional Planning, University of Sydney), `An Alternative Approach to African development: The Role of Endogenously-induced Contribution to the Process of Policy Design and Implementation: An Analysis of a Kenya Case".

Albert J. Paolini (History dept., La Trobe University), "The Postcolonial, the Global, the Modern- But Whatever Happened to Africa ?

Film screenings in conjunction with the conference:

Martin Mhando (Drama and Screen Studies, Flinders University), Mama Tumaini: Women of Hope (1987 UNICEF Award at FESPAC Festival, Ouagadougou, Burkino Fasso)

Panel on the 1994 South African Elections:

Dr David Phillip (History Dept., University of Melbourne)

Prof. Martin Chanock (Legal Studies, La Trobe University).

Fatima Dike, South African author and political activist.

The Institute has continued to forge strong links with the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, AusAID, the African Heads of Mission resident in Australia, the Australian Council for Overseas Aid and its constituent organisations, such as the Overseas Service Bureau and Community Aid Abroad, the Africa-Australia Business Council and a broad spectrum of African community and special interest groups.

Members of the Australian diplomatic corps regularly visit the Institute before departure to postings in Africa and provide briefings for members of the Institute upon their return to Australia. Dr Dorward provided a briefing on the political economy of contemporary Africa as part of a Joint Services International Training Programme at the Joint Services Staff College, Canberra.

The Institute maintains extensive correspondence with academic and research institutes, government officials and political organisations throughout Africa.

During 1994 the Institute received additional manuscript material from Prof. John Barnes relating to his period as research officer at the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute in Zambia in the 1940s- 1960s, a large collection of South African publications and anti-apartheid literature from Ruan Maud of Ballarat and publications in the area of African politics with special reference to Kenya from Dr David Goldsworthy of Monash University.

Dr Maritta Kock-Weber ( Chief of Environmental and Natural resources Division, Work Bank) "The World Bank Environmental Policy in Africa, Asia and Latin America"

Thenjiwe Mthintso, M.P. (Member of the ANC Women's Causus, of the South African Communist Party politburo, former commander of the ANC's military structure in Botswana), "Women in the New South Africa"

Baleka Kgositsile, M.P., senior female ANC politician (former Secretary-General of the ANC Women's League) and member of the South African National Assembly. Member of the National Assembly's Standing Committees on Constitutional Affairs and on Land Affairs

Dr Schuyler Jones, Director, Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, United Kingdom.

Professor Leonard Thompson, Oxford University, United Kingdom

The Hon. Kerry Sibraa, former Speaker of the Senate and Australian Ambassador Designate to Zimbabwe.

Virginia Mann, Curator, The Christensen Fund, Palo Alto, California

Colin Reed successfully completed his MA thesis on "Pastors, Partners and Paternalists: African Church Leaders and the development of Missionary Paternalism in Kenya, 1850- 1900".

Elizabeth Dimock continued work on her doctoral thesis, "Women and the Church Missionary Society in Uganda, 1895-1935: Gender Relations in an Imperial Setting" (successfully completed in 1995).

Derek Overton, University of Tasmania, commenced fieldwork in Kenya and undertook archival research in Kenya, Great Britain and Portugal as part of his doctoral research on White Settlers in Post-Colonial Kenya.

Graduates of the Institute are now teaching at universities in Canada and Africa, one is serving with the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs in the Australian Embassy in South Africa, while another is in charge of the Office of the President of Namibia.

With additional funding from the Research Committee of the Faculty of Humanities, La Trobe University, the African Artefacts Documentation Project was extended to include New Zealand.

Antipodean museums worked closely in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, often acquiring materials from common collectors. Consequently, collections were frequently fragmented over a number of institutions.

The African collections in the National Museum of New Zealand in Wellington, the Canterbury Museum in Christchurch and the Otago Museum in Dunedin were photographed and documentation entered into a central computer data programme.

Dr Dorward was invited by the Institute for African Studies of the Russian Academy of Science to deliver a paper on `Ethnicity in Rwanda' at a conference of Africanists in Moscow.

Members of the Institute were interviewed by the Australian radio and TV on a range of African events and issues.

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Dr David Dorward, Director
African Research Institute

e-mail < D.Dorward@latrobe.edu.au >