Dr. Ashley Parcells, Assistant Professor of History at Jacksonville University, published an article in the July 2018 edition of The Journal of African History. The piece is titled “Rural Development, Royal History, and the Struggle for Authority in Early Apartheid Zululand (1951-4).” Parcells, a former student of Clifton Crais, graduated in the spring of 2018. Check out the article abstract below and read the full piece here.

“From 1951, apartheid officials sought to implement soil rehabilitation programs in Nongoma, the home district of Zulu Paramount Chief Cyprian Bhekuzulu. This article argues that these programs brought to the surface fundamental questions about political authority in South Africa’s hinterland during the first years of apartheid. These questions arose from ambiguities within native policy immediately after the passage of the 1951 Bantu Authorities Act: while the power of chiefs during the colonial and segregationist era in Zululand had been tied to their control of native reserve land, in Nongoma, these development interventions threatened that prerogative at the very moment apartheid policy sought to strengthen ‘tribal’ governance. In response, the Zulu royal family in Nongoma called on treaties with the British from the conquest era, colonial law, and the very language of apartheid to reassert chiefly control over land, and more importantly, to negotiate this new apartheid political order.”