Speaking for the slave: Britain and the Cape, 1751-1838
Postcolonial studies has asked the question "Can the subaltern speak? ", but has focused less strongly on the strategies by which the subaltern is prevented from securing a hearing. The textual and social strategies used to prevent Cape slaves in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries from voicing their plight have been neglected, though both pro- and anti-slavery lobbyists were eloquent. To present the slave as one whose inferiority rendered him incapable of pleading his cause was a device of the pro-slavery group; to pretend that consultation was impossible was another, though people who offered this defence were often surrounded by slaves. Others, accepting and profiting from the inequalities of a class-stratified society, were unable to perceive any but the extreme experiences of an unfree condition as constituting injustice. Anti-slavery campaigners were rarely in favour of the slave's being consulted: they preferred to condemn their political rivals, the slave-owners. Abolition found many of them searching for arguments to maintain the inequalities of society, and especially to prevent former serfs from securing a hearing.
Re-writing the 'Slave Narrative' : Rayda Jacobs's The Slave Book and André Brink's The Rights of Desire
The dynamics of confrontation and reconciliation operative in contemporary South African society are clearly reflected in the literature from both sides of the 'colonial divide.' They are articulated not only in the colonized/colonizer debate, but are also expressed in and relevant to female/male perspectives on history. This preoccupation with the past has been expressed in various types of literary genres or conventions, which have been reclaimed to lend emphasis and credence to the message conveyed. Examples of this include the re-writing or mutations1 of the sixteenth-century picaresque tradition (depicting the moral effects of a hypocritical society), the subtle conversion of autobiography into testimonial writing such as the traditional 'slave narrative' from the nineteenth century or Rigoberta Menchu's (1985) testimony of oppression, and the adaptation of magic realism as a form of political interrogation and commentary exemplified in Latin American novels. In one or other way, all of these redeployments of genre evince a desire on the part of the author to establish individual and collective roots within a multicultural and global society. From the colonized' s point of view, it entails a search for roots and markers of identity; for the former colonizer it implies a retrospective, soul-searching exercise in determining
A quantitative measure of nitrifying bacterial growth.
Nitrifying bacteria convert ammonia (NH3) to nitrate (NO3-) in a nitrification reaction. Methods to quantitatively separate the growth rate of these important bacterial populations from that of the dominant heterotrophic bacteria are important to our understanding of the nitrification process. The changing concentration of ammonia is often used as an indirect measure of nitrification but ammonification processes generate ammonia and confound this approach while heterotrophs remove nitrate via denitrification. Molecular probe methods can tell us what proportion of the microbial community is nitrifying bacteria but not their growth rate. The technique proposed here was able to quantify the growth rate of the nitrifying bacterial populations amidst complex ecological processes. The method incubates [methyl-3H] thymidine with water samples in the presence and absence of an inhibitor of nitrification-thiourea. The radioactively labeled DNA in the growing bacteria was extracted. The rate of incorporation of the label into the dividing bacterial DNA was used to determine bacterial growth rate. Total bacterial community growth rates in full-scale and pilot-scale fixed-film nitrifying reactors and an activated sludge reactor were 2.1 x 10(8), 4.1 x 10(8) and 0.4 x 10(8)cell ml(-1)d(-1), respectively; the growth rate of autotrophic-nitrifying bacteria was 0.7 x 10(8), 2.6 x 10(8) and 0.01 x 10(8)cell ml(-1)d(-1), respectively. Autotrophic-nitrifying bacteria contributed 30% and 60% of the total bacterial community growth rate in the nitrifying reactors whereas only 2% was observed in the activated sludge reactor that was not designed to nitrify. The rates of ammonia loss from the nitrifying reactors corresponded to the rate of growth of the nitrifying bacteria. This method has the potential to more often identify factors that enhance or limit nitrifying processes in both engineered and natural aquatic environments.