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The article discusses three contemporary works about and by first- and second-generation South African exiles. In Lauretta Ngcobo's collection of memoirs, Prodigal Daughters: Stories of South Afric...

Within the larger context of intertextuality in contemporary South African works of fiction, the article focuses on Michiel Heyns's novel, Invisible Furies, whose characters, plot trajectories, nar...

Zoe Wicomb’s third novel, October (2014), provides the most searching revision of the notion of home in contemporary South African fiction. Taking as its point of departure the epigraphs from Tony ...

The article traces the continuity between Zakes Mda's storytelling in his works for the theatre and his fictional works. This is especially evident in the performative character of his novels: his fictional protagonists are performers and artists of various kinds, and some kind of indigenous cultural, religious or artistic performance is usually foregrounded in his novels. His novel, The Sculptors of Mapungubwe (2013), is the latest stage in his larger fictional project of imaginatively mapping southern Africa. In a narrative that draws on different epistemological realms and modes of storytelling, Mda recreates the physical and human geography of the precolonial Kingdom of Mapungubwe in Limpopo, its social hierarchy, cosmogony and historical context. Continuing with his narrative formula of having twinned protagonists, Mda considers, with reference to the half-brother sculptors, Chata and Rendani, the role of the artist in society and the relationship between art and national identity. Traditional and in...

Shoulder surgery has emerged from being a marginalised sub-speciality to being an area of much research and advancement within the last seventy years. This has been despite the complexity of the joint, and success majorly rests on parallel development of biomedical technology. This article looks at the past and present of shoulder surgery and discusses future directions in the speciality.

The renewed outbreak of xenophobic attacks in March and April 2015 in Durban, Johannesburg and Cape Town, the killings, looting, and burning of homes and shops, and the flight of thousands of foreign Africans to refugee camps, have brought to the fore not only the question of the African diaspora in South Africa, but also into focus the notions of home and homeland in a diasporic context. In Shadows, for which she was awarded the Herman Charles Bosman Prize in 2014, Zimbabwean writer Novuyo Rosa Tshuma presents the dislocations of life in present-day Zimbabwe and the relocation and double displacement of the Zimbabwean diasporic community in South Africa. The text, comprising a novella, ‘Shadows’, and five other stories, is best approached as a story cycle, the individual narratives being linked not only by the theme of diaspora but also by a number of recurring diasporic situations, figures, and tropes. Drawing on a wide range of contemporary diaspora theory, including the African and intra-African diaspora, as well as current research on Zimbabwe and its diaspora, this article examines the ambiguous diasporic concepts of home and belonging, and inclusion and exclusion, with reference to Tshuma’s fictional depiction of daily township life in Mugabe’s Zimbabwe with its food queues, depleted resources, and crashed economy, as well as in the marginal world of the presentday Zimbabwean diaspora in Johannesburg with its police corruption and brutal exploitation of illegal immigrants. The article considers the psychogenic condition known as ‘conversion disorder’, which Tshuma foregrounds in one of the stories, as a metaphor for understanding the paradoxical diasporic identification with, and alienation from, home, community, and home country in Zimbabwe as well as in the unaccommodating host country, South Africa.

The essay considers four novels, written post-1990, that structure their fictional negotiation of the past by employing as protagonist/narrator the figure of a stricken and dying old white woman who recalls her personal story in the context of the national history: Karel Schoeman's This Life (1993), J M Coetzee's Age of Iron (1990), Andre Brink's Imaginings of Sand (1996), and Marlene van Niekerk's Agaat (2006). The stories of these old women are told at the discursive intersections of memory, gender and race, and individually and together they revise the story of South Africa before, and for, the advent of democracy. Taking as its point of departure the pseudo-autobiographical form of these novels, the essay examines the role of memory in the narrative construction of self and identity, the self as discursive subject, and collective memories in relation to contesting nationalisms. The essay concludes with a more extensive discussion of Agaat, which exemplifies many of the issues discussed in the first th...

J. M. Coetzee's autobiographical novel/ fictional autobiography, Summertime: Scenes from Provincial Life (2009. London: Harvill Secker), engages more fully and more self-reflexively than any of his other works with the knotty question of his identity as a white South African.This essay argues that in a characteristically elaborate narrative construct he both avows and disavows his Afrikaner as well as his English cultural roots. The essay begins by contextualizing Summertime in the current critical discourse on South African identity, and then suggests that the rhetorical figure of chiasmus provides a way of understanding the cruciform logic that underpins much of Coetzee's thinking and writing, and of engaging with the cultural cross-over between English and Afrikaner cultural filiation and affiliation that he foregrounds in works such as Boyhood, Slow Man, Diary of a Bad Year, and Summertime. In the cruciform exchanges between Coetzee's biographer Vincent and his interlocutors in Summertime, questions a...

Bimodal distribution of genomic MLL breakpoints in infant acute lymphoblastic leukemia treatment

The essay analyses the figurative mapping in Sally‐Ann Murray's first novel, Small Moving Parts (2009), which is a coming‐of‐age novel about the young Halley Murphy who grows up in the suburb of Umbilo in Durban in the 1960s. The essay begins by analysing the narrative topography of Durban in the 1960s in terms of J. Hillis Miller's notion of “topotropography”, with special reference to what Miller calls “atopical” or unplaceable/unmappable places. Against the background of the main Western philosophical conceptions of the self, the essay then analyses the way Halley's developing sense of herself is mapped in the narrative, and pursues the analogy between, on the one hand, the philosophical problem of a unified and diachronic sense of self that persists despite gaps in consciousness, and, on the other hand, the narrative paradox of a coherent narrative topography of the self being mapped despite zones of absence. Absences, losses and gaps – personal, social, historical and linguistic – are a dist...

Abdulrazak Gurnah's novel, Paradise (1994), provides a narrative reversal and revision of Conrad's canonical text, Heart of Darkness (1902), self-consciously returning its colonial gaze from a postcolonial position. The article begins with the contrived narrative optic of reversal in Conrad's novella, and proceeds to examine the similar narrative structure of privileged and obstructed sightlines, and gazes knowingly and unknowingly returned, in Paradise, showing the intertextual relationship between the two works. Paradise narratively re-maps Conrad's colonial route to an African ‘heart of darkness’, but from the east coast of Africa westwards, and both recreates and subverts the ‘topotropography’ of Conrad's work and reconfigures the darkness at its heart. Gurnah's narrative about the last of the great East African trading caravans retraces one of the major trading routes from the coast into the interior around the Great Lakes, which in the nineteenth century had become one of the axes of the sl...

OBJECTIVE To compare the functional results after transplantation of locally obtained and assigned kidneys (without taking into account HLA typing) with those after transplantation of kidneys obtained via Eurotransplant (with HLA typing as principal criterion for assignment). PATIENTS AND METHODS Between December 1983 and December 1993 a total of 236 kidneys were transplanted into 234 patients, 40 kidneys having been obtained via Eurotransplant and 196 removed locally and transplanted directly into patients on the local waiting list according to strict criteria: same blood group; waiting time since decision on transplantation; negative current crossmatch between recipient's serum and donor lymphocytes. Transplantation results were analysed retrospectively according to: ischaemia time, HLA mismatch, postoperative renal failure, postoperative renal function, rejection rate and transplant survival. Mean observation period was 55 months for the local and 50 months for the Eurotransplant kidneys. RESULTS The number of HLA matches was higher in Eurotransplant group (P < 0.001). However, the cold ischaemia time was greater for this group (20.2 vs 15.7 hours; P < 0.01). Acute renal failure was less common with locally assigned kidneys (33 vs 53%: P < 0.02). There were no significant differences with regard to one-year and five-year renal function (serum creatinine; percentage of normal): 90.2% local vs 88.3% Eurotransplant and 81.8% vs 62.3%, respectively). Survival rates were also similar (96.9% local vs 95% Eurotransplant after one year, 94.4% vs 90% after 5 years). CONCLUSION Local assignment by waiting time and blood group gave results that were similar to those via Eurotransplant based on HLA typing criteria.

The translocation t(9;11)(p22;q23) is a recurring chromosomal abnormality in acute myeloid leukemia (AML) fusing two genes designated as MLL and AF9. Within MLL, almost all rearrangements cluster in an 8.3-kb restricted region and fuse 5' portions of MLL to a variety of heterologous genes in various 11q23 translocations. AF9 is one of the most common fusion partners of MLL. It spans more than 100 kb, and two breakpoint cluster regions (BCRs) have been identified in a telomeric region of intron 4 (BCR1) and within introns 7 and 8 (BCR2). We investigated 11 children's bone marrow or peripheral blood samples (3 AML, 5 t-AML, 2 ALL, 1 ALL relapse) and two cell lines (THP-1 and Mono-Mac-6) with cytogenetically diagnosed translocations t(9;11). By use of an optimized multiplex nested long-range PCR assay, a breakpoint-spanning DNA fragment from each sample was amplified and directly sequenced. In four patients and two cell lines, the AF9 breakpoints were located within BCR1 and in two patients within BCR2, respectively. However, in five patients the AF9 breakpoints were found outside the previously described BCRs within the centromeric region of intron 4 and even within intron 3 in one case. All five patients with a secondary AML, who had not received etoposides during treatment of the primary malignant disease, revealed almost identical MLL breakpoints very close to a breakage hot spot inducible by topoisomerase II inhibitors or apoptotic triggers in vitro. Sequence patterns around the breakpoints indicated involvement of a "damage-repair mechanism" in the development of t(9;11) similar to t(4;11) in infants' acute leukemia.

The tension between the insistent binarism of Marlow's discourse on darkness and the cautionary self‐reflexivity of the frame narrator in Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1902) has remained a feature of writing about Congo up to the present day: King Leopold's Ghost (1998) by Adam Hochschild; The Poisonwood Bible (1998) by Barbara Kingsolver, and A Passage to Africa (2001) by George Alagiah. The patriarchal discourse of the American missionary, Nathan Price, is central to Kingsolver's novel. However, Price's voice is only heard reported — and subverted — in the narratives of his family members, who bear out the truth that “to resist occupation, whether you're a nation or merely a woman, you must understand the language of your enemy”. The article considers, in the light of a theory of cross‐cultural discourse, whether Kingsolver's novel, despite its self‐reflexive analysis of English as hegemonic language, and its engagement with the various linguistic and epistemological worlds of the Congo — Lingala...

Membrane filtration allows safe retention of microorganisms when treating filter backwash water from conventional drinking water filters. The permeate of the membrane plant can thus be reused to produce drinking water. The benefits are a higher yield of the drinking water treatment plant and a minimised wastewater production. This paper discusses the results of a pilot study, cost data and full-scale operation experiences concerning the application of ultrafiltration to treat filter backwash water. The effectiveness of ultrafiltration was assessed with regard to flux, cost and permeate quality.

The quantitative understanding of rheological experiments on compatibilized binary polymer blends requires the consideration of viscoelastic interfacial properties. The Palierne model offers these capabilities but a systematic analysis has not been performed yet. Starting from the Palierne model containing a Maxwell ansatz for complex interfacial shear or dilatational moduli and which considers a particle-size distribution function, we find that this model combines parameter and material functions in an ambiguous way. Consequently, a simplified version of the model—frequency-independent interfacial moduli and monomodal particle-size distribution—was introduced. Formulas have been derived for the relaxation times, the form relaxation time, and one additional still longer time which is associated with viscoelastic interfacial properties. We have found a good agreement between the predictions of the model and experimental data as well as the characteristic times in the relaxation time spectrum and the derived time constants for a PS/PMMA blend compatibilized with different amounts of a corresponding symmetric block copolymer. These results reveal that from the rheological point of view, the interface is of almost elastic nature, either shear or dilatational.

Summary This article approaches Michael Ondaatje's novel. The English Patient [1992](1993b), via its pre‐texts, the autobiographical memoir, Running in theFamily [1982](1993a), and the novel, In the Skin of a Lion [1987](1988). The article first analyses Ondaatje's interpellation as postcolonial subject in Running in the Family and views the generic hybridity of the work in terms of the cultural hybridity of its autobiographical and biographical subjects. The narrative exemplifies the intertextual mode that characterises Ondaatje's writing. In In the Skin of a Lion, through the fragmented and contrapuntal narratives of the marginalised characters, Ondaatje illustrates how inhabiting a dominant discourse through mimicry (Bhabha) is a complex strategy of appropriation and resistance. The ostentatious intertextuality of The English Patient, it is argued, exhibits “postcolonial impatience”: the tension between recognition by postcolonial subjects of the imperialistic narratives by which they are constrained, ...

This article considered the literary representation of young South Africans coming of age within a post-apartheid, multicultural context and forging for themselves a modern identity across a divide between, and also within, cultures. They identify themselves with the global West, but also subscribe to indigenous African values, whilst recognising how they themselves have been damaged by corrupted cultural practices. Postcolonial theories of identity-formation – Said’s argument that post-imperial cultures are all hybrid and heterogeneous, Bhabha’s interstitial ‘third space’ where postcolonial identities are produced through processes of negotiation and translation, Hall’s theory that cultural identity is based on differences and discontinuities rather than on fixed essences, De Kock’s notion of a ‘cultural seam’ or site where cultures both differ and converge and difference and sameness are sutured together, Nuttall’s notion of entanglement, and Clingman’s theory of the transitive self – are used for understanding how young South Africans are shown in recent writing as having been shaped by traditional cultural practices and also damaged by cultural malpractices. Texts chosen for discussion are Adam Ashforth’s Madumo, about witchcraft, Russell Kaschula’s short story,‘Six teaspoons of sweetness’ and Gcina Mhlope’s short story, ‘Nokulunga’s wedding’, both of which deal with ukuthwala [forced marriage abduction] and, finally, Thando Mgqolozana’s novel, A man who is not a man, which deals with the consequences of a botched traditional circumcision. The article argued that self-reflexive critical and imaginative engagement by young people with the cultures that have formed – and deformed – them is a mark of the true coming-of-age of postcolonial and post-apartheid writing.

Zoë Wicomb’s three fictional works – You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town (1987), David’s Story (2000) and Playing in the Light (2006) – all engage with the question of a South African ‘coloured’ identity both under apartheid with its racialised discourse of black and white, and in the context of the postapartheid language of multiculturalism andcreolisation. This essay examines the representation of ‘colouredness’ in Wicomb’s writing in terms of the two different conceptions of cultural identity that Stuart Hall has defined: an essential cultural identity based on a single, shared culture, and the recognition that cultural identity is based not only on points of similarity, but also on critical points of deep and significant difference and of separate histories of rupture and discontinuity.The politics of South African ‘coloured’ identity in Wicomb’s works reveals a tension between, on the one hand, acceptance of the complex discourse of colouredness with all its historical discontinuities, and, on the other, the desire for a more cohesive sense of cultural identity, drawn from a collective narrative of the past. In David’s Story the possibility of an essential cultural identity as an alternative to the unstable coloured oneis considered with reference to the history of the Griqua ‘nation’ in the nineteenth century. And in Playing in the Light the alternative to colouredness is examined with reference to those coloured people under apartheid who were light enough to pass for white and crossed over, reinventing themselves as white South Africans. The essay approachescoloured identity through the lens of postcolonial diaspora theory, and more specifically, diasporic chaos theory.

Fusion between ETV6 and RUNX1 defines the largest genetic subgroup in childhood ALL The genomic fusion site, unique to individual patients and specific for the malignant clone, represents an ideal molecular marker for quantification of minimal residual disease. Sequencing of DNA breakpoints has been difficult due to the extended size of the respective breakpoint cluster regions. We therefore evaluated a specially designed multiplex long-range PCR assay in 65 diagnostic bone marrow samples for its suitability in routine use. Resulting fusion sites and breakpoints derived from previous studies were subject to cluster analysis to identify potential sequence motifs involved in translocation initiation. (C) 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

BACKGROUND: Infantile hypophosphatasia (IH) is an inherited disorder characterized by defective bone mineralization and a deficiency of alkaline phosphatase activity. OBJECTIVE/DESIGN: The aim of the study was to evaluate a new compound heterozygous TNSALP mutation for its residual enzyme activity and localization of the comprised amino acid residues in a 3D-modeling. PATIENT: We report on a 4-week old girl with craniotabes, severe defects of ossification, and failure to thrive. Typical clinical features as low serum alkaline phosphatase, high serum calcium concentration, increased urinary calcium excretion, and nephrocalcinosis were observed. Vitamin D was withdrawn and the patient was started on calcitonin and hydrochlorothiazide. Nonetheless, the girl died at the age of 5 months from respiratory failure. RESULTS: Sequence analysis of the patient's TNSALP gene revealed two heterozygous mutations [c.653T>C (I201T), c.1171C>T (R374C)]. Transfection studies of the unique I201T variant in COS-7 cells yielded a mutant TNSALP protein with only a residual enzyme activity (3.7%) compared with wild-type, whereas the R374C variant was previously shown to reduce normal activity to 10.3%. 3D-modeling of the mutated enzyme showed that I201T resides in a region that does not belong to any known functional site. CONCLUSION: We note that I201, which has been conserved during evolution, is buried in a hydrophobic pocket and, therefore, the I>T-change should affect its functional properties. Residue R374C is located in the interface between monomers and it has been previously suggested that this mutation affects dimerization. These findings explain the patient's clinical picture and severe course.

D ESPITE intense and repeated antirejective therapy with triple combinations of cyclosporine A (CyA), cortisone (CORT), antithymocyte globuline (ATG), and consecutive monoclonal CD3 antibodies (OKT3) in acute rejection episodes, still confront transplant recipients who have relapses of acute rejection (AR). In a patient subset after allogenic TX we asked (1). Can this recipient group be characterized by risk factors? and (2) Is there an efficacious regimen for safe therapy of recurrent rejection episodes?

A mobile robot operating in the presence of other vehicles should be able to determine at any time whether some other vehicle is in the process of passing it. A concept of a recognition system for realizing this ability is introduced. An algorithm is presented that interprets the image sequence of a forward-looking camera and detects passing vehicles when they enter the field of view. Controlled correlation is used for feature extraction, and the rate of false detections is minimized by applying a motion criterion. The algorithm operates in real time. It has been tested with recorded highway scenes played back and interpreted in real time. >

To compare the functional results after transplantation of locally obtained and assigned kidneys (without taking into account HLA typing) with those after transplantation of kidneys obtained via Eurotransplant (with HLA typing as principal criterion for assignment).Between December 1983 and December 1993 a total of 236 kidneys were transplanted into 234 patients, 40 kidneys having been obtained via Eurotransplant and 196 removed locally and transplanted directly into patients on the local waiting list according to strict criteria: same blood group; waiting time since decision on transplantation; negative current crossmatch between recipient's serum and donor lymphocytes. Transplantation results were analysed retrospectively according to: ischaemia time, HLA mismatch, postoperative renal failure, postoperative renal function, rejection rate and transplant survival. Mean observation period was 55 months for the local and 50 months for the Eurotransplant kidneys.The number of HLA matches was higher in Eurotransplant group (P0.001). However, the cold ischaemia time was greater for this group (20.2 vs 15.7 hours; P0.01). Acute renal failure was less common with locally assigned kidneys (33 vs 53%: P0.02). There were no significant differences with regard to one-year and five-year renal function (serum creatinine; percentage of normal): 90.2% local vs 88.3% Eurotransplant and 81.8% vs 62.3%, respectively). Survival rates were also similar (96.9% local vs 95% Eurotransplant after one year, 94.4% vs 90% after 5 years).Local assignment by waiting time and blood group gave results that were similar to those via Eurotransplant based on HLA typing criteria.

A group of 113 patients were investigated after allogenic cadaver renal transplantation to analyse whether the small number of patients presenting acute rejection relapses could be defined by risk factors and whether there is an efficacious regimen for the safe therapy of recurrent rejection episodes. According to these results we are aware of a group of "highly reactive rejectors" especially within the younger recipients and there are further characteristics which can be identified as being associated with an elevated risk of recurrent acute rejection. By adequate antirejection therapy we can achieve a favourable transplant survival rate of 97% in the critical first year. An additional benefit may result from ALG consolidation related to suppression of the remaining CD8-positive human natural killer cells.