WR 150: Strategies for Researching Apartheid
Choose a Topic. This is the crucial first step.
Select a topic that interests you. Your own curiosity will be a bigger incentive to finish the paper than just getting a grade.
Not too broad: "Education in South Africa" could fill volumes. Narrow it down to a time period or comparison of two time periods. Look at curriculum for elementary school. Look at funds allocated to Black African students as compared to White students.
But not too narrow! A day in the life of one student in South Africa is not sufficient for a paper - unless you can tie in the events with broader issues.
Be sure you can find information. It would be fascinating to explore the racism in beauty pageants in South Africa - but can you find anything that's been written about it?
Start from what you know: your class reading and lectures, what you've read in the media or heard in other classes. If you don't feel you know enough to devise a topic, do some basic reading. Recommended reading:
Africa South of the Sahara AFR ST DT 351 F71
Survey of Race Relations in South Africa Mugar DT 763 F535
(From the 1950s through the early 1990s, the South African Institute of Race Relations, a non-governmental organization, published an annual report on conditions in all sectors of South African life (including education, employment, housing, politics and more) and what effect apartheid had on people.)South Africa as apartheid ends : an annotated bibliography with analytical introductions AFR ST DT 1719 S78 1993
South Africa (World Bibliographical Series) DT 753 D38 1994
Do a quick check to see what resources you're likely to find before it's too late to change.
For most research projects you will need a combination of books, articles and online resources. Books are longer, usually broader, take longer to write and longer to publish. Articles may be published in academic journals, popular magazines, or newspapers. They are usually shorter, more narrowly focused, and take less time to write and publish. Online resources may be the means by which you obtain books and articles, or may be web sites or documents posted on web sites. Each type of material has its advantages and disadvantages.
Books
To find books in the BU Libraries, go to the online catalog. A WORD search will tell the computer to check the title, notes, and other parts of each book's record for the words you type in. A SUBJECT search will match the term you use with terms used as subject headings. Between the two strategies, you are likely to find some books that look good. Broaden your search by looking at books with the same subject headings, or books that are nearby on the shelf.
Articles
The best way to find articles is by using indexes. See the Electronic Resources for African Studies page or the list of all the indexes owned by the library. Some recommended indexes for African projects:
AfricaBib: a free index focused on Africa
Project Muse: a subscription database of scholarly journals linking to full text of articles.
Jstor: a subscription database of older issues of scholarly journals, with links to full text.
Be a detective; look for clues; follow up leads. If words that relate to your topic don't yield anything in a catalog search, look at broader works on South Africa. Use the index in the back of the book to see if the topic or incident you are researching is listed. Think of other words that might be used to indicate your topic.
When you find a good book or article, look for more by that author. Look at the author's bibliography and notes. These tell you what she read to come to her conclusions. Get more information from these other sources.
Talk! Scholarly communication isn't limited to tweedy old fellows with beards. Talk about your ideas and research with your instructor, with librarians, with fellow students, with teachers in other courses.
How do you decide if an author knows what he's talking about? There's been a lot of propaganda and disinformation written about South Africa throughout its history. Different people have different opinions and beliefs. What they write as fact may be influenced by those beliefs.
Who is the author? What else has she written? What organizations does he represent? Can you find out his ethnic, religious, or philosophical background? Can you get clues from the publication?
What can you guess about the philosophy of an author writing in the journal African Communist? Can you trust a report on Black South African workers' conditions published by the South African Ministry of Information in 1975?
Who is the publisher? When was the work written? What kind of vocabulary appears in the text?
What can you guess about a work that refers to "bloody Kaffirs"? About an author who describes events as evidence of "imperialist greed"?
Notes and Bibliography: Credit Where Credit is Due
The guide to citation styles will be helpful. Your main concern is that you give credit where credit is due: quoting or paraphrasing without citing the source is plagiarism. The other reason for citing sources is so that your readers can find them. Be clear, be accurate.
Build your bibliography and list of references as you do your research. Don't assume you'll remember where you read that perfect quote.