It is 15 short years since the curtain was finally drawn on the system of institutionalised racism that the world knew as apartheid. Memorial signifiers (such as monuments, museums, statues or street names) of its demise are writ large on South Africa’s public landscape. Yet, its pernicious effects on our inner-worlds; on memory, identity and subjectivity continue to constrain the promises of a truly post-apartheid South Africa. Trapped by a national desire to look forward rather than to the past, the everyday personal accounts of the scourge of apartheid are rapidly fading into a forgotten past.
Based on the premise that the Apartheid Archive is both public and personal and should encompass not only the spectacular but the quotidian, capillary effects of oppression and dehumanization, the Apartheid Archive Project aims, through the collection of over 5000 narratives, to examine the nature of the experiences of racism of South Africans under the old apartheid order and interrogate their continuing effects on individual and group functioning in contemporary South Africa.
The project’s first conference represents the first step towards this overarching aim. The conference will feature keynote addresses by leading scholars and social commentators in the fields of memory, racism, history and narrative, including:
Prof. Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela (abstract)
Professor Jonathan Jansen (abstract)
Dr John Kani (abstract)
Commissioner Jody Kollapen (abstract)
Professor Mahmood Mamdani (abstract)
Dr Noor Nieftagodien (abstract)
Professor Gillian Straker (abstract)
Professor Abebe Zegeye (abstract)
These luminaries, together with other conference participants will launch a long-term, multi-country project devoted to constituting and examining the Apartheid Archive as crucial to acknowledging and inscribing South Africa’s past, so as to better manage its present and future.
You can now:- Register for the conference
Note that the registration deadline is 12 June 2009. - View the final programme
- View a compendium of all speaker and play abstracts
