Southern Africa Seminar Events Archive

Violence, memory and commemoration: Perspectives from southern, east and central Africa  9 December 2011, Birkbeck   

See blog post by Sarah Duff on this event

Tom Lodge (University of Limerick)
Sharpeville and Memory

Rachel Ibreck (University of Limerick)
The Time of Mourning: The Politics of Commemorating the Tutsi Genocide in Rwanda

Annie Coombes (Birkbeck College) 
Learning from the Lari Massacre(s): Object Lessons from Contemporary Kenya

Discussant:  JoAnn McGregor (UCL)

 

South Africa on Film  10 June 2011, Birkbeck

Brian Willan
'Cinematographic calamity' or 'soul-stirring appeal to every Briton': Reactions to Birth of a Nation in England and South Africa, 1915-1931

Emma Sandon (Birkbeck College)
The African Mirror Newsreel and African Film Productions Documentaries: Non-fiction film production in South Africa, 1910-1950

Jacqueline Maingard (University of Bristol)
'Assignment Africa': Colonial imaginaries and Donald Swanson's African Jim (1949) and The Magic Garden (1951) in South African film history

Neil Parsons
Early southern African movies and the lingering ambiguities of South African Union, 1910-1923

 

Law, Policing and Human Rights in South Africa  25 March 2011, Birkbeck

Keith Shear (University of Birmingham)
Tested loyalties: Police, politics and the Second World War in South Africa

Saul Dubow (University of Sussex)
Human rights and citizenship in South Africa: A long and fractured tradition

Pippa Lane (Centre for Social and Economic Inclusion)
'Heroes as ordinary people': A social and cultural history of political imprisonment in South Africa, 1960-1992

Paul Trewhela
Democracy, race, security and corruption: Issues in the ANC and the South African Communist Party in exile 

 

South Africa and the Black British Anti-apartheid Solidarity with the Southern African Liberation Struggle, 1970-1990  5 November 2010, Goldsmiths

Introductory speaker:  Professor Shula Marks OBE, FBA (Historian)

Panel 1:  The Anti-Apartheid Movement and Black Communities
Chair: Professor Harry Goulbourne (South Bank University)
Chitra Karve (ACTSA Chair, solicitor, human rights activist)
Suresh Kamath (ACTSA Treasurer)
Glenroy Watson (Trade unionist)
Dr Elizabeth Williams (Historian, librarian, Goldsmiths)

Panel 2: Black Solidarity with the Anti-Apartheid Struggle
Chair: Dr Hakim Adi (University of Middlesex)
Alex Pascall OBE (Writer and broadcaster, oral historian)
Onyekachi Wambu (Author and journalist)
Bini Brown (Community activist)
Kimathi Donkor (Artist and activist)

Guest convenor: Dr Elizabeth Williams (Goldsmiths)

Imagining the City  30 April 2010, Birkbeck

See abstracts

Professor Vivian Bickford Smith (University of Cape Town and Institute of Historical Research)
South African cities in film: Johannesburg, Cape Town and Durban from the 1890s to the 1960s

Oliver Murphy (Oxford)
‘I have seen the illness. We have found the medicine’. From local struggles to national ‘imagination’ (and back again): Langa and Nyanga, 1959 – 63

Madalina Florescu (SOAS, University of London)
Listening to and imagining others’ whereabouts at the Catholic Mission in Luanda: An ethnographer’s perspective

Lizzy Attree
AIDS and the city – Shared spaces of infection

Discussant: Professor Jennifer Robinson (University College London)

 

Cities in Southern Africa: Migrants and Urban Agents  26 February 2010, Birkbeck

See abstracts and download event poster

Busani Mpofu (University of Edinburgh)
The Urban Poor and the ‘Rebuilding’ Programme in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, 2005-7

Rebekah Lee (Goldsmiths College, University of London)
Death ‘On the Move’: Funerals, Entrepreneurs and the Rural-Urban Nexus in South Africa

Professor Paul Jenkins (Herriot-Watt University and Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture)
Changing Attitudes to Land in the Expanding Urban Areas of Xilunguine/Lourenco Marcques/Maputo

Debbie Potts (King’s College, University of London)
Making a Livelihood In (and Beyond) the African City

Discussant:  Professor Terence Ranger (University of Oxford)

 
Identities and Imaginaries in South Africa  4 December 2009, SOAS

See abstracts and download event poster

Ian McQueen (University of Sussex)
Black Consciousness in Dialogue: Steve Biko, Richard Turner and the Durban Moment in South Africa, 1970 - 1974

Rachel Bright (University of East Anglia)
Who is a ‘real’ South African? The Cape Election and Chinese Indentured Labour, 1903 -4

Joel Cabrita (Cambridge)
Everyday Literacy: How Handwriting and Printing Presses Make Power in the South African Nazareth Church

Sarah Duff (Birkbeck College)
‘Saving the Children to Save the Nation’: Poverty, Whiteness and Childhood in the Cape Colony, c. 1890 – 1899

Discussant: Professor Vivian Bickford-Smith (University of Cape Town and Institute of Historical Research)