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09 March 2018 Photo Eugene Seegers
Research group rethinks white societies in Southern Africa
Profs David Roediger and Jonathan Hyslop, international delegates who presented keynote addresses at the workshop.
Poor, Precarious, White? Rethinking white societies in Southern Africa, 1930s-1990s is a two-day workshop that was recently convened by the International Studies Group (ISG) with financial support from the office of the Vice-Rector: Academic, on the University of the Free State’s (UFS) Bloemfontein Campus. The event drew together a range of historical research on poor and working-class whites across Southern Africa during the twentieth century, with the goal of uncovering wider histories of race. 

In his welcoming speech, Prof Francis Petersen, Rector and Vice-Chancellor of the UFS, stated that race and its histories have taken on a new and renewed significance, not only in South Africa, but also globally. He said, “I am very proud to see the ISG organising and hosting such a wonderful workshop. It has attracted some of the leading intellectuals in the world on critical studies related to whiteness, and though its focus is on the histories of whites, I am pleased to see that a large number of presentations concern the wider questions of race.”

Mentioning several areas of concern on the world scene, such as policies issuing forth from the Trump government in the USA, violence against new migrants across Europe, as well as challenges of race as exhibited by specific events at the UFS, Prof Petersen said that it is particularly significant for this event to be hosted on one of our campuses. Quoting from Prof Neil Roos’ inaugural lecture held the previous evening, Prof Petersen added, “The histories of race offer the opportunity to rethink the approaches and methodologies of social history, and thus revitalise … the discipline.”

Participants in the workshop came from across Southern Africa, Europe, and the United States, and included leading scholars in the field. The first keynote was by the author of the acclaimed book The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (published in 1991), Prof David Roediger, who currently serves as Foundation Professor of American Studies and History at the University of Kansas. In his keynote entitled Settlers and Immigrants in Critical Whiteness Studies, Prof Roediger dealt with topics such as Southern Whiteness and Indigeneity in Australia and New Zealand, the relationship between migration and race, as well as how the current focus on the role of the white working class in the election of Donald Trump overlooks the complicity of the middle-class and elite whites who also supported him.

The second keynote address was delivered by Prof Jonathan Hyslop of the Colgate University, on the topic Workers called White and Classes called Poor: The ‘White Working Class’ and ‘Poor Whites’ in Southern Africa, 1910-1994. Prof Hyslop offered a sweeping overview of poor and working-class white experiences in Southern Africa, suggesting attention to comparisons and connections as a way of analysing and understanding the history of the region. 

The workshop was organised by Drs Danelle van Zyl-Hermann and Duncan Money, both Postdoctoral Research Fellows in the ISG, in conjunction with Prof Neil Roos, who is also based in the ISG. The research papers presented at the workshop covered topics as diverse as the experiences of white female civil-service employees in colonial Zimbabwe, French immigrants to the apartheid-era Vanderbijlpark steelworks, and white working-class resistance to state regulation. The papers are to be published in an edited collection which will be included in the Routledge African Studies series.

News Archive

Mellon Foundation awards R10 million research grant to Trauma, Forgiveness and Reconciliation Studies
2015-02-20

Prof Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, Senior Research Professor in Trauma, Forgiveness and Reconciliation Studies, and Dr Saleem Badat, Programme Director at the Mellon Foundation.
Photo: Johan Roux

Through her profound insight, vast experience, and unfaltering belief in humanity, Prof Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, has secured a R10 million grant from one of the world’s most prestigious foundations funding human sciences research.

“This is one of the biggest grants that the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded to a university”, said Dr Saleem Badat, Program Director: International Higher Education and Strategic Projects at the Mellon Foundation. Prof Badat attended the press event that took place on 16 February 2015 on our Bloemfontein Campus.

UFS Trauma, Forgiveness, and Reconciliation Studies, spearheaded by Prof Gobodo-Madikizela, will manage the research project.

Prof Jonathan Jansen, Vice-Chancellor and Rector of the UFS, expressed great excitement “about this particular grant and the subject on which it focuses is so incredibly timely and germane to our own situation.”

Trauma, Memory and Representations of the Past: Transforming Scholarship in the Humanities and Arts

This new-found partnership between the Mellon Foundation and the UFS will enable a five-year research programme. The focus area of this initiative will be ‘Trauma, Memory and Representations of the Past: Transforming Scholarship in the Humanities and Arts’.

The research will pivot specifically around the question of how trauma is transmitted from one generation to the next. “South Africa lends itself to these questions,” Prof Gobodo-Madikizela said, “because we are now dealing with a generation of young people who were born after the traumas of the past.” These past experiences, though, are “passed on to the younger generation and become their own stories and narratives as if they themselves experienced the traumas directly.”

“This is an investment in how we can in fact create a different kind of community,” Prof Jansen said, “in which we eventually recognise each other – not by the accident of our skin, but by that elusive sense of a common humanity.”

Arts and theatre

Other aspects critical to this study are the inclusion of the arts and theatre. Many people have great difficulty in expressing their experiences of trauma in the spoken word. The arts and theatre provide an ideal platform to engage the public and stimulate conversation. As an example of the power these platforms possess, Prof Gobodo-Madikizela highlighted the success of the Johannes Stegmann Art Gallery – situated on the Bloemfontein Campus and curated by Angela de Jesus – in engaging the public in very productive ways.

Participants

Some of the artists, directors and scholars who will join in this project include:

• Lara Foot-Newton, Director/Playwright
• Sue Williamson, Activist Artist
• Angela de Jesus, Visual Artist/Curator
• Dr Buhle Zuma, Social Psychology Research
• Dr Shose Khessi, Social Psychology Research
• Prof Tamara Shefer, Women’s and Gender Studies
• Prof Kopano Ratele, Gender/Men and Masculinities
• Prof Jan Coetzee, Sociology of Developing Societies
• Prof Helene Strauss, Literary and Cultural Studies

New intellectual frontiers

“There is an aspiration in this proposal,” Dr Saleem Badat said. “We were born through this pain of colonialism and apartheid; we even went through the TRC. Our scholars in this country, our universities, should be at the forefront of this research. This is not research we can leave to the institutions in the north.”

Prof Gobodo-Madikizela agreed. “The overarching theme of this work is new knowledge production, focusing on the experiences in South Africa as experiences that can teach us something new.”

This will serve not only South Africa, but can also establish support for, and inform, countries facing similar dilemmas. In fact, “any part of the world in which genocide and murder and racism remains as legacies from the past,” Dr Badat said.

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