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24 July 2019 | Story Valentino Ndaba | Photo Valentino Ndaba
Dr Lazlo Passemiers
Dr Lazlo Passemiers spent six years conducting research across three continents.
A keen interest in unravelling transnational histories of 20th-century Southern Africa led Postdoctoral Research Fellow Dr Lazlo Passemiers to spend six years conducting extensive research across three continents. Dr Passemiers sifted through archives in Africa, Europe, and the US in order to convert his PhD thesis into a monograph.

It was on 17 July 2019 that the fruits of Passemiers’ labour were officially launched by the International Studies Group at the University of the Free State’s Bloemfontein Campus. His book, Decolonisation and Regional Geopolitics: South Africa and the ‘Congo Crisis’, 1960-1965, offers an important shift in the historiography of the Congo Crisis. It creatively centres African involvement in the debate by examining this event from a regional geopolitical angle. 

Going back in time 

By providing a three-fold perspective that examines decolonisation, apartheid diplomacy, and Southern African nationalist movements, the book offers a rounded picture of South African involvement in the Congo Crisis.

Dr Passemiers’ fascination with the transnational dynamics of Southern Africa’s history has rippled into two new research projects that respectively explore “the connection between decolonisation and white flight in the region as well as the transnational support networks of liberation movements”.

Finding the missing pieces of the puzzle

Prof Christopher Saunders, Emeritus Professor at the University of Cape Town, commended Dr Passemiers’ historiographical contribution: “He has identified a major gap in the literature and he has filled it admirably by looking across the spectrum.” As Prof Saunders noted, “what has been missing in the literature is the African angle.” 

Literature’s role in transformation

The process of undoing the profound impact of colonialism on society is long and difficult and important in this process is a clear understanding of history, which Dr Passemiers’ book enhances.

News Archive

Inaugural lecture explores the compatibility of commercial certainty and constitutionalism
2015-10-15

From the left: Prof Caroline Nicholson,
Prof Elizabeth Snyman van Deventer,
Justice Malcolm Wallis and Dr Lis Lange.

Justice Malcolm Wallis presented his inaugural lecture, entitled “Compatibility of commercial certainty and constitutionalism”, to the Faculty of Law on 17 September, 2015. The occasion was attended by faculty staff, students, and senior members of the Bloemfontein judiciary.

In her welcoming remarks, Prof Caroline Nicholson, Dean of the Faculty of Law at the UFS,  expressed the immense pride the faculty has in hosting such an occasion, and the remarkable work of Justice Wallis in the South African legal fraternity over his forty-year career.

Justice Wallis spoke of the constitution’s important role in ensuring that the law in commercial matters is enforced fairly without the prejudice or undue influence from the desire to obtain or preserve personal advantage. “Try, if you can, to conceive of a society in which commercial relationships are enforced and enforceable purely as a matter of discretion. Ask yourselves:  how would such a society function?” he said.

He reiterated that the role and the rule of law is to guide and protect parties in commercial transactions. It has considerable impact on society in how it is enforced. “Commercial disputes may seem to involve only the parties to the proceedings, but when they involve significant changes to established commercial law, their impact is inevitably wider. Such changes affect other agreements, other relationships, underlying financing transactions, and, in our modern world, contracts of insurance and reinsurance. The latter at least will always have an international dimension,” he said.

He explored specific judgements and the role the concept of “Ubuntu” played in delivering them, the fair enforcement of commercial law, and how this should be an integral part of South African law under the constitution.

 In closing, Justice Wallis stated that “in principle, the existence of a constitution and constitutional rights need not destabilise commercial law, or the reasonable expectations of business people.”

Justice Wallis has received numerous accolades locally and internationally during his long career, including his appointment as a Professor Extraordinary in the Department of Mercantile Law at the University of the Free State in 2014.



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