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16 May 2022 | Story Dr Nitha Ramnath

 

 

 

As a public higher-education institution in South Africa with a responsibility to contribute to public discourse, the University of the Free State (UFS) will be presenting the webinar in collaboration with News24 and the Free State Literature Festival.  The aim of the webinar series is to discuss issues facing South Africa by engaging experts at the university and in South Africa.

Some of the topics discussed by leading experts in 2021 included, among others, reimagining universities for student success; corruption in South Africa – the endemic pandemic; South African politics and the local government elections; is South Africa falling apart: where to from here; predications for 2022; and why vaccinate?

First webinar presented on 31 May 2022
There is a perception that the presence of migrants in South Africa is compromising job opportunities and is the source of crime and inadequate service delivery, among other things. People are being stopped on the street by private citizens and forced to produce identification to verify their immigration status. Some political leaders are exploiting people’s grievances for political gain and are making unfounded pronouncements about immigrants. Businesses of migrants are being looted, burned, and destroyed. People’s homes are being invaded and raided for evidence of criminal activity. Frequent attacks are being levelled and people are even killed because of how they look and because of their accent.

Is the focus and targeting of foreigners merely a smokescreen for government’s failures?
These are some of the aspects we look forward to discussing in the forthcoming webinar.

Date: Tuesday, 31 May 2022
Topic: Crime in South Africa – who is to blame?
Time: 12:30-14:00
RSVP: Alicia Pienaar, pienaaran1@ufs.ac.za by 29 May 2022


Facilitator:

Prof Francis Petersen
Rector and Vice-Chancellor, UFS

Panellists:

Adriaan Basson
Editor-in-Chief
News24

Gareth Newham
Head of the Justice and Violence Prevention Programme
The Institute for Security Studies

Prof Joy Owen
Head of Department: Anthropology
Faculty of the Humanities, UFS

Judge at the High Court of Cape Town and Judge President of the Competition Appeal Court 


Bios of speakers:

Adriaan Basson

Adriaan Basson is the editor-in-chief of News24, South Africa's biggest website. Before that, he edited Netwerk24 and the daily newspaper Beeld. He is a recipient of the CNN African Journalist of the Year award for news, the Standard Bank Sikuvile Journalist of the Year award, and the Taco Kuiper award for investigative journalism. He has reported for Beeld, the Mail & Guardian, and City Press. In 2010, he co-founded the M&G Centre for Investigative Journalism, nicknamed amaBhungane. Basson has authored four non-fiction books, the latest being Blessed by Bosasa: Inside Gavin Watson’s State Capture Cult (Jonathan Ball Publishers).

Prof Joy Owen

Prof Joy Owen is an academic, mother, and Head of the Department of Anthropology at the University of the Free State. The former head of department and deputy dean (Humanities) at Rhodes University, Prof Owen spent some time as a visiting lecturer at the University of Münster (Germany) in 2016, and as a TORCH Global South visiting professor at the University of Oxford (UK) in 2019.

Prof Owen’s primary research love is African transnational migration. Her monograph, titled Congolese social networks: Living on the margins in Muizenberg, Cape Town, detailed the lives of transnational Congolese migrants residing in Muizenberg in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Her work homes in on the complex ways in which African transnational migrants create and maintain belonging in post-apartheid South Africa. Focusing particularly on social networks, Prof Owen demonstrates how contingency, strategy, love, and habitus support onward migration (or not).

A second research flirtation is embodied in critical pedagogy that recognises students as knowledge holders and producers through their experiences prior to and during higher education. Students are critical teaching and learning collaborators in classroom spaces, however defined. As an invisible pioneer, ‘Just Joy’ – as described by one of the students she supervises – merges both head and heart in her teaching, as she encourages students to become critically conscious of the world they have inherited and are creating, and the ways in which all forms of oppression can and need to be collectively addressed.

Prof Owen’s work, including her research, teaching, and administrative work, unobtrusively pulls apart academic and social binaries, making the world safer for the appreciation and celebration of difference – the primary marker of humanity.

Gareth Newham

Gareth Newham has spent the past 26 years working to promote public safety and justice in South Africa. In January 2010, he joined the Institute for Security Studies (ISS), which is an independent Pan-African organisation that undertakes policy research, technical support, and capacity building to enhance human security across Africa.

Newham currently heads the Justice and Violence Programme, which consists of a team of people working to inform government policy and practice, and to promote public awareness on effective responses to preventing and reducing violence, crime, and corruption, and improving the performance of the criminal justice system in South Africa.

He regularly publishes both nationally and internationally, and regularly briefs various government departments, parliamentary committees, civil society organisations, the private sector, international audiences, and the media on his areas of work. From 2016 and 2018, he served on the independent ‘Panel of Experts on Policing and Crowd Management,’ appointed by the Cabinet. More recently, he was a contributing author to an internationally published book, titled ‘Police Integrity in South Africa.’

Prior to joining the ISS, Newham held the positions of Strategic Adviser and Special Projects Manager to the Gauteng Provincial Minister (MEC) for Community Safety (2006-2009). He also served as Project Manager in the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation (1999-2005), and Project Manager in the Institute for Democracy in South Africa (1995-1998).

Justice Dennis Davis

Judge Dennis Davis, who retired from the bench in December 2020, was educated at the Herzlia School and the Universities of Cape Town and Cambridge. He served as judge of the High Court of Cape Town (since 1998) and Judge President of the Competition Appeal Court (since February 2000). He is honorary professor at the Universities of Cape Town, the Western Cape, Wits and is an extraordinary professor in the University of the Free State Centre for Human Rights. He is also Chair of the Davis Tax Committee and was one of the drafters of the Competition Act 1998 and the Companies Act 2008. He authored 11 books and held visiting professorial posts at the universities of Toronto, Melbourne, Harvard, Florida Brown, Georgetown and New York University. Judge Davis received an honorary doctorate from the University of the Free State in April 2022.

 


News Archive

Sites of memory. Sites of trauma. Sites of healing.
2015-04-01

Judge Albie Sachs – human rights activist and co-creator of South Africa’s constitution – presented the first Vice Chancellor’s Lecture on Trauma, Memory, and Representations of the Past on 26 March 2015 on the Bloemfontein Campus.

His lecture, ‘Sites of memory, sites of conscience’, forms part of a series of lectures that will focus on how the creative arts represent trauma and memory – and how these representations may ultimately pave the way to healing historical wounds. This series is incorporated into the five-year research project, led by Prof Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, and funded by the Mellon Foundation.

Sites of memory and conscience – and healing

“Deep in solitary confinement, I read in the Bible: ‘the lion lay down with the lamb … swords will be beaten into ploughshares.’” And with these opening words, Judge Sachs took the audience on a wistful journey to the places in our country that ache from the past but are reaching for a better future at the same time.

Some of the sites of memory and conscience Judge Sachs discussed included the Apartheid Museum, Liliesleaf, District Six Museum, and the Red Location Museum. But perhaps most powerful of them all is Robben Island.

Robben Island

“The strength of Robben Island,” Judge Sachs said, “comes from its isolation. Its quietness speaks”. Former prisoners of the island now accompany visitors on their tours of the site, retelling their personal experiences. It was found that, the quieter the ex-prisoners imparted their stories, “the gentler and softer their memories; the more powerful the impact,” Judge Sachs remarked. Instead of anger and denouncement, this reverence provides a space for visitors’ own emotions to emerge. This intense and powerful site has become a living memory elevated into a place of healing.

After Judge Sachs visited the National Women’s Memorial in Bloemfontein some years ago, he came to an acute realisation as he read the stories, experienced the grief, and saw the small relics that imprisoned commandoes from Ceylon and St Helena sculpted. “It’s so like us,” he thought, “our people on Robben Island making a saxophone out of seaweed, our people carving little things. It was so like us. It was another form of inhumanity to human beings in another period.”

The Constitutional Court

The Constitutional Court next to the Old Fort Prison is also a profound site of trauma and healing. Bricks from the awaiting trial lock-up were built into the court chambers. “We don’t suppress it, we don’t say let’s move on. We acknowledge the pain of the past. We live in it, but we are not trapped in it. We South Africans are capable of transcending, of getting beyond it,” Judge Sachs said.

Transforming swords into ploughshares

Judge Sachs had great praise for Prof Gobodo-Madikizela’s research project on Trauma, Memory, and Representations of the Past. “You convert and transform the very swords, the very instruments, the very metal in our country. In a sense, you almost transform the very people and thoughts and dreams and fears and terrors into the ploughshares; into positivity.”

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