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Alumna Antjie Krog keynote speaker at UFS conference

22 November 2022 | Story Gerda-Marié van Rooyen

Antjie Krog at UFS — The award-winning writer, Antjie Krog, will be the keynote speaker at the International Hybrid Conference from 24 to 26 November 2022. This conference is a joint venture of the University of the Free State (UFS) Centre for Gender and Africa Studies and the War Museum.

The award-winning writer, Antjie Krog, will be the keynote speaker later this week at an International Hybrid Conference titled, The Unsung Heroines and Youth of South Africa: Violent Histories and Experiences of South African Women and Children during Wars, Conflicts and Pandemics. This conference – a joint project of the Centre for Gender and Africa Studies at the University of the Free State (UFS) and the War Museum – starts on Thursday 24 November and will be hosted at the War Museum in Bloemfontein and broadcast online. The three-day conference overlaps with the global 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence and aims to assemble historians, academics, and other scholars researching the violent histories of not only women and children in the South African War but in other wars, conflicts, and pandemics as well.

Prof Krog, an Extraordinary Professor in the Faculty of Arts at the University of the Western Cape, poet, and author of Country of my Skull (among other books), is an alumna of the UFS, where she completed a BA degree with Afrikaans, Philosophy, and English. She will deliver her keynote address, Survival, Complicity, and Race: (Im)possibilities of Narrating and Interpreting Rape in Havenga Affidavits, on the first day of the conference.

Prof Heidi Hudson, Dean of the Faculty of the Humanities at the UFS, will deliver her keynote address on Friday (25 November 2022). Prof Hudson is considered a specialist in feminist security studies. Her keynote address is titled Disciplinary and other stories: From women’s peace movements to the Women, Peace and Security ecosystem.

Several historians, academics, and scholars will either present their research or attend the conference. The conference aims to gather various stakeholders who are researching the violent histories of not only the women and children in the South African War, but other wars, conflicts, and pandemics in South African history dating from precolonial times to the World Wars, Apartheid, to the present. Each of the eight sessions over the first two days will conclude with time set aside for discussion.

The conference programme includes a visit to the art exhibition Unsung Heroes at the Oliewenhuis Art Museum on Friday after the last session. On Saturday, conference attendees can look forward to a tour of Bloemfontein. Click here for more information or send an email to vicky@anglo-boer.co.za.

News Archive

Colloquium focuses on protection of reproductive and sexual health in Africa

2011-10-28

Proff. Charles Ngwena and Loot Pretorius, both from the Department of Constitutional Law and Philosophy of Law at the UFS.
Photo: Stephen Collett

Our Department of Constitutional Law and Philosophy of Law of the Faculty of Law recently convened a two-day colloquium with the theme, ‘Strengthening protection of reproductive and sexual health in Africa through human rights’.

The colloquium built upon the work of the university’s LLM Programme in Reproductive and Sexual Rights, which trains law graduates to become specialists in reproductive and sexual health as human rights. The LLM Programme was first established in 2005. The colloquium brought together delegates from different professional backgrounds, including academia, health sciences and human-rights advocates from across the African region as well as from abroad.

Delegates addressed the theme of the colloquium in sessions organised around the topics: HIV/Aids and human rights; sexual health and sexual rights; reproductive health and rights; abortion-related issues; and the intersection between cultural and religious perspectives and sexual and reproductive health and rights.

According to Prof. Charles Ngwena, Director of the LLM Programme, and co-convener of the colloquium together with Dr Ebenezer Durojaye, Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Constitutional Law at the UFS, the discussions flowing from the papers were to:

identify a persistent gap or challenge in the respect, protection and realisation of reproductive and/or sexual health as a human right under African human rights systems; and
advance arguments and suggestions that are aimed at addressing the gap or challenge and ultimately strengthening African human rights systems.

To address the regional dimension of the colloquium, the papers delivered ultimately addressed selected reproductive and/or sexual health or right issues from a regional rather than a mere country perspective so that the experiences and challenges of the African region are captured.

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