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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

Transforming lives through reading

2014-08-11

The UFS Library and Information Services visited Lekhulong Senior Secondary School as one of their community development projects commemorating Mandela Day on 25 June 2014. Situated in the Bloemfontein township of Rocklands, the school’s library was depleted of books and in need of a total revamp. The group of change agents under the guidance and leadership of Marcus Maphile, Assistant Director: Information Services, consisted of seventeen library staff members, library ambassadors and volunteers from Student Life and Leadership.

A total of 450 books were donated to the school. The range of books was made up of mainly dictionaries and encyclopaedias. Fifty of these copies were acquired through the ‘Buy or Donate a Book’ campaign run by the library earlier this year.

In thanking the UFS library, the school’s principal, Mash Mawasha said reading has always been a challenge for his learners and that he is confident that this will be a major turning point for them.

The Director of Library Services, Betsy Eister, expressed the UFS library’s commitment to this project. She pledged regular visits to the school to ensure that Lekhulong library staff are trained on how to run the library and that teachers include library books in their teaching.

“We try to ensure that by the time learners arrive at universities,” Maphile said, “they have exposure to libraries, that they acquire a love for reading books and most importantly have confidence not only to express themselves but to use the library system efficiently.”

The book donation programme has been running successfully for two years and apart from revitalising school libraries in disadvantaged communities, the UFS library staff provides training and support to teacher librarians. Next year, the team plans to extend their project to another community in Bloemfontein – that of Headstart High School.

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