in a perpetual state of disaster and creating a normalised life, even if it is built on anomalous arrangements,
Prof Nyasha Mboti launched his newly published book,
Apartheid Studies: A Manifesto, on the UFS Qwaqwa Campus on 25 July 2023.
Prof Mboti is an Associate Professor and Head of the Department of Communication Science at the University of the Free State and is the pioneer and founder of Apartheid Studies, a new interdisciplinary field of study from the Global South, which utilises the notion of ‘apartheid’ as a paradigm by which to understand the confounding persistence and permanence of harm, oppression, and injustice.
Oppressive systems persist in modern South Africa
Making reference to the pass laws that were a dominant form/tool of oppression and segregation during the country’s apartheid system, he said apartheid created a “paradigm of life where things that aren’t supposed to go on, go on.
Life has to go on even in oppression. People have the capacity to live with harm, and apartheid banks on people’s capacity to go on”.
The daring book posits itself as a first-of-its-kind authoritative study of the phenomenon of apartheid, shedding light on the continuing impact of apartheid decades after its formal abolishment and exploring the idea that while it was intended as a temporary phenomenon, it became deeply ingrained and normalised, persisting in various forms today.
“What apartheid is, is a temporary phenomenon that has become permanent. That is my argument. This book is an attempt to leverage how we live with harm as a way of doing something about it and hopefully putting an end to it. If you can go on one day living in harm and the next, before you know it, four decades of living under Apartheid from day to day have passed. Until we understand it, it persists,” he said.
By asking whether one would queue for a dompas, Prof Mboti challenged the audience to reflect on how oppressive systems persist when normalised, even when inflicting profound harm.
“Would you queue for a dompas? If your answer is yes, then for me, that is an indication that Apartheid persists. Harm persists. Until we understand it, it persists.”