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Famed string instruments at home with Odeion String Quartet

16 February 2023 | Story Rulanzen Martin | Photo Anja Aucamp

Quarter of Peace_web read more — Samson Diamond, Jeanne-Louise Moolman, Prof Anmari van der Westhuizen-Joubert, and Sharon de Kock with the QoP instruments created by luthier Brian Lisus to honour SA’s Nobel peace laureates.

Hope, the viola; Freedom, the first violin; Peace, the second violin; and Reconciliation, the cello, collectively known as the Quartet of Peace (QoP), have found their home at the UFS. The Odeion String Quartet (OSQ) has been made the custodians of this world-famous quartet created by Brian Lisus. The instruments were created by Lisus in 2010 to commemorate the four Nobel peace laureates of South Africa, namely Albert Luthuli, Nelson Mandela, FW de Klerk, and Desmond Tutu. In March 2022, Lisus presented a lecture in the Odeion Theatre to officially present these instruments to the UFS.

Many new performing opportunities

“The trustees found that justice will be done by making the Odeion String Quartet the new custodians, since they are the only quartet-in-residence at a South African university,” says Prof Anmari van der Westhuizen-Joubert, cellist and Head of the OSQ.

As the custodians of the QoP, it brought many new performing opportunities, both nationally and internationally. “It can also be used in presentations of lectures on all subjects and not only of a political nature. In this way, string quartet music reaches more people than just those who go to concert halls,” Prof Van der Westhuizen-Joubert says. The OSQ consists of Prof Van der Westhuizen-Joubert (cellist), Samson Diamond (violinist and leader of the string quartet), Sharon de Kock (violinist), and Jeanne-Louise Moolman (violinist).

Unique part of UFS identity

The uniqueness of the QoP instruments will be an important element of the OSQ, the Odeion School of Music, the Faculty of the Humanities, as well as the entire UFS community. “One of the plans is to raise money to enable students to come and study with the Odeion String Quartet members at the UFS,” Prof Van der Westhuizen-Joubert says. Another historic moment with these instruments took place in October 2022, when the instruments took centre stage at a concert hosted by Prof Francis Petersen, UFS Rector and Vice-Chancellor, at Constitution Hill in Johannesburg. At this event, the QoP instruments were introduced to the public, important stakeholders, and to guests of the UFS. Other plans include trips to international festivals such as the Ojai Music Festival in the USA in 2023 and the String Quartet Biennale in Amsterdam in 2024.

*This article first appeared in the Bult Magazine.

News Archive

The TRC legitimised apartheid - Mamdani

2010-07-20

Prof. Mahmood Mamdani

“The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) accepted as legitimate the rule of law that undergirded apartheid. It defined as crime only those acts that would have been considered criminal under the laws of apartheid.”

This statement was made by the internationally acclaimed scholar, Prof. Mahmood Mamdani, when he delivered the Africa Memorial Lecture at the University of the Free State (UFS) last week on the topic: Lessons of Nuremberg and Codesa: Where do we go from here?

“According to the TRC, though crimes were committed under apartheid, apartheid itself – including the law enforced by the apartheid state – was not a crime,” he said.

He said the social justice challenges that South Africa faced today were as a result of the TRC’s failure to broaden the discussion of justice beyond political to social justice.

He said it had to go beyond “the liberal focus on bodily integrity” and acknowledge the violence that deprived the vast majority of South Africans of their means of livelihood.

“Had the TRC acknowledged pass laws and forced removals as constituting the core social violence of apartheid, as the stuff of extra-economic coercion and primitive accumulation, it would have been in a position to imagine a socio-economic order beyond a liberalised post-apartheid society,” he said.

“It would have been able to highlight the question of justice in its fullness, and not only as criminal and political, but also as social.”

He said the TRC failed to go beyond the political reconciliation achieved at Codesa and laid the foundation for a social reconciliation. “It was unable to think beyond crime and punishment,” he said.

He said it recognised as victims only individuals and not groups, and human rights violations only as violations of “the bodily integrity of an individual”; that is, only torture and murder.

“How could this be when apartheid was brazenly an ideology of group oppression and appropriation? How could the TRC make a clear-cut distinction between violence against persons and that against property when most group violence under apartheid constituted extra-economic coercion, in other words, it was against both person and property?”, he asked.

“The TRC was credible as performance, as theatre, but failed as a social project”.

Prof. Mamdani is the Director of the Institute of Social Research at the Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda; and the Herbert Lehman Professor of Government in the Department of Anthropology at the Columbia University in New York, USA.

Media Release
Issued by: Mangaliso Radebe
Assistant Director: Media Liaison
Tel: 051 401 2828
Cell: 078 460 3320
E-mail: radebemt@ufs.ac.za
20 July 2010

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