The University of the Free State (UFS) recently hosted three authors for a discussion titled ‘Apartheid’s Legacy: Ghosts, Psyche and Trauma’. The event was aimed at exploring the lasting legacy of apartheid with academics and writers who’ve recently published books related to the topic.

The authors included Professor Saleem Badat, Research Professor in the Department of History at the UFS and author of Tennis, Apartheid and Social Justice: The First Non-Racial International Tennis Tour, 1971 (published 2023); Professor Premesh Lalu, Founding Director of the Centre for Humanities Research at the University of the Western Cape and author of Undoing Apartheid (2022); and Professor Wahbie Long, Deputy Dean in the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Cape Town and author of Nation on the Couch: Inside South Africa’s Mind (2021).

Professor Sarah Nuttall, Professor of Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand, facilitated the conversation and described the authors as “people who have been embedded in trying to undertake that post-apartheid project, as we took it then, and people who have really tried to build institutions for a different kind of future”.

The discussion took place on 12 October 2023 at the Albert Wessels Auditorium on the UFS’s Bloemfontein Campus. Professor Vasu Reddy, Deputy Vice-Chancellor for Research and Internationalisation at the UFS, described the launch as a celebratory occasion. “Books are essential to the knowledge project. They shape our teaching, learning, and research, and engage scholars,” he said.

Examining apartheid’s legacy

Prof Badat discussed his book (Tennis, Apartheid and Social Justice: The First Non-Racial International Tennis Tour, 1971), which details the first non-racial tour of Europe by black tennis players. “The book is a description of the 1971 tour by this intricate group of six young people from ages 16 to 30, who are not provided opportunities of coaching or any of that within South Africa at the time,” Badat said.

Prof Lalu’s book (Undoing Apartheid) examines unresolved critiques of apartheid by taking the reader back to 1985. “The book is an attempt to turn against my own position in 1985 – which was that we will transcend apartheid – and return to the work of study to see what we might have missed and what we squandered in our haste in overcoming apartheid.”

Prof Long said his book (Nation on the Couch: Inside South Africa’s Mind) aims to understand the problem of violence using psychoanalytic terms. “I try to give a psychoanalytic reading of violence in South Africa; not violence in its conventional and interpersonal sense, but violence broadly understood, whether I am speaking of racism, economic inequality, or gender-based violence,” he said.

In addition to discussing their books, the panel explored several themes related to the topic, including the concept of stasis through each writer’s lens, as well as the idea of non-racialism and what it means to them.