The programme speaks to some of the questions, contestations, contradictions and critical concerns that arise when reflecting on the meaning, quality, and lived experience of freedom.
Leading feminist voices and scholars, Professor Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela and Malaika Mahlatsi (who writes as Malaika wa Azania) will address these questions across generations at a public lecture and conversation on 23 and 24 April.
“Apologies in the Shadow of the South African TRC: The Faultlines of a Closed Text”- 23 April at 13:00 at the South Campus Council Chambers.
“The Born-Free Generation Revisited: A Conversation on Youth, Power and Democracy with Malaika wa Azania” – 24 April at 13:00 at the Conference Centre on North Campus.
In the opening pages of her landmark study What is Slavery to Me? (2010), Prof Pumla Dineo Gqola, Professor of Literary and Cultural Studies and the NMU-DSI-NRF SARChI Chair in African Feminist Imaginations, points to the complexities of freedom in post-apartheid South Africa.
Reflecting on the hopeful dawn of democracy, she writes: “The new dispensation came to symbolise the promise of freedom and multiple beginnings: individually and collectively, 27 April 1994 was an invitation to envision ourselves differently.” Sixteen years later, Gqola would reflect that “we are both free and not entirely free of apartheid.” And 32 years later, her words continue to echo.
Revisiting the TRC, 30 years later
“Few topics stake a more compelling claim on humanities research than the legacies of historical trauma. Apartheid, colonialism, slavery and other watershed moments of crimes against humanity in the 20th century are not events in “the past”. They are a history whose traumatic repercussions reverberates across multiple generations.” - Professor Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, The Conversation
Prof Gobodo-Madikizela’s career has been shaped by a sustained engagement with trauma, exploring concepts, such as “remorse”, “forgiveness” and “repair” in post-apartheid South Africa. Her work introduces the ideas of the “reparative quest” and “reparative humanism,” offering ways to confront enduring legacies of violence.
On 23 April, the acclaimed scholar will deliver the first “Feminist Focus on Violence” lecture, reflecting on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission 30 years on.
Addressing how violence shapes relationships, she argues that dealing with the past remains “unfinished business,” as the afterlife of trauma is complex and unpredictable, often exceeding terms like “forgiveness” and “reconciliation.”
This lecture forms part of a multi-year series bringing leading feminist scholars to Mandela University to share research on violence across disciplines.
As the DSI-NRF South African Research Chair in Violent Histories and Transgenerational Trauma and Director of the Centre for the Study of the Afterlife of Violence and the Reparative Quest (AVReQ) at Stellenbosch University, Prof Gobodo-Madikizela’s work spans trauma studies and psychoanalysis.
Her publications include the critically acclaimed and award-winning A Human Being Died That Night: A Story of Forgiveness (2003) and Memory, Narrative and Forgiveness: Perspectives on the Unfinished Journeys of the Past (2007).
In the 1990s, she chaired the Human Rights Violations Committee in the Western Cape office of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Cape Town, a body she continues to revisit in her research, most recently through the project “Aesthetics of Trauma, Poetics of Repair.”
This project reexamines selected testimonies to explore the meaning of trauma and its transgenerational effects in post-apartheid South Africa.
Revisiting the Born-Free Generation
In Malaika Mahlatsi’s work, theory and practice are inextricably linked. Her scholarship centres on spatial justice, placing black women, often pushed to the margins, at the core of her thinking. Her early book, Memoirs of a Born-Free: Reflections on the Rainbow Nation (2014), was among the first to critically examine what freedom means for the so-called born-free generation.
Twelve years later, Mahlatsi joins a public conversation on the Born-Free Generation Revisited. She will be in dialogue with Professor Babalwa Magoqwana, Director of CWGS, and Keneilwe Natu.
Natu is an emerging historian, researcher, and writer based in Gqeberha. She is currently a research assistant with the Research Chair for Critical Studies in Higher Education Transformation (CriSHET) at Nelson Mandela University.
Her work is grounded in socially engaged, decolonial research, and her activism reflects a commitment to transforming higher education, concerns that resonate with Mahlatsi’s scholarship.
Mahlatsi is a scholar, geographer, urban planner and author whose work spans public service, spatial justice, and environmental protection.
Her academic background includes three master’s degrees: Water Resource Science (Rhodes University), Urban and Regional Planning (University of Johannesburg), and Public Affairs (Tshwane University of Technology). She is currently pursuing a PhD at the University of Bayreuth in Germany, focusing on the gendered geographies of gentrification in African cities.
Together with her academic work, Mahlatsi is a prominent public intellectual and columnist, contributing to Eyewitness News, The Sowetan, and The Herald. She is a frequent speaker on issues shaping contemporary democracy.
As she has noted: “Black youth, and young black women in particular, need support, protection and solidarity so that their humanity is not disregarded.”
Her bestselling and award-winning books include Memoirs of a Born Free: Reflections on the Rainbow Nation (2014), Corridors of Death: The Struggle to Exist in Historically White Institutions (2020) and Why We Vote For The ANC: Voices of Gauteng Youth (2024).
Her award-winning books include Memoirs of a Born-Free: Reflections on the Rainbow Nation (2014), Corridors of Death: The Struggle to Exist in Historically White Institutions (2020), and Why We Vote for the ANC: Voices of Gauteng Youth (2024).
Mahlatsi’s work, alongside that of Prof Gobodo-Madikizela, reflects a shared commitment to imagining feminist futures, central to the freedom concerns of the CWGS and the Chair.
Join us for a rich two-day series of programming in Freedom Month, where we will engage the legacies of the past and the ways that it continues to shape the present, across generations.
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