 Hi everybody, welcome to today's event on de facto in De Jury apartheid in South Africa. Very happy to have you. I feel like we've actually with a bunch of warm bodies in this closed space transported ourselves climatologically to South Africa for a few hours. But we're going to go there intellectually, historically, politically in a moment with our distinguished mini-panel of speakers, Yasir Henry and Heidi Grumbau. I'm John Torchari. I'm a professor at the Ford School and I also am an affiliate of a couple of the centers and initiatives here at the International Institute. We at the International Policy Center are grateful for the support from the African Studies Center here in the International Institute as well as our Center for Public Policy and Diverse Societies and the Dean's Office for cosponsoring this event. We're very lucky to have two people who are extremely experienced both as scholars and as advocates for reconciliation and justice in South Africa. We're also especially privileged that they have a long experience of working together and the discussion that we're about to participate in is one that's been going as the subtitle for today's event suggests for a couple of decades now. As the country continues along its arduous path toward reconciliation, intellectual and leaders and advocates such as Yasir and Heidi have been at the forefront of that and they're going to share some of their insights and experiences with us today. Let me introduce them really briefly. Heidi is a scholar and a writer. She's a senior researcher at the Center for the Humanities Research at the University of the Western Cape in South Africa. Her work focuses on aesthetic and social responses to the afterlives of war and mass atrocities or violence, politics of memory and memorialization and also the geographies of displacement of South Africa, Germany and more recently Israel-Palestine. She's the author of Memorializing the Past, a 2011 book about everyday life in South Africa after the TRC. She's also been involved in a number of other academic projects and some of you had the pleasure and privilege of seeing the film that she did with Mark Kaplan yesterday. That's entitled The Village Under the Forest. If you weren't able to make it yesterday, I really highly recommended to you and I believe you said it's available now on iTunes and so people can look for this after the event. It's going to touch on some of the same themes and also draw connections between today's discussion and another of the sort of difficult processes of reconciliation that's underway in the Near East. Yassir Henry is my friend and colleague from the Ford School who teaches there. He's a scholar, a writer, a strategist and also a professional human rights advocate. Yassir has written and published on the political economy of social voice, memory, trauma, identity, peace processes and transitional justice. His current research and writing are focused on how structural and administrative violence come to be institutionalized during post-colonial transitions and so you can hear both from the title of Heidi's book that I mentioned and Yassir's current project. Both of them are working as intellectuals on the exact themes that we're going to be discussing today. He's got in-depth experience, Yassir and social and political movements, in fact that's a very personal connection to these issues as well as a professional intellectual one as well as a lot of experience in political strategy and conflict management. So what I've asked our panelists to do is to start off by each helping to frame our conversation speaking for about 10 minutes apiece. I'm then going to pose a couple of questions to sort of feed into a conversation and dialogue between the two of them and then I hope that as we go along you'll feed in with comments and questions so we make this as conversational and informal as possible. So let's all first thank Heidi and Yassir and then last let me start with you. Thank you for coming in this beautifully warm winter, January day in Ann Arbor, my favorite place to spend my time during the winter. Especially when it's like this, doesn't mean I'm not aware of what Alnino is doing to other parts of the world. Just I'm not very saddened by the fact that it's like I walk around without wearing five layers of down and this is a dedication to all of you that came from a 717 class. I'm going to use this technology today because I talk too much usually. Maybe not. So I want to dedicate this panel and talk to the mothers and the families of those who lost their children during the anti-apartheid war. And too many of them today continue to love the consequences not only of apartheid but the defense of apartheid locally as well as globally and remain extremely vulnerable today as we speak. The title of my talk is apartheid South Africa, a crime which endures on the framing, of course, is in the title that you have before you. I was born in South Africa at the time. It had become infamous both in South Africa and the rest of the world, not only because it actively created and enacted and also defended violently the system which came to be known as apartheid. But also because there were so many who actually thought it was a good thing. At the same time, this word, apartheid, was associated with a growing movement globally inside South Africa as well as elsewhere for the stand taken by many people to end it, oftentimes at great risk to themselves and their families. Making a legal and political distinction between the material realities produced by different forms are political and social apartheid as practice is a very important one to make intellectual. Such conceptual understandings of human rights travesties are crucial for mediating and also coming to terms with a global model responsibility to engage oppression and the human devastation which such oppressive systems cause, especially for those of us who consider ourselves global citizens and who care also for humanity. Such oppressive systems should affront all of humanity. This seems obvious, but as many of us know, it is not always so. In order to fight such crimes, understanding that such systems are created, also as systems of benefit and systems of loss in the socio-structural and the meta-ethical spheres of our everyday life is important. The discourse and discourses which justify and allow for legal, social, economic and political damage to be perpetuated and lived as normality has to be apprehended. Documents which form the basis for global moral ideals, sometimes not only and not always curated by the United Nations organization, are too often read as useless documents because the material realities of the present seems always at odds with the human and moral ideals experienced by those of us engaged in human rights hypocrisy and too often times argued as future impossibilities. The system of apartheid in South Africa was labeled a crime against humanity by the United Nations organization General Assembly on the 16th of December 1966, which was endorsed by the United Nations Security Council in 1984. And in November 1973, the General Assembly adopted the apartheid convention, declaring, and this is very important for those of us who live in South Africa as well as those of us who live in the US, declaring systematic oppression of groups and persons, groups of persons as an international crime. Now I have many pages here. I printed them in 14 font so that I can read because I lost my specs. So don't think I'm going to be speaking for too long. And I'm very serious. I wanted to break that seriousness a little bit as part of my news resolution. The South African state's political failure to adhere to the model of precepts contained not only in the Universal Declaration on Human Rights after 1948, but also in the charter of the United Nations in 1945, I will argue and have argued is central to causing the civil conflict in South Africa, which endured formally and legally until 1994 and continues to endure socially today, despite for nearly 15 years there being a global acceptance that, apart as a crime, has been settled. It has not been settled. Negotiations, political settlements, and peacemaking during war always exist within very complex interplays of politics, of law, and of morality. Such inherent and intersecting relations of power include the persistence of structures of dominance related to the initiating instance of violence. And these should be regarded as pivotal in understanding how the context of political transition are the context of resistance to oppression, textures, the nature of conflict, as well as the nature of conflict management and the nature of settlement. Colonial settlements, especially in Anglo-Foreland, Africa, but not only, have almost always included a moral paradox, seamed into the peacemaking process and into human rights settlement questions. This moral paradox is crucial to understanding the political and legal settlement of conflict. But it does not necessarily, and for me, this is important, it does not necessarily lead to longer term social and economic settlement, so important in terms of social and economic rights in constructing and manifesting the idea of a sustainable and a longer term peace of the war. So initial settlements as ongoing social dialogues need to be constantly managed in policy frames, legally, as well as in society as a whole. The role of transitional justice mechanisms, such as truth commissions and acts of official public apologies, are important in shaping reproductive narratives, which follow some national settlements of the conflict and civil strife. But unfortunately, and I don't mean to be just the harbinger of doom, but I think it's important to understand this conceptually, they do not settle all the questions central to the conflict, nor to broader moral ideas and ideals of human rights. Such questions and challenges remain a part of the democratic state's quest for greater social cohesion of the conflict. Such historical dialogic processes may continue unofficially long after constitutional democracies have been inaugurated. They do not provide for human rights settlement miraculously, neither, and just as wars do not just occur out of the ether. The consequences of systems like apartheid whether to juror or de facto all find their genesis in the law, here I speak of the law as a constituting and a constitutive law. The law, in this sense, is political, and it is historically, and it is morally constructed. It is not natural. It is administered by states, and it is administrative, and it is lived through complex governmental procedures and policies. In complex societies, legal and political professionals create and mediate the law, as the concept of law has a responsibility to regulate the peace based on the moral precepts inherent to the constitution of the law. Now universally applicable, regardless of individuated, organizational, or institutional opinion. Therefore, the law, as well as those who curate the law, are responsible to the live and material conditions which such consequences produce. Feeling, thinking, and speaking human rights ideals as a responsibility to the public domain beyond the moral, social, and political paralysis sometimes experienced both interpsychrically as well as psychologically largely in the social political body, or generally social political psyche of the collective body of the people, of the people, of the global people. Article 56 and Article 55 read very easily, but they relate to the softer elements of politics, law, and morality. And this is articles of the chart of the United Nations. Article 55, with the view to the creation of the conditions of stability and well-being, which are necessary for peaceful and friendly relations amongst nations based on respect for the principle of equal rights and self-determination of people, the United Nations shall promote higher standards of living, full employment, and the conditions of economic and social progress and development. Section B, Article 55, solutions to international economic, social, health, and related problems, and international cultural and educational cooperation, and the universal respect for and observance of human rights and fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language, or religion. Article 56 says, all members pledge themselves to take joint separate action in cooperation with the organization for the achievement of the purposes set forth in Article 55. Therefore, the public representation of witnessing of recovery and of testimony after administrative, legal, historical, and political violence, as I said before, always exist within certain sociocultural, structural, economic, and interpretive, as well as narrative settings. The production of the official voice during systematic processes claiming to settle all human rights questions is thus imbued with such inherent and intersecting relations of power which mediate all such claims. An important secondary part to the actual settlement process are always and are the ways in which violence during conflict, along with the experience of human rights abuses and atrocities, come to be publicly represented, accepted, and accepted by the multiple parties previously involved in the war. Now, the legacy and lived as the legacy of war, those able and capable to articulate themselves systemically voice in the political body politic of society and voicing articulated legally, officially, and publicly. And if this is so, then silence, especially social legal and political silence, as well as the process of silencing the experience and articulation of vulnerability in the context of social violence is not innocent. These consequences are lived as experience in society, local, national, and as part of the global public's experience, a complex and simultaneous experience that has a context of loss, of benefit, of perpetration, of victimhood, and is thus made possible by those of us who stand by as if we are not also beneficiaries. And yet I speak of myself as a global citizen. And therefore it's important for me to distinguish first between the first and the second and the third order of beneficiary and perpetration group experience, because these allow actors who are engaging in the discourse of domination and human rights to address this idea of a psychic impossibility as a cure to the ills of society, to the ills of war, and to the ills of violence. Silencing this possibility, this ideal, this willingness to self-particulate as individuals and as groups, I'm arguing here is the ideal of both imperialistic practice as well as imperialistic discourse. It starts with a negative, so. We don't have any moments. Okay, nearly done. So the questions, and you have these questions before you, is the official record of human rights violations, abuse, and atrocity enough to ensure systemic and administrative change in accordance with human rights claims, before and during settlement processes of the violence and conflict? What does it mean to give up that right once the conflict has ended and the peace has just begun? For me what's important to note so that I'm not just depressing. Okay, that was supposed to be funny. No, sir. Is that official recognition and acknowledgement of pain and abuse is crucial to the ending of atrocity, but it is only the beginning of the recovery of the repressive and of the restitute of process. It does not end with a peace settlement. Apartments systems are administrative. Therefore they are also social and political systems and they are constructed ideologically as well as legally. They're not simple aberrations to human ideals created by bad human apples. It is expedient for people like myself who benefit from such systems to think. So, and here I, like I said, I've included myself and I want to state that categorically. I don't see myself free of the beneficiary classes. For these systems to be engaged effectively, they have to be addressed at every level where they exist, including the post-legal structures which live on as they factor were parted. Hidden in the case of South Africa has resolved human rights miracle in the US, for example, as a fantasy of post-racialism. As intellectual, it is crucial for us to explore and reflect critically on the socio-political, the psychosocial and the socioeconomic inflections contained in the processes of testifying to pain. Caused by such systems in which I lived both unofficially and officially in the public domain as normal. So I want to conclude, how the complex meanings and framings attached to such articulations by multiple communities involved in the South African conflict during the apartheid in South Africa as well as in the rest of the world because South Africa was an international crime. It did not only exist on the land, the geospacificity and the geopolitical sphere of the nation called the Republic of South Africa. It was supported, enabled and articulated elsewhere and it has a history deeply rooted in the colonial practice and the theft of our land. Doing so will directly impact this violence, legally, administratively, socially, politically, morally and economically. So the local and global framing of the dominant, those groups who directly are responsible for perpetrating and defending atrocity as well as those who benefit from the context of atrocity and the ways in which human rights violation come to be legally and morally framed during and after official process of transitions from atrocity to democracy, now lived as normality. It is not normal in my opinion intellectually, both as advocate and as scholar, to live death as social experience as normality. So it is my opinion that such an analysis and theoretical endeavor may contribute to the historical understanding of why specific groups may come, may over time come to feel that the benefits of the peace process do not adequately account for their perceived loss, real and intellectual, long after the transitional process managing what is a crime against humanity has officially ended. And I want to say that this needs and continues to be managed in the policy sphere and in the legal sphere and in the political sphere after the transitional phase so that the dream of a democracy, the dream, the possibility of a lived peace may live. Thank you, Yas. Hi, everyone, just to thank you again to reiterate John Chochari, Yasir Henry and Paira for working so hard and with incredible kind of positive energy to invite me here to Michigan. It's a huge honor and I'm very grateful to be here. About 20 years ago, Yasir and I began a conversation which will probably end when whatever's written in the stars for who of us goes into our graves first, I think that it will be the end of the conversation. And I think maybe that's important, is to question the normality of beginnings and ends. So let me start with, I suppose, something that should have been a beginning, but that was actually an end which began 20 years ago towards the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission. It's generated a whole industries, scholarly industry, global kind of policy, transitional justice. The South African Truth Commission was a major event and events have beginnings and ends, right? But it was 20 years ago, in April 2016, the first public hearings of the Human Rights Violations Committee took place in East London, in the Eastern Cape which is geographically, for those of you who know South Africa, was also one of the first kind of earliest points of encounter, of engagement, of resistance, and of colonial settlement and ongoing wars of resistance. So it wasn't an accident that took place in the Eastern Cape, these first hearings. And 20 years later, just, you know, there's been a county industry that has basically critiqued the Truth Commission to death. And 20 years ago, when Yasser and I were having a conversation, we were having a conversation against reconciliation. And I'll try and explain a little how I've understood that and maybe we can all engage together. I think we've had very different understandings of what against reconciliation means. But just to say that as much as I've been, and I think a number of us in South Africa, on the continent, in other war contexts, have been critical of the Truth Commission and of the industry of Truth Commissions, it was a very, it was something noble in that experiment. And I want to hold on to the fact that its outcomes weren't written in advance. There have been two dominant narratives about South Africa, both within South Africa, but I think it's also one that kind of comes from abroad. It comes from this global discourse on South Africa. And the one is the miracle transition, right, in which Nelson Mandela was, you know, never picked up arms, was a nonviolent kind of an icon of nonviolent resistance, and all white people embraced and loved him. And he was the key to a peaceful transition, as if there wasn't already a civil war. On the one hand, on the other, there's a story about South Africa that is the kind of failed dream. It's been written. It's got a beginning, a middle and end. It's got a moral. It's the post-colonial story of Africa. And somewhere between that, these two utterly unrealistic, simplistic, reductive, and possibly, you know, for me, insulting versions, they lies in much more complex and contradictory reality. And I think the way in which the Truth Commission unfolded and got kind of interpreted and packaged and disseminated has contributed to the kind of edifying of these two mutually exclusive and yet completely already married versions of the post-apartheid South African story. In the South African scenario, and I think this has now become a very normal, kind of almost commonplace observation in public discourse in South Africa, where things are much more contested, much more edgy. It's not so, you know, it's a much more kind of interesting and difficult space, particularly for, I think, for the beneficiary clauses. Impunity is not granted anymore. By the sociality of South Africa. But it's worth restating. Forgiveness was the kind of the go-to term for, as a discursive term, as a moral, as a theological, and as a political term, you know, the question of forgiveness was very important to the way the Truth Commission was understood. And my argument has been and in our conversation has kind of been around what kind of closures did that lead to in terms of a thoroughgoing reckoning and still has, you know, continues to lead to in terms of a thoroughgoing reckoning with the multiple forms of administrative dehumanization and in particular its afterlives that settler-colonial apartheid produced. And because, you know, because this kind of fetish, which I don't think was only a South African a kind of a construction of South African beneficiary clauses, this fetish of reconciliation and forgiveness meant that any responses that didn't fit the kind of frame were not admitted. They were delegitimized, especially politically which has been a great pity because the intellectual and political traditions in South Africa, on the continent, in other places that have been kind of intentionally erased. You know, scholars now and new generations of younger scholars more and more are kind of reclaiming those traditions. But the problem with erasure is that you never reclaim anything intact. You find traces and shards. You have to kind of risk reading into the future. You can't kind of put a total, a whole, a complete intellectual tradition back together after it's been erased. I think that work is happening and that is incredibly important and hopeful but that's hard work and it takes generations. It's begun. The other kind of rush to impose a language of forgiveness meant that what should have been a beginning was cast as an end, an end of apartheid, an end of settler coloniality which in a sense formed the very matrix on which apartheid was shaped, including its laws. apartheid laws were not a kind of invention of the white supremacists that took power in 48. They grew out of kind of a global colonial and often liberal jurisprudence. So, you know, I think that's just important even though that's not at all my area and I can't talk about law. A lot of scholars are making that argument and I think it's an important one in the context of our conversation where you would probably have much more to say as would Yassir. And then that, and this brings me to the question of complicity. With the kind of imposition of an official discourse of reconciliation, the space is narrow. So, there were very clear moral and political roles ascribed to actors, to citizens. Perpetrator, victim. Very early on, vocal critics of the process, people like Mahmoud Mandania, very important interlocutor and intellectual in this conversation, argued that beneficiaries had been left out and that was putting South Africa and its political reckoning with political change, at risk. And he marked that the Truth Commission was never kind of established to engage with anything other than political violence and political transition. And I think that was an important point because he alluded very early on to the limitations that the South African Truth Commission presented. So, with these kinds of very reductive roles that were ascribed and apportioned out and that had to do with political violence, both invisibilized and normalized structural and systemic violence and structural racism as an integral part of how systemic violence plays out in South Africa and in post-apartheid South Africa, was an avoidance of engaging the question of complicity. Complicity as with its moral messiness, its multiple modalities that include the agency of individual subjects in its direct forms but also that extend beyond the individual subject to include indirect systemic and structural implicatedness. And this is new work that's coming from a very well-known North American-based scholar of genocide, Michael Rockburn. And I think it's really important because he's asking me at least how I read him is to think about the slippery place between individual agency and indirect and structural implicatedness. Why it's important in South Africa is because the perpetrators it kind of gave, you know, there was a picture of the baddies who led us, who got their hands dirty and we can talk about which I'm alluding to here could sleep at night. And their violence was easy to identify and to name, to morally admonish and to kind of displace self-introspection onto this skewed condemnations of actions taken by those who police the system. And I think that did contribute to some degree to disconnecting the historical links between beneficiaries and complicity and structural inequality and violence that doesn't just persist as a question of the post-aparate it's being reconfigured in the post-aparate because with the erasure of intellectual and political traditions of resistance, but not only of resistance of imagining other forms of being human of cohabiting of freedom when that is erased it's almost as if the alternative seems like what we have not that there were other alternatives and that part of those alternatives were being debated, contested and put forward by different parts of the anti-aparate liberation movement which the ANC's hugely important part but not only, right? And then finally and this is a point I want to put on the table I have two minutes and I think for people who were at the film screening and in our discussion last night we'll get why, but the question of an ethical obligation to engage the experience and the remains of massed force displacement of forced removals was set aside and forced removals to my understanding and to my own everyday engagement with living in the city of Cape Town although that plays out in every single city you would live in or step on to as a visitor to South Africa is that these are they constitute the matrix of the post-aparate of our human, social, spatial and economic geographies and so just from 1960 this is not even kind of between 1913 and 1960 but just from 1960 to the mid 1980s more than 3.5 million people were forcibly removed by a state administered project of organized mass displacement and Lauren Platsky and Cheryl Walker who were researchers in the surplus people's project in the 1980s wrote that that was in their estimate the biggest modern state mass displacement being conducted during times of hot war right and there's no discussion of that there's no discussion of the right of return as an ethical question I mean reparation and restitution these are huge and important issues they're political issues I'm not saying as a political question the right of return as an ethical and moral question as something that to kind of in one's conscious mind through everyday encounters in the little itineraries of my own small life there is no space that has not been marked by forced removals and so in our avoidance or in the avoidance to raise these questions that relate to how we think about ourselves as human beings who inhabit the same geopolitical territory but utterly disjunctural life worlds there's a by not speaking this I think there's there's a contribution to I'm struggling to find a pronoun I contribute to thickening the spatial and social erasures and silences that persist in public discourse and in the social architecture at a time when these questions are refusing to be ignored people are refusing to have these questions I mean South Africans, people who have lived the experience every and continue to live the experience that Yaza spoke about are refusing to let these questions be deferred any longer and therefore they cannot remain unaddressed or yeah so I'll stop there and take us to the next moment before we fold everyone in the conversation I just wanted to follow up with a question or two there are so many insights of interest in both of your presentations maybe I could ask a question of you Heidi and then have Yasia respond to your remarks and that is both of you have discussed in various ways how while those of us studying in western universities like UM tend to regard the TRC process as a kind of political maybe even a moral and certainly a legal watershed in South Africa that there are all kinds of ways in which the same structures political, economic, social, racial and otherwise that created the problems and the abuses in the first place continue after that after that institution closes its doors and the conversation historically as people who are engaged in that process and as a conceptual point of departure I'd like to use it as well thinking about are there things looking back that you think realistically could have been done as part of the TRC process that would have begun to address some of these questions the silenced voices that both you and Yasia spoke about obviously a TRC can't cure all of the socio-economic problems in society but are there things that you look back on that is a learning experience for those of us who look back at that sometimes? That's a great question, thank you I think that it could have been a much more effective tool for beneficiary communities to begin to to become aware that require unlearning not to start even begin unlearning that's a lifelong journey but to become somewhere and I'm interested to hear what Yasia has to say somewhere in that process I don't think that beneficiary communities who've been raised white realised that the gift of equal citizenship was bequeathed on us, not the other way around that realisation could be a moment could bring profound humility profound gratitude and somewhere kind of very clumsy because the process of unlearning privilege sorry I hate that word privilege, no I don't hate it I just dislike it supremacist ways of being in the world which of course means that becoming aware that there's something to unlearn is going to come with failure, mistakes that's part of the course but to some kind of pedagogic process that would have enabled those communities the communities that I grew up in to register that everything wasn't found that everything wasn't justified let's not speak about that and let's move on is actually profoundly if middle class psychotherapy refuses that as a healthy human response to the things that trouble then surely one should extrapolate that into a more collective an assumption that that would work for a collective I don't think that there was a way in which beneficiary classes also got to name and speak their fear for themselves I think I'm speaking quite in an abstract maybe, in a slightly cryptic way beneficiaries should be put into the center of the story I think there's a much more complex relational tensions that need to be fleshed out but I do think that is a worry that in other contexts when I think about other contexts with that question will be raised how does a society institutional process bring many more people on board to not necessarily to beat oneself morally but to have that little insight that there's a gift here there's an act of profound generosity that's been offered by people that you have been socialized to dehumanize just think of that as a question so just the humble to that as a question that is a huge question and that didn't happen and how to do that is that's a whole research project or whole team research project on itself as both as response and engagement not only to your question to Haley's response it is very important when addressing these questions to disambiguate and understand the meaning of the concept anger because in popular discourse oftentimes these conceptions or these conceptualizations are very simplistically completed and especially when there are very narrow narrative arguments in terms of settlement and peace processes that lead one to a very quick acknowledgement of a small part of the devastation that such systems cause and then allowing for a moving away from a very quick distancing from what it means to be morally and dialogically responsible in the context of a constitutional framework that guarantees humanity and human rights for all and when I say for all I mean for all simply narratives which say for all but only guarantee it for a few so at the same time distinguishing temporally at the level of mapping the time frames the multiple time frames of conflict historically as well as understanding that in each and disparate each disparate temporal frame the moral responsibility of each of us as citizens shift so in the context of the apartheid war and I want to call it that both legally as well as socially because oftentimes it's conflated and collapsed I think the war that Haiti speaks of in terms of the displacement point is a social war of devastation that those of us who live in an harbor know very well just think of Detroit for example that brings up some of the principles but it can no way be compared in the same way that I'm speaking where one just has to drive through across the highways and to see trees growing through through houses to understand that there is a consequence of social devastation that might not have been legally articulated in the same way that the apartheid displaced several generations of too many families including my own so when I come into this conversation of complicity and in anger it's from a very different place and so when I engaged and when myself and Haiti engaged intellectually at the beginning of this conversation it was a charged conversation and we had to learn to year each other because I at that time and today I refuse as an intellectual to accept the discourse of moving on quickly without pausing to understand the devastation that such administrative and policy framework and I say administrative here I don't mean administrative in certain organizations because oftentimes people confuse me when I say when I use the language of administrative violence that is you know this word that we just administering institution but the principle is linked at the larger systemic sphere that these laws had to be carried out by people and defended by the executive arms of the state and they were beneficiaries so understanding that apartheid was defeated is important to mark it was defeated I did not simply evaporate it was defeated by many in the movement abroad and it was defeated by many in the movement locally as well as regionally who committed their moral lives to its defeat at its end but it still lived the consequences of the devastation it is devastating you see the pictures all around you it is devastating sometimes you can speak too easily about the war it's just being with the bad people and everything is fine it's much more complicated than that ask me I live the legacy of war on my skin but I think this point of anger, of understanding it when those who are officially ended voiceless meaning what I mean by this is that there is no it is very slight capacity to really articulate your voice in terms of manifesting administrative frameworks that promote and enable human rights over time and this is the basis of the long term peace when those vulnerable groups speak a vociferous is there such an English word as vociferous vociferously is what I'm looking for when one articulates not only in the social movements vociferously but it rings only as their echo into the social legal sphere it produces a different traumatic anger than the traumatic anger that the beneficiary classes experience once they've lost the war because they voted and supported for that and in South Africa there is an act of denial and there is a pain of having lost the supremacist war which for most people across the world is like oh my god really and a lot of students and a lot of individuals here who only encounter South Africa's discourse once you land and I've spoken to many of you who've been there once you land you are confronted with the violence of an apartheid structure that lives and continues to live as normality and that is a different anger and we were both angry when we met I mean I worked at the truth commission although I was not very I mean I was from the early movements that were ideologically saying no we do not want to make peace with you but I was humbled during that process just reading the testimonies of the families who have experienced the war actively and was tired, tired, tired of this constant running being run over by the law constantly and wanted to believe I think to some extent that peace and the ideal of a human rights possibility could be and wanted to have the conversation but immediately when people say about our land our houses we removed then people from the more stronger economic system were like no we don't want to talk no more that's the past let's just move on together now it's in this whole where the possibility of having a difficult dialogue that ensures a mutual peace that says yes you are responsible and you have a responsibility to that benefit to accept this generous offer that some of the most pain the most vulnerable people were prepared to commit to in the name and the hope of a peace and if we look at the question title which is a broad question mark the failure is it leaves us with another question which is who is responsible when the most vulnerable cannot legally articulate who is responsible to curate this promise is it the state when the United Nations says no it's your problem now it's now our local problem but it's an international crime what is the role of the international community and in our case everybody was very happy including and it was our fault as the liberation movement to quickly without legally enshrining responsibility to the atrocity and the atrociousness of our past to want to be included into the international community without an official apology firstly and secondly without an effective acknowledgement that goes beyond the narrow parameters of actual physical violence against the body by the arms of state those legal and those hidden so yeah something that's fascinating about your two responses put together is that we get the we learn that this process of creating an official narrative about what happened and in particular for lack of a better term I'll sum it up as a sort of a decapitation narrative identifying some of the most the most ignored atrocities and some of those most responsible and in a sense pitting a disproportionate amount of the blame for historical abuses on a relatively narrow segment of the population ends up silencing both sides again in quotes and we have a silencing in effect of those who were complicit who no longer feel pressure to discuss their roles and you also of course a silencing of those who are told that you're meant to now reconcile and that means that you're no longer supposed to according to social norms express anger in public spaces but that's something of the past and what I'd like to ask you guys before we open up to further discussion is have you seen a lot of change in the 20 year period in terms of civil society or academic space is it seen as more legitimate less the same to be able to narrate the perspectives that each of you has described I think I don't know I think we were talking last night about 20 years in the university of talking about talking about transport we're going to bet you you know what's really interesting is that my own perspective is so shaped by generation I mean that's becoming clearer and clearer to me in the last year in South Africa another generation of of young intellectual scholars, academic students have said enough talking about talking about transformation here's how we're going to do it we are removing statues we're demanding the removal of statues of colonial villagers and war criminals and then we're going to look at a range of other things from what do we what do we study when we study humanities disciplines who teaches us why? I work at the University of the Western Cape which is a historically black university a very interesting and complex university and very much an institutional creation of the apartheid state but when I leave the university I look up the main highway and up on the hills it's very beautiful, very wealthy, very prestigious university called University of Cape Town which is actually where the student movement calling for the beginning of transformation with the statues that also wasn't a really wasn't the end that that university has one black South African female professor in the entire teaching faculty of the university, this is 20 years later they've always been intellectuals and scholars, that's not new I mean Charlotte Matlake who's a foundational intellectual in South African intellectual history from the early 20th century studied, she was a student of WDB Du Bois you know, she touched people's lives, she taught students she's one of hundreds of people who were not only in South Africa across the South African diaspora, the South African black diaspora, there's been centuries of flourishing life, artistic intellectual, creative political and yet 20 years after the end of apartheid so students are saying well, you know this is how we're going to do it and we're making demands and we're not actually, we're occupying we're renaming we are going to set the terms of a new agenda and I think we have to, you know, for those who've been holding the door open for other ways, for other possibilities, it's time to say okay, they've arrived and we need to be, or not, I mean it's a very contested and the role that anyone has to play in it is kind of seems to my, from my experience defined on a case by case basis, it depends on the relationships you have and the networks you you know, how you, if I've been kind of present and working quietly in the little corners of my life in those of the spaces that I can participate you know, it's not automatic that everywhere is my space anymore and that's how it must be, personally academically yeah, so that's in the university maybe I'm oversimplified and maybe I'll just leave it at that and we can, I mean, of course they're changes, they're always changes and a huge, huge change has been the centrality of education, you know, restating of education at the heart of the making of a kind of, you know, of a new citizen, at the heart of re kind of open discussions and debates of what is freedom what is a human being how do we think about the human being when the human being in western philosophy was shaped through the question of race, how do we unthink that you know, so yeah, I think this is a long wall but I definitely think that some of the slow change pace is we need to buckle up for some fast change, it's the train lift, the station I'll try and be brief because I'd like you know time to engage us as well no, I wasn't an indication of your time I was just speaking to myself when I think something that when one grows up inside of a new system, especially when you live as the brunt of it can you hear me that's why I've been trying to speak so loudly but I stopped because I thought I've been scared people so I'll just project again, okay no worries I was saying as someone who has survived I consider myself a survivor and not in any negative terms, in fact I wish to and I have and I have done this since I've come to the United States as my own responsibility to the experience of those who are the most vulnerable in my country and I'm not one of them any longer as you can see then that's why I chose a polka dot a tie to make sure that you see that that I've come to a place where I can actually wear that publicly and I'm of that otherwise I'm too serious that but what's not a joke is that it's true I've had to overcome the meaning of surviving the problem as an intellectual and as a human being and not many people have been that lucky and so it's important to recognize that both the ideal of human right and democracy as well as the systematic creation and construction of atrocity takes place over time doesn't just occur and it doesn't just end which is some of the fallacies of the dominant narratives that try to move on too quickly without addressing what people are living without these systems end this is the only thing that I want to say next is that it's so important to mark the fact that this system that dogged us for so long and so many generations contributed their intellectual and their physical bodies to its ending ended I don't just want to complain about its legacy but it's important to mark that it ended because if we don't mark that it ended it's easy to forget all of those who contributed to its end and it's this legacy that's at risk as well and too many people and I don't want to be one of them say that there's no difference any longer between apartheid and post apartheid and that's not true and it's easy for people to be articulated and to become public resonance through a beneficiary and a second-order experience but when you've actually lived it you can't articulate that and I was there was a I'll tell a very quick story of an activist intellectual who never went to school and died when she was 60 in the mid 60s not too long ago in one of the townships outside of Mongolia and she was asked this question what is the difference and I was sitting there listening to her and I was humbled and I'm not always humbled and she said when someone asked actually the person articulated that it's the same now than it was then and she was an activist as a teenager 13 year old running pamphlets in the 1950s and hopefully my math works out here and she said that for me you cannot compare the two I'm suffering economically now I'm experiencing a worse pain even 15-20 years later than I did at that time because then at least we held each other together but the police and there will be no white person again that will walk on and she pointed to the seat because we were in a sort of a ramshackle of space when we were having this conversation and she pointed out and you could see the pavement but there was no pavement and in the brochure that you have this articulates the extremities of Cape Town for example and she pointed to the pavement and said no one will just push me off that pavement again and get away with it and think that it's okay and it was in this metaphor that she articulated the memory of the difference and I think it's important to remember that and too many people including myself at the time forgot and so yes the change is immense immense but for peace to be legally articulated in the long run there needs to be more in terms of the law in terms of the policy frame because the party colonized not only our land but colonized our hearts our minds our central nervous system it wrote itself as into our blood and I see similar things here but in different ways so I'm not saying we are unique it wrote itself into our blood and another person and I'll finish said to me and she wrote a very interesting paper on this recently and I'm just blanking on her name although I know it very well and she said when she was explaining the post-apartheid form she said there's a saying she struggled to ever click that correctly she said meaning that it's in the blood the pain, the form of the experience it's lived and if we as intellectuals and activists and professionals do not hold those who are legally responsible for creating difference and the ideal of change we do not hold them responsible both locally as well as internationally this type of pain and trauma will endure despite the enormity of the of the change so I'm trying to ask you my question my name is Vangile I'm trying to ask you my question in the context of education basic education my education I was born in the estate cave I understand what you're talking about it's a closet, the stakehouse I was born in the estate cave but I had to move to South of Jordan to orange-flavoured township so that I could make this better education and now with the investment of Pretoria and those spaces are so different and I have memories of those spaces and I continue to struggle for those spaces my question is this memory and recovery what can we recover individually, collectively alongside state narratives about what state narratives and also power players in the contributions what can be or must be recovered alongside the dignity the dignity of the people that experience and forgiveness and I'm deliberately listing those in that order memory and recovery dignity and forgiveness well of course the material realities in education how do we practically do this work when you say there's this erasure and I think in many ways the silencing but also the sanitizing going on how do you work with this with young people that I work I'm writing my ethnography on a township in my melody and every day I have to walk in there I'm confronted by this but now occupying these multiple spaces how do you deal with it how do you talk to young people I'm working in high school I teach at a historically african university how do you deal with this practically this messiness because we acknowledge it ended and the legacy but we also need to think about where we're going do you have a preference I'll be very honest there is no answer that's going to act as a silver bullet who comes to this issue firstly when I say there is no answer it doesn't mean that there should not be multiple answers I think the answer is in the multiplicity of our response and the openness to allow for such a multiplicity which I think is the problem generally after the apartheid system fell firstly at such a larger instance the second issue here is to understand that I think based on what you said it's clear that you know this I'm not acting as an expert on this issue in terms of your question but until the education system and those education professionals, intellectuals and practitioners during the apartheid moment are apprehended politically and legally they will be and I think it's easier to say that now than it was 20 years ago there will be a very difficult accounting for the centrality of the education system in creating not only a apartheid mentality but one educating those of us who were not supposed to be legally treated as equally human to live our lives as secondary and third class human beings and then to educate at the same time those who were supposed to be the beneficiaries of this of such a eugenicist paradigm to then as normality to live out their supremacy with dignity I mean I live and teach in the United States because I cannot live and teach there I was kicked out of the university for example I'm an earlier generation my graduate work was in the late 90's from the earlier generations of people who went into higher education I got kicked out we fought and I was too immature at the time to understand the consequences of me wanting as a and I continued to self-identify in black consciousness terms as black as I did then and I do now and I do not accept the narrow pigeon-holing of what the meaning of my skin color I will not carry my skin color and I will not walk my skin color in any context here or there as burden and the consequence of that is me which is a good consequence in this case now teaching at the University of Michigan I consider myself a self-imposed intellectual exile and I don't say that easily because I come from I was exiled when I was 15 in the mid-1980's as part of the 1995 uprising as well so exiled is not new to me but but I do think that until it is doubtful that it's very rude to either one of these concepts we will continue to then both these systems around it that fail and I understand it's failure and I don't know if many of you that are years apart it had 17 to 18 different education systems at the bottom at its base and it's divided in very narrow and very destructive ways and that legacy continues to be lived in the minds and hearts of too many people and so it's very difficult to articulate and so I again I conclude there is no simple answer but we have to engage on our terms those of you in your generation those of us in my generation every generation as we begin to inhabit the intellectual spheres in such ways that our thinking has the possibility of becoming social reality I can only reflect thank you for your question I don't have an answer but if I can reflect on a kind of first anecdote from well I have a synchronicity today on Facebook a friend posted a pdf I don't know if it's a book or a long article but by Ibita Bhatta from an intellectual anti-aparite intellectual from a very different kind of political tradition than the congress movement with an interest in education and it's an article called I can send it to you it's called education for barbarism and it's a critique and it looks almost I haven't read it but it looks almost prophetic like it's almost if this there's certain kinds of archeologies and architectures that persist in institutions beyond 94 and education is one of them of technocratic like immaculate technocracy or bureaucracy or policy making more data more information you know kind of like precisely defining your target group and target population none of that kind of policy language can actually undo the deep kind of matrix of the system and I'm not you know I'm not an educator in the train sense I work in the university I work in a very particular university it's also where I got my PhD so and I say that because I thought because of who I am if I got a PhD if I studied for a PhD at a historically black university I wouldn't be punished for that that didn't turn out quite true I have a devalued the way in which white supremacy works isn't only person by person it's systemic I don't have a doctorate from a former white so-called white university and there's a certain kind of I have to work harder then and that's really interesting the shop was okay it works like that but work you know my experience is that I'm in the center our work had we started a critical education project and the argument is that community arts projects were really central to nourishing the creative intellectual political life of people in areas that were not allowed that were prohibited from the infrastructure and resources to develop those parts of the human being that characterizes all human life and there was this flourishing community arts a movement in the 1980s actually Yasser introduced me to one in particular when we first met in the late 90s and subsequently and through a kind of coincidence the center where our work has established a critical arts education center not on the community arts model because after 94 anything that has the word community and usually means developmental and it usually means somehow bereft of the intangible alchemistic magic stuff that happens when you put people together and let them think freely and without imposing how they should think because they're in a community I mean sorry if that's being too harsh and I don't mean to offend anyone who does development work or community work but there's a way in which something of the magic of encounter when you put people together to think together without imposing a program on what should be thought, what should be painted what should be imagined as a future it just you know something else happens and we wanted to go with something else what can't yet be imagined let's try to do something without knowing what it's going to be and put people together and so we've got a group of artists who are brilliant in their field they are accomplished in their field and we're saying put together a set of courses and let's and let's raise money and we've done that and bring students from a teacher that's participating there's a school in Woodstock that's the others that are participating and let's see what happens let's experiment and I'm sorry I'm taking a long time to talk but the anecdote is about being willing to experiment to say that maybe you know the one thing that I've learned from the anti-apartheid struggle because I wasn't in the anti-apartheid struggle is that people risk some things that couldn't be imagined people imagined freedom they imagined a post-apartheid society it doesn't look like the one we're living in but that means it can be done again and I think there's something in the ways in which the arts or creativity or the classroom can become a laboratory for that at least that's what I'm seeing I don't know how it's going to turn out but I think it's worth risking the experiment of putting people together to reimagine something that can't be imagined I don't know if that's an answer that satisfies you Thank you both for your fascinating talk so my question is for Heidi so you yes I'm sorry to pronounce your name wrong you spoke briefly about the contemporary like roads must fall fields must fall movement and I was wondering how does that movement work to I guess reform your research questions also you spoke about your strategies being generational and so I was wondering what are the tactics that are different now with the roads must fall which obviously is like action and what are the resistance strategies you are using for that encapsulates your own research questions I guess I'm looking for the comparison also I don't know if you have even possibly the collaboration with the roads must fall with social media resistance like Palestine and their transnational virtual spaces of resistance and so how do you conceptualize this in your research if you do it all I don't research I don't do any research on it I kind of comment as a citizen so it's not like an object or focus or area of research I think I for one feel that it's an emergent it's a beginning process it's very very it's uneven from campus to campus the issues are different from campus to campus I mean working class and rural black students coming to a historically black university a very different kind of demands although that isn't to say that they aren't starving students on other campuses they are there's also the question I know at our campus there's a huge question the whole funding structure is set to work against dignity against conditions that make studying possible I mean the lowest possible common denominator is what even the national loan scheme is based on it's not to kind of create conditions for thinking or for reading for asking questions for debating for having a full belly and setting about like exploring this incredible gift of three or four years where you can you have to do your studies and get your grades all kinds of pressures that people have but to also indulge curiosity there isn't space given for that in a lot of universities I think it's a very uneven the politics the party politics are very complicated and uneven playing out differently from space to space and university administrations responding differently from place to place so that being said I think students are also defining the kinds of alliances that they wanting from supportive faculty and that differs from space from from place to place and lastly yeah I'm just kind of not reaching any conclusions I'm just showing up to work university work was closed for two months last year our university we go back to exams next week exams that weren't finished and I really don't think we're going to start off the year with a regular registration because fees must fall is also you know demanding no registration so I know I think I imagine there is a very different take on your question I don't know if you want to I think the important aspects you're raising that I'm not engaging with but partly it was very most I mean John knows before I came with the immediacy of the fees must fall so I haven't had time and space to reflect on it now yeah I'd like to put your permission because I know the question wasn't directed at me um there's a lot to be said I won't say too much two important points for me is in terms of the two movements in South Africa that you mentioned these are contemporary very recent articulations in an important space but it's very narrow particularly it's an important recognition and these movements have managed to articulate themselves outside of some of the more narrow ideological blinders of some of the other movements that have not disappeared and also exist in South Africa firstly and it's important that anybody thinking through these questions remember that successful movements that come to articulate themselves in the body politic below usually are transgenerational they've been there for a long time and they've learned from the defeats successes of previous iterations of such movements and it's important you know and I know this what I'm gonna say now might not sound politically nice but I'm going to say it nonetheless because I think I would be to be irresponsible of me as an intellectual not to and if you're here we're welcome to have a longer conversation outside of the space is that and I was guilty of this it's the only reason why I'm saying this now as a 16 year old as part of the early iterations of the student movements of that time under the particle is that sometimes as young people we want to think of ourselves as always the first iteration and when there's a transgenerational gap between previous iterations I know he was having a conversation with someone earlier on WU Du Bois in Washington and other intellectuals of the African American liberation yeah but when young people start articulating themselves as the first iteration without and sometimes I understand why that is done because we had to tell our parents in 1985 no we will not accept this any longer and we were at high school at that time and I didn't finish high school actually it's always a funny thing that part is when people start going to high school and I said I didn't went to high school so because at that time our central organizing slogan was liberation before education we will liberate ourselves and then we will create the structures but that was also not complicated enough because we learned during that time that once you liberate yourself from this process the building of the education structures is continuous and simultaneous you cannot wait there's no simple articulation of the past present and future we are building at the same time as we are moving in a sense so these organizations if they do not find an intellectual ability and I get tired of people who want to dismiss thinking almost those acts no you can't act without thinking you can't think what you're going to do you're going to act in the ways that have failed and so it's important intellectually as leaders of these movements to think about that and to begin to understand that the issues as articulated are humane issues and others may be experiencing similar issues differently and that conversation has to happen if larger movements are to coer successfully but if one movement imposes its issue as the main issue and starts stepping on other issues you are doing the work of imperialism and it is hard to have a conversation dialogically to say oh my god you've got this issue I've got this issue how do we put it together think creatively vision together and walk not as allies but in solidarity with one another to a larger human appeal and ideal of humanity a hope these organizations they cannot build hope together they will fail together is my opinion based on studying them and having lived through them but that's a longer conversation that's a simplistic answer thank you I think we're just about out of time but I hope you all join me in thanking us here Henry I'm sure some of you have additional things you'd love to talk about but I wanted to have that break so that I know some of you also need to get going so if you want to stick around I'm sure we