SEMINAR SERIES: Mandela Conversations 2025

 

MANDELA INDABA: From Dalibhunga to Rolilhlahla: Making Trouble with Mandela 

See the Indaba proceedings summary.

 

MQHAYI MEETS MANDELA

 

Following a period of development and rehearsals focused on the interpretation of Mqhayi’s poetry, the Mqhayi Meets Mandela project is kicking off, with the following schedule:

  • 30 July 2025 [South Campus, 12h00–13h00]: flash mob performance by the Nelson Mandela University Choir, introducing the project’s concept and songs between the Madiba Shirt and the Mandela Bench.
  • 31 July 2025 [Missionvale Campus, 11h00–12h00]: an introduction to the Institutional Culture Signature Programme “Mandela In Us” project, followed by a performance by the Nelson Mandela University Choir, sharing the songs and stories with the Missionvale campus.
  • 1 August 2025 [North Campus, 15h00–17h00]: the Nelson Mandela University Choir and Arts, Culture and Heritage Student Societies interpret and perform responses in multiple languages.
  • 21 August 2025 [George Campus, 12h00–14h00]: the George Campus Society Choir performing their interpretations of Mqhayi’s poetry and the impact it had on Mandela, as part of the Mandela: Our Living Heritage project.

 

REMEMBERING FANON A HUNDRED YEARS ON

Verne Harris / 20 July 2025

 

There is an irony in remembering Frantz Fanon on the centenary of his birth. For it was Fanon who dedicated the final chapter of his Black Skin, White Masks to a powerful, poetic enjoining of those who fight for freedom to let go of pasts and let the dead bury the dead. Fanon opens that chapter with an extended quote from Karl Marx’s The Eighteenth Brumaire:

“The social revolution cannot draw its poetry from the past, but only from the future. It cannot begin with itself before it has stripped itself of all its superstitions concerning the past. Earlier revolutions relied on memories out of world history in order to drug themselves against their own content. In order to find their own content, the revolutions of the nineteenth century have to let the dead bury the dead.”

And there’s a particular poignancy to remembering Fanon within what could be called a ‘Nelson Mandela rubric’, for the two great freedom fighters came within a whisker of meeting but missed each other through a cruel twist of fate. READ MORE HERE.

 

IMAGE: Madiba in Morocco for training with members of the National Liberation Front of Algeria.

 

 

 

 

 

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Programme Coordination: TIMS
Engagement & Transformation Portfolio

 

TIMS is a strategic project run via the Engagement & Transformation Portfolio (ETP) Office. Find the ETP Office on Facebook and Instagram. 

 

The colloquium was organised around the following themes: rights, democracy and justice, cultural memory and the politics of the present; inheritance, legacy and commemoration; and representation, signification and iconism. Watch the event here. 

 

The Nelson Mandela Foundation and Nelson Mandela University joined hands in 2020 in an effort to advance the legacy of the world icon after which they are named. Watch the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) signing ceremony here.

 

The purpose of the webinar was to engage with current Mandela-related scholarship, identify and explore fresh lines of enquiry, and distil critical questions which would be helpful for the process currently underway towards the establishment of the Transdisciplinary Institute for Mandela Studies (TIMS). Watch the session here. 

 

This workshop held in September explored the ‘academic expression’ of Nelson Mandela and the broader question of how naming cultures work. The session was facilitated by Professor Verne Harris of the Nelson Mandela Foundation and Adjunct Professor at Nelson Mandela University. Watch the workshop session here. 

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