Published Works

'Remembering Fanon A Hundred Years On' by 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.”

27 January 2025

The year 2025 marks the 30th anniversary of Nelson Mandela’s appointment of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). Through the second half of the 1990s and beyond, the TRC was lauded around the world as an exemplary transitional justice intervention and used as a template by many countries going through processes of peacemaking and democratisation. Today, however, the TRC is vilified in many quarters locally, while views on it internationally are ambivalent, influenced profoundly now by the failures of South Africa’s democratic administrations over three decades. Clearly, it seems, despite the work of the TRC, South Africa has neither reckoned with its pasts effectively nor found a way to make Mandela’s reconciliation project stick. What went wrong?

11 December 2024

On the anniversary of Nelson Mandela’s passing, we reflect on one of the unfinished aspects of the first administration and Mandela’s presidency – the issue of land reform. The Foundation has commissioned research that traces the land reform governance pathway followed under Madiba’s presidency. It does so with a view to reflect honestly on the successes and failures that have paved an enduring status quo of widespread land hunger and inequity.

20 June 2024

The recent workshop, "Decentered Critical University Studies in a Techno-Science-Society," provided rich insights that the Acting Chief Executive of the Nelson Mandela Foundation and Adjunct Professor to the Chair for Critical Studies in Higher Education Transformation (CriSHET), Verne Harris is eager to share. The workshop was a collaboration between CriSHET, the Transdisciplinary Institute for Mandela Studies (TIMS), and the ACUSAfrica network, and was partially funded by the National Research Fund (NRF).
In his op-ed, Verne Harris offers reflections on "Decentring 'The University'" in response to the workshop. Aiming to provoke thought and dialogue on higher education's current and future state, Verne explores some profound questions about the nature and future of universities. He challenges the assumption that universities are inherently 'good', and examines the pervasive influence of neoliberalism that has transformed higher education into corporatized, technocratic institutions resistant to change.