Mbongiseni Buthelezi represents APC in South Africa and Croatia

September was a busy month for Mbongiseni Buthelezi. He ranged between Cape Town and Zagreb in Croatia, participating in activities spanning seminars, public talks and volunteer work.​

 

The month began with Jo-Anne Duggan and Buthelezi making a presentation to the Parliamentary Portfolio committee on Arts and Culture on the findings of the Archival Platform’s The State of the Archives Analysis on 1 September. 

 

On 3 September, Buthelezi presented a paper entitled “Who is responsible for Colonialism and Apartheid?: The Past in Public Discourse” as part of the Indexing the Human seminar series in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Stellenbosch University.  The paper explored how the past is mobilised when arguments are made in political discourse that policy interventions are being made to address legacies of colonial and apartheid rule. It tried to answer why some people feel that they are being blamed when the past is referenced as one of the main reasons for the inequitable nature of South African society today. The paper provoked lively debate, both in the seminar and in the reading group meeting that followed the seminar.

 

From the 9 - 11 September, Buthelezi took part in a workshop on spoken and performance poetry at Rhodes University. Organised by Deborah Seddon of the English Department at Rhodes with Andrew van der Vlies of Queen Mary University of London, the workshop brought together poets and academics to explore what it would take to establish a digital archive, mainly of poetry, that circulates in oral form. The poets included well-established figures Keorapetse Kgositsile, Maishe Maponya, Lesego Rampolokeng and Mhlobo Jadezweni as well as popular younger poets Thabiso ‘Afurukan’ Mohare, Iain ‘Ewok’ Robinson, Mak Manaka, Adriaan ‘Diff’ van Wyk and Pieter Odendaal. The scholars were Seddon, van der Vlies, Duncan Brown (University of the Western Cape), Rachael Gilmour (Queen Mary, UL), Pamela Maseko (Rhodes), Thulani Nxasana (Rhodes), and Buthelezi.

 

For three mornings and afternoons the group discussed poetry and digital archives, provoked by keynote addresses by Kgositsile, Buthelezi, Brown and Gilmour. Buthelezi’s keynote address was entitled “From Socwatsha kaPhaphu to James Stuart to Khaya Ndwandwe: Archival, Digital and Public Lives of a Poetic Form”. It traced the journey of a poem that appears in the James Stuart Archive from its recording in the late nineteenth century to its performance at a public event in 2011.

 

Buthelezi was a guest of the Centre for Peace Studies in Zagreb, Croatia from 18 – 28 September. He was scheduled to give a keynote address at a conference organised by the Centre for Peace Studies with the UN High Commission for Refugees. The invitation emanated from Mbongiseni’s involvement in the Mandela Dialogues.

 

Owing to the deepening Syrian migrant crisis in the Balkans, the conference was cancelled at the last minute while Buthelezi was en route to Croatia, so instead he spent time helping activists from the Centre for Peace Studies respond to the crisis. On 25 September Mbongiseni delivered the intended keynote address as a public lecture entitled “Conditions of Hospitability: Three Reflections from South Africa” at Human Rights House. The lecture considered what it would take to be hospitable to migrants in the light of xenophobic violence against African and Asian migrants in South Africa.