Tribute to Professor Bhekizizwe Peterson 1961-2021

The Archive and Public Culture (APC) research initiative and its fellows, across South Africa and internationally, mourned the untimely passing of our deeply admired colleague, Bhekizizwe Peterson who died on 16 June 2021.

We miss greatly his wry warmth, his luminous integrity and his scholarly comradeship.

Bheki’s work on Black intellectual traditions has been formative of key aspects of the APC’s trans-disciplinary research focus. In recent years his formulation and ongoing development of the concept of the Black Humanities historically operating outside of South Africa’s racially configured universities has offered a richly generative framework for scholars engaging with early works by Black writers. For historically orientated APC scholars this has proven especially productive in developing approaches to reading their works, and recognizing and exploring the kinds of historiographical interventions which they constitute.

In the last few years Bheki began to realize the fruits of deep, long-term scholarly and cultural investments. These were the basis for so much of the intellectual direction and incisive conceptual engagement that is evident in his latest interventions and work. Some of Bheki’s most recent thinking is not readily available in publication. We provide here a link to the abstract of an incisive presentation entitled “African Arts, Archives and the Anteroom of the Academy” given by Bheki in 2018 at the Black Archives and Intellectual Histories Seminar Series. We also provide a link to Bheki’s keynote address to a 2020 APC colloquium.

We thus mourn not only the passing of a valued scholar at the height of his powers, but one whose work was not yet done.