March 2022 Research Development Workshop
Visuals from APC March 2022 workshop. Image courtesy of the APC.
The APC’s 2022 Research Development Workshop took place over Zoom, with hybrid affordances particularly on the first day, over the 23th-25th of March. Following the model of preceding Zoom workshops, 26 papers by 28 authors were read, given written commentary by assigned commentators, and discussed collectively over 11 sessions divided across three workshop days. Each session raised questions from the collective discussion that would come to shape the direction of the three days of the workshop.
As visual referents, the APC drew on a series of works by Athi-Patra Ruga—a critical overlay of Ruga’s tapestries by his stained glass works was used to raise paralleling questions of reference and creation in Ruga’s work and the work of thinkers engaged by APC, and a photograph of Ruga’s large-scale stained glass work, iiNyanga Zonyaka, offered an invitation to prismatic modes of attending to time, pasts and futures. These critical aesthetic points of departure were graciously expanded upon in conversation with the artist at the close of the workshop.
The first session of the workshop brought together papers thinking with sound, its politics and travels. Anette Hoffman presented an excerpt from her upcoming book, focusing on a recording of Stefan Bischoff speaking a secret language and invoking a deity. This presentation raised questions of opacity (as a space of play, and of the ethical response when it is unwittingly uncovered), and of commentary and critique emerging in the archives. Nashilongweshipwe Mushaandja presented a draft conclusion to his PhD thesis, retracing the examination of Oudano throughout the thesis, working to theorize it as an orientational, citational and colloquial form of praxis that plays with and inhabits ideas of transgression. Amo Maledu presented a paper focusing on Sepitori and Amapiano as critical avenues for and instantiations of refusal, considering how they occasion opacity and decline being fit into existing social and genre categories.
Following this, the second session’s papers explored questions of public intellectual activity in media and cultural life. The session was opened by a paper by Lesley Mofokeng, who presented a draft PhD thesis proposal on Sol Plaatje’s journalism, working to evaluate Plaatje’s importance to the history of journalism in South Africa. Following this, Sandile Ngidi presented a paper assessing Mazisi Kunene’s writing, offering a reading of it as at once grounded in Zuluness and Pan-Africanism, in poetic history and as historiographical critique. Closing the session, Sbonelo Radebe presented a draft PhD thesis proposal for a critical biography of Jordan Ngubane, raising resonating questions about the biography as genre of praise and of critical appraisal, and about the trickiness of mapping alongside one another a developing political and intellectual biography.
Closing the first day of the workshop, two papers anticipated the coming conversations at the After the Fire Symposium, to take place the following month, co-sponsored by APC. Duane Jethro and Alírio Karina presented a draft introduction to the symposium, laying out the problem space that the symposium papers would move through in thinking questions of loss, archive, and African Studies. This was followed by Susana Molins Lliteras’s paper examining efforts to digitize, record and remake the Timbuktu Archive, with special attention to the Google Arts and Culture digital curation, underscoring the questions of politics, access and loss that shape interactions with this archival space.
The second day opened with a set of papers reconsidering the relationship between public memory and (seemingly) hidden archives. First, a draft chapter from Mojalefa Koloko examined the pre-Moshoeshoe period of Basotho history, bringing the historical writing of Moshoeshoe’s son, Nehemiah, to bear on other histories of the period, underscoring the political situatedness and dynamism of claims to past historical periods. Following this, Vanessa Chen presented a draft literature review for her PhD proposal, tracing efforts to write histories of the Chinese and other subaltern groups at the Cape to the mid 19th century, and considering questions of digitization and archival holdings that would support her PhD work. Closing the session, a joint paper by Heather Hughes and Victoria Araj relayed some of the findings of the Reimagining Lincolnshire project, revealing crucial and illuminating connections between parochial life and imperial domination.
The second session’s papers explored the process of engaging and questioning received forms of ‘heritage’ and knowledge, broadly conceived. Nina Liebenberg’s paper reflected on the value of curatorial approaches as a critical means of engaging the habits and assumptions that mark disciplinarity, with particular attention to engagements with the sciences. Katleho Shoro’s paper explored the sociality and sensoriality of litema, considering too the stakes of how this Basotho practice is contained by terms like ‘mural art’ and ideas of its genderedness, and proposing instead to push beyond the limits of easy Western categorizations. Lebogang Mokwena’s paper examined how shweshwe comes to invoke claims to and contestations of authenticity, and how shweshwe further, and in more broadly resonant ways, comes to bear the weight of political and social signalling in ways that are complicated by an attention to its history.
The following session brought together papers considering storytelling, mythmaking, ritual and futurity. Sihle Motsa presented on her developing Master’s project, raising a critical conversation broaching the relationship between futurism and prophecy as modes of engaging futures, the role of orality and archive, and the possibilities of digitization. After this, Athambile Masola and Milisuthando Bongela’s co-authored paper offered a personal and critical set of reflections on their childhood experiences with ukuqatshulwa and ukuqiniswa, raising questions of rituality, intimacy, care, and of the specialized knowledges needed to produce these.
Closing the day, the fourth session’s papers underscored the importance of what, in his abstract, Wade Smit refers to as ‘conceptual history’. Sanele kaNtshingana presented a draft of a late chapter of his thesis that broadly engages the development of the concept of umbuso, with this chapter taking stock of how, in his writing, SEK Mqhayi placed the term in critical relation to other isiXhosa concepts, from which umbuso becomes inextricable, even as it proceeds to transform in meaning in Mqhayi’s writing. Following this, Wade Smit’s paper critically engaged Magema Fuze’s life and writing, drawing out, with particular attention to Fuze’s many names, critical questions of intellectual and political affiliation and lexical-conceptual recognition and meaning.
The third day began with a paper by Sibusiso Nkomo, examining the development of a royal reading and writing community in Lesotho, tracing the historical conditions that enabled Moshoeshoe and his relatives to make critical and political use of print technology to set particular narratives into motion. This was followed by Thokozani Mhlambi’s exploration of the origins and usage of the term ‘Bantu’ as a marker of tribe, with particular attention to the term’s contemporary life in the field of linguistics. Closing the session, Alírio Karina presented an early draft of a chapter exploring the idea of witchcraft in African Studies, and considering how it plays the role of a repeating crisis for the field.
The following session brought together different modes of thinking the development of political life in mid-19th-century Natal. Angela Ferreira’s paper examined efforts to assign census definition to mixed trader communities in ways that denied them claim to resources and land, underscoring the early messiness and tentative nature of what come to be quite fixed and closed-seeming forms of definition. Sizakele Gumede presented a draft conclusion to her Master’s thesis on the political praxis of Harriette Colenso, emphasizing the importance of attending to Colenso’s full period and context of political activity in order to make visible the full interplays motivating her political perspectives and choices. The conversation that followed, echoing earlier conversations at the workshop, underscored the critical relationship between chronological and thematic approaches to intellectual and political history. Closing the session, Precious Bikitsha presented a paper critically appraising Nontsizi Mgqwetho’s memorialization of Dingane in Umteteli wa Bantu, proposing it as an instantiation of an early and resistant claim to ethnicity.
The final paper session of the workshop began with Himal Ramji’s tracing of the discursive lives of the Cattle Killing as a site of critical interest and reaction, with the idea of the Cattle Killing coming to serve various rhetorical ends. Following this, Carolyn Hamilton presented a paper tracing the structure of freedoms prior to colonialism, underscoring the possibilities that mobility and broad social networks fostered, and their unsettling and renarration in the wake of colonial settlement. Closing the session, David William Cohen offered the court case Namuluta v. Kazibwe as a point of interrogation, reading from it a set of relationships to historical debate that illuminated the influence and authority of the 19th century Buganda Kingdom.
Athi-Patra Ruga’s Artwork on display at the Norval Museum. Screenshot courtesy of the APC.
In addition to the workshop papers, over the lunch and break periods on this closing day, participants were invited to engage more deeply with Athi-Patra Ruga’s work through a slide-show curated by Nina Liebenberg, and a recorded reflection on IiNyanga Zonyaka by Khanyisile Mbongwa, in anticipation of the closing event. The workshop closed in critical conversation with Athi-Patra Ruga, led by Athambile Masola and Alírio Karina. Thinking with the long trajectory of Ruga’s work, the conversation paid special focus to Ruga’s invocation of and play with histories, as resources, sites of reckoning, means of connection and claim. Ruga underscored the value of ‘luxuriating in contradiction’—the contradictions of history and of the imagination alike. Central to many of these luxuriations were the spaces of tangled valorization and marginalization—or, exoticization and recognition—that recur in the historical and utopic imagination, and in the art canon. As such, Ruga’s use of avatars—of characters, referentially created and periodically reinvented in new contexts and conversations—raised archival questions about the lives of ideas and stories, and what is at stake in the work of remaking and reinvoking them. Blackness, black womanness, black queerness emerge as provoking a reckoning with the partial and complicated space availed by history and utopic imaginations alike. Further, this claim is laden with myth, sacredness and the cosmic, a claim laid not only to history but to the power of the aesthetic—of color, prettiness, and declaration. We are very grateful to Athi for joining us for this conversation, and giving us so much to think with and from in his work and his engagement.
Athi-Patra Ruga and Athabile Masola in conversation about Ruga’s artwork. Screenshot courtesy of the APC.