Wrapping up 2020

We have finally come to the end of an astonishing year. Many APC researchers have lost friends and family in the pandemic and we are saddened by these depredations. I hope that all the APC researchers, staff and students will make sure ...

APC joins Twitter and Instagram

The APC has joined social media to reach out to similar initiatives and create an online community around the work we do. Part of being on social media is about enhancing our public engagement beyond the seminars and written material.

Can the archive be liberated?

“We have to read this [archive] suspiciously,” said Jacob Dlamini in the course of a discussion held by the Nelson Mandela Foundation under the title “Liberating the Archive”, aiming to investigate the archive, public delibera

Authors meet critics at African Studies Association

As part of ongoing engagement with the recent publication, Babel Unbound: Rage, Reason and Rethinking Public Life (Wits University Press, 2020), APC Post-Doctoral Fellow Susana Molins Lliteras organised an “Author Meets Critic” pa

Elephants and leadership, family and nation

In 2019, I had the chance to visit the ruins of the old Zulu capital of uMgungundlovu, where King Dingane lived in the 1830s. I was one of a group of investigators from the Archive & Public Culture Research Initiative, KwaZulu-Natal ...

Why we protested in Namibia

The recent #ShutItAllDown protests emerged in October 2020 as a response to the pervasive crisis on Sexual and Gender-based Violence (SGBV) and femicide in Namibia. This crisis is not new; in fact, it has been one of the biggest social ...

Lesotho’s remembering of itself

In this issue of the Gazette, we feature the Morija Museum & Archives in Lesotho, an important actor in the history of — and history-writing about — large parts of Southern Africa. Stephen GIll, the director, gives here his insight on