HUMA Doctoral Seminar Series

Speaker: Bongani Kona, University of Western Cape 

The question of who gets to tell other people’s stories is an old one. It’s also one I’ve been turning over in my own research which, broadly speaking, chronicles the experiences of ordinary people during the tail end of the guerrilla war to liberate Zimbabwe from white rule. Using the questions posed by the poet Brandon Shimoda as a departure point – ‘How do (or can) we write about an event or experience—a communal or ancestral trauma, for example—that happened prior to our being born, and yet about which we feel the intimacy and pressure of a memory? And what are the ethics of doing so? – I intend to reflect on the task of writing about these experiences.   

About the speaker: Bongani Kona is a writer, editor and lecturer in the Department of History at the University of the Western Cape. His work has appeared in a variety of places including Chimurenga, The Baffler and BBC Radio and he is the editor of Our Ghosts were Once People: Stories on Death and Dying.

Convenor: Ayanda Manqoyi, HUMA Programme Administrator: Postgraduate Development. See profile

More about the HUMA Doctoral Seminar Series

Register to attend: send us an email at huma@uct.ac.za

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