About | Forum members | What we do
About
A/Xarra Restorative Justice Forum
The Xarra Restorative Justice Forum was established at CAS in 2018 as a co-design knowledge and research partnership with a number of Civic and Traditional Khoi and San structures. It has functioning research commissions in land, language, human remains, women and youth. It has also recently established a Covid 19 research commission. It has played a leading role in transformation initiatives at UCT such as the Naming of the Sarah Baartmann Memorial Hall and the teaching of foundational Khoekhoegowab to the community.
A brief timeline of A/Xarra Restorative Justice forum at UCT:
The establishment of the A/Xarra Restorative Justice Forum at the Centre For African Studies, University of Cape Town (2017 – 2018)
The UCT campus is situated on land that was respectively settled on by the San and Khoi for thousands of years. Huri #oaxa – Mountain rising out the sea
The A/Xarra Values & Terms of Reference
- Anti-racism
- Anti-sexism
- Anti-gender based violence
- Anti-patriarchy
- Anti-corruption
- Anti-exploitation
The following commissions have been established by A/XARRA:
- Language Commission
- Human Remains Commission
- Land and Housing Commission
- Women’s Commission
- Youth Commission
- Covid-19 Commission
Centre for African Studies (CAS) collaboration with A/Xarra Restorative Justice Forum
Centre for African Studies (CAS) in collaboration with A/Xarra Restorative Justice Forum hosted the Third 'Rethinking Africa' catalytic Precolonial conference that took place from the 23-24 January 2020 at the CAS Gallery, Upper Campus, UCT funded by The National Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences (NIHSS). The co-design knowledge partnership led to the establishment of the Khoi and San Unit which will develop into an Institute, where the A/Xarra is a key community engagement stakeholder.
Further engagement at UCT
Forum members
Dr Yvette Abrahams (from 2020)
Yvette Abrahams holds a Ph. D. in Economic History from the University of Cape Town. She has consulted for government and various NGO’s on issues relating to gender equality in policy and practice, while publishing widely both locally and internationally on gender equality, queer theory, climate change as well as the history of First Nations South Africans. She served as Commissioner For Gender Equality where she headed their programmes on poverty, energy and climate change. She subsequently worked as Advisor to Project 90 by 2030, an NGO which focuses on food security, energy, and promoting renewable energy and energy efficiency entrepreneurship in the context of climate change, She served as Commissioner on the University of Cape Town’s Institutional Reconciliation and Truth Commission. Today she runs a small business making organic carbon neutral soaps and body products on her smallholding east of Cape Town.
A/Professor June Bam-Hutchison
June is a former anti-apartheid teacher activist and has worked in education policy transformation for many years. She has been working with and in the Centre for African Studies over the past 8 years, focusing on the ‘pre-colonial’ research area under the directorship of Professor Ntsebeza. She served as Acting Head of African Studies for 6 months from 2017 to early 2018 and has been teaching in African Studies for the past 3 years where she also co-supervises interdisciplinary research up to doctoral level (indigenous knowledge and practices, transformation of the disciplines etc.) Her own research has been Khoe and San identity studies, museum and heritage transformation and decolonising historiography. She played a leading role in the international peer reviewed Bam, J., Ntsebeza, L. and Zinn, A. eds., 2018. Whose History Counts: Decolonising African Pre-colonial Historiography (Vol. 3). African Sun Media which has been recently profiled for consideration for the 2020 NIHSS Inaugural Award. June has been affiliated as Research Associate at York University's Institute for the Public Understanding of the Past, and has been Visiting Professor with Stanford University's Overseas programme on 'Sites of Memory' for 6 years. She has published widely, and has organised and participated as a key speaker in a number of international and local conferences at universities over many years; including recently, as an invited African representative on international indigenous literature in Seoul and on gender and indigenous heritage in Peru. She coordinated the A/Xarra forum for CAS from 2018 - 2020. She is Interim Director of the San and Khoi Centre. Her earlier work won the Unesco Peace Education Award for South Africa in 2008.
Professor Gertrude Fester
Cape Town-born gertrude was active in anti-apartheid activism focusing on articulating women's and national liberation. She participated in establishing women's structures (1980s-1990s) and Women's National Coalition, which advocated successfully for a gender-sensitive constitution. She founded Women's Education and Artistic Voice and Expressions, a feminist writing collective encouraging young black women's writing resulting in a self-published anthology. She actively encourages inter-generational working at all levels.
The oppression of women and marginalised groups has been central in her writing, both fiction and nonfiction. Her prison play, The Spirit cannot be caged, composed in her head during solitary confinement as Apartheid prisoner was performed at the Fourth Women's UN Conference, Beijing. Post-1994 she had several political deployments including national Member of Parliament and Commissioner on Gender Equality. Some academic positions include Wynona Lipman Chair (Centre for American Women and Politics), Rutgers, USA and professor Extraordinaire in Gender and Women's Studies (UWC). In 2011-2015 she taught Transitional Justice mainstreaming Gender (University of Rwanda). Currently she is honorary professor (Centre for African Studies, UCT) and PhD supervisor (Bishop Stuart University, Uganda). She is part of Aboriginal/Xarra Restorative Justice Forum (UCT) and formed part of the pilot course in Foundational Khoekhoegowab, Extra-Mural studies, UCT). Her Prison Memoirs and The Spirit shall not be Caged and other one act plays are in the process of being published. She is currently working on a chapter commissioned by Wits Press on Black Feminism, Querying the Queer.She heads the A/Xarra Womens’ Commission.
Tazlin Maasdorp
Tazlin is a climate change and environmental justice activist. She is a leading activist in the Phillippi Horticultural Area and Farming campaign. As member of the A/Xarra Youth Commission, she is a passionate student of Khoekhoegowab and graduated from the Foundational course programme offered by the San and Khoi Centre. Below is links to the work she is involved in.
https://africanclimatealliance.org/2020/02/11/aca-deep-adaptation-open-space-in-cape-town/
Gaob” Martinus Fredericks
The 13 generations of Gaob since King Akembie was recorded in 1661 in the history of the !Aman // Aes also called the “ Amaquas of the Cape Records” or the Little Nama. Goab Martinus Fredericks was born during the height of apartheid on 06 March 1965 within this ancestral oral history context in Robertson in the Western Cape and grew up as a ‘Cape Coloured’ which he describes as ‘a deliberate myth created through apartheid legislation that changed the identity of the Aboriginal Khoe and San people to Cape Coloured’. After he completed his matric during the turbulent 1984 in Grabouw, he completed a number of tertiary courses of which were the following: National diploma in Agriculture, National Diploma in Farm Business Management , National Diploma in Nature Conservation , Cert Management Development University of Stellenbosch, Cert Management Development University of Western Cape , and Cert in Environmental Law. His employment included being a farm manager in Grabouw, an Environmental Officer and as a Biophysical and Environmental Specialist for the City of Cape Town. In 2014 his family from Bethanie in Namibia and South Africa was mandated to set up a sister structure of the !Aman Traditional Authority of Bethanie in Namibia here in South Africa, to start the Unification process between the !Aman // Aes in South Africa , Namibia , Botswana and elsewhere in the Khoe and San Diaspora. In 2016 he was mandated by the Royal Family in Bethanie Namibia as the “Goab “ of the !Aman //. He is a founder member of the A/Xarra Restorative Justice Forum and leads on research in rural land reform.
Dr Sharon Groenmeyer (from 2020)
Sharon is a sociologist and development worker with more than 20 years’ experience in education and training. She works in a network with other development workers’ in South Africa as an independent, feminist researcher, gender auditor of non-government projects. Recently, she has mentored and taught literacy to young girls.
After completing her doctoral thesis on Women and Social policy in contemporary post-apartheid South Africa with the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim in Norway, she continues to write and publish on two main themes in social policy: (i) Women SMME owners operating in male dominated industries of fishing and agriculture and (ii) the role of women in the peacebuilding process. She was a Senior Research Fellow for the Centre for the Study of Democracy (CSD) University of Johannesburg where she researched public participation in local government and published on childcare grants. She has also held a position as Post-Doctoral Fellow in the Faculty of Health, University of Cape Town. She has worked as an external collaborator for the ILO Turin, Italy, on the Gender Poverty Employment and as a tutor on the Gender Mainstreaming open learning programmes. She is also a paralegal practitioner and continues to contribute knowledge and ideas on monitoring and evaluation. Sharon holds membership of South African Monitoring and Evaluation Association (SAMEA) and South African Sociological Association (SASSA) and is a member of Codesria and has presented at the Gender Symposium in Cairo, Egypt.
Robyn Humphreys
Robyn Humphreys is a PhD candidate in Archaeology and African Studies. Robyn advocates for an accountable archaeology which acknowledges communities and community institutions as important stakeholders in knowledge production and research. She argues that when we listen to communities as archaeologists and biological anthropologists, we create the potential for new practice that is transformative, self-critical and beneficial to communities
Tauriq Jenkins
Tauriq is chair of the A/Xarra Restorative Justice Forum and one of its founding members. He is a lead pro-poor civic activist in heritage protection of the Liesbeeck River (within the current Two Rivers Urban Park in Observatory) for which he is claiming for it to be declared a World Heritage Site. As former chair of the Observatory Civic Association, and a Masters’ graduate from Columbia University, with a keen commitment to environmental justice, Tauriq leads the Human Remains and Urban Land Reform Research Commissions of the A/Xarra. It is under the recognised strategic leadership of Jenkins that the A/Xarra Restorative Justice Forum has been sustained as a profoundly important and complex traditional structures and civic organisation coalition and under whose leadership on ‘co-design’ conceptual processes that the renaming of Jameson Hall to Sarah Baartmann could be attained through difficult and challenging dialogues. He is also an accomplished film actor, a chess champion and has established an innovative cultural rehabilitation programme through Shakespearean theatre for prisoners in Pollsmoor .
Paramount Chief Sedas (Shedrick Kleinschmidt)
National Chair of the House of |Xam who also represents the National Office of the |Xam Nation.
Xegwi from Eastern their Queen is Anette Twyipie Loots Voster
The Xau Sakwa (Grass Bushmen)
The Guriqua from West Coast
Hawequa-|Xam Cape Winelands
Sanquas Swartland
Karoo-|Xam Karoo
Khwe Bushmen
Kalahari |Xam from Kalahari
Xun Bushmen Northern Cape
Annelize Kotze (from 2020)
Annelize Kotze is a Social History Curator at the Iziko Museums of South Africa and is currently doing her Masters in Archaeology at the University of Cape Town, focusing on cultural identity in Khoe, San and Coloured women of the Western and Northern Cape. In 2018 Annelize did an exhibition on the repatriation of Human Remains of especially the remains of women and children still housed in museums and universities. She has been involved in community engagement, both in a personal and professional capacity, and is a passionate advocate for the importance of community engagement and decolonising museum spaces.
Paramount Chief Patricia Lemmetjies
Patricia is a community activist researcher with an interest in working with the Dutch archives and later missionary church records on land appropriation in the Cape. She is trained in forensic law and is currently pursuing a doctorate at UWC on land restitution. She spends most of her time in the archives doing research on disputed land claims pertaining to the West Coast and ensuring community safety. She is the Khoekhoe chief of the Cochoqua Royal House, Mamre, and affiliated to the KwaZulu-Natal KhoeSan Women’s League. Mrs Lemmetjies is a founding member of the A/Xarra Restorative Justice Forum.
Danab Bradley van Sitters
Bradley is a world renowned indigenous southern African languages activist and community languages researcher. He is chair of the A/Xarra Languages Commission and Khoekhoegowab teacher of the UCT-certificated course.He has been admitted to an MPhil in Pan African languages in Linguistics and African Studies based on Recognition of Prior Learning.He was the elected praise singer for the State of the Nation Address in 2019, to mark 25 years of South Africa’s democracy.He is cited widely in academic journals.
Professor Sylvia Vollenhoven
Carine Zaayman
Carine Zaayman is an artist, curator and scholar committed to critical engagement with colonial archives and collections, specifically those holding strands of Khoekhoe pasts. Bringing intangible and neglected histories into view is a key motivation for her work. Her research aims to contribute to a radical reconsideration of colonial archives and museum collections, especially by assisting in finding ways to release their hold over our imaginations when we narrate the past, as well as how we might shape futures from it. She obtained a PhD in Fine Art from the University of Cape Town where she also worked at the Michaelis School of Fine Art and the Centre for Curating the Archive. At present, Zaayman is a postdoctoral fellow at the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, as a team member in the NWO Worlding Public Cultures project, as well as a research associate at the Research Centre for Material Culture . Zaayman is the Curator of Under Cover of Darkness, an exhibition and project concerned with the history of women in servitude, especially slavery, in Cape Town. (uncovered darkness)
What we do
A/Xarra Restorative Justice Forum Members are active in the community and involved in many important initiatives. Here you will find some of the work they are doing.
Khoi and San Language Revival
Read
- First certified foundational Khoekhoegowab course for SA
- Review of Kora: A lost Khoisan language of the early Cape and the Gariep (Unisa Press), by June Bam-Hutchison (Centre for African Studies, University of Cape Town)
- Language course cements Khoi identity
-Year-old San and Khoi Centre adds invaluable indigenous knowledge to archive
- Heritage Month: UCT cleansing ceremonies a powerful transformation narrative
- TLC2020: teaching as a form of social responsiveness
https://www.news.uct.ac.za/article/-2020-10-07-tlc2020-teaching-as-a-form-of-social-responsiveness
- First certified foundational Khoekhoegowab course for SA
Saving southern Africa’s oldest languages
https://mg.co.za/africa/2020-07-20-saving-southern-africas-oldest-languages/
Language course cements Khoi identity
Review of Kora: A lost Khoisan language of the early Cape and the Gariep (Unisa Press), by June Bam-Hutchison (Centre for African Studies, University of Cape Town)
Watch
The Faculty of Humanities at the University of Cape Town (UCT) hosted a virtual San & Khoi Heritage Month Colloquium, titled “Unburning the Fire and Acknowledgement of Land Cleansing Ceremony” on 29 September 2021.
Challenging Development at Two Rivers Urban Park
Read
Group walks through the Cape CBD to protest Amazon development at River Club site
Heritage Western Cape slams River Club development plan
How to whitewash colonial pain and trauma
https://mg.co.za/opinion/2020-09-24-how-to-whitewash-colonial-pain-and-trauma/
Listen
'Black River development: Here's why we are against it'
Concerns raised over the obs development
https://omny.fm/shows/the-midday-report-capetalk/concerns-raised-over-the-obs-developme
https://obs.org.za/cms/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/River-Club-RADIO-786.mp3
Watch
Allan Boesak - why #Statuesmustfall was part of #June16th march to deliver the 50 000+ signatures
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l80LT8szaQY&ab_channel=OCANewsChannel
Walk of resistance against Amazon River Club development
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdlI9geNRd4&ab_channel=NdifunaUkwazi
Stop the River Club Development
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=447osdabfC4&ab_channel=AndreaCouvert
Nama, Herero and Damara Genocide
Listen
More than 100 Years Without Reparations to Victims of Genocide in Namibia
https://rights.culturalsurvival.org/more-100-years-without-reparations-victims-genocide-namibia
Martinus Fredericks On Germany - Namibia Compensation Agreement
https://rights.culturalsurvival.org/martinus-fredericks-germany-namibia-compensation-agreement
Publications by A/Xarra Restorative Justice Forum Members
Lewis, Desiree, and Gabeba Baderoon, eds. Surfacing: On being black and feminist in South Africa. Wits University Press, 2021.
https://witspress.co.za/catalogue/surfacing/
Muthien, Bernedette and Bam, June, eds. Re-thinking Africa: Indigenous Women Re-interpret Southern Africa's Pasts. Jacana Media, 2020.
https://jacana.co.za/product/rethinking-africa-indigenous-women-re-interpret-southern-africas-pasts/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YEIkOguGV9U&t=47s&ab_channel=Khoi%26SanUnitUCT
Bam, June, Lungisile Ntsebeza, and Allan Zinn, eds. Whose History Counts: Decolonising African Pre-Colonial Historiography. African SUN Media, 2018.
https://catalog.princeton.edu/catalog/99116941153506421
Jenkins, Tauriq. "When it flows, it floods." New Agenda: South African Journal of Social and Economic Policy 2021.79 (2021): 36-41.
https://obs.org.za/cms/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Tauriq-Jenkins-New-Agenda-No79-2021.pdf
Abrahams, Yvette. "How Must I Explain to the Dolphins?: An Intersectional Approach to Theorizing the Epistemology of Climate Uncertainty." Environmental Ethics 40.4 (2018): 389-404.
Food Security and Advocating for the Marginalized
Rights violations threaten individuals and communities via lockdown regulations in South Africa
Hungry men and women are angry men and women, say activists
Transforming Museums
The Big Review: Slavery at the Rijksmuseum by Carine Zaayman
https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2021/07/09/the-big-review-slavery-at-the-rijksmuseum
‘Under Cover of Darkness’ team present at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, 6 April 2021
https://undercoverofdarkness.co.za/press/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVEuKtKVLCE&ab_channel=CLUEPlus
‘Inter-RESTING Times’ exhibition restores a touch of dignity to museum life