Matthew Wannenburgh

Matthew Wannenburgh is a former Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung (KAS-SAIIA) and HB Thom Master’s scholar pursuing an MA in Political Science at Stellenbosch University. He holds a postgraduate Honours in International Studies (cum laude) with a focus on Global Political Economy, Comparative Politics, and Subaltern Studies and a BA with minors in German Language and Culture and Historiography. As a researcher, he is currently on the team digitising the Bleek and Lloyd Archive at UCT’s Centre for Curating the Archive, focusing on “Publications and Reports” and miscellaneous “Other Documents”. Drawn to how the collections elucidate on spatial politics and postcoloniality, he is curating materials from the archive concerning pre-Union formative South African politics and colonial law and society (that reveal key inflexion points) and other Victorian-era South African history more boradly, as well as |xam bushman folklore and genealogies in the notebooks and addenda. Matthew has previously worked as a KAS postgraduate Research Intern and climate advocacy Junior Researcher at the South African Institute of International Affairs.

There are synergies between his MA research and materials in the archive that show (seemingly) innocuous colonial-era data collection as inadvertent or eventual intelligence gathering. These provide a rich, early case study of institutionally sanctioned data colonialism in a territory that would evolve into a hyper-biometric (pre-1994) South Africa.