Hani’s daughter to speak at summit
STRUGGLE icon Chris Hani’s daughter, Lindiwe Hani, will tomorrow discuss the conversations she had with her late father’s assassin Janusz Walus.
Hani is one of the speakers participating in the Reverberations of History Conference at the Stellenbosch University until Sunday.
Her talk, which looks at how the impact of colonialism, slavery and apartheid is shaping tomorrow’s world, takes place at 6.30pm.
Hani’s talk will be preceded in the morning by a session of conversations between apartheid victims and perpetrators. The session is strongly reminiscent of the TRC hearings.
Keynote addresses were by two of the world’s respected post-colonial theorists Harvard University’s professor Homi Bhabha and Wits University’s professor Achille Mbembe.
The line-up is made up of leading scholars in the field of researching the impact of past institutional injustices on the psyche of current generations. Tomorrow, the widow of the late UDF-activist Fort Calata, one of the so-called Cradock Four murdered by South African security police in the ‘80s, will engage with Maties professor Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela in a conversation about her life, entitled: The Past has Never been Past for Me: A Conversation on My Life.
Gobodo-Madikizela said: “Far from being over, the past continues to act on the lives of descendants – the children of both victims and perpetrators. Issues of shame and guilt, of impoverishment and inequity, have trans-generational impacts.”
Gobodo-Madikizela served on South Africa’s TRC. “The post-apartheid generation in South Africa, the children raised after the genocide in Rwanda, after the war in Sierra Leone, are developing their own language of what the future looks like.
“This is the language of Rhodes Must Fall and the like; it is a new universal language being developed by young people.”