Talk:
You have to name it to reclaim it

Dr. June Bam-Hutchison
(University of Cape Town, South Africa) on the Historical Genocide of 'Khoisan' communities in South Africa

16 Apr 2019 (Tue) 4:30-6:00pm
Room 4.36, Run Run Shaw Tower, Centennial Campus, HKU

Historical genocide of ‘Khoisan’ communities is much silenced in public discourse in South Africa and often not linked to land dispossession nor to epistemological justice long overdue in the post-apartheid context. This paper explores how contemporary society (through higher education institutions and museums) could possibly restore social and economic justice for the Cape Flats ‘KhoiSan’-descendant communities through contextualised socially engaged precolonial research programmes and memorialisation aimed at addressing the loss of knowledge of the land and landscape.

June Bam is an internationally known South African heritage practitioner. She currently teaches in the Centre for African Studies, University of Cape Town and is also a Visiting Professor with Stanford University's Overseas Programme on 'Sites of Memory' . Her current research is on precolonial identities in South Africa. As former Director of South Africa's first national history project in post-apartheid South Africa, she is co-editor of 'Whose History Counts?': Decolonising Precolonial Historiography (2018). Bam has worked globally in museums and cultural spaces, as Honorary Secretary of African Studies (UK), Research Fellow with York University (Institute of the Public Understanding of the Past), and Visiting Fellow, Kingston University (London). She also served as the inaugural chair of Cape Town's first virtual museum of the city.