HOW Series | Ordinary Whites in Apartheid Society: Social Histories of Accommodation
In this episode, Prof Neil Roos discusses how whiteness operated not only through state violence but also via the bureaucratic disciplining of the white working class. Drawing on archival material and personal memory, he illuminates how apartheid’s structures absorbed and managed misfit white bodies, from the expansion of the civil service to the little-known ‘work colonies’ where white men deemed deviant were reformed through labour therapy. Through exchanges with Dr Anell Daries and the audience, Prof Roos grapples with the psychological and generational complexities of complicity. He underscores that the task of history is not only to record the past but to provide moral and political off-ramps—ways to imagine futures beyond the prison of whiteness.NEIL ROOSNeil Roos is Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities at the University of Fort Hare. He is also one of the lead implementers of the South African Department of Higher Education and Training’s national collaborative Future Professors Programme (FPP). He writes on histories of race, and his recent research has focused on the historical, moral and political dimensions of white everyday life in apartheid South Africa. From this body of work, he has published essays in Social History, the Journal of Social History, The Historical Journal and International Review of Social History. Roos is also interested in historiography and theory, especially the theoretical moorings of a post-Marxist, left wing social history.
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1:21:06
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1:21:06
HOW Series | Desire at the End of the White Line
Dr Azille Coetzee speaks with remarkable vulnerability and intellectual clarity about the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality within white Afrikaner identity. Drawing on personal memoir and theoretical inquiry, she examines how the apartheid regime not only demanded political loyalty but also shaped affective orientations, who white women were expected to love, obey, and fear. Through reflections on feminist genealogy, security logics in suburban life, and the haunting story of white women shipwrecked on the Pondoland coast who chose to remain, Coetzee pushes us to imagine lives no longer organised around whiteness. In conversation with Dr Anell Daries, she explores the emotional grip of inherited power and the possibility of desiring otherwise.AZILLE COETZEEAzille Coetzee is a writer and a research fellow at Stellenbosch University. In her work she explores the relationship between gender and race in colonial logic, and the role of gender liberation in the project of decolonisation. Her research is published in various international feminist journals, like Hypatia, Feminist Review, and the European Journal of Women’s Studies, and she is the writer of the academic monograph Desire at the End of the White Line: Notes on the Decolonisation of White Afrikaner Femininity (2025, UKZN University Press).
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1:12:28
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1:12:28
The Three Deaths of Steve Biko: Towards a Jurisprudence of the Irreparable
In this powerful and unflinching lecture, Prof Joel Modiri challenges us to reckon with South Africa’s unfinished liberation and the symbolic transformation that has failed to deliver substantive justice. Drawing on the life and legacy of Steve Biko, Modiri frames his argument around three “deaths” of Biko, his physical death under apartheid, the juridical death through post-apartheid legal compromise, and the ongoing erasure of Biko’s radical vision in the present. Modiri’s address traverses’ law, philosophy, politics, and history, offering a sobering account of post-1994 South Africa and a call for the radical reimagining of justice, belonging, and historical redress.Professor Joel ModiriJoel M Modiri is the acting Deputy Dean: Teaching and Learning and Head of the Department of Jurisprudence in the Faculty of Law, University of Pretoria. He holds the degrees LLB cum laude (Pret) and PhD (Pret). His PhD thesis was entitled “The Jurisprudence of Steve Biko: A Study in Race, Law and Power in the ‘Afterlife’ of Colonial-apartheid.” His research and teaching interests are located in the broad field of jurisprudence and relate to critical race theory, Black political thought and African philosophy. His current projects intersect under two umbrellas rooted in the ethics and politics of the global Black radical tradition: Azanian critical theory and constitutional abolitionism. He was recently appointed as a United Nations Independent Eminent Expert in the area of race and racial discrimination.
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1:07:23
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1:07:23
Magical States and Latent Ghosts: Accountability for Apartheid-Era Crime In South Africa
In this compelling talk, Dr Robyn Gill-Leslie examines how the apartheid regime created a bureaucratic fiction to disguise political killings, using the case of Imam Abdullah Haron as a focal point. She draws on Veena Das’s concept of state magic to show how death in detention was masked as accidental and how this created a lasting space of uncertainty for families. With reference to Berber Bevernage’s idea of allochronic time, she explains how the post-TRC state's failure to pursue prosecutions has left survivors trapped in a painful temporal suspension. Reopened inquests offer limited redress but also reveal how truth can re-emerge through documentation, family persistence, and spectral memory, raising new questions about justice and repair in democratic South Africa.More readings:https://iol.co.za/news/south-africa/kwazulu-natal/2015-03-24-tortured-souls-of-dududu/https://witness.co.za/politics/2023/12/14/sangoma-calls-for-cleansing-ritual-in-kzn/https://www.news24.com/southafrica/news/tears-flow-as-jail-cell-visited-during-inquest-into-imam-abdullah-harons-death-in-detention-20221108ROBYN GILL-LESLIE Robyn Gill-Leslie is the postdoctoral fellow on the Bodies of Evidence project. Gill-Leslie’s work focuses on corporeal, aesthetic and creative approaches to truth recovery after atrocity. Intentionally inter-disciplinary, her work intersects with law, humanities and socio-legal approaches. Focusing on deconstructive, decolonial and reflective academics, she is interested in how the physical body is framed inside and outside of truth recovery mechanisms. Gill-Leslie’s expertise is in sub-Saharan Africa, specifically South Africa’s truth-finding mechanisms including the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and the Marikana Commission of Inquiry.
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Why do People Kill and Die for Religion? With Prof John Brewer
Professor John Brewer explores the powerful and paradoxical question: Why do people kill and die for religion? The conversation confronts the ways in which monotheistic religions have been entangled with violence throughout history. Brewer offers a sociological lens on how sacred beliefs, identity politics, and historical trauma create conditions ripe for religious conflict. Dr Demaine Solomons responds by pushing back against overly deterministic readings of monotheism, arguing for a more nuanced understanding that recognises socio-political forces and the potential of religion to foster justice and solidarity. Facilitated by Professor Robert Vosloo, the event also features rich reflections from attendees, making for a deeply layered discussion on faith, power, nationalism, and peacebuilding in both historical and contemporary contexts.JOHN BREWERJohn Brewer is Professor Emeritus in the Senator George J Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice at Queen’s University Belfast. He was awarded an Honorary DSocSci from Brunel University and is a Member of the Royal Irish Academy, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, a Fellow in the Academy of Social Sciences and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. He has held visiting appointments at Yale University, St John’s College Oxford, Corpus Christi College Cambridge and the Australia National University. He has been President of the British Sociological Association. He is Honorary Professor Extraordinary at Stellenbosch University, Honorary Professor of Sociology at Warwick University, and a member of the United Nations Roster of Global Experts. He was the recipient of the British Sociological Association’s Distinguished Service to British Sociology Award in 2023. He is the author or co-author of eighteen books and editor or co-editor of a further six. He is also Series Editor of two book series.
This podcast aims to bring conceptual clarity to the concept of violence and its consequences in the lives of victim and survivor groups on the one hand, and perpetrators and their descendants on the other.
South Africa