It is 15 short years since the curtain was finally drawn on the system of institutionalised racism that the world knew as apartheid. Memorial signifiers (such as monuments, museums, statues or street names) of its demise are writ large on South Africa’s public landscape. Yet, its pernicious effects on our inner-worlds; on memory, identity and subjectivity continue to constrain the promises of a truly post-apartheid South Africa. Trapped by a national desire to look forward rather than to the past, the everyday personal accounts of the scourge of apartheid are rapidly fading into a forgotten past.

Based on the premise that the Apartheid Archive is both public and personal and should encompass not only the spectacular but the quotidian, capillary effects of oppression and dehumanization, the Apartheid Archive Project aims, through the collection of over 5000 narratives, to examine the nature of the experiences of racism of South Africans under the old apartheid order and interrogate their continuing effects on individual and group functioning in contemporary South Africa.

The project’s first conference represents the first step towards this overarching aim. The conference will feature keynote addresses by leading scholars and social commentators in the fields of memory, racism, history and narrative, including: