Apartheid—The Global Itinerary

by Louise Bethlehem -- As our research project draws to a close, I thought I would revisit some of its founding assumptions and reflect on its findings and consequences. In my blog entry on this platform (December 2016), I wrote of how I came to the conclusion that: “Apartheid moved things.” Indeed, the conceptual foundations of the research project that emerged there were bound up with displacement—my own voluntary displacement from apartheid South Africa certainly, but much more significantly, the myriad forms of exile, internal banishment and migration associated with the apartheid regime. Taking the South African government’s exiling of political activists, intellectuals, writers, photographers, and musicians as one point of departure, the project tracked the outward trajectories of South African cultural agents and cultural formations beyond the borders of that country in order to investigate how apartheid functioned as a catalyst for transnational cultural production.  Agains...

by Louise Bethlehem and Roni Mikel Arieli -- Kier Schuringa served as a full-time activist in the Dutch Anti-Apartheid and southern Africa solidarity movement from the early 1970s until its dissolution in 1994. He subsequently coordinated the Library, Information and Documentation Center of the Netherlands Institute for Southern Africa (NIZA). He joined the International Institute of Social History in 2008, working with its southern African collection which was transferred from NIZA that year. He was interviewed by Louise Bethlehem and Roni Mikel Arieli on 25 January 2017. The interview has been edited slightly for clarity. Anti Apartheid Demonstration, Amsterdam, 1985. Sjakkelien Vollebregt / Anefo [CC0] Louise Bethlehem: First of all, thank you for agreeing to talk to us. Let us begin perhaps from the story of your personal involvement in the anti-apartheid movement here in the Netherlands, and then move through those experiences to ask you what it means for you as an archivist [...

by  Louise Bethlehem  -- In 1996, Leon de Kock and Ian Tromp published an anthology entitled The Heart in Exile: South African Poetry in English, 1990-1995 . The volume included a poem by Denis Hirson, “The Long-Distance South African,” recounting Hirson’s experience of viewing the televised broadcast of Nelson Mandela’s triumphant release from prison at a long geographical remove from South Africa. Hirson, a poet and writer, is the son of the anti-apartheid activist, physicist and later historian, Baruch Hirson, who was a key figure in the Armed Resistance Movement (ARM) in South Africa in the early 1960s. The family left South Africa following Baruch Hirson’s release from prison in 1973. I had gone to primary school in Johannesburg with Denis’s younger sister, Zoë. But by the time I encountered the poem, I had been living in Israel for over a decade. Unlike the Hirsons, my displacement was self-imposed. I had no official genealogy of political exile to claim. But Denis Hirso...