Friday, April 30, 2004
King Juan Carlos Center
53 Washington Square South, 1st Floor
New York University

Morning Session: Post-Liberation Politics in Southern Africa
Chair: Marilyn Young, Director, ICAS Project on the Cold War as Global Conflict and Department of History, NYU

Rehad Desai is a filmmaker based in Johannesburg. His documentary Born into Struggle, chronicling his family’s involvement in Apartheid resistance, will be screened during the Ten Years of Freedom Film Festival, to be held concurrently with the Africa Symposium. Rehad’s credits include the documentaries My Land My Life, a film about Zimbabwe, and Carlos Cardoso: An Independent Spirit. Rehad holds a Masters in History, and has worked as a media and training officer for the South African trade union movement. He is Executive Director of the 3 Continents Film Festival.

Shireen Hassim is a Lecturer in the Department of Political Science at the University of Witwatersrand. She studied at the Universities of Durban-Westville, Natal and York (Toronto) and has taught at all three universities. She is particularly interested in issues of institutionalization and state-society relations from the perspective of gender politics. She has published widely in South African and international journals, including Feminist Review, Women's Studies International Forum, Transformation and Politikon.

Horace Campbell is Professor of African American Studies and Political Science at Syracuse University in Syracuse New York. Most recently, he published Reclaiming Zimbabwe: The Exhaustion of the Patriarchal Model of Liberation, (David Phillip and Africa World Press). Rasta and Resistance From Marcus Garvey to Walter Rodney is going through its fifth edition. He is currently completing a book on the wars against the Angolan peoples and serves as the Chairperson of the International Caucus of the Black Radical Congress.

Njogu Morgan, International Coordinator of the South African AIDS group, Treatment Action Campaign (TAC). The TAC is a member of an Africa-wide social movement, the Pan African Treatment Access Movement (PATAM), seeking access to anti-retroviral therapy and other essential medicines.

Afternoon Sessions: The Truth and Reconciliation Commission
Chair: Allen Feldman, Culture and Communication Department, NYU

Lindy Wilson is a South African film director and producer. Her latest documentary film The Guguletu Seven will be screened as part of the Ten Years of Freedom Film Festival. The Guguletu Seven is the story of an ambush and the extraordinary revelation of the truth, which lies behind the death of seven young men. Her other credits include producing the 16-part documentary series, Unbanned: The Films South Africans Were not allowed to See (1995) and Robben Island, Our University (1988).

Alex Boraine is the founding President of the International Centre for Transitional Justice (ICJT) in New York City. He was Deputy Chairperson of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission from 1995 to 1998, serving under Archbishop Desmond Tutu. His experiences on the TRC are contained in his memoir, A Country Unmasked (Oxford University Press, 2000). An ordained Methodist minister and long-time opposition Member of Parliament in South Africa before 1994, he teaches law at New York University.

Paul Ngobeni is a South African-born attorney from Mpumalanga in the northeast, who now lives and practices in Connecticut. He represents Digwamaje vs IBM, one of four class-action lawsuits in New York court against multinational banks and companies that profited from apartheid.

Judge Dennis Davis is a Judge of the High Court, Cape Town, South Africa,and an Honorary Professor at the University of Cape Town. He is currently a Visiting Professor of Law and John Harvey Gregory Lecturer on World Organization at Harvard Law School.

Art and Politics in the New South Africa
Chair: Sean Jacobs, Fellow at ICAS and Director of the Ten Years of Freedom Film Festival

Norman Maake is a 25-year-old Johannesburg filmmaker whose films, the feature Soldiers of the Rock and the short Home Sweet Home, will be featured at the Ten Years of Freedom Film Festival. Both films were made while he was a film student. Norman is currently working on his second feature film titled, The Other Side of London Bridge, with Terraplane Productions in Johannesburg. Norman won the award as most promising filmmaker at the 2003 Cape Town World Cinema Festival and has been called “living proof of what Apartheid denied South Africa.”

Ntone Edjabe is a Cameroonian-born journalist and DJ. He is the Founding Editor of Chimurenga, a pan African quarterly of arts, cultures and politics out of Cape Town, South Africa. His writing, mostly on arts and cultures, has been widely published in newspapers and magazines in South Africa and abroad. He hosts Soul Makossa on Bush Radio, a progressive radio station in Cape Town, and is a member of the Fong Kong Bantu Soundsystem, a collective of DJs. During the day, he manages the Pan African Market, a trade and cultural centre in Cape Town.

Lucia Saks has been an Assistant Professor in the Program in Film and Video Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor since 2002. Previously Saks was Senior Lecturer and Program director in the Department of Media and Communication Studies at the University of Natal, Durban. Her most recent publication is “New Viewsites in South African Cinema”, a book chapter in Change Reels: Film and Film Culture in South Africa edited by Isabel Balseiro and Ntongela Masilela (Wayne State University Press, 2003).

Zakes Mda is a writer. He is Professor of Creative Writing at Ohio University. He has published five novels, most recently The Madonna of Excelsior (Oxford University Press), The Heart of Redness (Farar, Strauss and Giroux), and Ways of Dying (Picador). He has also published numerous plays. He holds a Ph.D from the University of Cape Town. Mda is a Winner of the Commonwealth Africa Region Prize for Literature and the 2003 Hurston/Wright LEGACY Award for The Heart of Redness. Mda was born in the Transkei and grew up in Johannesburg and Lesotho.

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