Holding Memory: a conversation about slavery and its afterlives in South Africa

Please join us for our final WiCDS Wednesday of 2026, featuring Nicola Cloete and René Smith and chaired by Lebohang Masango

This talk introduces Nicola Cloete’s book Slavery and Post-Apartheid Cultural Production in South Africa: Holding Memory, which examines how memory, heritage and identity shape claims to belonging in post-apartheid South Africa. Cloete develops the concept of ‘holding memory’, a framework for understanding how the mobilisation of this long-marginalised history allows descendant communities and other stakeholders to assert a validated place in the post-apartheid nation. The conversation pays particular attention to the entanglement of Coloured identities with enslaved pasts, showing how memory becomes a site of contested and reclaimed belonging. Drawing on archival research, ethnography, and memory theory, Cloete offers new frameworks for analysing how histories of slavery are recovered and used in contemporary South Africa.

Wednesday 14 October, 13.30-15.00

In the WiCDS office and online (follow the QR code on the poster to register)

Dr Nicola Cloete is an Associate Professor in the Department of Curatorial, Public and Visual Cultures at the University of the Witwatersrand, where she previously served as Head of Department from 2018 to 2020. She holds a PhD in Political Studies from Wits (2015), an MA in Gender, Culture and Politics from Birkbeck College, University of London (2004), and a BA Honours in Dramatic Art from Wits (2003), a trajectory that has shaped an interdisciplinary approach spanning Critical Heritage Studies, Memory Studies, Gender Studies, Critical Race Theory, and Visual Studies. Cloete's research centres on the history and memory of slavery in South Africa, examining how the country’s slave past is represented, contested and negotiated in post-apartheid public culture, museums and memorials. Her scholarship has been recognised through numerous fellowships and awards, including the Harvard South Africa Fellowship, a Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Studies (STIAS) Team Fellowship, the Zumkehr Prize for Scholarship in Public Memory and the Female Academic Leaders Fellowship Award.

Prof René A. Smith is Head of the Wits School of Arts. She was the first woman president of the South African Humanities Deans’ Association (SAHUDA) and the first woman to serve as Steering Committee Chairperson for the South African Centre for Digital Language Resources (SADiLaR). She also chaired Agenda Feminist Media and served as Chairperson of the Creative Outputs and Innovations Advisory Panel of the Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET). Prof Smith was the founding director of a university-based Arts and Design Digital Festival (Digifest) and has taught at several institutions of higher education in South Africa. Her immediate past portfolio was that of Arts and Design Executive Dean. She has adjudicated several media and film-related awards over the past three decades and participated in a range of strategic national and international processes. Among others, she co-edited two editions of Sociology: A South African Perspective. She has a PhD (UKZN) and a master’s cum laude (UND) in Cultural and Media Studies, as well as a BA Hons from Falmouth College of Arts (UK).

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