You are invited by Wits University Press and SWOP (The Society, Work and Development Institute) to the launch of Jacklyn Cock’s Writing the Ancestral River: A biography of the Kowie. This biography of a river shows how the ravages of the past are congealed in the present. The Kowie River runs through the center of what was known as ‘the Zuurveld’, the area between the Fish and Sundays rivers which was the crucible of settler colonialism. During 100 years of conflict the amaXhosa were dispossessed of their land and livelihoods, defeated and absorbed into the settler economy as a source of cheap labour. Today this pattern continues as most of the African population of the area still do not own the land on which they live, and are denied the resources necessary for a dignified and productive life. The area of the Zuurveld, now called Ndlambe Municipality is one of the poorest parts of South Africa.
Mazibuko Jara, founding director of Ntinga Ntaba kaNdoda, a community-owned rural development facilitator in the Eastern Cape & author Jacklyn Cock will be in conversation on the implications of past injustices for living with each other and with nature.
- WHEN: Monday 23 April 2018, 17:30 for 18:00
- WHERE: South West Engineering Building, Graduate Seminar room, Wits University, Braamfontein, Johannesburg (Parking at Origins Centre, Yale Road)
- RSVP info.witspress@wits.ac.za by Friday 20 April 2018
More info about the book here.
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