Antjie Krog, Afrikaans poet, writer and Professor at the University of the Western Cape, will be the speaker at the next Africa and Knowledge Seminar on the 19th of August 2021. Her talk will examine two South African novels - Sol T Plaatje's Mhudi (1930) and Njabulo Ndebele's The Cry of Winnie Mandela (2003) - and how they might offer creative modes of thinking through a range of difficult historical, political and social questions and challenges.
This webinar will be held on Zoom from 15h00-16h30 South African Standard Time (GMT+2).
Please click here to RSVP, or contact Anele.Mngadi@Mandela.ac.za
Speaker Biography
Antjie Krog is an Afrikaans poet, writer and Professor at the University of the Western Cape. She published twelve volumes of poetry in Afrikaans of which three volumes were compiled with English translations: Down to my Last Skin (2000), Body Bereft (2006) and Synapse (2014). She also published three non-fiction books: Country of my Skull (1998), on the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission; A Change of Tongue (2004) about the transformation in South Africa after ten years; and Begging to be Black (2009) about learning to live within a black majority. Krog has also co-authored an academic book There was this Goat (2009) with two colleagues Prof Kopano Ratele and Nosisi Mpolweni, investigating the Truth Commission testimony of Mrs Notrose Nobomvu Konile. A book of essays was published in 2013 Conditional Tense – Memory and Vocabulary after the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission as part of Seagull Books’ African List.
Country of my Skull and A Change of Tongue have been nominated by South African librarians (LIASA) as two of the ten most important books written in ten years of democracy. She was also asked to translate the autobiography of Nelson Mandela, ‘Long Walk to Freedom’ into Afrikaans.
Krog had been awarded most of the prestigious awards for poetry, non-fiction, journalism and translation available in Afrikaans and English in South Africa. Internationally she was awarded the Stockholm prize from the Hiroshima Foundation for Peace and Culture for the year 2000, the Open Society Prize from the Central European University (previous winners were Jürgen Habermas and Vaclav Havel) and the Dutch Gouden Ganzenveer 2018 as well as an Honorary Doctorate from the Tavistock Clinic of the University of East London UK. Her work has been translated into English, Dutch, Italian, French, Spanish, Swedish, Serbian, Arabic and Chinese.
The Africa and Knowledge Seminar Series is a collaboration between the Emengini Institute for Comparative Global Studies, and the Chair for Critical Studies in Higher Education Transformation, the Centre for Philosophy in Africa, and the Faculty of Humanities at Nelson Mandela University.