Image: Shelley Christians/UWCAhead of the University of the Western Cape (UWC) awarding honorary doctorates to two extraordinary women who have championed anti-racism and anti-colonialism, a photographic exhibition opened highlighting the role of Ireland in the global fight against apartheid.
The exhibition is being hosted at the Iyatsiba Lab of UWC’s Centre for Humanities Research in Woodstock, featuring black and white photographs by Derek Speirs, curated by Professor Premesh Lalu who holds the UK-RSA Bilateral Research Chair: Digital Humanities in culture and technics.
Charlotte Maxeke, posthumously, and former Irish President Mary Robinson, are being awarded with honorary doctorates by UWC, which hosts the Charlotte Maxeke-Mary Robinson Research Chair.
The Chair was established in 2023 and is a broad and reciprocal collaboration between Ireland and Southern Africa focused on engagement with the complex inheritances of colonialism, empire, partition and apartheid, and exploring how to overcome this legacy.
Director of the CHR, Professor Maurits van Bever Donker, said that when the Centre was established in 2006, it was envisioned that it should not simply reproduce the disciplines of English literature, philosophy, etc.
Image: Shelley Christians/UWC“We thoughtit actually has to engage with one of the core questions that still remains in post apartheid South Africa, which is, how do you educate people? How do you create an understanding of what it means to be in a society that doesn't allow a repetition of apartheid/partition,” said van Bever Donker.
Speaking at the launch of the exhibition, Robinson said she was an active participant in the anti-apartheid movement, describing her good fortune in having ANC stalwart Kader Asmal as her Administrative Law professor while he taught at Trinity College in Dublin.
“We stood, for hours, listening together, and it was well worth listening to him. We were listening to the reality of South Africa at the time, and it deserved every word that Kader spoke.
“We often make a mistake when discussing an exhibition of this nature to focus on the content of the photos. But that's as important as the image itself. And the people behind the lens, in this case, they're exteriors,” said Robinson, who was Irish President between December 1990 and September 1997.
She said Speirs’ photographs are the perfect example of what famed Irish poet Seamus Heaney described as “Rhythmic Solidarity”- The solidarity of ordinary people, whose beliefs and perseverance resulted in extraordinary change.
While photographers like Speirs captured the raw and unfiltered truth with their lenses, Robinson said one of the greatest threats facing humanity is the unregulated emergence of artificial intelligence.
Justice Albie Sachs. Image: Shelley Christians/UWC“AI can falsify a photograph. It can create and spread disinformation faster than a shutter button can be pressed. This threat to truth - to what is real and factual - is not just about whether or not your child believes a talking dog video is genuine. It's the difference between whether a war will be won or a nation destroyed. It's not only an enormous threat to human rights and civil liberty. It's one of the greatest current threats to democracy itself,” said Robinson.
Professor Lalu recalled his visit to Ireland in 2019. Exhausted and being “propped up” by his colleague; he said the country had touched him after encountering an exhibition of Heaney at the Bank of Ireland’s Cultural and Heritage Centre.
“I thought about what his work was doing for us, in South Africa, and that what we had failed to consider was how, in some sense, the idea of solidarity was being rescripted. And so, at the core of this exhibition is the poem, Human Chains, which he wrote in 2010,” said Lalu.
He had worked with Speirs to mine his vast collection of photographs, capturing the anti-apartheid movement, which would both express the ordinary in the struggle against apartheid but also other sources of solidarity which were more than political - these were both the cultural and the aesthetic.
“It’s such a difficult process (curating) these images that gave us a sense of what rhythmic solidarity looks like, because he has such a vast archive. Rhythmic solidarity is more than a simple linking of arms; it's about building human chains - human chains that link over long periods and endure phases of history,” said Lalu.
