Toivo Asheeke, Ph.D.

Since1994 the African National Congress (ANC) has become synonymous with and indivisible from the fight against apartheid rule in South Africa. This has left little space for competing accounts, visions, and political projects to find their appropriate place in the historical narrative. This lecture will focus on the importance of exploring hidden narratives of freedom struggles as they are buried under layers of what Michel-Rolph Trouillot called silences in history. My aim is to move beyond well-trodden histories of South Africa’s liberation struggle to tell the previously neglected story of the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM) and its engagement with guerrilla warfare, community feminism and Black Internationalism. Uncovering the personal and political histories of those who have previously received scant scholarly attention, the lecture will illuminate the history of Africa’s decolonization struggle as well as that of the wider Cold War.