DUT Urban Futures Centre hosted a special seminar at DUT Steve Biko Campus, recently.
The seminar was held by Jacob Dlamini on history, memory and the intergenerational transfer of trauma in South Africa.

Jacob Dlamini is a historian of Africa at Princeton University , who has obtained multiple qualifications from universities abroad and has been a visiting scholar at Harvard University from 2014 to 2015.
The seminar topic was on how trauma of the past is transmitted across generations and how having such discussions might help people think differently about forging a new nation in South Africa.
Dlamini said apartheid was morally corrupt and people must acknowledge that story telling of the past has left the current generation traumatised.

“The burden of the future is living with the past, our generation is living under what people close to them when through. Again, we must acknowledge that the current generation does not get post trauma from what they hear from people who have experienced apartheid, but it’s from their own experiences where they connect the dots and remember the past,” said Dlamini.

He dwelled on how people with different stories should come out and tell their stories because he believes people treat apartheid as a single entity, and choose to forget collaborations that existed at that time, where black people worked with whites, but now people only choose to remember the violence as a crucial part.
“ We need to make room for more stories and narratives because the knowledge we have is not of everyones’ experiences and we must bear in mind that knowledge is not power as it serves with both negatives and positives,” said Dlamini.

Pictured: Prof Monique Marks and guest speaker Jacob Dlamini during the seminar.

Nomfundo Ngcobo