The University of KwaZulu-Natal College of Humanities cordially invites you to the John Langalibalele Dube Memorial Lecture on the theme of: Celebrating 150 years of Nokuthela Dube.
Treading in Shifting Sands: A Portrait of John and Nokuthela Dube
Remarkable people of our history are those who read their times, understood the exigencies of their constituencies, and decided the best course of their action in the circumstances. These are marked not by epic stories of incessant triumphs without odds, but by ambiguities that come with standing on shifting sands. This is the complexity of living through the shadow of death, crossing the line between non-being and being; defying the designs to nothingness African people pulled through in colonial settings. This is about the mystery of leading boldly in times of oppression, often defining and redefining what courage means in each context, what being bold entails in each epoch in the passage of time. It is about those who chose to make life out of dead situations and sought to give meaning to times of meaningless pursuits.
John Langalibalele and Nokuthela uMaMdima Dube lived through times of sea changes in southern Africa and in the colonial world as a whole. This was the period of consolidation of colonialism and expansion of its civilising mission; a period of massive disruption of the political economy that defined what it meant to live and live well in a society engulfed in imperialist fires and passions. It is a period of modernity expanding with its message of hope, salvation and civilisation ironically demanding a huge price for the indigenous peoples including the loss of their civilisation and ways of being. The Dubes were a prominent part of the mission-educated African elite buffeted by the promise of modernity and the experience of barbarity at the hands of the same modernity.
This lecture will locate them, their thoughts and their actions in this sense of shifting sands and changing meanings of what it means to resist and persist. We seek to explain the ambiguities of their positioning and outlook amidst these uncertain shifts. It will suggest that it is these ambiguities that make them remarkable amid crosswinds, turbulences, and storms. The lecture invites us to consider lessons from this for us who live today in stormy times of hopes and despair, progress and regress. This is so that we might answer the question: what do we read in the times and what do we do in the moment?
Date: 14 September 2023
Time: 18h30 - 20h30
Venue: LT10, Phyllis Naidoo Lecture Theatre, Edgewood Campus, UKZN, Pinetown
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View the YouTube livestream here: https://bit.ly/3CbT2OQ
Enquiries: Nkonzo Mkhize | MkhizeN2@ukzn.ac.za
Please see attached for details.
Issued by College of Humanities
