Premesh Lalu: The Humanities After Apartheid

Interview with Premesh Lalu on the Humanities in South Africa

Interview with Premesh Lalu on Nelson Mandela

World Bulletin / Ibrahim Tigli and Jalal Rayi - Cape Town

Nelson Mandela, South Africa's first black president who steered his nation out of apartheid, passed away on December 6 at the age of 95.

Premesh Lalu, who studies social history and the apartheid regime, has replied to the questions of World Bulletin about Nelson Mandela and South Africa's past and future.

Lalu is the director of the Centre for Humanities Research (University of the Western Cape) and chair of the Handspring Trust.

Mandela is very much with us!

by Premesh Lalu, Economics & Politics Weekly

If one believes media reports, Nelson Mandela is no longer with us. Yet, in more ways than one, he is. In the midst of the frenzy of soundbites and images that now circulate through the space left by his macabrely anticipated absence, there is danger that Mandela will be honoured, even monumentalised, but not meaningfully remembered. Part of the problem it seems is that the anti-apartheid struggle to which Mandela contributed so substantially has been recalled as an event, as a passing phase, not a sustained development of a thought that opened onto a concept of the post-apartheid.