Dr Carla Lever is a Research Fellow at the Nelson Mandela School of Public Governance, University of Cape Town says in her article published in The Conversation(The Conversation Africa is an independent source of news and views from the academic and research community, delivered direct to the public.) “It’s undoubtedly encouraging - more than that, exciting - to see UCT nail their colours to the mast in what feels like an embrace of structural transformation, she does though, express her reservations, that Sarah Baartman Hall is not named as an abstract Decolonial gesture. It’s not a simple symbolic reference to a closed chapter of history, chosen at random from hundreds of alumni submissions. It is so named explicitly because of the direct trauma that people of colour experienced from the on-going campus exhibition of an underclad statue of Baartman from 2000 to 2018 in the Science and Technology section of the main library.“

Guest: Dr Carla Lever – Research Fellow at the Nelson Mandela School of Public Governance, University of Cape Town. She is a cultural anthropologist interested in spectacle, place and embodied practice in a South African context.