AVReQ The Podcast

Prof Susanne Klausen traces the apartheid state’s obsession with suppressing interracial sex between white men and black women, revealing how Afrikaner nationalism relied on a punitive, puritanical masculinity to preserve its imagined racial order. Drawing from her archival research and critical race theory, Klausen explores how laws such as the Immorality Act and its amendments were used to criminalise not only acts of intimacy but even the suggestion of desire. White men who transgressed were publicly shamed, flogged, imprisoned, and in many cases driven to suicide, punishments meant to reinforce racial loyalty and sexual discipline. The conversation facilitated by Dr Anell Daries explores the contradictions of white masculinity, shame, and the limits of state power in regulating intimacy.

SUSANNE M. KLAUSEN

Susanne M. Klausen is the Julia Gregg Brill Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at The Pennsylvania State University. Her main areas of research are the history of fertility politics in modern South Africa, nationalism and sexuality, and transnational movements for reproductive justice. She is the author of Race, Maternity, and the Politics of Birth Control in South Africa, 1910-1939 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004) and Abortion Under Apartheid: Nationalism, Sexuality, and Women’s Reproductive Rights in South Africa (Oxford University Press, 2015) that won the Women’s History Prize awarded by the Canadian Committee on Women’s History (2016) and the Joel Gregory Prize awarded by the Canadian Association of African Studies (2016). Prof Klausen has published articles in a range of scholarly journals and is currently writing a monograph on the criminalization of interracial heterosex in South Africa during apartheid.

Dr Azille Coetzee speaks with remarkable vulnerability and intellectual clarity about the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality within white Afrikaner identity. Drawing on personal memoir and theoretical inquiry, she examines how the apartheid regime not only demanded political loyalty but also shaped affective orientations, who white women were expected to love, obey, and fear. Through reflections on feminist genealogy, security logics in suburban life, and the haunting story of white women shipwrecked on the Pondoland coast who chose to remain, Coetzee pushes us to imagine lives no longer organised around whiteness. In conversation with Dr Anell Daries, she explores the emotional grip of inherited power and the possibility of desiring otherwise.

AZILLE COETZEE

Azille Coetzee is a writer and a research fellow at Stellenbosch University. In her work she explores the relationship between gender and race in colonial logic, and the role of gender liberation in the project of decolonisation. Her research is published in various international feminist journals, like Hypatia, Feminist Review, and the European Journal of Women’s Studies, and she is the writer of the academic monograph Desire at the End of the White Line: Notes on the Decolonisation of White Afrikaner Femininity (2025, UKZN University Press).

In this episode, Prof Neil Roos discusses how whiteness operated not only through state violence but also via the bureaucratic disciplining of the white working class. Drawing on archival material and personal memory, he illuminates how apartheid’s structures absorbed and managed misfit white bodies, from the expansion of the civil service to the little-known ‘work colonies’ where white men deemed deviant were reformed through labour therapy. Through exchanges with Dr Anell Daries and the audience, Prof Roos grapples with the psychological and generational complexities of complicity. He underscores that the task of history is not only to record the past but to provide moral and political off-ramps—ways to imagine futures beyond the prison of whiteness.

NEIL ROOS

Neil Roos is Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities at the University of Fort Hare. He is also one of the lead implementers of the South African Department of Higher Education and Training’s national collaborative Future Professors Programme (FPP). He writes on histories of race, and his recent research has focused on the historical, moral and political dimensions of white everyday life in apartheid South Africa. From this body of work, he has published essays in Social History, the Journal of Social History, The Historical Journal and International Review of Social History. Roos is also interested in historiography and theory, especially the theoretical moorings of a post-Marxist, left wing social history.

This episode delves into the racialised logic of physical education in twentieth-century South Africa and its entanglement with whiteness, nationalism and citizenship. Dr Anell Stacey Daries examines the history of the Physical Training Battalion (PTB), a state-led initiative aimed at rehabilitating impoverished white boys and men through militarised physical and moral training. Drawing on archival material and historical analysis, she explores how ideals of whiteness were inscribed onto the body through physical education, creating a template for the ideal citizen and reinforcing social separation and racial hierarchies. The conversation further reflects on the legacy of these practices and their continued resonance in institutions and masculinities today.

ANELL STACEY DARIES

Dr Anell Stacey Daries is an NIHSS/SU Prestigious Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for the Study of the Afterlife of Violence and the Reparative Quest (AVReQ), Stellenbosch University. Her research explores the origins, trajectories, and social implications of sciences to do with the human body within the context of South African pedagogical histories. As an extension of her interests in the histories of education in South Africa, her research seeks to explore how notions of citizenship have been constituted and reinforced by educational institutions. Apart from her ongoing research interest, Dr Daries is the postgraduate programmes convenor at AVReQ and has experience as a lecturer, academic administrator and mentor. Through her role, she seeks to facilitate innovative ways of student engagement that foreground the student in the knowledge-building process.

In this powerful and unflinching lecture, Prof Joel Modiri challenges us to reckon with South Africa’s unfinished liberation and the symbolic transformation that has failed to deliver substantive justice. Drawing on the life and legacy of Steve Biko, Modiri frames his argument around three “deaths” of Biko, his physical death under apartheid, the juridical death through post-apartheid legal compromise, and the ongoing erasure of Biko’s radical vision in the present. Modiri’s address traverses’ law, philosophy, politics, and history, offering a sobering account of post-1994 South Africa and a call for the radical reimagining of justice, belonging, and historical redress.

Professor Joel Modiri

Joel M Modiri is the acting Deputy Dean: Teaching and Learning and Head of the Department of Jurisprudence in the Faculty of Law, University of Pretoria. He holds the degrees LLB cum laude (Pret) and PhD (Pret). His PhD thesis was entitled “The Jurisprudence of Steve Biko: A Study in Race, Law and Power in the ‘Afterlife’ of Colonial-apartheid.” His research and teaching interests are located in the broad field of jurisprudence and relate to critical race theory, Black political thought and African philosophy. His current projects intersect under two umbrellas rooted in the ethics and politics of the global Black radical tradition: Azanian critical theory and constitutional abolitionism. He was recently appointed as a United Nations Independent Eminent Expert in the area of race and racial discrimination.

In this compelling talk, Dr Robyn Gill-Leslie examines how the apartheid regime created a bureaucratic fiction to disguise political killings, using the case of Imam Abdullah Haron as a focal point. She draws on Veena Das’s concept of state magic to show how death in detention was masked as accidental and how this created a lasting space of uncertainty for families. With reference to Berber Bevernage’s idea of allochronic time, she explains how the post-TRC state's failure to pursue prosecutions has left survivors trapped in a painful temporal suspension. Reopened inquests offer limited redress but also reveal how truth can re-emerge through documentation, family persistence, and spectral memory, raising new questions about justice and repair in democratic South Africa.

More readings:

https://iol.co.za/news/south-africa/kwazulu-natal/2015-03-24-tortured-souls-of-dududu/

https://witness.co.za/politics/2023/12/14/sangoma-calls-for-cleansing-ritual-in-kzn/

https://www.news24.com/southafrica/news/tears-flow-as-jail-cell-visited-during-inquest-into-imam-abdullah-harons-death-in-detention-20221108

ROBYN GILL-LESLIE

Robyn Gill-Leslie is the postdoctoral fellow on the Bodies of Evidence project. Gill-Leslie’s work focuses on corporeal, aesthetic and creative approaches to truth recovery after atrocity. Intentionally inter-disciplinary, her work intersects with law, humanities and socio-legal approaches. Focusing on deconstructive, decolonial and reflective academics, she is interested in how the physical body is framed inside and outside of truth recovery mechanisms. Gill-Leslie’s expertise is in sub-Saharan Africa, specifically South Africa’s truth-finding mechanisms including the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and the Marikana Commission of Inquiry.

Professor John Brewer explores the powerful and paradoxical question: Why do people kill and die for religion? The conversation confronts the ways in which monotheistic religions have been entangled with violence throughout history. Brewer offers a sociological lens on how sacred beliefs, identity politics, and historical trauma create conditions ripe for religious conflict. Dr Demaine Solomons responds by pushing back against overly deterministic readings of monotheism, arguing for a more nuanced understanding that recognises socio-political forces and the potential of religion to foster justice and solidarity. Facilitated by Professor Robert Vosloo, the event also features rich reflections from attendees, making for a deeply layered discussion on faith, power, nationalism, and peacebuilding in both historical and contemporary contexts.

JOHN BREWER

John Brewer is Professor Emeritus in the Senator George J Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice at Queen’s University Belfast. He was awarded an Honorary DSocSci from Brunel University and is a Member of the Royal Irish Academy, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, a Fellow in the Academy of Social Sciences and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. He has held visiting appointments at Yale University, St John’s College Oxford, Corpus Christi College Cambridge and the Australia National University. He has been President of the British Sociological Association. He is Honorary Professor Extraordinary at Stellenbosch University, Honorary Professor of Sociology at Warwick University, and a member of the United Nations Roster of Global Experts. He was the recipient of the British Sociological Association’s Distinguished Service to British Sociology Award in 2023. He is the author or co-author of eighteen books and editor or co-editor of a further six. He is also Series Editor of two book series.

This conversation examines the ethical and psychological dimensions of bearing witness to atrocity, featuring Professor Jacqueline Rose and Professor Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela. Through insights grounded in psychoanalysis, history and ethics, the discussion interrogates the meanings of victimhood, the limits of remorse, and the moral obligation to recognise and respond to human suffering. From the Holocaust to apartheid, and from Gaza to South Africa, the speakers reflect on how we carry history and trauma into the present and the future, asking what it means to truly bear witness. The conversation also confronts the spectacle of violence, the repetition of historical trauma, and the challenge of acting ethically in the face of injustice. This is a moving and urgent dialogue on justice, memory and the body as a site of history.

Jacqueline Rose

Prof Rose is internationally renowned for her writing on feminism, literature, psychoanalysis, and political conflict, particularly in Israel/Palestine and South Africa. She is Professor of Humanities and Co-Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities at the University of London and a regular contributor to The London Review of Books, New York Review of Books, and The Guardian. Her books, including The Question of Zion and On Violence and On Violence Against Women, examine the intersections of trauma, history, and representation. In 2020, she delivered the annual Freud lecture, `To Die One’s Own Death – Thinking with Freud in a Time of Pandemic’, livestreamed from the London Freud Museum to the Freud Museum in Vienna. She is a co-founder of Independent Jewish Voices in the UK and a Fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Society of Literature.

In this intellectually rigorous and emotionally resonant conversation, Professors Jacqueline Rose, Vasti Roodt, Jaco Barnard-Naudé, and Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela examine what it means to “think without banisters” in the spirit of Hannah Arendt. Roodt reflects on Arendt’s call for unending, solitary thought as a practice of ethical responsibility, while Barnard-Naudé traces how Arendt’s idea of the banality of evil has become spectacular in today’s media-saturated political landscape. Rose brings a psychoanalytic and political lens to bear on Zionism, affect, and the destructiveness of “impotent bigness.” Gobodo-Madikizela grounds the discussion in South African experience, particularly the lessons and limits of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. A powerful audience engagement section expands the conversation to include poetry, witnessing, and the importance of memory as political resistance. Together, the panellists issue a challenge to scholars and citizens alike: to think critically, act justly, and imagine new forms of moral repair.

PROF JACQUELINE ROSE is a leading scholar at Birkbeck, University of London, internationally recognized for her groundbreaking contributions to feminist theory, psychoanalysis, and literary criticism.

PROF VASTI ROODT is a distinguished philosopher at Stellenbosch University, whose research navigates the intersections of political thought, ethics, and intellectual history.

PROF JACO BARNARD-NAUDÉ is a critical legal theorist and professor of jurisprudence at the University of Cape Town, exploring the complexities of law, power, and justice in contemporary society.

In this episode, we explore Prof Saleem Badat's compelling seminar, Reparative Justice and Social Justice Scholarship. Moderated by Dr Anell Daries, the discussion examines the structural and relational harms caused by apartheid and the urgent need for reparative justice in South Africa. Prof Badat draws from personal experiences, such as his detention and torture under apartheid, as well as historical injustices, including forced removals and exclusion in education and sports, to illustrate how reparative justice must address systemic inequalities rather than rely on symbolic gestures. His insights challenge traditional ideas of inclusion and equity, urging South Africans to rethink the true meaning of transformation.

The conversation highlights the role of universities and scholars in advancing reparative justice, with Prof Badat emphasizing the importance of authentic engagement and long-term commitments to generational change. He critiques post-apartheid “inclusion” that fails to confront structural inequality and calls for institutions to actively dismantle practices that perpetuate harm. This episode is a thoughtful reflection on the enduring legacies of apartheid and the transformative power of reparative justice, offering valuable insights for anyone invested in social justice and meaningful societal change. Tune in to be challenged, inspired, and moved by Prof Badat’s vision for a more equitable future.

Saleem Badat

Saleem Badat is a Research Professor in History at the University of the Free State. He was the first CEO of the Council on Higher Education and served as vice-chancellor of Rhodes University. As Program Director at the Mellon Foundation (2014–2019), he led arts and humanities grantmaking for African and Middle East institutions. Combining critical theory and practice, scholarship and activism, his concerns are structure and agency, reproduction and transformation, equity, redress, and social justice in and through universities, and the decolonization and transformation of universities. Prof Badat has authored some 60 book chapters, journal articles and several books, including Tennis, Apartheid and Social Justice (2023), Black Man, You are on Your Own (2009), and received honorary doctorates from the universities of the Free State, York, and Rhodes. His awards include the Inyathelo Exceptional Philanthropy Award and the HSRC-USAF award for research excellence in social justice scholarship.