Announcements

 

During the summer of 2009, Dr. Alex Lichtenstein spent six weeks teaching South African history at the University of Cape Town, in South Africa. Ironically, about half his students were Americans on study abroad programs.

 

Set on a stunning site on the flank of Table Mountain, the University looks over an area called “the Cape Flats,” stretching 35 miles eastward to another mountain range. The Flats is where “Coloured” and African residents of central Cape Town were forcibly removed to by the apartheid government (1948-1994) during white minority rule. These neighborhoods share the barren yet beautiful landscape with “townships” established in the 1950s and 1960s for migrant workers with limited residential rights in the Cape Town area, mostly Xhosa-speakers from the Eastern Cape.

One such township, Lwandle (“the sea” in IsiXhosa, even though Africans couldn’t go to the nearby beach), is the site of a wonderful community project: the Lwandle Migrant Labour Museum (www.lwandle.com). Dr. Lichtenstein spent an afternoon at the museum and walking around the community.

 

To view some of the photographs he took, click here.

 

While in South Africa, Dr.  Lichtenstein also gave the following talks and/or papers:

 

  • "Forty Acres & a Mule? The Land Question in the Post-Emancipation U.S. South", at the Program on Land and Agrarian Studies at the University of the Western Cape
  • "Citizens, not Subjects: The African Working Class in Durban (A Critique of Mamdani)", at the University of Cape Town
  • “Citizens or Subjects?: The Durban Strikes and the African Working Class--A Critique of Mamdani”, Stellenbosch University
  • "From Liaison Committees to Trade Unions: The Struggle for Industrial Citizenship in South Africa, 1973-1979", at the South African and Contemporary History and Humanities Seminar, Center for Humanities Research, University of the Western Cape.

Professor Lichtenstein is Associate Professor of History, and Director of Graduate Studies, African & African Diaspora Studies, at Florida International University.