Upcoming Event

Invitation to the “Knowing Africa” Seminar Series

We are pleased to invite you to the next session of the “Knowing Africa” Seminar Series.

Date: September 18, 2024
Time: 1:00 PM – 2:30 PM EST
Format: ZoomPreview (opens in a new tab)

Title of the Presentation:
Morafe: Person, Family, and Nation in Colonial Bechuanaland
Presenter: Khumisho Moguerane

Discussants:

• Thuto Thipe, University of Chicago
• Catherine Burns, University of the Witwatersrand

Chair:

Shireen Hassim
Canada150 Research Chair in Gender and African Politics, Carleton University

About the book

In Morafe, Moguerane has written a vivid exploration of two generations of the prominent Molema family. They were ‘border people’ who straddled what would become present-day South Africa and Botswana.
The book begins in the eighteen-eighties at the frontier of the new British territories of British Bechuanaland (North West and Northern Cape provinces) and the Bechuanaland Protectorate (Botswana), where the political boundary between these two territories is negligible and where skin colouring did not yet necessarily connect with a particular social or political status, nor did it yet necessarily connect with a particular social or political status, nor did it yet really affect economic opportunity.
Morafe ends in the nineteen-fifties, where the political boundary matters profoundly, dividing two different colonial dispensations of colonial racial ordering and classification and two traditions of nationalist politics. With this landmark publication, Moguerane reveals that the ‘nation’ is less ‘out there’ in public institutions and political struggles but ‘in here’, in the everyday drama of personal and ordinary lives.
When it was released in 1996, The Seed is Mine: The Life of Kas Maine, a South African Sharecropper 1894—1985 by Charles van Onselen changed how a generation of historians understood South African history and biography; Moguerane’s magisterial approach in Morafe will similarly change our relati

onship to southern African history.

About the author

Khumisho Moguerane is a historian at the University of Johannesburg. She is interested in how ordinary people experienced colonial rule and the political and cultural worlds they fashioned along the colonial frontier. She explores how people’s everyday struggles for moral reputation informed political identity and contestations for power.

We look forward to your attendance!