Looking back

Abstract

Professors Patricia Hayes and Premesh Lalu have in this edition of Signals provided useful insight into the importance of theory, history, archives and the humanities in South Africa, and how they can help “assist us in building an ongoing capacity to resist oppression and develop a politics of care in the present and future”. Their reflections on how to develop new ideas for the way forward in a country and “post-truth” world mired in crisis invite us to look back for lessons to the 1980s and 1990s when UWC famously started redefining itself as an “intellectual home of the democratic left”, challenging the traditional roles played by universities in South Africa. UWC questioned the whole system of knowledge production in South Africa and changed its mission to serve primarily excluded and marginalised narratives, seeking in the process to develop “an open and critical alignment … with the political movements and organisations committed to the struggle for liberation”.