The WISER Podcast

Hlonipha interviews Achille on winning the  Holberg prize, on their backgrounds, institutions and intellectual obsessions.

In this week’s episode, Anneke Rautenbach discusses how, when the writer Bessie Head escaped apartheid South Africa and settled in the rural village of Serowe, Botswana, she remained haunted by the violence of her past. In her work on experimental development farms, alongside locals and foreign volunteers, she discovered not only a source of healing, but a subterranean moral philosophy. Anneke Rau...

In this episode of The WiSER Podcast, Cheikh BA discusses the Senegal River as an intense node of knowledge making. He discusses how those who live alongside it observe, name and think about its flows, quantities, evolutions, water paths and distribution. He also shows how,  in parallel and sometimes in confrontation, the "modern management" of natural resources translates into developmental and t...

In this week’s  episode,  Simon van Schalkwyk discusses our new nuclear age, the re-emergence of a long latent Cold War atavism, including the politics of containment and psycho-warfare. Online ‘nuke maps’ mean you can now simulate the effects of nuclear strikes anywhere in the world. He sets the location for Braamfontain, Johannesburg and sees what (would) happen…. Simon van Schalkwyk is a Visiti...

In this episode, Caio Simões de Araújo discusses the politics of infrastructure in Southern Africa, taking as an entry point the Maputo-Katembe bridge, inaugurated in 2018. Araújo argues that the bridge is part of a renewed public investment in infrastructure enabled by Chinese cooperation in Africa. Yet, rather than a straightforward road into the future, the bridge is embedded in a highly comple...

In this episode, Timothy Wright discusses the graphic novel Rebirth (2012), which imagines a node of vampire culture in the striated and gritty space of Johannesburg. He reads the book’s terminally ill vampires as offering a surprising, generative vantage point from which to think through some urgent social and political issues of the contemporary moment: whiteness, entanglement, transformation, b...

In Episode One of Season Five of The WiSER Podcast, the Reverend Frank Chikane and his son Regotsofetse Chikane, recollect and discuss the moment – separated by 30 years – they were each arrested for treason – by the apartheid and post-apartheid states, successively. As prominent anti-apartheid activist and #FeesMustFall activist respectively, they retell their experiences  - and the conversation...

In this week’s episode, we present Part Two of our mini-series on the work of Botswanan artist Meleko Mokgosi by Hlonipha Mokoena of WISER. Last week, Mokoena offered an analysis of Mokgosi’s paintings from multiple perspectives. In today’s episode, she speaks to the artist himself, a wide-ranging and fascinating discussion that takes up many of the issues introduced last week. The members of The...

Today we release the first of a two-part podcast series that focuses on the work of Botswanan artist Meleko Mokgosi. In today’s episode, Hlonipha Mokoena, Associate Professor at WISER, discusses his work.   “There seems to be no better time than the present for us to have a conversation about what it means to be a black artist who paints black subjects”, says Mokoena, as she draws on her recent wr...

Today we hear from Najibha Deshmukh, WISER’s Senior Administrator and Adila Deshmukh, WISER’s Financial Manager. Najibha and Adila, who are sisters, give us their take on life at WISER, offering an inside view of everyday life, from both the front desk and the Institute’s financial office. In a richly nuanced and finely observed  - and often very funny – set of observations, they reveal aspects of...

Dr Tinashe Mushakavanhu discusses the coup of November 2017 in Zimbabwe, the death of Robert Mugabe, and why it is necessary to build a new set of digital tools for re-reading the country’s history. The podcast grapples with the question: how do we read a country beyond an individual? The members of The WiSER Podcast team are Sarah Nuttall, Sizwe Mpofu-Walsh, Isabel Hofmeyr, Tinashe Mushakavanhu a...

Today we release the second of several podcasts marking WiSER’s 20th anniversary. The Institute was launched in September 2001 and we asked a number of colleagues from Wits, the region and beyond to offer reflections on the last two decades of WiSER’s critical engagement with our country, our region and the world at large. In doing so, we also wish to thank all who have contributed to the Institut...

Today we release the first of several podcasts marking WiSER’s 20th anniversary. The Institute was launched in September 2001 and we asked a number of colleagues from Wits, the region and beyond to offer reflections on the last two decades of WiSER’s critical engagement with our country, our region and the world at large. In doing so, we also wish to thank all who have contributed to the Institute...

In this podcast, we present highlights from an event “On Violence: An Intergenerational Conversation about Women's Resistance” held at WiSER on August 11 2021.  Convened by WISER, the Governing Intimacies project at Wits and No10Publishers, the discussion features two feminist writers and activists, Zubeida Jaffer and Simamkele Dlakavu in conversation with Sisonke Msimang, prominent author and WIS...

Welcome to Season 4 of The WISER podcast. We begin this season with a number of event podcasts, capturing key debates happening at WISER on matters of urgent national importance. Today we release a two-part series, Uprising in South Africa, in which commentators reflect on the crises in KZN province which manifested so powerfully in the events of a few weeks ago, variously referred to as insurrect...

Welcome to Season 4 of The WISER podcast. We begin this season with a number of event podcasts, capturing key debates happening at WISER on matters of urgent national importance. Today we release a two-part series, Uprising in South Africa, in which commentators reflect on the crises in KZN province which manifested so powerfully in the events of a few weeks ago, variously referred to as insurrect...

Our latest episode focuses on oral poetry from the Kenyan coast and its relation to indigenous marine conservation knowledges; black travel writing from the Indian Ocean world in the early twentieth century;  learning to surf and read waves in Cape Town; and the recent rise in postcolonial fiction about mermaids.  Each of these topics, and many more, form part of a special issue of the magazine Wa...

This episode focuses on the most prominent themes in global and local preoccupations with the models of government that China holds out for African states and peoples. We focus, in particular, on the threats and limits of state surveillance for African countries as they show themselves around the COVID19 pandemic, and the growing international concerns about the eYuan, the new digital currency cha...

The second  episode  of our two-part series on Regions2050: mobility, extraction, circulation focuses on the Congo Basin eco-region of Africa, the world’s second largest rainforest block after the Amazon. In particular, the podcast examines how significant demographic, ecological, political and economic changes in this region are linked to climate. It also explores the interactions between human p...

Today we release the  next episode  of The WISER Podcast entitled Regions2050: mobility, extraction, circulation. This is Part One of a two-part series.   The podcast is a conversation between Achille Mbembe (WISER) and Mpho Matsipa (Architecture and Planning/WISER) exploring the dynamics of mobility, circulation and extraction and reflecting on the new pathways of regionalisation in an African co...

Today we release the next episode of The WISER Podcast entitled Lost Books: Four Narratives On Absent Books. Focusing especially on books by women, Tinashe Mushakavanhu, Sarah Nuttall, Isabel Hofmeyr and Confidence Joseph offer an array of engaging short narratives on books lost, hidden, dreamt, thrown overboard or killed on social media. The episode is dedicated to all those students, staff and w...

Today we release Part Two of The WISER Podcast’s next mini-series, The Futures of the Constitution. It draws on research by WISER Postdoctoral Fellow, Dr Sizwe Mpofu-Walsh, on continuities between South Africa’s apartheid past and its democratic present, under the framework of “the new apartheid”.   In this podcast, he continues to explore the South African Constitution’s conception of justice, th...

Today we release Part One The WISER Podcast’s next mini-series, The Futures of the Constitution. It draws on research by WiSER Postdoctoral Fellow, Dr Sizwe Mpofu-Walsh, on continuities between South Africa’s apartheid past and its democratic present, under the framework of “the new apartheid”. In this podcast, Sizwe and Tshepo Madlingozi, Director and Associate Professor at the Centre for Applied...

Today we release Part Two of our next mini-series of The WISER Podcast. This two-part series takes as its theme Travelling Technology. It draws on research led by Prof Richard Rottenburg at WISER spanning 15 African countries and focusing on large technical systems as well as stand-alone devices to reflect on the amalgamation of techno-science with social, political, juridical and cultural element...

This two-part series addresses Travelling Technology. It draws on research spanning 15 African countries and focusing on various technical assemblages to reflect on the amalgamation of techno-science with social, political, juridical and cultural elements in concrete African contexts beyond the modernist binary of nature and culture. In today's podcast, we hear from Richard Rottenburg (WISER) on t...