Research Focus Group Talk: Exploding the Khoi and San Colonial Stereotypes, Reclaiming African Histories

Academic historians have largely represented the Khoi and the San people of Southern Africa as marginal to the production of the region’s history, deleting their place in the emergence and development of African civilization and self-liberation. As a public historian, intellectual, activist and healer, Attaqua’s voice has intervened to forcefully reframe the history of the indigenous people of Southern Africa. In this talk, she will speak about the Khoi and San’s long struggle against the historical and epistemic silencing.

Attaqua is a South African indigenous historian, social justice activist, knowledge keeper, and oral and visual storyteller. She was born in District Six, Cape Town, in 1964. She is from the clan Herandien from Zoar, the Attaqua nation in the Western Cape. A fighter against the Apartheid state, she was forced to flee South Africa to Germany and the United Kingdom, where she studied and assisted the banned South African Congress of Trade Unions. She returned to South Africa in 1990 where she continued to work for the Department of International Affairs of the African National Congress. In 1994, Attaqua joined the film industry where she cut her teeth in fiction and documentary film making. She lives in Johannesburg where she works doing holistic indigenous treatments and consultations dealing with colonial, inter-generational, historical and oppression trauma.

Co-sponsored by the IHC African Studies Research Focus Group and the Africa Center

Zoom attendance link: https://ucsb.zoom.us/j/86978353518?pwd=dzZsQ0ZsOVVaNmhFTjR3bk95K3ZEZz09