Public Lecture

Telling the Stories of a Continuing Walk to Freedom:

Nelson Mandela and the Archive

Verne Harris is Project Manager for the Centre of Memory and Dialogue at the Nelson Mandela Foundation and an honorary research associate at the University of the Witwatersrand.  He participated in a range of structures which transformed South Africa’s apartheid public records system – amongst others, the African National Congress’s Archives Committee, the Arts and Culture Task Group, the Consultative Forum which drafted the National Archives of South Africa Act, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and the South African History Archive.  Widely published, he is best known for the books Exploring Archives: An Introduction to Archival Ideas and Practice in South Africa (1997, 2000 and 2004), Refiguring the Archive (2002), A Prisoner in the Garden: Opening the Nelson Mandela Archive (2005) and Archives and Justice (2007).  He is also the author of two novels, both of which were short-listed for South Africa’s M-Net Book Prize.

The lecture is free to attend and will take place at 4pm on 24 July 2007 in the Lecture Theatre, Sir Charles Wilson Building, 1 University Avenue (on corner of Gibson Street, E15 on campus map).