"Faces of the City" series: City and Nation in an African Context: National Identity in Kingshasa
Dear All,
Please join us for a seminar in the current "Faces of the City" series.
Date: Tuesday, 27 September 2011
Time: 16h00 – 18h00
Venue: First Floor Seminar Room, John Moffat Building, Wits East Campus.
Bill Freund (currently Professor Emeritus at the University of KwaZulu-Natal) will be speaking on “City and Nation in an African Context: National Identity in Kingshasa”
Abstract: Despite the manifest failings of the Congolese state since independence, its inability to deliver services or to promote the status or prestige of its population, the educated minority of citizens of the capital city, Kinshasa, continue to cling to a notion of the unified state as an ideal which is closely tied to their own sense of self in the world. At its peak, it was a city especially of display and consumption that nourished this sense. The city was the site of the creation of this class par excellence. The particular hold of the state as an ideal comes not out of some inherently African trait but in consequence of the conjuncture of class plus the particular way in which Kinshasa has evolved by contrast with other African capital cities and the DRC by contrast with other African countries
RSVP: Zakiyyah.ayob@wits.ac.za.
Hope to see you there!
Zakiyyah Ayob
Programme Administrator
NRF: SARChI
Development Planning and Modelling
School of Architecture and Planning
University of the Witwatersrand
Tel: 011 717 7642
Fax: 011 717 7624
E-mail: zakiyyah.ayob@wits.ac.za
Biosketch:
Bill Freund is the author of a number of books of which The Making of Contemporary Africa, The African Worker and The African City all deal with South Africa amongst many other countries in a continental setting. He has also written specifically about South Africa, Nigeria and Tanzania as well as currently the DRC. He holds a Ph.D from Yale, was Professor of Economic History at the University of Natal for many years and is currently Professor Emeritus at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. This year he is as well a Visiting Senior Fellow at CSID, University of the Witwatersrand.
