Gender activist, researcher, analyst and freelance writer on gender, political and cultural issues,
Professor Nomboniso Gasa will present the 45th Daantjie Oosthuizen Memorial Lecture, one of the most prestigious annual lectures at Rhodes University today, Tuesday 19 September 2017 at 6pm, at Eden Grove Blue Lecture Theatre. Her lecture is titled ‘Sexual and Gender Based Violence: Holding up a mirror to the South African Society’.
Today, gender based violence is arguably the most important and topical social pandemic facing the country. Gasa, an Adjunct Professor at the School of Public Law, University of Cape Town, is an esteemed scholar and activist who has been involved in the national liberation and struggle for women’s emancipation since she was 14.
Gasa has published scholarly works on gender and politics. She is also a contributing editor who writes for various newspapers nationally.
Daantjie Oosthuizen was a South African philosopher at Rhodes University who died in 1969. He was an early Afrikaner voice against apartheid and the main direction of his philosophical work lay in the field of epistemology and the philosophy of mind. Oosthuizen was widely known in South Africa for his moral, political and religious essays. He was described as ‘a thorn in the flesh of the establishment’.
“This is the top annual lecture at Rhodes where key issues relating to university life and the country within which the university exists are discussed by top thinkers from South Africa and abroad. As a university and a country we have not done enough to celebrate Daantjie, a scholar and activist we should all be proud of,” said Professor Pedro Tabensky, the Chairperson of the Rhodes Academic Freedom Committee.
The Memorial Lecture was founded in 1970 as an annual event now organised by the Rhodes Academic Freedom Committee. The first lecture was presented by Alan Paton Other notable South Africans who have presented papers at this lecture include Helen Joseph (1982), Nadine Gordimer (1983), Albie Sachs (1991), Mamphela Ramphela (1999), Minister Naledi Pandor (2005), Ferial Haffajee (2007), Professor Barney Pityana (2008) and Radio journalist and Rhodes alumni Eusebius McKaiser (2016).
