(u)Mzantsi Classics: Dialogues in Decolonisation from Southern Africa

Though Graeco-Roman antiquity (‘classics’) has often been considered the handmaid of colonialism, its various forms have nonetheless endured through many of the continent’s decolonising transitions. Southern Africa is no exception. This book canvasses the variety of forms classics has taken in Zimbabwe, Mozambique and especially South Africa, and even the dynamics of transformation itself.

How does (u)Mzantsi classics (of southern Africa) look in an era of profound change, whether violent or otherwise? What are its future prospects? Contributors focus on pedagogies, historical consciousness, the creative arts and popular culture.

The volume, in its overall shape, responds to the idea of dialogue – in both the Greek form associated with Plato’s rendition of Socrates’ wisdom and in the African concept of ubuntu. Here are dialogues between scholars, both emerging and established, as well as students – some of whom were directly impacted by the Fallist protests.

Rather than offering an apologia for classics, these dialogues engage with pressing questions of relevance, identity, change, the canon, and the dynamics of decolonisation and potential recolonisation. The goal is to interrogate classics – the ways it has been taught, studied, perceived, transformed and even lived – from many points of view.

Table of contents

1. Nothing about us? Reflections on classics in southern Africa –  Samantha Masters, Imkhitha Nzungu, Grant Parker

First dialogue: On baggage

2. Classical imagery and policing the African body – Ian Glenn

3. Classics and colonial administration in Southern Rhodesia – Obert Mlambo and John Douglas McClymont

Second dialogue: On intersecting identities

4. Classics for the third millennium: African options after The Fall –  Jo-Marie Claassen

Third dialogue: On classics and the canon

5. The liberatory potential of Latin studies: Stellenbosch University’s Latin Project – Reshard Kolabhai and Shani Viljoen

6. Responses to crisis: Cicero in Zimbabwe – Madhlozi Moyo

7. Rethinking the commemorative landscape in South Africa after The Fall: A pedagogical case study – Samantha Masters

Fourth dialogue: From reception to re-imagination

8. African port cities and the classics – Carla Bocchetti

9. Wilder than Polyphemus’: Towards a tragic poetics of the post-colonial consumption of symbols – David van Schoor

10. Conclusion: Ovid in the time of statues – Grant Parker