Memory, Justice, and (Re)Construction of Society in Post-Colonial Africa

Memorialization of the past has become an essential means to understanding Africa’s trajectories across a spectrum of its political and socio-cultural landscapes, and especially the legacy of its past on current and even future official and public consciousness and action over issues of national and local importance.

For some ordinary Africans, memory and imagination has provided them with tools to assert a view against that of a repressive regime keen on erasures of the past and censorship of the present. On the other hand, harnessing memory has been an effective strategy at implementing transitional justice in the aftermath of mass atrocity as has been the case in post-Apartheid South Africa and post-genocide Rwanda. 

In the later cases, transitional justice has paved way for restorative justice as victims of violence have desired reparations amid society’s demands for punishment, as memory regarding historical trauma opens avenues for acknowledging harm as a pathway forward for the respective nations.

Join us for more on these insights with an accomplished panel of two scholars with extensive research on memory in Africa. Dr. Sakiru Adebayo, a literary scholar, brings insights from memory studies and African literature in order to examine how the past is constructed, contested and confronted in Africa, while Dr. Nicole Fox, a professor of criminal justice, seeks to demonstrate how memory, through the built environment and other physical memorials, can be dedicated to acknowledge a difficult past and be at the heart of providing healing and reconciliation in Rwanda as that nation continues to rebuild after genocide.