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Lecture

Professor David Peimer
Countering the Words: ‘Settler, Colonial, Apartheid’

Saturday 3.08.2024

Summary

As we all know, words matter and often evoke emotions and opinions more than thought. In this talk we will take a nuanced, in-depth look at the actual meanings of the words “settler,” “colonial,” and “apartheid,” their origins, and how to counter them. We will also ask how these words and binary thinking storyboard or groom identities.

Professor David Peimer

head and shoulders portrait of david peimer looking at camera, smiling

David Peimer is a professor of theatre and performance studies in the UK. He has taught at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, and New York University (Global Division), and was a Fulbright Scholar at Columbia University. Born in South Africa, David has won numerous awards for playwriting and directing. He has written eleven plays and directed forty in places like South Africa, New York, Brussels, London, Berlin, Zulu Kingdom, Athens, and more. His writing has been published widely and he is the editor of Armed Response: Plays from South Africa (2009) and the interactive digital book Theatre in the Camps (2012). He is on the board of the Pinter Centre in London.

Well, I’ve tried to draw that here. What colonisation really means, as opposed to occupation. Colonisation, is you want to be rich back at home in the mother country. You want to have cheap labour, you want to send resources back, you establish a full military, you establish a bureaucratic organisation, rule everything. But the main thing, you get rich back at home. It’s for the mother country, the motherland to get rich. That’s the bottom line. Going way back to the ancient Greeks, the Egyptian, ancient Romans, that’s the meaning of colonisation, you know? You don’t just go out and take a land and put up a few people here away or even thousands.