Our partner institution, the Ujamaa Centre at the University of Kwazulu-Natal, hosts a number of institutional leaders and experts through its public lectures program on different themes each year. The annual Eudy Simelane memorial lectures focus on the general theme of LGBTI and faith communities in the African context, celebrating and remembering the life of Eudy Simelane, a South African football star who was violated and her life taken in her hometown, KwaThema, because she was lesbian. This year, the lecture is delivered by Koleka Putuma, the South African queer poet and theatre-maker, on the theme of memory and agency. We have also previously published the Inaugural Eudy Simelane Lecture in 2016. Stay tuned for more information regarding the upcoming talks and recaps of lectures that have already taken place!
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Introduction by Professor Charlene Van der Walt, Head of Gender and Religion, University of KwaZulu-Natal, and Deputy Director of Ujamaa Centre
For us at the Ujamaa Centre and our partners, it is really important to engage with the family and within the context that Eudy grew up in and the community that she grew up in. I think often within African contexts, and African faith communities especially, people want to pretend like LGBTI people don’t exist, like they’re not part of our communities, that they’re not part of our faith communities. What this lecture does and why we come to Kwa-Thema every year is to say, here is someone who you celebrated and who was part of your story as a community and we want to learn from her life, we want to learn from the painfulness of her death, but we also want to create spaces within Kwa-Thema and within every space that we share this lecture and this information, where people’s stories and legacies are honored and remembered.
The lecture has taken on a life of its own since its inception four years ago. We’ve reflected on LGBTI and the law, LGBTI, and faith communities. Last year, the theme was LGBTI family and friends, and this year, we’re thinking a little bit about memory and agency. But we don’t only want to remember the way in which Eudy died. We want to critically reflect, of course, on homophobic hate crime and the way that this denies life for LGBTI people in African faith communities. But we also – and this is probably the most important focus for this year’s lecture – want to think about how people create meaning and how amidst life-denying circumstances and complex realities people make meaning and make life. This year, we launched the #RememberEudy and what we aim to do with this is to create a little bit of an energy point annually to think about how memory informs identity, who we are but also our dreams, who we become.