Professor David Peimer
Countering the Words: ‘Settler, Colonial, Apartheid’
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
David Peimer is a Professor of Literature, Film and Theatre in the UK. He has worked for the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 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 in New York, UK, Berlin, EU Parliament (Brussels), Athens, Budapest, Zululand and more. He has most recently directed Dame Janet Suzman in his own play, Joanna’s Story, at London Jewish Book Week. He has published widely with books including: Armed Response: Plays from South Africa, the digital book, Theatre in the Camps. He is on the board of the Pinter Centre (London), and has been involved with the Mandela Foundation, Vaclav Havel Foundation and directed a range of plays at Mr Havel’s Prague theatre.
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.