By: Ntombifuthi Blose
Port Elizabeth- The Land is Ours: South Africa’s first Black Lawyers and the Birth of Constitution Book launch hosted by the Department of Sociology, Anthropology incl. Hist (CriSHET) and the Faculty of Law launched on Wednesday, 16 May 2018 at the Nelson Mandela University, North Campus Auditorium.
The opening of the ceremony was proceeded by the Vice Chancellor Professor Sibongile Muthwa, thanking all of those who made it to the talk. This included international professors from the UK, Sweden and Brazil who travelled all the way to be part of the book launch by Advocate Thembeka Ngcukaitobi. The speakers of the evening were Professor Nomalanga Mkhize as well as an audience discussion and Ngcukaitobi.
The talk was centred around how Africans need to decolonise their minds against colonial thinking and emphasised the importance of Pan-Africanism to strengthen the youth’s independence, political and economic development and cooperation. Pan- Africanism is an ideology that unifies the people of Africa and the diaspora. The book is about the first black lawyers of the nineteenth and twentieth century in South Africa in a time of belligerent colonial development.
Adv Thembeka Ngcukaitobi said that it was important to place Port Elizabeth to launch the book because this signified colonialism by the names still used for towns and cities including PE. He further made a statement saying “colonialism is gone but it still lives on in our names, language and how the education system does not tell our African history, the way black people know it”.
After the speeches there was a book signing by Ngcukaitobi.
The book is available at Van Schaik book shop.
