Interior of the building at the College of Cape Town, Thornton Road, Athlone, where the CHR’s Dullah Omar Centre for Critical Thought in African Humanities (DOCCTAH) hosts the Distinguished Lecture in African Humanities and Letters. DOCCTAH seeks to extend the reach of local and international humanities scholarship, and opportunities for arts education and cultural production, into communities on the Cape Flats. It is also aimed at bringing together scholars, students and artists in a once charged environment in the struggle for non-racialism, and speaks to a desire to recuperate commitments that once gave rise to ideas about a postapartheid society. Photograph: Derek Carelse