Sam Longford

Fellow: Department of History, PhD

Sam Longford is a final year PhD candidate and coordinator of the Remaking Societies, Remaking Persons (RSRP) Forum at the Department of History, UWC, and a Centre for Humanities Research Fellow. His PhD dissertation “The Untimely Deaths of Chris Hani: Discipline, Spectrality, and the Haunting Possibility of Return” is grounded by a sustained engagement with public history and different philosophies of history and of social change. This thesis focuses on the contested ways in which former General Secretary of the South African Communist Party (SACP) Chris Hani, who was assassinated in 1993 just before South Africa’s first general election, is remembered and memorialised today, and what these invocations mean for both thinking through the transitional period from apartheid to democracy, and the ANC’s postapartheid project. As well as his work at UWC, Sam is a co-founder of The Commons, a collaborative and experimental space which seeks to build an inclusive platform for the arts in and around Muizenberg, Cape Town.