Yonelisa Nakani

Honours Fellow, UK-RSA Bilateral Digital Humanities Chair in culture and technics

Yonelisa Nakani is an Honours student in the Department of Historical Studies at the University of the Western Cape. Yonelisa’s honours research focuses on racial passing, and family’s history as a source of archival material. This research explores the historical and ongoing impact of apartheid racial classification on black identity, belonging and language in South Africa. Yonelisa’s aim is to investigate how racial passing led to the loss of language- mother tongue within families. Yonelisa plans to use oral history interviews to recover personal narratives that have been excluded from mainstream South Africa historiography, and to connect past survival strategies to ongoing debates about black authenticity and identity in post-apartheid South Africa.