Professor Loren B. Landau (SARChI in Mobility and the Politics of Difference at the ACMS, WITS) delivered the keynote address at the opening of the Apartheid After South Africa: Legacies, Logics, and New Frontiers conference, hosted by the University of the Witwatersrand (29-31 July 2026).
[Photo Credit: Jaclyn Modise / ACMS]
His presentation, “Apartheid of Uncertainty,” explored how spatial, racial, and temporal divisions are emerging in an era of profound instability. Drawing on nearly a decade of research on mobility and meaning in African cities, Landau argued that uncertainty, driven by climate change, the changing nature of work, and political instability, is reshaping how communities form, who belongs, and who is excluded.
He posed an essential question: What does collective action and membership look like when there are few clear pathways to a better future and little faith in our ability to produce one?
Landau traced how lost faith in universal progress has given way to fragmented truths, particularism, and a turn to the miraculous, enabling forms of exclusion that border on genocide. He warned that the “apartheid of uncertainty” is not merely about racial or spatial separation, but about who can have a future.
The keynote also reflected on the legacies of apartheid, the dangers of using “apartheid” as a tool of shaming rather than analysis, and the urgent need to restore language and modes of knowing that can delegitimise temporal exclusion.
Thank you to the organisers, the Innovation Foundation for Democracy and IFAS, and to Samukelo Ndlovu for the invitation.
[Photo Credit: Jaclyn Modise / ACMS]
