Shose Kessi, UCT Dean of Humanities, opens up the conference speaking about Sarah Baartman and her significance within UCT. Dean Kesse reflects on the violence scientific inquiry can be capable of as evidenced by the life of Sarah Baartman. She references and provides an analysis of the 2015 Rhodes Must Fall protest action of robing the Sarah Baartman sculpture by Willie Bester that was located in the UCT Hiddingh campus and the events that led up to its being removed from the Library and relocation to the Ritchie Gallery, on UCT Hiddingh campus, in 2018. The 2018 renaming the former Jameson Hall to the Sarah Baartman Memorial Hall is contextualised within the greater institutional decolonisation. The San & Khoi Centre is also described as being part of UCT's decolonial work.

In 1937 a group of young Capetonians, socialist intellectuals from the Workers’ Party of South Africa and the Non-European Unity Movement, embarked on a remarkable public education and cultural project they called the New Era Fellowship (NEF). Taking a position of non-collaboration and non-racialism, the NEF played a vital role in challenging society’s responses to events ranging from the problem of taking up arms during the Second World War for an empire intent on stripping people of colour of their human rights to the Hertzog Bills, which foreshadowed apartheid. The group included some of the city’s most talented scholar-activists, among them Isaac Tabata, Ben Kies, A C Jordan, Phyllis Ntantala, Mda Mda and members of the famed Gool and Abdurahman families, whose aim was to disrupt and challenge not only prevailing political narratives but the very premises – class and race – on which they were based. By the 1950s their ideas had spread to a second generation of talented individuals who would disseminate them in the high schools of Cape Town. In time, some would exert their influence on national politics beyond the confines of the Cape. Among these were former minister of justice, Dullah Omar, academic Hosea Jaffe, educationist Neville Alexander and author Richard Rive. This book is a testament to how the NEF was at the forefront of redefining the discourse of racialism and nationalism in South Africa.In 1937 a group of young Capetonians, socialist intellectuals from the Workers’ Party of South Africa and the Non-European Unity Movement, among them Isaac Tabata, Ben Kies, A C Jordan, Phyllis Ntantala and Mda Mda, embarked on a public education and cultural project they called the New Era Fellowship (NEF). Taking a position of non-collaboration and non-racialism, the NEF played a vital role in challenging society’s responses to events ranging from the problem of taking up arms during the Second World War for an empire intent on stripping black people of their human rights to the Hertzog Bills, which foreshadowed apartheid. The group included some of the city’s most talented scholar-activists, whose aim was to disrupt and challenge not only prevailing political narratives but the very premises – class and race – on which they were based. By the 1950s their ideas had spread to a second generation of talented individuals who would disseminate them in the high schools of Cape Town. In time, some would exert their influence on national politics beyond the confines of the Cape. The Cape Radicals is a testament to the NEF’s position at the forefront of redefining the discourse of racialism and nationalism in South Africa.

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