2025 Black August

3rd Black August Festival: Self-Determination and Sovereignty in a New Age of Western Imperialism 

27-29 August 2025, University of Fort Hare 

The year 2025 marks a decade since the eruption of the Rhodes Must Fall protests which occurred at the University of Cape Town in 2015. The protests led to a series of systemic shocks, and related movements on South African university campuses before spreading across the globe. They also produced a series of responses from universities including securitisation, curriculum changes, the acquiring of new personnel and especially the ascendancy of “Decoloniality Theory” complete with institutes, centres, and annual summer schools in campuses across the country. A persistently neglected dimension of the protests and their intellectual roots which has set into the historiography of “#MustFall” over the past decade is the role of the Azanian Philosophical Tradition. This Tradition’s contribution was injected into the movement mostly due to the efforts of the Phillip Kgosana branch of the Pan Africanist Student Movement and its organisers and thinkers at UCT through their study groups and organizing on UCT’s campuses. Their particular set of demands went beyond even the symbolic, cultural, and discursive dimensions of neo-colonialism and focused on the land question itself. Students insisted that the relations of power in the classroom, at the library, and in the buildings and statues on campus were an extension of the general relations of power in South Africa itself rooted in the incomplete liberation struggle and the outstanding return of sovereign title to territory to the indigenous peoples. 

The global spread of the student movement reverberated as far as centres of Western imperialism in the United Kingdom and the United States of America, where they found expression in challenges of public memory, flags, curricula and epistemological paradigms in education programmes and Diversity Inclusion and Equity Programmes. Whereas these historic eruptions have largely been contained, even as the base causes that shaped them continue to prevail, the backlash against them in the rise of right wing-populism throughout the West continues to be a major living problem in our time. 

2025 is also the beginning of the 2nd term of the tumultuous American presidency of Donald Trump in the USA. Trump has spared no time wielding the USA’s power to assert dominance and challenge the sovereign power of countries across the world, employing instruments which were before reserved for “shit-hole countries” against some of its oldest allies and junior partners in Western Imperialism. This has of course not spared the older victims, not in the least South Africa itself which has emerged as a territory of special interest in Trump’s administration. Concurrently, the time-old Israel-Palestine problem continues to burn away the lives and life-worlds of human beings, highlighting the hypocrisies of the post-World War II International legal order. The second Trump presidency has intimated a sincere desire for the restoration of Classical Colonialism having publicly expressed designs of exerting sovereign control of the territories and populations of neighbours like Canada and Mexico, as well as distant territories like Greenland, further bringing the myth of Global progress into question. 

At the same time the Sahel revolts of Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso against French colonialism exert a vital challenge from the underside of history to the conventional story of progress from colonial conquest to national liberation. These struggles also take place during a time where some have expressed concerns about Chinese and Russian imperial designs over the African continent, and the tragedy it would constitute to substitute the outstanding liberation of the African continent with a new Imperial master. 

Finally, these historic struggles for and against new iterations of Western Imperialism are at their height now in 2025, the 70th anniversary of the Bandung Conference of 1955. Here, delegates from newly independent and soon-to-be ‘decolonised’ states of the Third World met to both galvanise their struggle against European and American imperialism, but also to imagine new futures for the international order, including new forms of sovereignty and modes of self-determination. 

The focus of the 3rd Black August festival and conference is on the broad themes of sovereignty and self-determination in the contemporary period. It means to include the broadest conception of these terms, covering international law and relations, domestic state policy, economics and economic policy, culture, educational, food, health, ecological, information and media sovereignty. The conference will include numerous book launches and a plenary film screening of Johan Grimonprez’s “Soundtrack to a Coup d’État”. 

You are invited to submit panel proposals or individual papers. 

Possible themes should fall into 3 categories broadly: 

1. Sovereignty and self-determination in International Law and Relations, African philosophy, Black Political Thought and more broadly within the disciplines of Political and Social Theory, Law, History, Theology, Literary Theory and Economics. This may include presentations dwelling upon particular figures, organisations or movements through the methods listed above. 

2. Papers on Rhodes Must Fall and the South African Student Movements of 2015/2016 [and their related political progenitors namely the PAC, BC, and Congress movements] as well as their impact upon the university itself from epistemological paradigms, curriculum and pedagogy to personnel changes, architecture, security. Papers dealing with epistemic sovereignty including the political economy, politics, history, and sociology of knowledge production. 

3. Cultural and Artistic dimensions of sovereignty and self-determination. This could include the submission of films, musical performances, art works for exhibition as well as academic papers dwelling on cultural or artistic practices, works, artists or artistic movements which touch on the themes of either the Student Movements or of Sovereignty and Self-determination more broadly speaking. 

The conference will take place at the University of Fort Hare (UFH) from 27-29 August 2025 and is being organized by the collaboration of the Department of Liberation Studies (UFH), the Department of Jurisprudence (University of Pretoria), the Centre for Applied Legal Studies (Wits University), the Department of Philosophy, Practical and Systematic Theology (UNISA), and the Azanian Philosophical Society. 

Abstract submissions: 

Interested scholars (including post-graduate students) may either submit individual abstracts dealing with any of the listed or adjacent themes. These should contain the full names of the author, the title of the abstract as well as the abstract itself (of no more than 250 words). Submissions may also be made in the form of entire panels consisting of 4 speakers each dealing with a unified theme (these should be submitted in a single page word file containing the proposed title of the panel session as well as the authors’ names and institutional affiliations, the title of each presentation and its corresponding abstract (of no more than 250 words each). 

Please address submissions of abstracts or panel sessions to the “Conference Organisers” in an email with the Subject line “Black August Conference 2025” and send to blackaugustfest@gmail.com by 30 May 2025. 

A decision on whether your proposed paper has been accepted will be communicated with you by 30 June 2025. 

Conference Fees: 

Post Graduate Students / Adjunct / Associate Staff (African): R500-00

Post Graduate Students / Adjunct / Associate Staff (International): R1000-00

Tenured Faculty (African): R 1000-00

Tenured Faculty (International): R 1500-00

In exceptional cases there will be a waiver granted for African post-graduate students and Adjunct Staff who request it. Send enquiries to blackaugustfest@gmail.com (Subject Line: Fee Waiver Request)