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Public lecture honours Kgosi Luka Jantjie

On 16 November 2022, Sol Plaatje University’s (SPU) School of Humanities hosted its first public lecture on the life and times of Kgosi Luka Jantjie. The public lecture was held at the SPU Central Campus Library Auditorium and guests joined online to commemorate this oft-forgotten hero.

Kgosi Luka Jantjie was a 19th century Batlhaping chief who fought colonial forces to protect his people and preserve their lands, before being killed in battle in 1897. The lecture was presented by Professor Kevin Shillington, author of the biography, Luka Jantjie: Resistance Hero of the South African Frontier.

SPU Vice-Chancellor and Principal Prof Andrew Crouch welcomed and thanked guests, students, staff, and members of the family of Kgosi Luka Jantjie for their attendance at the first Kgosi Luka Jantjie public lecture. “It is an honour to host Professor Kevin Shillington at SPU on such an auspicious occasion. Prof Shillington played an important role in naming the administrative building on SPU North Campus after Kgosi Luka Jantjie.” It’s a name befitting one of our buildings as Jantjie is a hero in the fight against colonial forces in the Northern Cape.

In his introduction of Prof Shillington, SPU’s Acting Head of School of Humanities, Dr Cobus Rademeyer explained how Prof Shillington was first introduced to African history as a young graduate from Trinity College, Dublin, when he taught at a secondary school in Zambia. “He went on to take an MA and PhD at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) at the University of London, which led to his teaching and training history teachers at the University of Botswana. It was his Botswana students who inspired him to write his best-selling History of Africa, now in its fourth edition. I regard the work of Prof Shillington as vital for research purposes in South African history, which is why his books are still used today in institutions of higher learning. I hope this lecture will be informative and thought-provoking for you as his books were for me when I read them as a student.”

Prof Shillington delivered a thought-provoking and informative lecture on the history of Kgosi Luka Jantjie: “He was the first independent African ruler to lose his land to the new colonialists, who promptly annexed the diamond fields. His outspokenness against the hypocrisy of colonial ‘justice’ earned him the epithet: ‘a wild fellow who hates the English’. As the son of an early Christian convert, Luka was brought up to respect peace and non-violence; his boycott of rural trading stores in the early 1890s was perhaps the earliest use of non-violent resistance in colonial South Africa. His steady refusal to bow to colonial demands of subservience intensified the enmity of local colonists determined to ‘teach him a lesson’.”

Prof Shillington added that while many of his people succumbed to colonial pressures, Luka was twice forced to take up arms to defend himself and his people from colonial attacks. “His life ended in a dramatic and heroic last stand in the ancestral sanctuary of the Langberg mountain range, and the tragic consequences of his death stretched far into the next century. Luka Jantjie was not a natural hero, one who flaunted heroic deeds or indulged in heroic rhetoric. Rather, he had heroism thrust upon him.”

Kgosi Luka Jantjie was a traditional African leader who sought, through his life and leadership, to demonstrate an alternative to the racism that confronted him. The life of Kgosi Luka Jantjie truly stands out as one of the greatest heroes of the Northern Cape.

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