This article takes its departure point from the fact that the VIADUCT 2015 platform overlapped chronologically with the "Rhodes Must Fall" campaign at the University of Cape Town (UCT). I ask whether bringing some of the archival theory that was discussed and applied at the platform to bear on an analysis of the campaign against the statue of Rhodes at UCT -in conjunction with the existing literature around monuments -is helpful in deepening understandings of the campaign. After singling out some of the most interesting literature on monuments and monumental iconoclasm, I explore the ways in which Derridean and Foucauldian inspired readings of the archive might be applied to the colonial memorial landscape. I propose that the campaign was sustained both by a substantial archive of iconoclasm, and that the protesters consciously tried to extend and elaborate on the archive/counter-archive.

Using Gayatri Spivak's famous question about whether the "subaltern" can speak, this article addresses the testimonies given to the Farlam Commission of Inquiry by the widows of miners who had been killed in police shootings while engaged in an unprotected strike at Lonmin's platinum mine at Marikana in August 2012. The widows were required to face down the dominant narrative disseminated by mine management and other business as well as state interests, which held that the police had acted in self-defence after the strikers had threatened to attack them. I argue that the widows consciously sought to undo the dominant narrative through their testimonies, assuming the role of a new kind of "political widow" as theorised by Mamphela Ramphele (1996). The article begins with a detailed consideration of the testimony of Sepati Mlangeni whose husband had been murdered by an agent of the apartheid state, delivered to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in the 1990s. This sets the scene for the questions that might be asked and the observations made of the Marikana widows' testimonies presented to the Farlam Commission almost twenty years later.

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This paper attempts to raise questions about the model of multiculturalism that is the ideal in South African state schools, by examining the debates around secularity in the public space that came to a head in France in 2003, which have very different philosophical and historical antecedents from those that inform South African principles. The paper focuses on the arguments made by members of the Stasi commission, convened by president Chirac in mid 2003, to make recommendations about the continuing viability of secularity (la laïcité) in contemporary France.