Journalism and The Archive: A conversation with journalist Niren Tolsi
Switzerland
March 14, 2017
Lunchtalk
From 12:30 pm to 1:30 pm
Location
Basler Afrika Bibliographien (BAB), Klosterberg 23, Basel
Niren Tolsi is a South African freelance journalist and co-founding editor of The Con, an online literary and long-form publication produced in Johannesburg.
His areas of interest include citizen mobilisation and protest, state violence, constitutional law, social justice, arts and football. His work has been published by various South African and international media, among them Mail & Guardian, Sunday Times, Chimurenga Chronic, The Guardian, The New York Times and Al Jazeera.
He won the prestigious Arts Journalist of the Year 2016 award and is currently in Switzerland for a writing residency with Pro Helvetia and Reportagen. He has been working on a longterm “slow journalism” project with photographer Paul Botes which follows the aftermath of the 2012 Marikana massacre in South Africa.
The lunchtalk is part of a series of Journalism Archive Sessions within the course “Journalism, gender and archive: revisiting the Ruth Weiss collection on southern Africa during the decolonisation and liberation era (ca. 1960s-1980s)” at the Department of History of the University of Basel and is co-hosted by the Centre for African Studies Basel and the Basler Afrika Bibliographien.
With the support of Pro Helvetia, Reportagen has developed an article series involving Swiss writers generating texts on contemporary life in BRICS countries, and writers from these countries in turn turning their gaze on life in Switzerland.
The anticipated piece from Niren Tolsi complements the article commissioned from Swiss author Monique Schwitter in the wake of a research visit to the Eastern Cape, published in the May 2016 edition of Reportagen.
