http://perpetualpeaceproject.org/initiatives/film-mbembe.php
In October 2009, the Perpetual Peace Project invited Achille Mbembe to
speak about the topic at Eastern State Penitentiary, Philadelphia.
Directors Alexandra Lerman, Laura Hanna, and Aaron Levy selected this
historic site as the backdrop for the segment because of its resonance
with sites of political deprivation and incarceration. Mbembe touched
upon one of these in his account of the headquarters of the
constitutional court in Johannesburg, which originally was a
historical fort that the British used in their struggle against the
Boers. Beginning in 1948, it was used by the Afrikaans nationalist
party as a prison in their war against the African National Congress,
where they imprisoned, amongst others, Nelson Mandela and Walter
Sisulu. The prison was closed in 1983, and reopened in 1994 as the
constitutional court of South Africa.
At one point Mbembe remarked to us that "Not that South Africa has
achieved peace, even less so perpetual peace, but in going from the
fort to the court we have opened an imaginary. We have set up a new
horizon against which we can measure the path that remains to be
crossed." For him the very journey from fort to court, from a place of
war and incarceration to a place of justice and law, represents the
long struggle for equality in post-Apartheid South Africa, and signals
one possible instantiation of Kant's project of perpetual peace.
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