Digital Queer Witnessing: Testimony, Contested Virtual Heritage, and the Apartheid Archive in Soweto, Johannesburg

Research into the events of Soweto and the South Africa Student Uprisings of 1976 – now in a process of recovery and memorialization – remains grounded in the realms of contested and difficult history, as is its historiography. The marriage of theory and praxis, in digital humanities, has meant the active development of new tools and platforms that inquire into human rights violations – specifically how 3D technology can be used to help us elicit new oral testimonies that have gone untold and unrecorded. In 1989 the killing of a queer youth in Mandela’s home named Stompie Seipei, (which few are willing to remember, let alone discuss, in any detail) – is perhaps one of the most glaring examples where the queer and activist community was suppressed or erased from anti-apartheid/liberation histories. Digital humanities may actually help sort through it and can help both reconstruct and recover a history that is still very early in the telling, despite what we think we know about the liberation struggle. Perhaps it could explain why someone like Stompie was killed – or at the very least, provide us with a more complex and messy narrative history that allows us to know more of the rationale for suppressing the role of queer activists against apartheid. This paper will explore the Social Justice History Platform developed at Hamilton College’s DHi, with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (in Unity3D) with the use available maps, photographs, video and other primary source materials to illustrate the ways that historical reconstructions are being used to document human rights violations under apartheid.