Language, Power and Marginalisation

Riaan Oppelt:
"Precarious Forms: Cape Flats Literature, Cinema, Language and the Aesthetics of Spatial Inequality"

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This lecture explores how the historical production of spatial inequality in Cape Town has shaped not only what cultural works represent but the formal structures through which stories are told. Drawing on my research into literature, cinema and Kaaps language practices from or about the Cape Flats, the peripheral townships created by apartheid-era forced removals, I argue that colonialism and apartheid persist as aesthetic conditions that continue to organise narrative space, subjectivity, temporality and linguistic expression.

I work with and extend the idea of precarious form to ask how spatial marginalisation shapes literary and cinematic structure. Enclosure, territoriality, fractured subjectivity and interrupted futurity operate here not only as social realities but as organising principles of narrative. The lecture considers representations of gang territoriality, family fragmentation, trauma, shame and belonging in selected texts and films, alongside the emergence of Kaaps as a form of linguistic and cultural citizenship, namely a site where historical marginalisation is contested and new forms of recognition are negotiated.

Bringing together literary criticism, film studies, spatial theory, trauma studies and linguistic anthropology, I read narrative structures, cinematic grammars and language practices as sedimentations of spatial history. Precarious form, I suggest, offers a critical framework for understanding how inequality becomes embedded in aesthetics, with relevance for the afterlives of apartheid in South Africa and for other divided urban contexts.

Biography

Riaan Oppelt is a Senior Lecturer of English Literary and Cultural Studies at Stellenbosch University. He works on Kaaps literature, popular culture and film and media. He is a playwright with several original full-length plays, writes short stories and is the founder and primary songwriter for the alternative, indie rock group, Aldano, with two album releases.

Gerald Kimambo:
"Kiswahili and Digitalisation in Tanzanian Higher Education"

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Despite Tanzania’s efforts to integrate Kiswahili into higher education digital infrastructures, the operationalisation of this integration remains unclear amid dependence on imported digital infrastructures. Drawing on decoloniality, this chapter analyses policy documents and Moodle-based LMSs at the University of Dar es Salaam, the University of Dodoma and the Open University of Tanzania, audited on 15 June and 19 July 2026, using an interface-oriented multimodal analysis. It examines how policy positions Kiswahili and where digital infrastructures enable or constrain its use. 

The findings show that Kiswahili is institutionally recognised and pedagogically embedded within university curricula but partially operationalised in platform architectures, administrative architectures and computational interactions. This asymmetry reflects English-dominant platform configurations and uneven interface localisation, influenced by institutional configuration choices and broader technological constraints. A layered form of computational marginalisation favours English. This chapter contributes methodologically through its multi-level analytical design and conceptually by proposing a Layered Digital Language Hierarchies (LDLH) Model, developed through the interplay of the analytical framework and the findings.

Biography

Gerald Kimambo is an associate professor at the University of Dar es Salaam in the Department of Foreign Languages and Linguistics. His research lies at the intersection of sociolinguistics, multilingualism, translanguaging, World Englishes, linguistic landscapes and digital communication. He is particularly interested in how language practices shape education, identity, technology and social inclusion in multilingual societies. He is currently collaborating on a project, ‘Describing Tanzanian English: Eviden