Ausi Told Me: Why Cape Herstoriographies Matter written by June Bam critically engages the early colonial archive and foregrounds decolonial knowledge ecologies on the Cape Flats. Ausidi are first-born daughters; female knowledge-keepers who were and continue to be profound intergenerational knowledge-holders of our pasts whose knowledges and interpretations of rituals, plants, animals and healing have been deliberately left out of official historiographies and archives – not only during colonial times.

The panel, moderated by Professor Wangui wa Goro, will discuss and debate issues of how we could critically engage assumptions, interpretations and research methods through feminist practices in deep listening in storytelling. How could these surviving stories of plants, intuition, telepathy, visions, rituals and astronomy help us in rethinking interpretations of our deep connected pasts of the de-Africanised Western Cape, for instance – a much distorted area of study. How could feminist interpretations of landscape and pasts help us to disturb assumed universalisms in scholarship and move us closer to what decoloniality in scholarship may mean in Africa?