Some farewells close a chapter while reopening a book. A recent colloquium, co-organised by Professor Jaco Barnard-Naude (WP Schreiner Chair, UCT Law), was a clear example of such a form of farewell. This colloquium, held in December 2025 at the Zeitz MOCAA, was titled Other Voices: Law, Poetry and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) at 30: a Colloquium in Honour of Distinguished Professor Philippe-Joseph Salazar, dedicated to the Memory of the Late Prof Erik Doxtader (1966-2025).

While primarily conceived to mark 30 years since the advent of the TRC, the gathering – quite serendipitously - also carried a quieter but unmistakable purpose: to recognise Distinguished Professor Philippe-Joseph Salazar on his retirement from UCT. 

If his departure from the institution passed without the fullness of a ceremony celebrating a truly remarkable academic career at the university, where the Distinguished Professor also for many years carried the honour of being the University’s Senior Professor (the longest serving professor at the university), then this colloquium answered in a different register. It was rigorous, deliberative and commemorative. To the extent that it could be said to celebrate, it did so by way of commemoration.

From the outset, the colloquium focus was clear. It would not be an oral festschrift disguised as an academic conference, nor a parade of encomiums. Instead, Professor Barnard-Naudé and his co-organiser Professor Karin Van Marle (Research Chair in Gender, Transformation and World-Making, UWC Public Law), structured the event not around a person and their academic legacy, but around a substantive theme to which that person contributed crucial academic interventions: the instance of the TRC as a political and legal ‘event’ as well as the fraught contemporary legacies to which it has given rise (as is typically the case with most ‘events’ of this sort). Areas of focus included law, poetry, psychoanalysis and rhetoric. With a keynote presented by Prof Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela and responded to formally by Dr Thapelo Teele, the colloquium intentionally invited an intergenerational and interdisciplinary group of participants to ask a deceptively simple question: are we (even) asking the right questions about the TRC 30 years on?

That formulation alone bore Salazar’s imprint. Over the course of almost five decades, the Distinguished Professor has insisted that rhetoric is not ornament but method. It is the discipline that turns attention to the framing of questions, to the shaping of publics, to the ethics of persuasion. The TRC, in Salazar’s work, was never ‘merely’ a juridical innovation - it was a rhetorical event, a national stage on which voice, testimony and authority were presented (and often contested) in real time. To revisit it at 30 was therefore (also) to revisit one of the central problematics of Salazar’s scholarship: how democracies speak.

The colloquium programme reflected this ambition. Professor Gobodo-Madikizela’s keynote set the tone and it was followed by plenary roundtables that moved between post-apartheid jurisprudence and the psychoanalytic concept of the ’phantom’, between the contemporary legacy of spatial injustice and the traumatic memory of both racist, misogynistic and homophobic criminalisation and interdiction. Poetry readings by the likes of Diana Ferrus, Antjie Krog and Ingrid de Kok punctuated the proceedings, refusing any neatly preconceived disciplinary separation of law and literature. Visual art, theatre, opera and documentary film were given discursive space, not as cultural garnish but as modes of argumentation. This too functioned as a two-way mirror in which Salazar could recognise dimensions of his work (his first monograph was on opera) and the participants could in their turn recognise Salazar (for instance, for convening the first colloquium of gay and lesbian studies in Southern Africa). The Other Voices colloquium consciously echoed the latter intervention – it insisted once more on opening space, refused like the earlier colloquium to reduce public deliberation to divisive slogans. 

The Zeitz MOCAA as the chosen venue, emphasised the point that it is imperative for multidimensional academic discourse never to confine itself to the rarefied ivory tower, but to actively shape public discourse, especially in the era of predominantly unidimensional social media. The result was a monumental memorial to the rigorous academic legacy of Distinguished Professor Philippe-Joseph Salazar. It was commemoration as a working laboratory of ideas. It was appropriately serious, occasionally tense, somewhat mournful, moving and unmistakably alive with its moments of laughter.

Salazar’s own career hardly needs rehearsing in detail. Educated at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, trained under renowned intellectuals including Louis Althusser, Roland Barthes and Emmanuel Levinas, later Research Director at Jacques Derrida’s Collège International de Philosophie, Distinguished Professor Salazar brought to UCT an intellectual formation both classical and insurgent. He has held the highest rating from the National Research Foundation for more than two decades, authored over two dozen books across several languages and received honours ranging from the Harry Oppenheimer Fellowship to France’s Ordre des Palmes Académiques. International colleagues marked 40 years of his work with a jubilee volume in 2022.

Yet this recent colloquium resisted the temptation to catalogue these achievements. Its recognition of Salazar was more oblique and, for that reason, more fitting. It lay in the form of the event itself: the careful attention to deliberative structure; the insistence on conceptual clarity; the willingness to stage disagreement without collapsing into polemic. These are habits Salazar cultivated at UCT over more than three decades, sometimes against the grain of institutional fashion.

If there was a valedictory note in Salazar’s honour, it sounded at the close of the first day in the atrium of the museum. Words of appreciation were offered by the Dean of the Law Faculty and the Head of the Private Law Department. Salazar’s close colleague and friend of many decades, Prof John Higgins, delivered a substantial, characteristically robust, valedictory. Photographs were taken, glasses raised. But even there, the emphasis remained on continuity. In a message circulated afterwards, Professors Barnard-Naudé and Van Marle thanked participants for the “enriching, vibrant, passionate” exchange and announced plans to pursue an edited volume arising from the proceedings, likely in collaboration with Wits University Press and an international publishing partner. Texts would be archived for public access. The conversation would not evaporate.

In this sense, the colloquium achieved something quietly corrective. Where formal institutional ritual had been sparse, the colloquium supplied substance. It demonstrated that recognition in the academy need not take the form of plaques or speeches; it can take the form of serious thought carried forward in company - and taken into all sorts of academic and public discussion and scholarship.
More than anything, the event reaffirmed a proposition central to Salazar’s life’s work: that democracy depends on how we speak and how we listen. 

Thirty years after the TRC, South Africa remains marked by what was said and what could not be said in that forum. To revisit those dynamics now, across law, art and critical theory was to acknowledge both inheritance and responsibility.

Professors Barnard-Naudé and Van Marle’s co-organisation (as part of an ongoing collaboration aimed at bringing UCT Law and UWC Law closer together in both academic and collegial terms), ensured that this acknowledgement would be neither perfunctory nor private, political because it was plural at its core. Guided by the ideals of public deliberation itself, the colloquium was disciplined, searching, unfinished. If the measure of a scholar is the conversations he makes possible, then the colloquium stands as evidence enough of the contribution made to scholarship by Distinguished Professor Philippe-Joseph Salazar.