On the evening of 14 April 2026, UCT's Chris Hani Lecture Theatre was the setting for the inauguration of what promises to become an important intellectual tradition within the Faculty of Law. Hosted under the auspices of the WP Schreiner Chair in Private Law and Jurisprudence, the inaugural WP & Olive Schreiner Memorial Lecture brought together scholars, diplomats, university leaders and members of the public for an occasion that was as much about institutional reflection as it was about scholarship. The lecture, delivered by Professor Mark Sanders of New York University and Stellenbosch University, was titled Promise of Truth: Reflections on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (30 Years On). 

Yet the deeper significance of the evening lay in the vision articulated by Professor Jaco Barnard-Naudé, who earlier this year assumed the WP Schreiner Chair in the Faculty of Law's Department of Private Law. In his introductory remarks, Barnard-Naudé described arriving at the Chair with only a partial understanding of the Schreiner legacy. While WP Schreiner’s distinguished legal and political career was familiar to Barnard-Naude, he reflected candidly on discovering - with renewed attention - the intellectual and familial connection between William Philip Schreiner and his sister, the celebrated writer Olive Schreiner. That rediscovery became foundational to the conception of the lecture series.

For Barnard-Naudé, the pairing of WP and Olive Schreiner represents more than a historical coincidence. It offers a framework through which to think about the relationship between law, politics and literature in South Africa. These three disciplines, embodied within one family, mirror the interdisciplinary concerns that have shaped Barnard-Naudé's own academic work over many years. 

At the centre of his remarks was a conviction that law cannot be separated from politics, and that the field of law and literature is never politically neutral. Barnard-Naudé argued for a more complex understanding of the relationship between the two disciplines, resisting what he described as the modern temptation to flatten ideas into rigid categories or certainties. Drawing on the psychoanalytic work of Jacques Lacan, he invoked the idea of ‘ambivalent affection’ or what Lacan termed ‘hainamoration’, a relationship characterised simultaneously by attraction and tension.

Barnard-Naudé used this concept to describe both the relationship between WP and Olive Schreiner and the broader relationship between law and literature. During the years preceding the Anglo-Boer War, the Schreiner siblings occupied different political and institutional positions. WP Schreiner, increasingly concerned with the responsibilities of governance, operated within the structures of political power, while Olive Schreiner adopted a radically independent and uncompromising political voice. Yet despite these differences, they remained united in their opposition to the racial injustices of the empire. This complexity, Barnard-Naudé suggested, is precisely what the new memorial lecture seeks to honour. Rather than offering simplified narratives or easy moral conclusions, the lecture series aims to create a space for rigorous public engagement across disciplines and traditions of thought.

The event also reflected a deliberate effort to position the WP Schreiner Chair more visibly within public intellectual life. In correspondence shared ahead of the lecture, Barnard-Naudé explained that, within a national research landscape increasingly focused on engaged scholarship, he hoped to demonstrate that the Schreiner Chair is committed to facing outward and engaging publicly after what he described as a long period of relative institutional quiet.

The timing of the inaugural lecture carried particular resonance. The event was intentionally held on the 30th anniversary of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s first hearing in the Eastern Cape. In inviting Professor Sanders to deliver the lecture, Barnard-Naudé drew attention to Sanders’s landmark work Ambiguities of Witnessing: Law and Literature in the Time of a Truth Commission, widely regarded as one of the most important interdisciplinary studies of testimony, ethics and law in post-apartheid South Africa.

Professor Sanders’s broader body of work reflects an intellectual career deeply engaged with questions of complicity, responsibility, language and memory. His scholarship, which spans literary theory, philosophy and legal thought, has consistently explored how societies confront histories of violence and injustice. His presence at the inaugural lecture therefore reinforced the larger ambitions of the series itself.
Barnard-Naudé also used the occasion to foreground questions of gender and institutional recognition. The decision to formally include Olive Schreiner’s name in the lecture title was intentional and political. As he observed during his introduction, the absence of an Olive Schreiner Chair anywhere in the world remains striking given her global literary and political significance. Naming the lecture after both siblings was therefore not simply symbolic, but part of a broader commitment to confronting ongoing forms of gender injustice within intellectual and institutional life.

That commitment was reflected in the structure of the evening itself. Following Professor Sanders’s lecture, formal responses were delivered by UCT Law’s Ibtisaam Ahmed, and Professor Karin van Marle of the University of the Western Cape. Barnard-Naudé later described Ahmed’s response as breathtaking, while Van Marle’s participation further underscored the lecture’s commitment to critical jurisprudence, transformation and interdisciplinary dialogue.

Although no official photographs were taken due to logistical issues related to protocol arrangements, the audience reflected the significance of the occasion. Senior university leadership, including present and former deputy vice-chancellors and deputy deans, attended alongside local and international guests, among them representatives from the British High Commission and the French Consul Attaché in Cape Town.

What emerged from the evening was not merely the launch of another academic lecture, but the inauguration of a public intellectual project. In linking the legacies of WP and Olive Schreiner, the new memorial lecture series signals a commitment to difficult conversations about law, literature, politics, ethics and memory in South Africa. More importantly, it suggests an understanding of scholarship not as an isolated institutional exercise, but as a form of engaged public thought attentive to complexity, history and justice.