Reimagining Liberation
If our liberation is bound together, how do we build the futures we need?
The 2026 Canon Collins Trust Annual Scholars’ Festival brought together more than 150 delegates, including scholars and alumni from across Southern Africa, to reimagine liberation.
This year’s gathering centred on the theme, Reimagining Liberation: If Our Liberation Is Bound Together, How Do We Build the Futures We Need?
The theme responded to the challenges shaping our world and recognised that they do not exist in isolation. Climate change, displacement, xenophobia, rising inequality, democratic backsliding, technological transformation and growing social fragmentation reveal how deeply our lives and futures are interconnected.
The festival featured several memorable moments. It opened with a provocation by Prof. zethu Matebeni, a scholar, activist and curator whose work advances African queer knowledge through research, teaching, mentorship, archiving and community-based practice. Among other thought-provoking reflections, Prof. Matebeni argued that liberation is grounded in place, collective purpose, attentive listening and a return to the histories, relationships and knowledge held within one’s community.
The breakaway discussions were another highlight. Facilitated primarily by alumni and friends of the Trust, the sessions created space for delegates to exchange ideas, reflect on shared challenges and explore possibilities for collective action.
Civic activist and communications strategist Koketso Moeti delivered the closing address, leaving delegates energised and ready to advance liberation within themselves and their communities.
Finding Liberation in the Ground Beneath Us.
Knowing where our liberation lies gives direction to the work of justice. It connects personal struggle to collective responsibility and asks us to consider the places, histories and relationships that shape who we are. It also challenges us to listen closely to what our communities need and to understand that freedom is built through shared purpose.
In her keynote address, Professor zethu Matebeni invited delegates to reflect on the connection between place and liberation. Drawing on her experiences across several universities, she described how she had once looked to academic institutions as spaces of freedom and transformation. Her involvement in Rhodes Must Fall and the Black Academic Caucus, however, revealed the personal and institutional costs of challenging entrenched systems of power.
“Where is your liberation?” she asked. For Matebeni, answering this question required returning to Peddie in the Eastern Cape, where her ancestors settled in 1835 after being given land by King Hintsa. Guided by the Sankofa principle of looking to the past to find the future, she began to recognise that the ground she came from held the knowledge and direction she had been seeking elsewhere.
That return gave rise to Grounded Sensing, a practice shaped by listening to the land, memory and the body. It also informed the development of MATI Archives, a research collection, residency and community initiative based in Peddie. Through this work, Matebeni has created a space where scholarship, public engagement and community knowledge can meet.
Her message was clear: liberation begins with knowing our intentions and recognising that our futures are connected. The task is to build principled relationships, listen to the histories carried by people and places, and undertake the work of freedom together.
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Putting Eswatini’s Creative Industry on the map
Attending the 2026 Canon Collins Conference in Johannesburg was a profoundly affirming and energizing experience for me, both as a scholar and as a practitioner in the screen industry. As a second-year MFA student at AFDA Film School in Johannesburg and a Commissioning Editor at Eswatini TV, I arrived at the conference carrying the dual realities of postgraduate study and day-to-day work in broadcasting. This was my second Canon Collins conference, and once again I felt the depth of care and purpose that sits at the heart of this community.
What I carry home most strongly is the richness of the connections I made. Over the course of the weekend, I met scholars from across Southern Africa and beyond, each bringing their own disciplines, struggles and visions. Out of those conversations came a wave of ideas and potential collaborations, creative projects, research partnerships, and cross‑border support for building stronger creative ecosystems. Even though I did not know many people at the start, I never felt out of place. Canon Collins events are genuinely safe spaces: you walk into the room and it feels as though everyone is living in the future we aspire to, eager to listen, collaborate, and offer thoughtful advice.
The theme, “Reimagining Liberation,” resonated deeply with where I am currently positioned. In my context in Eswatini, liberation looks like a thriving local creative industry, one where content is being produced consistently, where independent producers can make a real living from their craft, and where our stories move beyond our borders while holding onto the authentic glory of true Swati experiences, told through our own lenses and lived realities. Liberation, for me, is when the film and television ecosystem truly works: when we have multiple national funds intentionally set up to support creatives, when our labour is valued, and when our industry can stand strong and independent.
This vision is closely tied to my MFA thesis. My research confronts a structural absence in Southern African screen storytelling: the silenced labour and intellectual contribution of Black women inside corporate and creative spaces. I am asking how a Black South African woman screenwriter can make that labour legible on the page of a feature film script without reproducing the romance‑driven, respectability‑bound conventions that have organised the prestige melodrama and the four‑letter‑word telenovela tradition. The study contributes to a growing body of work in which African and African diasporic writers explore what practice‑led screenwriting research looks like when it is undertaken from the standpoint of Black women writing for African audiences.
At its core, my thesis challenges dominant narrative patterns that organise the Black female protagonist’s story around marriage, betrayal and reconciliation, often making her intellectual and professional labour either invisible or culpable.
Being in a room where liberation was discussed not only in political or legal terms, but also in relation to education, culture, gender and creativity, sharpened my sense that narrative liberation is part of broader social liberation. The conference reminded me that changing how we tell stories, who is centered, whose work is seen, whose voices shape the frame, is itself a form of justice work.
I leave this year’s conference feeling renewed in my purpose and more determined than ever to help build the kind of creative ecosystem I have been imagining in Eswatini. I am deeply grateful to Canon Collins Trust for fully sponsoring my MFA studies, and to the staff and volunteers who work tirelessly to make this platform possible. This past weekend was a beautiful experience and a much‑needed recharge. It has re‑anchored me in why I do this work, and it has given me both the courage and the companionship to continue pushing for an industry, and a storytelling culture, in which Black women’s labor, intelligence and creativity are fully recognized and celebrated.
Festival Reflections from Southern African Scholars and Alumni
