Kasonde Thomas Mukonde

New Archival Visions Postdoctoral Fellow

Kasonde Thomas Mukonde is a postdoctoral fellow in the New Archival Visions project at the University of the Western Cape’s Centre for Humanities Research. Mukonde recently completed a PhD thesis in History with the History Workshop and the Department of History at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. The thesis traced the history of the Theatre of Resistance in Johannesburg from 1960 to 2010 using a combination of archival research, oral history interviews, and analysis of play scripts. He has previously worked as a teacher and a librarian, and has published work on the history of subversive reading practices in Soweto high schools. Mukonde is a qualified librarian and has managed programs that developed library services for marginalised youth in Zambia. Apart from a deep curiosity about social movements, Mukonde is also interested in the intersection of technology and history. At the CHR, he is working on the history of the African National Congress’s Radio Freedom, using one of the few audio archives of guerrilla radios of liberation movements on the African continent. Kasonde obtained his undergraduate degree in history from Georgetown University in Washington, DC.