Makers and Shapers Profile

Philip Bonner

Commissioned Contributor

31 March 1945 - 24 September 2017

[Source - FHYA, 2016: Prof Bonner was Professor of History at the University of the Witwatersrand and held the NRF Chair in Local Histories and Present Realities. He was also the Chair of the History Workshop and was principal organizer of conferences and open days in 1990, 1994 and co-organizer of the 1999 History Workshop on the Truth and Reconciliation Report entitled “Commissioning the Past” the two History Workshop Conferences that were staged in 2001:“Aids in Context” and “The Burden of Race” and the History Workshop Conference on ‘Rethinking Worlds of Labour’, held in July 2006. Each of these has been a landmark intellectual event. Phil Bonner also organized/participated in various teachers’ workshops in Gauteng, Limpopo, Mpumalanga and North-West Province. He was on the editorial committee of the South African Democratic Education Trust and helped supervise the production of Vol.1 of The Road to Democracy in South Africa. He was historical consultant and executive producer to a six part documentary television series entitled Soweto: A History, which embodied a large amount of original historical and film archival research. It was screened on Channel 4 in Britain, on SBS in Australia and was shown on SABC TV 1 to considerable critical acclaim. Phil Bonner was the co-curator of the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg. He entered a partnership between History Workshop and the Robben Island Museum and supervised a pilot project interviewing ex Robben Island prisoners.]