Where lineage becomes Living knowledge

Grounded in the philosophy of UBuSuSu, our work unfolds across the archive, studio, education, community, and global dialogue as intergenerational sites of living knowledge.
 

SHOLDING AND ACTIVATING AFRICAN KNOWLEDGE THROUGH PRESERVATION, DIGITISATION, AND PUBLICATION.

ADVANCING ARTISTIC CREATION, MENTORSHIP, AND INTERGENERATIONAL MAKING.

EDUCATION, RESEARCH, FELLOWSHIP, AND INSTITUTIONAL PARTNERSHIP.

EXHIBITIONS, COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT, AND INTERNATIONAL CULTURAL EXCHANGE.

To consolidate, preserve, and digitise Professor Ntuli’s body of work, establishing the studio as a primary archival and pedagogical site.

To position African philosophical and artistic knowledge within continental and global cultural institutions.

 

To activate the studio as a site of education, performance, and community engagement.

From bold concepts to early pilots, we support ideas with potential to scale across African communities, providing catalytic funding, strategic partnerships, and evidence-based learning.

The purpose of the Ntuli Foundation is to deliver public benefit in the areas of culture, heritage, and education, ensuring that African philosophical, artistic, and spiritual knowledge systems are preserved, activated, and transmitted to future generations. All assets and activities of the Foundation are applied exclusively towards these objectives.

Freedom Charter at 70: A Vision Adrift

Seventy years after the Freedom Charter was adopted at Kliptown in 1955, historian, sculptor and academic Professor Pitika Ntuli is sounding a sobering note. Speaking to SABC News as South Africa commemorated the anniversary at Walter Sisulu Square in Soweto, Ntuli argued that the majority of the Charter's promises have been abandoned, and that the document which once mapped the moral and political horizon of a free South Africa has lost much of its value in practice.

For Ntuli, the problem is not a shortage of good ideas. South Africa, he points out, has produced no end of visionary frameworks — from the Reconstruction and Development Programme to the Chapter 9 institutions created to safeguard constitutional democracy. The question he poses is disarmingly simple: what exactly are we reconstructing, and what are we developing? The blueprints exist; what is missing, in his view, is the ideological backbone to carry them through.

Ntuli traces the drift to what he calls a template of oppression that has quietly reasserted itself in the post-apartheid era. Neo-colonialism, he suggests, did not arrive with tanks but seeped into the ruling class through self-interest, greed and corruption, bending institutions away from the people they were built to serve. The Charter's call for the land, the wealth and the country to be shared among those who live in it has, in that telling, been slowly unlearned.

The 70th anniversary is therefore less a celebration than a summons. For Ntuli — whose life's work in sculpture, poetry and scholarship has long insisted on returning to the source — the Freedom Charter still holds its original power. The task is to recover its spirit, match its ideas with political will, and refuse to let a founding promise become a museum piece.

Commentary based on reporting by Kholo Tefo for SABC News, 26 June 2025.

 

https://www.sabcnews.com/sabcnews/the-freedom-charters-has-lost-its-value-ntuli/