Tweet By: Athambile Masola* There’s a youtube video that’s been causing a stir. This video has the title I will not let an exam decide my fate. It’s a spoken word piece where the artist does a great job at trying to untangle the question of the purpose of education. I showed the video to…
Tweet By Gcobani Qambela*, Bose Maposa**, and Mathe Maema*** Institutions of higher learning have always been at the centre of development practice, and through higher education many people from all walks of life have been able to achieve class mobility. Harvard University Professor, Calestous Juma in 2008 noted that “economic growth is the transformation of…
Tweet By: Bose Maposa* Our current blog theme urges us to consider ways in which we can change the world without taking power and specifically “we should be thinking of change beyond the confines of state power, whose failure at facilitating a space where individuals can live creative and dignified lives can be deduced from the growing and harrowing…
Tweet By: Gcobani Qambela* It is hard to believe that anyone is so at home with the world that they do not feel revulsion at the hunger, violence and inequality that surrounds them. – John Holloway The 2012 South African final high school matriculation results were important in many respects. This is primarily because many…
Tweet The year 2011 saw the collapse of some of Africa’s longest despots: Ben Ali, Mubarak, and Gaddafi in the noted North African awakening. Post conflict reconstruction challenges in these countries since then, especially in Egypt, demonstrate the limitations of centering revolution on changing state power.In “change the world without taking power: the meaning of revolution today” (2002), John Holloway argues…
Tweet By: Gcobani Qambela* I spent much of 2012 researching from home in Lady Frere, rural South Africa. In the course of the year, two young males from our community committed suicide. I could not believe it the first time my mother informed me of the first suicide early in the year. I was taken…
Tweet The other day I was reminded of Plato’s allegory of the cave, an incredible sketch of what could happen when one does not interrogate set beliefs or does not have anything to benchmark oneself against. In the allegory, Socrates’ great apprentice tells of a story of a few men who had been stuck in…
Tweet As a teacher, I am often confronted with many questions in the classroom. Recently, some of my learners heard about South Africa’s ranking in education, fourth from the bottom out of a 100 countries, and they demanded to know how this is possible. They also wanted to know whether they had any chance at…
Tweet Emerging from a past of racial discrimination and prejudice, one of the hopes for a new South Africa is that young people will be born and grow up in a society where they are simply human beings rather than racialized human beings. There is a hope that our children will escape the scourge of…
Tweet By: Nuunja Kenyan scholar Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o has written extensively about the ‘language question’ in African literature, most prominently in his book Decolonizing the Mind where he famously rejected English as a medium for his writing. In fact, there has been a great deal of scholarship regarding the use of indigenous vs. foreign languages…
