Since colonialism and apartheid set foot in Africa – and until today – all systems of knowledge production, distribution, and consumption reflect Western hegemony. Africa's universities have since their foundation embraced Western models of academic teaching and learning. However, these models destroyed and excluded the native and colonised people; hence, the call for change was made in the modern era. This involves redressing structures embedded during the colonial era, which have not been fully rectified during the post-colonial era in any productive way; years into the so-called democracy, African unity is still the exception rather than the rule.  Read more...

Mr Teboho Khiba
Junior Lecture: Sociology UFS

Lesotho and South Africa: A Clarion Call for a Pan-Africanist Future

From 19 to 20 March 2022, the UFS Borderlands research team led by Dr Munyaradzi Mushonga (PI) and coordinated by Dr Moorosi Leshoele, participated in an online think-tank conference with the theme, Lesotho and South Africa: A Clarion Call for a Pan-Africanist Future. This is an NIHSS/UFS-funded research project in collaboration with the Academic Forum for Development of Lesotho (AFDeL). The keynote speakers were Molefi Kete Asante, Professor and Chair, Department of Africology at Temple University in Philadelphia and President of the Molefi Kete Asante Institute for Afrocentric Studies; and Dr Khabele Matlosa, former Director of the Department of Political Affairs, African Union Commission in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Out of a total of 16 papers presented, the UFS Borderlands team presented 10 papers, 5 of which were read by students in the Centre for Gender and Africa Studies (3) and the Department of History (2). This was a massive haul where all the student presenters delivered papers at an international conference for the first time in their lives. Read more...

Munyaradzi Mushonga (PhD)
Senior Lecturer and Programme Director for Africa Studies in CGAS

Moorosi Leshoele (PhD)
Lecturer at the Centre for Gender and Africa Studies

Richard Ocaya
Associate Proffessor (UFS)
UFS Ambassador of the Rhodes Trust of Southern Africa

There is, somewhere in the vast body of literature, the story of a geriatric, retired captain who once lived on an island off a remote coast, but within sight of the mainland. The correct time was so precious to this man that he would fire off a cannon to mark noon of each day by his trusty wristwatch. The villagers on the mainland would listen for the distant rumbling boom to set their own less trustworthy timepieces and plan their day. The captain and a fishing boat crew navigating the intervening waters, usually caught sight of each other as the former set off to trigger his cannon. One morning, in a panic, having forgotten to wind his wristwatch and knowing just how valuable his contribution was to the times of the area, the captain settled upon recovering the time. Read More...

Merle Hodges
Research Fellow (UFS) South Campus

There is often criticism that study abroad programmes usually benefit the students who have the means to travel and that the host institution and country benefit little from it.  In my many years of work in higher education (HE) internationalisation, which included hosting students from many countries, the challenge was to structure a programme that benefits all stakeholders and maintains the quality of the programme. 

In 2017, just before I retired as Director of the International Office, I was invited to a meeting in Paris where the French government and Alliance Francaise hosted the South African HE sector. The meeting was to facilitate joint activities between HE institutions of both countries.  Read More..

   

 Pule Mmula: Final Year LLB Student (UFS)
    Debate Coach UFS
    

African Higher Education – Celebrating African Education

African Education: Modernity and Idealism of Africa

The African landscape has for far too long been deemed archaic, ancient in history, and lost in the 20^th century. This has been perpetuated by years of disenfranchisement, a downward look on Africa’s ability to grow and develop and an inherent bias that our education is subpar to the rest of the work. This has been ever-so-evident when it came to the development of education in struggling African countries, the establishment of state-of-the-art institutions that not only allow access to higher education but offer competing technologies and an African flavoured fuel to develop. Although this may be seen as true to Eurocentric thought, a development has been in existence in social, cultural, and legal frameworks across Africa. Read More...

Nombulelo Shange
Lecture: Sociology (UFS)

Overview of African Union’s role in apartheid resistance

South Africa’s democracy might not have existed today without the sacrifices and support of African states and their citizens who supported the Pan-Africanist ideals of a free and united Africa. Ideals that were pushed by the then Organisation of African Unity (OAU), later named the African Union (AU). Africa Day is a celebration of the formation of the AU, which was founded on 25 May 1963. The political and financial support that the OAU extended to South Africans resisting apartheid differed with the changing tides of the struggle. Read more...

Rodwell Makombe
Associate Professor (UFS) Qwaqwa Campus

The issue of decolonization remains a contentious subject in most African countries. This is firstly because there is no one way of defining decolonization, and secondly because there are too many interested parties in the decolonization agenda. The best way to define a term is to, first of all, establish what it is not. Decolonisation is not reverse colonialism or what Jean Paul Sartre would call “anti-racist racism”. To decolonize is not to erase the history of colonialism or to, in some radical way, reclaim the Africa that was, before the colonial encounter. In other words, decolonization is not an attempt to bring back the once glorious African continent of King Tshaka and Munhumutapa … without roads, piped water, electricity and all the niceties of the modern world. Read more...