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18 December 2018 | Story Thabo Kessah | Photo Thabo Kessah
Charlotte Maxeke
Residence students preparing old tyres to use in new playing swings.

The name Charlotte Maxeke is, since time immemorial, associated with ‘hope’ for the downtrodden Black majority. And the name Fulufhelo means ‘hope’ in Tshivenda, the language spoken mainly in Limpopo, her birth province. She was the first black South African woman to earn a degree, a Bachelor of Science from the Wilberforce University in the Unites States of America in 1901.

Khayelisha and Khayelethu also project a very high expectation of ‘hope’. Considering our painful past dominated by the 1913 Land Act, the former literally means ‘our new home’, whilst the latter means ‘our home’.

Fast forward to 2018 at the University of the Free State’s Qwaqwa Campus. These are the names of student residences that brought hope to the needy when they collaborated with Community Engagement to give back to their communities.

“The need to give back was sparked by our encounter with needy students on campus. We then thought that if we could do the little for our fellow students who are part of the No Student Hungry (NSH) campaign, we could actually extend this to those who are even worse off,” said Beyoncé Matsoso, Prime of Charlotte Maxeke and Residence for first year students.

“Taking time out to give toys, play with the kids on the swings we erected for them, helping them with their laundry and giving them fruit and food bought from our own pockets gave us a lot of satisfaction,” said Beyoncé, a final year BA Psychology and Languages student.

Acknowledging the role played by Residence Head, Makeresemese Mokhatla, in the whole exercise was Sikolethu Dodo, Prime of Khayelitsha / Khayelethu Residence.

“Having had a dialogue on how we can make other people’s lives better with our Residence Head Makeresemese Mokhatla and Mme Matsoso from Community Engagement led to this initiative. Some of us will be going out to the world of work soon and this has equipped us with necessary skills like compassion,” said Sikolethu, a final year BAdmin student.

The centres visited were the Itsoseng housing disabled children as well as the Team Spirit Hospice.

News Archive

The TRC legitimised apartheid - Mamdani
2010-07-20

 Prof. Mahmood Mamdani
“The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) accepted as legitimate the rule of law that undergirded apartheid. It defined as crime only those acts that would have been considered criminal under the laws of apartheid.”

This statement was made by the internationally acclaimed scholar, Prof. Mahmood Mamdani, when he delivered the Africa Memorial Lecture at the University of the Free State (UFS) last week on the topic: Lessons of Nuremberg and Codesa: Where do we go from here?

“According to the TRC, though crimes were committed under apartheid, apartheid itself – including the law enforced by the apartheid state – was not a crime,” he said.

He said the social justice challenges that South Africa faced today were as a result of the TRC’s failure to broaden the discussion of justice beyond political to social justice.

He said it had to go beyond “the liberal focus on bodily integrity” and acknowledge the violence that deprived the vast majority of South Africans of their means of livelihood.

“Had the TRC acknowledged pass laws and forced removals as constituting the core social violence of apartheid, as the stuff of extra-economic coercion and primitive accumulation, it would have been in a position to imagine a socio-economic order beyond a liberalised post-apartheid society,” he said.

“It would have been able to highlight the question of justice in its fullness, and not only as criminal and political, but also as social.”

He said the TRC failed to go beyond the political reconciliation achieved at Codesa and laid the foundation for a social reconciliation. “It was unable to think beyond crime and punishment,” he said.

He said it recognised as victims only individuals and not groups, and human rights violations only as violations of “the bodily integrity of an individual”; that is, only torture and murder.

“How could this be when apartheid was brazenly an ideology of group oppression and appropriation? How could the TRC make a clear-cut distinction between violence against persons and that against property when most group violence under apartheid constituted extra-economic coercion, in other words, it was against both person and property?”, he asked.

“The TRC was credible as performance, as theatre, but failed as a social project”.

Prof. Mamdani is the Director of the Institute of Social Research at the Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda; and the Herbert Lehman Professor of Government in the Department of Anthropology at the Columbia University in New York, USA.

Media Release
Issued by: Mangaliso Radebe
Assistant Director: Media Liaison
Tel: 051 401 2828
Cell: 078 460 3320
E-mail: radebemt@ufs.ac.za  
20 July 2010
 

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