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14 February 2018 Photo Bonolo Nkoane
First Sesotho soundtrack for fulldome film launched at Naval Hill Planetarium
Tshireletso Nkoane, best known for her television roles in the drama series, Tshisa, the comedy series, Moferefere Lenyalong, as well as the miniseries, Naledi.
In December, the Naval Hill Planetarium used the voice of a well-known South African actress for yet another trailblazer: the first Sesotho soundtrack for a full-dome film.

“It is important for our children to become interested in science and astronomy through exposure to good language use in their mother tongue from an early age, so that we can still make a sound contribution to these fields in the future,” said Prof Matie Hoffman from the Department of Physics at the University of the Free State.

Space Shapes, a child-friendly fulldome film by the Ott Planetarium at the Weber State University in Utah in the US, was translated into Sesotho as Dibopeho tsa Sepakapakeng by Khantlapane Selina Ketla and Dr Andries Hoffman, following last year’s release of the short film by the Naval Hill Planetarium as Ruimtevorms in Afrikaans. The film, created by participants of the 2010 Blender Production Workshop in Utah, takes young audiences on a journey to explore the different shapes found in space.

The voice artist, Tshireletso Nkoane, a star in her own right, is best-known for her television roles in the drama series, Tshisa, the comedy series, Moferefere Lenyalong, as well as the miniseries, Naledi. She has several theatre and radio credits to her name, and also boasts a diploma in Electrical Engineering.

The premiere of this Sesotho trailblazer, as well as the CosmoQuest and Ward Beecher Planetarium’s English fulldome film, Cosmic Castaways, will take place at the Naval Hill Planetarium on Saturday 17 February 2018 at 17:30. Cosmic Castaways is an exciting work that reaches out to places where there are no constellations; where there are still isolated stars to be found in the voids between the galaxies.

Tickets for this double premiere, as well as for the weekly Saturday 17:30 shows, are available from Computicket – just search under ‘planetarium’ on the Computicket website or visit Checkers.

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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