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After South Africa’s battle with the record-breaking drought of 2015, Prof Andries Jordaan from our Disaster Management Training and Education Centre for Africa(DiMTEC) saw room for improvement in dealing with this kind of disaster.
Drought impact
Commercial farmers who are usually net exporters of food crops and communal farmers who own the bulk of the country’s livestock, were all hit hard in 2015. Most of the latter had no resources to spare as the drought progressed. The concern about the drought’s impact on the country’s food production and availability resulted in a joint goal of preventing food scarcity during future droughts.
Prof Jordaan’s visit to the National Drought Mitigation Center (NDMC) in Lincoln, Nebraska, in the US, several years ago prepared him to better equip communities in South Africa to deal with drought situations. “I recognised that in spite of the impact DiMTEC has been able to make on disaster preparedness, a gap remained in disaster response in South Africa.”
Sharing knowledge
In August this year Prof Jordaan again visited the NDMC. This time he requested a few key players in South Africa’s agriculture and disaster response communities to join him. With him were Janse Rabie, head of Natural Resources at AgriSA, a nonprofit organisation that functions as an interface between the government and about 28 000 South Africa farmers, and Moses Musiwale Khangale, director of Fire Services for the South African Ministry of Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs.
The South African delegation met with and learnt from climatologists, geospatial technologists, and outreach and planning analysts.
Discussion on mass violence and genocide in Africa
2013-09-25
25 September 2013
Africa’s contested pasts have frequently been characterised by violence. The manner of the continent’s subjugation to colonial rule; processes of indigenous resistance and accommodation; patterns of dispossession and accumulation; the construction and reconstruction of gendered identities; liberation movement dynamics; and the postcolonial politics of patronage have all shaped African experiences of violence and antagonisms.
To this list could be added past and present manifestations of xenophobia; the struggle for scarce resources in conditions of extreme inequality and climate change; and many more.
Looking at the above, the Institute for Reconciliation and Social Justice will host a colloquium on Mass Violence and genocide in Africa: Colonial and postcolonial perspectives on 26 September 2013.
The aim of the colloquium is to account, through a mixture of historical case studies and over-arching contemporary thematic and conceptual analyses, for a spectrum encompassing individual trauma, mass violence and genocide.
Time: 08:00-16:45
Place: Institute for Reconciliation and Social Justice (DF Malherbe House and the Centenary Complex)
RSVP: DemanA@ufs.ac.za