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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.
Stanford University hosts book launch for UFS Prestige Scholar
2015-12-14
Dr Christian Williams, a member of the Vice-Chancellor’s Prestige Scholars Programme, had his book launched by Stanford University. The book called National Liberation in Postcolonial Southern Africa: A Historical Ethnography of SWAPO’s Exile Camps will be available in South Africa early in 2016.
Photo: Sonia Small |
A launch for the much-anticipated book by Dr Christian Williams from the University of the Free State (UFS) was sponsored by the Humanities Center and the Center for African Studies of Stanford University in the USA, among others.
The launch of the book, National Liberation in Postcolonial Southern Africa: A Historical Ethnography of SWAPO’s Exile Camps, coincided with the 40th anniversary of Angola’s independence.
The book was published by Cambridge University Press in September 2015, and the launch at Stanford was on 16 November 2015.
This groundbreaking study, which will be available in South Africa early next year, has already been lauded for its invaluable contribution and the depth of its scholarship. The author is a senior lecturer in the Department of Anthropology of the UFS, and member of the Vice-Chancellor’s Prestige Scholars Programme (PSP). He is a former Fulbright scholar, and holds a doctorate from the University of Michigan in History and Anthropology.
National Liberation in Postcolonial Southern Africa follows members of the South West Africa People's Organization (SWAPO) through three decades of exile in Tanzania, Zambia, and Angola.
It highlights how different Namibians experienced exile, as well as the tensions that developed within SWAPO as Namibians encountered one another while officials asserted their power and protected their interests.
It also follows the return of Namibians who lived in exile to post-colonial Namibia, examining the extent to which divisions and hierarchies that emerged in the camps still continue to shape Namibians today.