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21 August 2019 | Story Ruan Bruwer | Photo Varsity Sport
Netball
The UFS netball team celebrating their victory in last year’s Varsity Netball competition. They are the most successful team in the tournament’s history, with three titles (2013, 2014, and 2018).

Kovsies can lift the Varsity Netball trophy again if they repeat last year’s recipe of playing for each other, motivating one another, and giving their all in each game. This is what the captain, Lefébre Rademan, believes. 

The competition started yesterday, Monday 26 August 2019 with a repeat of last year’s final. The UFS women played Tuks in the Callie Human Centre at 19:00. The final score was Kovsies 42 - 63 Tuks.

“I believe we can retain the trophy if all the players’ heads and hearts are in the right place. We must play for each other and for the UFS. I don’t think we have a point to prove after what happened at the USSA, although we would like to set the record straight,” Rademan said.

The UFS netball team went unbeaten through the group stage of the USSA champs in July, but they lost their final two encounters to finish fourth.

The Kovsies received the best possible draw. Five of their seven matches are at home, three of them against traditional powerhouses Tuks, North-West University, and Maties. They only have to travel once (to Pretoria), where they will play matches on consecutive days.

“It is certainly a great advantage to have so many matches in front of your home support and only playing away twice (against the Madibaz and the University of the Western Cape).”

Rademan took over the captaincy from Alicia Puren, who finished her studies at the end of 2018.

The team also lost the services of Maryke Coetzee, Khomotso Mamburu, and Tanya von Berg, who were all extremely experienced.


News Archive

African historian honoured at UFS Library book launch
2016-08-23

Description: Library book launch Tags: Library book launch

The UFS Library, in collaboration with the Department of Political Studies and Governance, launched This Present Darkness, a book by the late Stephen Ellis on 23 August 2016 at the Sasol Library on the Bloemfontein Campus.

Stephen Ellis was a Professor in the Faculty of Social Sciences at Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, and a senior researcher at the African Studies Centre, Leiden. He wrote ground-breaking books on the ANC, the Liberian Civil War, religion and politics in Africa, and the history of Madagascar.  He died in 2015.

The book explores how Nigerian criminal syndicates acquired a reputation for involvement in drug-trafficking, fraud, cyber-crime, and other types of criminal activity. Successful Nigerian criminal networks have a global reach, interacting with their Italian, Latin American, and Russian counterparts. Yet in 1944, a British colonial official wrote that “the number of persistent and professional criminals is not great in Nigeria” and that “crime as a career has so far made little appeal to the young Nigerian.”

Ellis, a celebrated Africanist, traces the origins of Nigerian organised crime to the last years of colonial rule, when nationalist politicians acquired power at regional level. In need of funds for campaigning, they offered government contracts to foreign businesses in return for kickbacks, a pattern that recurs to this day. Political corruption encouraged a wider disrespect for the law that spread throughout Nigerian society. When the country’s oil boom came to an end in the early 1980s, young Nigerian college graduates headed abroad, eager to make money by any means. Nigerian crime went global, and new criminal markets are emerging all over the world at present.

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