Latest News Archive

Please select Category, Year, and then Month to display items
Categories
UFS News Media Release Research
Years
2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 2023 2024
Months
January February March April May June July August September October November December
Previous Archive
08 January 2019
Oupa Mohoje
Oupa Mohoje is the first former Kovsie to be named regular Cheetah captain since Juan Smith in 2008.

Former captain of the Kovsie Shimlas, Oupa Mohoje, was chosen to lead the Free State Cheetahs for the 2018/2019 rugby season.

 

He is the first Kovsie to be the regular Cheetah captain since Juan Smith 10 years ago.

“It certainly is a big honour, but it comes with a lot of responsibilities,” said Oupa. One thing he is glad about, is the fact that the players and the Cheetah coach, Franco Smith, fully support him, which makes his job a lot easier, he explained.

 

“Choosing Oupa as captain came naturally – he is a true favourite with everyone in the team,” said former captain, Juan. Oupa grew up in the Free State, he studied here and became a Springbok here, and that makes him a Free State player through and through, explained Juan.

 

From Shimlas to Springboks in three months, Mohoje, a loose forward who can also assist as lock, captained the South African A side in 2017, and the Shimlas in 2013. He represented the Shimlas between 2011 and 2014 and was voted the Player of the Varsity Cup in 2013. His final match in the famous blue jersey was on 17 March 2014. A little more than three months later he became a Springbok, playing the first of 19 tests.

 

According to Harold Verster, Managing Director of the Cheetahs, Oupa is very popular among the players, he is very disciplined, and has all the qualities to make a great captain.

 

Oupa’s teammate Ox Nche added, “He has good people skills and communicates very well. I think he is a very good leader”.

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
 

We use cookies to make interactions with our websites and services easy and meaningful. To better understand how they are used, read more about the UFS cookie policy. By continuing to use this site you are giving us your consent to do this.

Accept