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14 May 2019 | Story Thabo Kessah | Photo Sonia Small
Dr Musawenkosi Saurombe
Dr Musawenkosi Saurombe.

The University of the Free State’s 2019 graduation season is continuing this week when over 800 degrees, diplomas, and certificates will be conferred during the Qwaqwa Campus graduation ceremonies on 17 and 18 May 2019.

All degrees in the Faculties of the Humanities, and Natural and Agricultural Sciences will be conferred on Friday. On Saturday, it will be the turn of the Faculties of Economic and Management Sciences, and Education.

Among the degrees to be conferred will be four PhDs and nine master’s degrees in the Faculty of Natural and Agricultural Sciences, and one PhD and three master’s in the Faculty of Education. The Faculty of Economic and Management Sciences will also confer its very first PhD to the Assistant Dean, Dr Calvin Mudzingiri.

Three members of the current Student Representative Council (SRC) and six from the 2017-2018 group will be graduating.

Dr Musawenkosi Saurombe, Africa’s youngest PhD graduate, will address graduands on both days.


WATCH: 17 May 2019 Graduation Ceremony
10:00 Faculties of the Humanities and Natural and Agricultural Sciences 
All qualifications
Graduation Programme

18 May 2019
10:00 Faculties of Economic and Management Sciences and Education
All qualifications
Graduation Programme


News Archive

Expert in Africa Studies debunks African middle class myth
2016-05-10

Description: Prof Henning Melber Tags: Prof Henning Melber

From left: Prof Heidi Hudson, Director of the Centre for Africa Studies (CAS), Joe Besigye from the Institute of Reconciliation and Social Justice, and Prof Henning Melber, Extraordinary Professor at the CAS and guest lecturer for the day.
Photo: Valentino Ndaba

Until recently, think tanks from North America, the African Development Bank, United Nations Development Plan, and global economists have defined the African middle class based purely on monetary arithmetic. One of the claims made in the past is that anyone with a consumption power of $2 per day constitutes the middle class. Following this, if poverty is defined as monetary income below $1.5 a day, it means that it takes just half a dollar to reach the threshold considered as African middle class.

Prof Henning Melber highlighted the disparities in the notion of a growing African middle class in a guest lecture titled A critical anatomy of the African middle class(es), hosted by our Centre for Africa Studies (CAS) at the University of the Free State on 4 May 2016. He is an Extraordinary Professor at the Centre, as well as Senior Adviser and Director Emeritus of the Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation in Sweden.

Prof Melber argued that it is misleading to consider only income when identifying the middle class. In his opinion, such views were advanced by promoters of the global neo-liberal project. “My suspicion is that those who promote the middle class  discourse in that way, based on such a low threshold, were desperate to look for the success story that testifies to Africa rising.”

Another pitfall of such a middle-class analysis is its ahistorical contextualisation. This economically-reduced notion of the class is a sheer distortion. Prof Melber advised analysts to take cognisance of factors, such as consumption patterns, lifestyle, and political affiliation, amongst others.

In his second lecture for the day, Prof Melber dealt withthe topic of: Namibia since independence: the limits to Liberation, painting the historical backdrop against which the country’s current government is consolidating its political hegemony. He highlighted examples of the limited transformation that has been achieved since Namibia’s independence in 1990.

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