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18 October 2019 | Story Thabo Kessah | Photo Tshepo Moeketsi
Prof Pearl Sithole
Prof Pearl Sithole says higher education needs to create space for Africa to be contributors and innovators of knowledge.

“Excellence is my main priority. For me, excellence means mastery of cross-communicable science and liberation of intellectual creativity that is free of mere complacency and acknowledging the right to analyse from where we stand. I am unapologetic about indigenous knowledge being the basis for scientific advancement.” This is how the newly appointed Vice-Principal: Academic and Research, Prof Pearl Sithole, sums up her vision and plan for academia and research on the Qwaqwa Campus. 

She believes that the human mind is geared towards ‘seeking and constantly explaining itself in the service of innovative change.’ 

“With this service of innovative change fully realised, the Qwaqwa Campus will be able to produce students who can analyse, innovate, and solve real social and world problems. For me, this is the University of the Free State graduate I pine to see – and there had better be truth to the ‘free’ part of this intellectual soul! I see Qwaqwa as a site for this intellectual innovation catalyst,” she said.

Social anthropologist

Prof Sithole is a Social Anthropology graduate with both master’s and PhD degrees from the University of Cambridge in England. “I stumbled upon Anthropology as part of my three majors at the then University of Durban-Westville. This discipline confessed its previous conceptual sins in a way that inspired change! From the exploration of human origins, to economic and political developments, and that was Anthropology. I was just absolutely taken by its acknowledgement of the intellectual project being socio-culturally rooted,” she said about her chosen area of study.

“I have always been inspired by Archie Mafeje’s work. I was motivated by Bernard Magubane’s scholarship, and I marvelled at the rigour of Oyeronke Oyewumi and Marilyn Strathern in feminist discourse. I mention these, because they inspire intellectual passion in me and I eventually met them,” she added.

Higher education in SA

She believes the higher-education sector is succumbing to streamlining methods, uninformed processes, and very little impact. “Like in government, higher education should not suffer from reduction of people into statistics, interventions into annual performance plan targets, and planning and monitoring into sanitised expenditure against targets. I see the shortage of relevance, responsiveness, and humanness; as well as ‘being captured’ by the latest fashions of doing rigid academe as the major challenges of higher education in South Africa today. We need to liberate our own innovative potential. We really need to create space for Africa to be contributors and innovators of knowledge,” Prof Sithole, the author of Unequal Peers, said.

She is, however, optimistic about the future of higher education in South Africa. “The day that we will have our innovation systems and systems of defining excellence – liberated from merely kneeling before the altar of Westernisation – we will gain integrity both conceptually and instrumentally in terms of responding to a society that is waiting for higher education to solve societal problems. The solution is to let those who see this truth continue to produce the knowledge despite being less than pleasing to the average scientific oversight bodies steeped in conventional Western validation.”

Research interests

Prof Sithole was previously employed with the Public Service Commission as a commissioner, a position she held from 2015 to August 2019. Prior to that, she worked at the University of KwaZulu-Natal as an Associate Professor of Community Development from 2010 to 2015, and at the South African Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) as a senior researcher from 2006 to 2010. Her research interests and areas of expertise are governance, gender and development, analysis of social inequality, and the politics of knowledge production.


News Archive

UFS Music rises to academic prominence
2007-10-18

 

From the left are: Ronella Jansen van Rensburg, Hanna van Schalkwyk, Elene Coetzer en Lizabé Lambrechts

Four postgraduate students gave prominence to the Music Department of the University of the Free State by having four academic articles published by accredited journals, and a fifth published in an international online journal.

It is the first time that a tertiary music institution in South Africa has had so many postgraduate studies published in one year, says Prof Martina Viljoen.

The students who worked under Prof Viljoen's supervision are Hanna van Schalkwyk, senior lecturer in singing at UFS; Ronella Jansen van Rensburg, part-time music lecturer and founder of the Sentraal-Kultuurakademie (Central Culture Academy); Elene Coetzer, also a part-time lecturer and involved in the Mangaung String Project; and Lizabé Lambrechts, who is still studying full-time.

Hanna and Ronella attained their master's degrees and Lizabé honours.

Hanna's research on the unique and at times unorthodox philosophy in singing and method of the pedagogue in singing Sarie Lamprecht (1923-2005) is published in the Tydskrif vir Geesteswetenskappe (Journal for the Humanities).

The study documents interviews held with Lamprecht over more than two years as well as conversations with her most prominent students.

Ronella's study on the relationship between emotional intelligence and musical performance anxiety is divided into two successive articles in the journal Musicus.

Dr Adelene Grobler, Epog director at UFS, was Ronella's co-supervisor.

Elene conducted a qualitative investigation into the Mangaung String Programme in which the social value of this teaching programme is emphasised.

She documented the responses of learners, parents and teachers who are involved in the project. Her article is published in the Journal of the Musical Arts in Africa.

Lizebé reached out to pop culture for her research and wrote about no less a person than the controversial shock-rock-icon Marilyn Manson.

Her study serves as a model analysis for educational work that focuses on popular culture as a didactic instrument.

In this respect Manson's music, which is frequently slated as vulgar or disturbing, is shown as aggressive social comment.

Lizabé's article, which throws light on Manson's bisexual identity, was published as a full-length monograph in the first edition of the overseas online noncejournal.

In 2005 the Department of Music also excelled when it was the first academic music institution in South Africa that published international congress proceedings as a subsidised collection.

The collection contained eminent international authors and was published under the guest editorship of Viljoen.

Die Volksblad – 1.10.07

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