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12 September 2019 | Story Ruan Bruwer | Photo Varsity Sports
Netball
Jana Scholtz, goal defender and playing in her first year as a regular starter, has been a solid performer for the Kovsie netball team in Varsity Netball.

The building blocks are starting to form a solid basis from where Kovsies can launch an attack to defend the Varsity Netball title they won in 2018. This is according to Karin Venter, one of the team’s assistant coaches.

After losing their first encounter to Tuks, they registered wins over the University of Johannesburg, Tshwane University of Technology, and the North-West University. The match against the Maties in Bloemfontein on 23 September 2019 – the last in the group stage, should determine which of the two teams will book a home semi-final along with Tuks.

“Yes, that is the crucial one,” said Venter, the team’s defensive coach. Her counterpart at the Maties is Adéle Niemand, with whom Venter combined as defenders at Kovsies for several matches in the mid-2000s. Apart from the Maties, the women of the University of the Free State still have to face the Madibaz and the University of the Western Cape (both in Pretoria on 15 and 16 September 2019).

“The combinations are starting to form a unit and our confidence is on the increase. Now we are looking for consistency in our performances.”

According to Venter, they were hit hard by goalkeeper Ané Retief’s injury, which kept her out of the first two matches. This meant that they had to start against Tuks with a first-year student, Chanel Vrey.

“It was tough, but I’m impressed with the way in which she, Ancia Pienaar, and Jana Scholtz – who are all youngsters – stepped up.”

Venter is responsible for the analyses and recons to assist players.

“The programme we are using provides us with all the required footage. You can make notes on it and send these clips to players, which means you don’t have to sit next to a player to explain something. We also provide them with notes and sketches of opponents’ playing patterns, which they must work through as part of their preparation.”

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
 

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