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25 May 2020 | Story Prof Danie Brand | Photo iStock

We are indeed privileged to have this paper from Prof Toyin Falola to include in our celebrations of Africa Day. Toyin Falola is a world-renowned African. A scholar of African history and African studies, he holds the Jacob and Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities at the University of Texas, Austin. He has published, as author or editor, more than 100 scholarly books on topics ranging from diaspora, migration, empire and globalization to intellectual history, international relations, religion and culture. He has been awarded seven honorary doctorates and has received, among many other awards, the Distinguished Africanist Award from the African Studies Association, the Ibadan Foundation Award for Professional Excellence in Scholarship and the Cheikh Anta Diop Award for Excellence in African Studies. He served as Vice President of UNESCO’s International Scientific Committee, Slave Route Project from 2011 – 2015 and currently is a member of the Carnegie African Diaspora Fellows Programme and the International Committee of the Thabo Mbeki African Leadership Institute at UNISA.

In this wide-ranging paper, originally presented as keynote address at the Visions of African Unity (1930s – 2018) conference at the University of the Free State, Prof Falola begins with a tour of the intellectual history of ideas of African Continentalism (Pan-Africanism / African Unity), from Henry Sylvester Williams, through WEB du Bois, Marcus Garvey, George Padmore and Julius Nyerere, to Kwame Nkrumah. He then describes the current institutional landscape of African unity and present-day intellectual versions of African Continentalism. Asking, and answering the question ‘Why must Africa unite?’, he then proceeds, on the basis of a consideration of more contemporary intellectual versions of African continentalism such as Black Consciousness, Black Nationalism, Afropolitanism, and now Afrofuturism (which he depicts as ‘ideological dispensations of true African cultural recovery and re-orientation’), to propose a disaggregated approach to contemporary African unity that is not fixated on global-Northern models. This means that unity should (re)start small, working territorially from regional units toward a continental unit, on the one hand; and on the other, seeking unity and cooperation around discrete substantive themes, from the more obvious and traditional, such as economic policy, global politics and a reformed unified political and military system, to the less, such as common educational policy, synergizing science and technology with African culture(s) and language, culture and literary exchange.

We thank him for the gift.

News Archive

PwC invests in student potential at UFS
2017-02-28

Description:PwC invests in student potential  Tags: PwC invests in student potential  longdesc=

From the left are: Cassius Coetzee, Marketing
Manager at PwC, Mbalentle Mdange and
Clementine Molaeng, both accounting students
at the UFS, and Belinda Janeke from the Career
Development Office at the UFS.
Photo: Siobhan Canavan

Corporate Bloemfontein has made it its mission to invest in the potential of students, which is exactly what PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) set out to do with its competition for accounting students.

PwC to join UFS Career Fair in 2017

The Career Development Office at the University of the Free State (UFS), in partnership with PwC, held a competition in which students had the opportunity to win book vouchers.

Cassius Coetzee, marketing manager at PwC, did the handover at the UFS which saw Mbalentle Mdange and Clementine Molaeng each walk away with book vouchers to the value of R1500, as well as goodie bags from the Career Development Office.

Belinda Janeke from the Career Development Office said it was always a pleasure working with the PwC team and said they would be joining the UFS Career Fair later this year.

Corporate companies and the community

Vicky Simpson, from the Department of Institutional Advancement, said there were businesses and organisations that believed in making a difference in the lives of students. “We commend each of them for their passion and enthusiasm. Collaboration is the key to the success of our community. People matter to us and even more so, the important role we play within our community.”

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