Latest News Archive

Please select Category, Year, and then Month to display items

Celebrating a Distorted Notion of Unity in Diversity

23 September 2022 | Story Dr Mpumelelo Ncube | Photo Supplied

Opinion article by Dr Mpumelelo Ncube, Academic Head and Senior Lecturer at the Department of Social Work, University of the Free State (UFS).

September is the heritage month during which the nation observes and celebrates all that it inherited from preceding generations. This is the sort of inheritance that includes but is not limited to culture, traditions, monuments, knowledge, land, and belief systems. It anchors the nation. The value attached to any form of heritage is what sustains it and any inheritance that may be deemed to be of less value, loses its significance with the progression of time.

Heritage month and day is the time the nation should celebrate oneness in diversity. Unity in diversity requires clarity of mind and extreme levels of tolerance for each other’s uniqueness. South African society presents such diversity in languages, cultures, religions, tribes, politics, and nationalities among others. Although some of these are inherited and others are acquired, they create a mosaic worth embracing and celebrating.

Language is one critical aspect of people’s heritage

We, however, need to be critical of what we celebrate considering the distorted nature of some of what we have inherited. Language is one critical aspect of people’s heritage. It defines who they are and through it, people are able to create their worldview and develop relationships not only with one another but with their world as well. The African history of colonialism and apartheid that is still perpetuated through various colonial matrices of power has and continues to impact negatively on linguistic interactions. The impact is such that the indigenous African languages are quickly losing their depth as communities experience a linguistic shift to English which is a minority language but due to its economic dominance, commands authority. African parents are putting up with a system that demands their children be taught in a language other than their own and many of them see nothing wrong with that. Given a chance, they would demand that the status quo be upheld or even enhanced. These are the lived experiences of colonisation and its impact on daily lives including language.

If you control people’s language, you control their understanding which forms their worldview. You further control the extent of their development as language is pivotal in ingenuity. Ingenuity speaks to inventiveness and originality. Surely, such cannot manifest through the second, third or fourth languages of instruction which is a common phenomenon across the African continent. Even as people celebrate their heritage, many are struggling to identify some features of their heritage in their languages, let alone start and finish a sentence in their mother tongue. In some communities, it is even seen as a sign of being educated. What type of education is this that disinherits you of your mother tongue? In celebrating diversity, why is it that it’s only the black child who gets given an English name? So many questions that are indicative of a system that is unkind to language diversity as it is lopsided to disadvantage indigenous African languages. It renders celebrations of unity in diversity a mockery.

People have been turned tourists in their own heritage

African food, music, and attire form the tapestry of Heritage Day. At least for a day, one gets a rare experience of one’s identity. For a day, people marvel at the richness of their types of food and feel different but good in their traditional attire while dancing to the sounds of their own music. It is one’s heritage after all. The sad part is that people have become tourists in their own heritage. Their identity no longer forms part of their daily lives. It is one to be visited occasionally. Foreign tendencies have formed habits that in turn are creating new identities and heritages. It is these new heritages that the current generations will bequeath to forthcoming generations. However, we as a people would have moved further away from who we originally were. This has dire consequences on the identity and progression of the nation. As we celebrate this September, let us critically think about what it is that we are celebrating when we are detached from the heritage ceded to us by the generations before us.

News Archive

Bullying in schools: Everyone’s problem

2005-06-03

From left: Prof Gerhardt de Klerk, Dean: Faculty of the Humanities; Prof Corene de Wet; Prof Rita Niemann, Head of the Department of Comparative Education and Educational Management in the School of Education and Prof Frederick Fourie, Rector and Vice-Chancellor of the UFS

It is not only learners who are the victums of bullying in schools, but also the teachers. Prof. Corene de Wet from the Department Comparative Education and Educational Management at the University of the Free State reported, against the background of two studies on bullying in Free State secondary schools, that bullying is a general phenomena in these schools.

Prof. de Wet, who delivered her inaugural lecture on Wednesday night, is from the Department Comparative Education and Educational Management which resorts under the School of Education at the University of the Free State. She is the first women who became a full professor the School of Education.

Prof. de Wet says, “A student is being bullied or victimized when he or she is exposed, repeatedly and over time, to negative action on the part of one or more students. Bullying always includes the intentional use of aggression, an unbalanced relationship of power between the bully and the victim, and the causing of physical pain and/or emotional misery.

In some Free State schools there are victims and perpetrators of direct and indirect verbal, as well as emotional, physical and sexual bullying.

“Adults who say that bullying are part of the growing-up process and parents who set not only academic expectations but also social expectations to their children cause that victims are unwilling to acknowledge that they are being bulled. Many parents are also unaware of the levels of bullying their children are exposed to.

“Some of the learners were at least once a month the victim of direct verbal harassment, 32,45% were assaulted by co-learners and 11,21% of them were at east once per week beat, kicked, pushed and hurt in any other physical way. Free State learners are very vulnerable to bullies at taxis and on the school yard they are mostly exposed to bullies in bathrooms.

“Learners are usually bullied by members of the same gender. However, racial composition also plays a role in some Free State schools. A grade 12 girl writes, ‘There are boys in my school who act means against black people. When the teacher is out they take a red pen and write on the projector and spray it with spirits. It looks like blood and they would say it is AIDS and my friends and I have it.’

“Educators must take note of bullying in schools and must not shrug it off as unimportant. Principals or educators could be find guilty of negligence. A large number of educator respondents, 88,29%, indicated that they would intervene in cases of verbal bullying and 89,71% would intervene if they saw learners being physically bullied. However, only 19,97% of the learners who were victims of bullying were helped by educators/ other adults from their respective schools.

“The learners’ lack of trust in their educators’ abilities and willingness to assist them in the fight against bullying has important implications for education institutions. The importance of training must be emphasised.

Learners bully their educators to undermine their confidence. In Prof. de Wet’s study on educator-targeted bullying in Free State schools 24,85% of the respondents were physically abused by their learners, 33,44% were the victims of indirect verbal bullying, and 18,1% were at one time or another sexually harassed by their learners. These learner offences may lead to suspension.

“Educators are not only victims of bullying; some of them are the bullies. The South African Council for Educators prohibits bullying by educators. It is worrying that 55,83% of the educators who participated in the research project verbally victimised learners, 50,31% physically assaulted learners and a small percentage was guilty of sexual harassment.

“Every educator and learner in South Africa has the right to life, equal protection and benefit of the law, of dignity, as well as of freedom and security of the person. These rights will only be realised in a bully-free school milieu.

“To oppose bullying a comprehensive anti-bullying programme, collective responsibility and the establishment of a caring culture at schools and in the community is necessary,” said Prof. de Wet.

Back

Economic and Management Sciences

Education

Health Sciences

The Humanities

Law

Natural and Agricultural Sciences

Theology and Religion

Open Distance Learning

Business School

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