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01 August 2023 | Story NONSINDISO QWABE | Photo SUPPLIED
Apartheid Studies, A Manifesto Book Launch
Prof Nyasha Mboti launched his book, Apartheid Studies: A Manifesto, on the UFS Qwaqwa Campus on 25 July 2023.

in a perpetual state of disaster and creating a normalised life, even if it is built on anomalous arrangements, Prof Nyasha Mboti launched his newly published book, Apartheid Studies: A Manifesto, on the UFS Qwaqwa Campus on 25 July 2023.

Prof Mboti is an Associate Professor and Head of the Department of Communication Science at the University of the Free State and is the pioneer and founder of Apartheid Studies, a new interdisciplinary field of study from the Global South, which utilises the notion of ‘apartheid’ as a paradigm by which to understand the confounding persistence and permanence of harm, oppression, and injustice.

Oppressive systems persist in modern South Africa

Making reference to the pass laws that were a dominant form/tool of oppression and segregation during the country’s apartheid system, he said apartheid created a “paradigm of life where things that aren’t supposed to go on, go on. 
Life has to go on even in oppression. People have the capacity to live with harm, and apartheid banks on people’s capacity to go on”.

The daring book posits itself as a first-of-its-kind authoritative study of the phenomenon of apartheid, shedding light on the continuing impact of apartheid decades after its formal abolishment and exploring the idea that while it was intended as a temporary phenomenon, it became deeply ingrained and normalised, persisting in various forms today.

“What apartheid is, is a temporary phenomenon that has become permanent. That is my argument. This book is an attempt to leverage how we live with harm as a way of doing something about it and hopefully putting an end to it. If you can go on one day living in harm and the next, before you know it, four decades of living under Apartheid from day to day have passed. Until we understand it, it persists,” he said.

By asking whether one would queue for a dompas, Prof Mboti challenged the audience to reflect on how oppressive systems persist when normalised, even when inflicting profound harm. 
“Would you queue for a dompas? If your answer is yes, then for me, that is an indication that Apartheid persists. Harm persists. Until we understand it, it persists.”

News Archive

UFS mathematician rates as top reviewer
2017-09-27

Description: Abdon Atanaga Tags: pre-publication peer reviews, Prof Abdon Atangana, Institute for Groundwater Studies, Publons for Publons Peer Review Awards 

Prof Abdon Atangana is a professor at the
Institute for Groundwater Studies at the University
of the Free State.
Photo: Rulanzen Martin

South Africa was included in the top 30 countries in terms of researchers who added the most pre-publication peer reviews. 

Prof Abdon Atangana, a professor of Applied Mathematics at the Institute for Groundwater Studies at the University of the Free State (UFS), is included in the list of top reviewers from top countries, as determined by the number of verified pre-publication peer reviews added to Publons for Publons Peer Review Awards 2017.  

Producing the most verified peer reviews

He rated in the top 1% of reviewers (9th), in all fields, who performed the most verified pre-publication peer reviews at Publons for Publons Peer Review Awards 2017. In 2017 he also received the following awards:
- Top reviewers for UFS in the category Mathematics, rating in eighth place. In this category Stanford University rated second. Rating in ninth place is the University of Luxembourg.
- Top reviewers for Mathematics (rating 1st). In this category the Southern Illinois University and the Johns Hopkins University in the US rated in 27th and 25th place respectively. 
- Top reviewers for Engineering (rating 47th)

Prof Atangana’s research interests are methods and applications of partial and ordinary differential equations, fractional differential equations, perturbation methods, asymptotic methods, iterative methods, and groundwater modelling.

Passion for the development of science
Key to his success as peer reviewer is his passion for the development of science, his ability to write fair reports about a given manuscript, as well as his knowledge of what has been done and what the challenges are in a given field to be able to give a report that will help the advancement of science. 

“Due to the impact of my research papers in the field of mathematics and applied mathematics and also my international recognition in the field of applied mathematics, many editors in more than 100 journals of applied mathematics trust my opinion to assess whether a submitted paper in a given journal of mathematics and applied mathematics can be published or not,” said Prof Atangana.

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