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UFS development studies alumnus now prominent international researcher in disability studies

03 July 2023 | Story Leonie Bolleurs | Photo Stephen Collett

Prof Oliver Mutanga and Prof Melanie Walker — Prof Oliver Mutanga, one of the first PhD gradautes under the SARChI Chair in Higher Education and Human Development, pictured with his former supervisor, Prof Melanie Walker, during his first visit to the university after ten years.

Prof Oliver Mutanga, a University of the Free State (UFS) alumnus with a PhD in Development Studies and an experienced researcher focused on matters pertaining to disability, education, equality, and health issues, recently took up the position of Assistant Professor in the Graduate School of Education at the Nazarbayev University in Astana, Kazakhstan.

Prof Melanie Walker, Director of the SARChI Chair in Higher Education and HumanDevelopment (HEHD) at the UFS, invited Prof Mutanga to discuss his own research via an open webinar and to engage with members of her research group.

Prof Walker explained that she was delighted to host Dr Mutanga at the university, given his profile as an outstanding and internationally mobile early career researcher, from whom others in her group could learn. “Further, I very much wanted Dr Mutanga to speak about his own research, given its overall academic excellence, quality, and impact. Going forward, I am looking forward to developing this link with Dr Mutanga and his colleagues abroad around critical diversity studies,” she states.

Profs Walker and Mutanga have collaborated in the past to write articles for academic journals arising from his doctoral research. Examples include, ‘Towards a disability-inclusive higher education policy through the capabilities approach’ (published in the Journal of Human Development and Capabilities) as well as ‘Exploration of the academic lives of students with disabilities at South African universities: Lecturers’ perspectives’ (published in the African Journal of Disability).

Prior to joining Nazarbayev University, Prof Mutanga gained valuable research and development experience in various countries, including Zimbabwe, Botswana, South Africa, Norway, and the United Kingdom.

He has also received several accolades for his work, including the prestigious Marie Sklodowska Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Oslo, Norway, and the Global Challenges Research Fellowship at University College London's Institute of Education.

A unique outlook on disability

In 2013, Prof Mutanga was part of the first cohort of PhD students under the SARChI Chair in Higher Education and Human Development. Recently, during his three-day visit to the UFS, he addressed the HEHD research group and an international academic audience during a hybrid seminar on the perceptions and experiences of disability within the Tembo Mvura communities of Northern Zimbabwe.

In his research for this paper, Prof Mutanga uses storytelling and in-depth interviews to offer a distinctive, community-based, and Southern interpretation of disability. By applying the capabilities approach and the ubuntu philosophy, his study presents a contrast to Western perceptions of disability that often emphasise individual limitations and differences based on physical and mental characteristics, which have the potential to both result in isolation and to understanding people as autonomous but isolated beings.

Within the Tembo Mvura communities, he discovered that disability is viewed through a lens of interconnectedness between individuals, their environment, and the spiritual world: “They recognise the inherent worth and dignity of all individuals, irrespective of their impairments,” found Prof Mutanga. Indeed, impairment of full personhood is understood as lacking in any of the three dimensions outlined above.

Thus, Prof Mutanga explored the complex interaction of identity, access to land, laws, and language, as well as labelling, highlighting how these factors shape perceptions and experiences of disability within these communities.

He is of the view that these findings will have implications for North-dominated disability discourse and for policy, practice, and research within indigenous contexts, such as the Tembo Mvura, where disability is uniquely perceived and experienced.

In addition to the hybrid seminar, Prof Mutanga led valuable sessions with the HEHD Research Group, where the PhD and postdoctoral fellows had the opportunity to workshop and refine various aspects of their current research papers and to engage in discussions around building their academic careers.

News Archive

From peasant to president; from Samora Machel to Cahora Bassa

2015-03-25

Prof Barbara Isaacman and Prof Allen Isaacman
Photo: Renè-Jean van der Berg

When the plane crashed in Mbuzini, the entire country was submerged in a profound grieving.

This is how Prof Allen Isaacman, Regents Professor of History at the University of Minnesota, described the effect President Samora Machel’s death in 1986 had on Mozambique. In a public lecture, Prof Isaacman spoke about the man, Samora Machel, and the influences that shaped Machel’s life. The event, recently hosted by the UFS International Studies Group on the Bloemfontein Campus, was part of the Stanley Trapido Seminar Programme.

Samora Machel: from peasant to president
Born in 1933 into a peasant family, Machel was allowed to advance only to the third grade in school. “And yet,” Prof Isaacman said, “he became a very prominent local peasant intellectual and ultimately one of the most significant critics of Portuguese colonialism and colonial capitalism.” Machel had a great sense of human agency and firmly believed that one is not a mere victim of circumstances. “You were born into a world, but you can change it,” Prof Isaacman explained Machel’s conviction.

From herding cattle in Chokwe, to working as male nurse, Machel went on to become the leader of the Liberation Front of Mozambique (Frelimo) and ultimately the president of his country. To this day, not only does he “capture the imagination of the Mozambican people and South Africans, but is considered one the great leaders of that moment in African history,” Prof Isaacman concluded his lecture.

Displacement, and the Delusion of Development: Cahora Bassa and Its Legacies in Mozambique, 1965–2007
Later in the day, Profs Allen and Barbara Isaacman discussed their book: ‘Displacement, and the Delusion of Development: Cahora Bassa and Its Legacies in Mozambique, 1965–2007’ at the Archives for Contemporary Affairs. As authors of the book, they investigate the history and legacies of one of Africa's largest dams, Cahora Bassa, which was built in Mozambique by the Portuguese in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

The dam was constructed under conditions of war and inaugurated after independence by a government led by Frelimo. The dam has since operated continuously, although, for many years, much of its electricity was not exported or used because armed rebels had destroyed many high voltage power line pillars. Since the end of the armed conflict in 1992, power lines have been rebuilt, and Cahora Bassa has provided electricity again, primarily to South Africa, though increasingly to the national Mozambican grid as well.

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