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18 October 2023 | Story Anthony Mthembu | Photo Charl Devenish
UFS Book Discussion
From left to right: Prof Wahbie Long, Prof Premesh Lalu, Prof Saleem Badat, and Prof Sarah Nuttall.

The University of the Free State (UFS) recently hosted three authors for a discussion titled ‘Apartheid’s Legacy: Ghosts, Psyche and Trauma’. The event was aimed at exploring the lasting legacy of apartheid with academics and writers who’ve recently published books related to the topic.

The authors included Professor Saleem Badat, Research Professor in the Department of History at the UFS and author of Tennis, Apartheid and Social Justice: The First Non-Racial International Tennis Tour, 1971 (published 2023); Professor Premesh Lalu, Founding Director of the Centre for Humanities Research at the University of the Western Cape and author of Undoing Apartheid (2022); and Professor Wahbie Long, Deputy Dean in the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Cape Town and author of Nation on the Couch: Inside South Africa’s Mind (2021).

Professor Sarah Nuttall, Professor of Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand, facilitated the conversation and described the authors as “people who have been embedded in trying to undertake that post-apartheid project, as we took it then, and people who have really tried to build institutions for a different kind of future”.

The discussion took place on 12 October 2023 at the Albert Wessels Auditorium on the UFS’s Bloemfontein Campus. Professor Vasu Reddy, Deputy Vice-Chancellor for Research and Internationalisation at the UFS, described the launch as a celebratory occasion. “Books are essential to the knowledge project. They shape our teaching, learning, and research, and engage scholars,” he said.

Examining apartheid’s legacy

Prof Badat discussed his book (Tennis, Apartheid and Social Justice: The First Non-Racial International Tennis Tour, 1971), which details the first non-racial tour of Europe by black tennis players. “The book is a description of the 1971 tour by this intricate group of six young people from ages 16 to 30, who are not provided opportunities of coaching or any of that within South Africa at the time,” Badat said.

Prof Lalu’s book (Undoing Apartheid) examines unresolved critiques of apartheid by taking the reader back to 1985. “The book is an attempt to turn against my own position in 1985 – which was that we will transcend apartheid – and return to the work of study to see what we might have missed and what we squandered in our haste in overcoming apartheid.”

Prof Long said his book (Nation on the Couch: Inside South Africa’s Mind) aims to understand the problem of violence using psychoanalytic terms. “I try to give a psychoanalytic reading of violence in South Africa; not violence in its conventional and interpersonal sense, but violence broadly understood, whether I am speaking of racism, economic inequality, or gender-based violence,” he said.

In addition to discussing their books, the panel explored several themes related to the topic, including the concept of stasis through each writer’s lens, as well as the idea of non-racialism and what it means to them.

News Archive

CTL experiments with mobile technology in teaching and learning
2016-05-23

Description: CTL experiments with mobile technology  Tags: CTL experiments with mobile technology

On the left is Nokukhanya Nkosi, Researcher and Project manager at the Centre for Teaching and Learning presenting Annah Nggoepe her brand new laptop as part of the project which assesses the impact of personal mobile devices on teaching and learning.
Photo: Supplied

Video clip

Same curriculum. Add technology. Wait and see what happens. This research project which is funded by the Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET) seeks to understand the impact of personal mobile devices (PMD) in teaching and learning.

The University of the Free State (UFS), in conjunction with the University of Cape Town, the University of the Witwatersrand, the University of Johannesburg, and Sol Plaatje University, was approached by the DHET to spearhead this national collaborative project. Investigating whether the financial investment of a PMD on either the part of a university or of students adds value to the teaching and learning experience is the overall objective of the project.

Contemporary education
The Centre for Teaching and Learning (CTL) at the UFS have been taking an active part in the project since 2015, focusing specifically on the use of personal mobile devices in teaching and learning by both staff and students.

At the student level, the study will focus specifically on not just the obstacles that first-generation students face in terms of using technology in teaching and learning, but how institutions can support these students through access to these devices.  “In 2015, the CTL conducted the Digital Identity Study of students which highlighted the view that students at the UFS deemed laptops to be the most important PMD in their studies,” said Nokukhanya Nkosi, Researcher and Project manager at the CTL.   

In April 2016, thirty students were presented with laptops funded by the project grant. For the next two years, the CTL will assess whether these laptops enable greater flexibility and effectiveness of teaching and learning, both inside and out of the classroom for these students.  

Rise of the digital classroom
Annah Ngoepe, a second-year Geography and Environmental Management student taking part in this study, commends the shift from using only textbooks in the past to incorporating technology. “The laptop has the latest applications and programmes, which are convenient for me as a student, because they help in my learning. I can also download textbooks, get summaries of the textbooks, and even other people’s views on a particular subject online.”

Tiana van der Merwe, Deputy Director at the CTL, anticipates that, after two years, the Centre would be able to make not only institutional recommendations, but also recommendations to the National Department of Higher Education.

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