By Athambile Masola As a product of a Eurocentric, former white educational institution, I was once very quick to embrace non-racialism (that race should no longer be used as a marker to understand our experiences). I’ve been living in Cape Town for over a year and have come face to face with the politics of […]
Mandela Rhodes Scholars
Mandela Rhodes Scholars who feature on this page are all recipients of The Mandela Rhodes Scholarship, awarded by The Mandela Rhodes Foundation, and are members of The Mandela Rhodes Community.
The Mandela Rhodes Community was started by recipients of the scholarship, and is a growing network of young African leaders in different sectors. The Mandela Rhodes Community is comprised of students and professionals from various backgrounds, fields of study and areas of interest. Their commonality is the set of guiding principles instilled through The Mandela Rhodes Scholarship program: education, leadership, reconciliation, and social entrepreneurship.
All members of The Mandela Rhodes Community have displayed some form of involvement in each of these domains.
The Community has the purpose of mobilising its members and partners to collaborate in establishing a growing network of engaged and active leaders through dialogue and project support
[The Mandela Rhodes Scholarship is open to all African students and allows for postgraduate studies at any institution in South Africa. See The Mandela Rhodes Foundation for further details.]
Posted inEquality, News/Politics
Why all Afrikaners should go to Europe
By Mark John Burke Europe is a great place, it really is. You step off your plane onto a train that takes you to your destination and once there trams and buses stand ready to take you to wherever you want. Europeans have perfected recycling and they go to great lengths to ensure everybody’s safety. […]
Posted inGeneral
Ubuntu in western society
By Melo Magolego Black South Africans have a penchant for waxing lyrical about botho/ubuntu. It is an ideology which, much like Pratley Putty, we seek to export worldwide. An ideology to which we claim intellectual property and boldly assert is inextricably linked to our being Africans. But is this thing really that unique? Or do […]
Posted inGeneral
UKZN is failing its students
By Matthew Beetar If Monty Python were still in business they would need look no further than the University of KwaZulu-Natal for material. The absurdity of the management of the institution, ironically pitched to be “inspiring greatness”, has reached a new level of disregard for the staff and students. The coping mechanism of laughing instead […]
Posted inGeneral
Do women have to champion other women’s causes
By Melo Magolego The interwebs are abuzz with Yahoo chief executive Marissa Mayer asking all staff that work from home to start reporting to the office. Those affected include middle-class mothers for whom the flexibility of working from home had afforded the opportunity to lead more balanced lives — to be both mothers and career […]
Posted inGeneral
Young white South Africans…where are you?
By Janet Jobson I never imagined that one of the biggest challenges I would face this year would be how to get young white South Africans interested in joining a network of young leaders driving public innovation. It had simply never occurred to me that it would be difficult. After all, my whole life I’ve […]
Posted inGeneral
How much money is enough?
By Mario Meyer Aristotle, in The Nicomachean Ethics, makes the following assertion: “The life of money-making is one undertaken by compulsion, and wealth is evidently not the good we are seeking; for it is merely useful and for the sake of something else.” One of the intractable questions of moral philosophy is the question of […]
Posted inGeneral
Reflecting on Lance Armstrong’s flaws
By Melo Magolego I think Lance should hang up his racing shorts and head for the world of national politics. Truly this man’s other talents are lying in waste. Watching him in his interview with Oprah I thought him to be very intelligent: he gives measured responses, effortlessly tames negative questions and then masterfully spins […]
Posted inGeneral
Yes, there’s more to Africa than poverty
By Zdena Mtetwa Let us be wary of becoming blindly defensive Africans who deny the challenges faced by our continent, sweeping the dirt under the rug, as though it did not exist. But with the same breath, let us also be brave Africans who stand for the brand Africa, highlighting the hard work of our […]
Posted inLifestyle
An inconvenient truth…animal cruelty is forever
By Steven Hussey There are few topics as emotive as animal abuse. The daily evidence I can see of this is no farther than on my Facebook wall, with people calling for the senseless nuclear obliteration of China in support of some powerless petition to stop animal cruelty in rural areas there, of dogs in […]
Posted inNews/Politics
The politics of teaching
By Athambile Masola There is a largely negative perception about teachers as being quasi-professionals, overworked, underpaid, intellectually complacent and, if they are members of the largest teacher union, often jeopardising the education of their learners by going on strikes. The image of teachers is also largely dependent on the school culture a teacher is working […]
Posted inGeneral
Books on wheels
By Noella Moshi The Development and Debate Dinner group people are a motley bunch but they have two things in common: a penchant for active citizenship and a fondness for wine. We meet for dinner once a month and discuss how we can be the change we wish to see. It was during one such […]