By Zdena Mtetwa-Middernacht It is Election Day in Belgium. I am not voting but I’ve taken the walk to the polling station. The polling station is a school a few hundred meters from our home, in a little Flemish town on the outskirts of Brussels. I’m at the playground with the kids while my husband…
By Lehlohonolo Mofokeng There is no shortage of evidence that our basic education is in shreds. That being said, the question that we should be asking ourselves is: how do we get out of this mess? How do we ensure that our learners, in spite of an already established culture of mediocrity, start to believe…
By Zukiswa Mqolomba Former President Thabo Mbeki’s OR Tambo lecture is indeed most welcome as it is a timely call to action to save the African National Congress (ANC) from a burgeoning trend of greed, avarice and an insatiable appetite to amass personal wealth, while millions of South Africans continue to live in wide-spread poverty…
By Nompumelelo Zinhle Manzini It’s been two weeks of being at the University of Zululand (UniZulu) as a contract lecturer for the Philosophy Department. Perhaps these personal reflections are slightly premature but I think that they do bear some merit. I have only been on the main campus which is in Kwadlangezwa, which is in…
In the last chapter of The Kanga and the Kangaroo Court, author Mmatshilo Motsei starts her concluding remarks by quoting Sello wa Loate: [w]e need to re-evaluate our value system as a society. The highly competitive environment we have created and the resultant conflict and pressure on different sections of our society make post-apartheid black…
By Abigail McDougall Between last night and this morning an “I’m in for Britain” poster popped up in the window of my upper-middle-class neighbours. This display of support for Remain is rather gutsy for Kenilworth, Warwickshire, where Leave posters are in many windows and I’ve had Leave propaganda raining through my mailbox for weeks. It…
By Zinhle Manzini In 2017 I will hopefully be registering for my PhD in philosophy. In thinking about this decision, I was charmed by the idea of doing my postgraduate degree abroad, hoping it would broaden my horizons as a scholar, an academic and as a person. Most academics that I have interacted with during…
By Lisa Thelma Sidambe Most of us enjoy a juicy, delicious and well-cut steak. Some like to have it casually and others have it to punctuate a celebratory mood. I am sure even now some of us are impatiently waiting for these festivities to be over so that we can have a lusciously juicy steak…
By Zukiswa Mqolomba Firstly, I would like to congratulate the honourable Julius Malema for having graduated with his first degree in communications and African studies from the University of South Africa. Secondly, I’d like to congratulate him for being accepted for his first postgraduate degree, an honours in philosophy. These are inspiring achievements that should…
By Zinhle Manzini On February 25 it was reported that two buildings and a car were burnt at the North West University Mafikeng campus, yet this incident is not the only occurrence of violence that has disrupted some of South Africa’s universities. One would recall that a bus was also set alight a week ago…
