African feminism is engaged in the project to recoup indigenous knowledge systems and to salvage identities that were destabilised by foreign incursions
Decolonisation
Posted inGeneral
Youth Month: To reform or to abolish?
The paradox of Theseus’ ship could give some clues on institutional identity and food for thought for schools looking to ‘transform’
Posted inGeneral, News/Politics
From #RhodesMustFall to #LeopoldMustFall
Belgian protests a year ago have many parallels with South Africa’s decolonisation movement
Posted inGeneral
To all South Africans: In memory of who we are
When we critically inspect our histories, none of us come out completely faultless, but we will find something, and we can learn
Posted inGeneral
The things we lost in the fire
The fight for equality is valid but the burning down of our universities is not the revolution or decolonisation any of us should want
Posted inEquality, General
Decolonising African prisons: An introduction to neocolonialism
The idea of incarcerating people into exiled spaces designed for ‘discipline’ in European society, is the antithesis to ubuntu … but it served the scramble for Africa and Asia well
Posted inEquality, Gender violence, Health, Media, News/Politics
Creating space to talk about the politics of shame
By Rebecca Helman and Neziswa Titi In their interview with Elspeth Probyn, Vivienne Bozalek, Tamara Shefer and Ronelle Carolissen argue that “[s]hame has typically been understood as a negative emotion, a view which is prevalent in individualist, psychologising discourses about human experience”. Conversely Probyn argues that shame can be a generative force, one which is […]
Posted inGeneral
Some Remarks On A ‘Good’ University
Manzini reflected upon her recent experiences at her new institution. I won’t comment on most of those reflections, and would rather focus on her closing remarks. She asks, “Ultimately, on whose standards do we measure and determine whether a university is ‘good’ or not?” There are two implicit questions here. First, is there but one […]
Posted inBusiness, Equality, General, News/Politics
Aesthetics of power and questioning what a ‘good’ university is
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 […]
Posted inEquality, News/Politics
Beyond Trevor Noah and Mandela’s rainbow: Towards a politics of empathy
I’ve been thinking about Trevor Noah’s op-ed in the New York Times, and its angry critiques, since the Day of Reconciliation in South Africa on December 16. Reconciliation is a thorny topic in our moody democracy, a reminder that the road to postcolonial hell is paved with good intentions. If you missed it, Noah argued […]
Posted inEquality, General, News/Politics
#ScienceMustFall in retrospect: Three lessons to help us move on
I remarked once that, “If the curricula shall be Africanised then, one may presume, we’ll have to find an Africanised version of Newtonian mechanics for the engineers, decolonised theorem proofs for mathematicians and the non-racist equivalent of Maxwell’s equations for physicists, among other things”. I said that this would be to take the call for […]
Posted inBusiness, General, News/Politics
The REAL task of decolonisation
Too few people seem to take the work of those two inimitably emancipatory thinkers, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, seriously. And I am not talking about those nit-picking academics who engage with them at an analytic level to argue about whether they got Marx right, or Foucault, or Deleuze, and so on. What I mean […]