Thought Leader

Let’s chant a dirge for the chief executives of one of South Africa’s most besieged economic sectors. Just consider the challenges they face daily. They head financially precarious entities in a field where both the raw-material inputs and the finished goods are of declining quality. A number of them preside over plants that once produced…

South Africans are big on celebrations, the makietie ever more lavish even as the ostensible reason for it diminishes. So it is unsurprising that one of the biggest annual bashes is that of the governing party feting nothing more remarkable than its own continued existence. The African National Congress centenary a few years ago cost…

Every time you read of yet another racist incident at the University of the Free State (UFS), you cannot avoid colliding with the despondency people feel as they become resigned to yet another Truth and Reconciliation Commission on the way. Every time you want to get angry, be outraged at racism, you are very quickly…

For many, the mercurial politics of corporate South Africa are punctuated by awkwardly silent, contrived spaces of uncomfortable reflection – spaces known as office elevators. Every so often the silence is broken by wide-eyed faces brimming with the heat of new degrees. Ha! It must be February and the new crop for the graduate programme…

I teach English. People often have a quizzical look when I respond to the question: “Which subjects do you teach?” (I won’t belabour the race issue that underpins the subtext of the quizzical look seeing as there aren’t many black English teachers in the southern suburbs of Cape Town). I often try to explain to…

By Athambile Masola The media coverage about the shambolic state of education in South Africa (with a recent focus on the Eastern Cape) is disturbing. The views vacillate between inspiring hope for change and declaring doom over the future of the thousands of young people whose right to basic education is being flouted in the…

By Robyn Clark With the Matric results being published last week, a long-running debate has again reared its head. Is Maths Literacy all that worthwhile? After all, many are opposed to it because it’s “dumbing down our students”. Is the Maths taught today the same as the Maths that you learnt at school? Firstly, I…

By Kate Omega Wilkinson Prof Jonathan Jansen over at University of the Free State has been given a hard time about the fact that he wants to limit political activity on the Student Representative Council (SRC). I just want to give him a pat on the back. I think that it is a step in…