by HSRC Press on May 15th, 2012
Shamil Jeppie, author of The Meanings of Timbuktu and Language, Identity, Modernity, will deliver a lecture on 31 May as part of HUMA’s 2012 seminar programme.
The lecture, entitled “Revolution and its other in North Africa and the greater region: a view from the South”, will take place at 1 PM in the HUMA Seminar Room on UCT’s Upper Campus.
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by HSRC Press on May 10th, 2012
Shamil Jeppie, author of The Meanings of Timbuktu and head of UCT‘s Timbuktu Manuscripts Project, has expressed concern regarding the fate of the extraordinary Timbuktu manuscripts. South Africa’s role in preserving this history for the world has been key and researchers are only just beginning to understand the manuscripts’ impact.
However, the survival of this African heritage hangs in the balance with the recent taking of the city by Islamist rebels and their destruction of the tomb of a Sufi saint. Two recent articles in the Daily Maverick highlight the enormity of the danger to the manuscripts:
Historians’ worst fears are coming true as Timbuktu’s new rulers set fire to an ancient tomb, just one of the city’s many World Heritage sites. And this is just the beginning, says Ansar Dine, the Islamist group whose fundamentalist dogma threatens to destroy Africa’s most fabled city
As Timbuktu reels under rebel control, South Africa’s investment in the preservation and protection of ancient manuscripts has been significantly imperilled. A good few million rands were poured into the Timbuktu project, but it’s not the financial loss that will be felt most acutely
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by HSRC Press on May 10th, 2012
In the second part of an interview with The Independent’s Andrew Mwenda and Mubatsi Habati, author and leading political philosopher Mahmood Mamdani discusses why Somalia continues to be a problem for East Africa, and the reason why President Yoweri Museveni backs the militarisation of the region. Mamdani is the author of Saviours and Survivors and Scholars in the Marketplace.
The Independent: Prof. Mamdani, Kenya, Uganda, Ethiopia and Burundi have troops in Somalia. It is the first time Kenya has troops in a foreign country. What do you think are the implications of militarisation of the region?
Mahmood Mamdani: Let us step back a little to understand the basic problem with the present strategy which is looking for a military solution in Somalia. The problem becomes clear if you look at Northern Uganda.
One of the biggest achievements of NRM was the use of a broad-base government for those who would give up armed struggle. Even leaders, not just remnants from the Idi Amin regime, but of the Obote II and Okello administrations, were welcome in the broad-base. But the NRM closed the door when it came to the political north. They refused a political solution when it came to the leadership of Alice Lakwena and Joseph Kony. The north could have its representatives in parliament but the NRM insisted that the solution for the region must be military. Uganda’s challenge today lies in finding a political solution to the Kony problem. Even when Kony has no more than a few hundred fighters around him, the LRA has become a justification for the entry of US forces in the region, leading to its militarisation.
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by HSRC Press on May 8th, 2012
Andrew Mwenda and Mubatsi A Habati, from The Independent, spoke to author and leading political philosopher Mahmood Mamdani about his thoughts on the recent government banning of political pressure group Activists for Change in Uganda. Mamdani is the author of Saviours and Survivors and Scholars in the Marketplace.
The Independent: The government has banned the civic pressure group known as Activists for Change. What do you think of this development?
Mahmood Mamdani: Activists for Change (A4C) organised themselves in response to the events in the Middle East and the Arab spring. They hoped to be catalysts of change in Uganda. Walk-to-Work was brilliant in its simplicity. It was brilliant in that it showed that government was unwilling to tolerate the very idea of protest. Government responded to it as if it was a threat to the security of the state which it obviously wasn’t. That kind of response played straight into the strategy of A4C, for the public was outraged that even a simple idea of walking as a mode of protest could invoke such a response from the state.
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by HSRC Press on May 4th, 2012
Alan Mabin, contributor to Simon Bekker and Göran Therborn’s Capital Cities in Africa: Power and Powerlessness, is one of the speakers participating in this year’s Wits Interdisciplinary Seminar in the Humanities (WISH) series.
Mabin will deliver a seminar entitled “Think Metropole: Memory, citizenship and futures in Paris, São Paolo and Johannesburg” on 21 May.
The WISH seminars take place every Monday at 3:00 PM in the WISER Seminar Room. The paper will be made available on the Friday before the seminar and participants are required to read the paper prior to the event.
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- Date: Monday, 21 May 2012
- Time: 3:00 PM
- Venue: WISER Seminar Room
Wits Institute for Social & Economic Research
6th Floor, Richard Ward Building,
University of the Witwatersrand East Campus | Campus Map
- Queries: info.wiser@wits.ac.za
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by HSRC Press on May 3rd, 2012
The Mail & Guardian’s Victoria John attended the launch of Old Enough To Know: Consulting Children About Sex and AIDS Education in Africa at which co-author, Sharlene Swartz, addressed the need for exposure to sex education in African schools. In a report of the event John quotes Swartz as saying that “we must stop thinking that if kids don’t know about sex it will protect them against diseases and pregnancy”:
Children in sub-Saharan Africa are highly aware of the sexualised world they live in and are at dire risk falling pregnant or contracting HIV/Aids or both as teenagers if they are treated as mere innocents, a recent Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) and Cambridge University study has found.
And children themselves say they want to discuss sex — because they see evidence of it all around them in any case.
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- Old Enough To Know: Consulting Children About Sex and AIDS Education in Africa by Colleen McLaughlin, Sharlene Swartz, Susan Kiragu, Shelina Walli and Mussa Mohamed
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EAN: 9780796923745
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by HSRC Press on Apr 24th, 2012
It is not enough to criticise the privatisation of services such as the provision of water, electricity and health care, says David MacDonald in a video for the Municipal Services Project, one has to critically evaluate alternative public service initiatives.
McDonald’s endeavours to better define the meaning of “public” and to establish a set of criteria to measure the success of public services, are related in the book Alternatives to Privatization: Public Options for Essential Services in the Global South, of which he is the co-author:
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- Alternatives to Privatisation: Public Options for Essential Services in the Global South edited by David A McDonald and Greg Ruiters
EAN: 9780796923776
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by HSRC Press on Apr 16th, 2012
HSRC Press has released a brand new edition of Don Pinnock‘s Voices of Liberation Title, Ruth First:
The struggle to free South Africa from its apartheid shackles was long and complex. One of the many ways in which the apartheid regime maintained its stranglehold in South Africa was through controlling the freedom of speech and the flow of information, in an effort to silence the voices of those who opposed it.
United by the ideals of freedom and equality, but also nuanced by a wide variety of persuasions, the ‘voices of liberation’ were many: African nationalists, communists, trade-unionists, pan-Africanists, English liberals, human rights activists, Christians, Hindus, Muslims and Jews, to name but a few.
The Voices of Liberation series ensures that the debates and values that shaped the liberation movement are not lost. The series offers a unique combination of biographical information with selections from original speeches and writings in each volume. By providing access to the thoughts and writings of some of the many men and women who fought for the dismantling of apartheid, this series invites the contemporary reader to engage directly with the rich history of the struggle for democracy.
This volume presents a brief biography of Ruth First, followed by a selection of her writings as a political activist, scholar and journalist. The book presents a timeline summary of significant events in Ruth’s life within the context of major socio-political events of the time. It concludes with a reflection on her legacy from a current perspective and offers a further reading list.
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by HSRC Press on Apr 12th, 2012
Realising the Dream: Unlearning the logic of race in the South African school is an intellectual and practical response to the dangers that come with the ubiquity of race, race-thinking and its attendant propensity to subsume the nuances of all other social complexity.
Beginning with a comprehensive scoping of the theoretical literature on race and social difference, the book delivers a meticulous examination of how the ‘logic of race’ is played out in the lives of post-apartheid South African school students. Based in two decades of empirical research, this compelling and insightful analysis reveals how the ongoing preoccupation with race not only obscures but also prevents the evolution of new ways of understanding privilege and subordination.
We dream of a better world. The fundamental promise of education, the author argues, is to develop the capacity to make real, in our will and desire, this possibility. However, the dream can be fully realised only when the learnt prejudices and false certainties of race, gender and indeed all our unproblematised conceits about who and what we are, are unlearnt. Written by one of South Africa’s foremost theorists of school education, this book is as brave as it is challenging – an inspiring, essential read for education practitioners and students in particular, and social theorists more broadly.
Praise for Realising the Dream
“Realising the Dream is a pledge to a transformative agenda. It presents an unflappable belief in the possibility of change that attaches immense value to the premise embedded in the book’s subtitle Unlearning the logic of race… Soudien opines, rightly, that as a social construct ‘race’ is learned and therefore can be unlearned. That is the challenge of our times and a solace to W.E.B. du Bois’s famous lament that ‘the problem of the 20th century is the problem of the color line’. Realising the Dream is a must-read. Beyond reading, however, it also requires a commitment to personal transformation.” – Mokubung Nkomo, Director of the Centre for Diversity and Social Cohesion, University of Pretoria
“A sterling example of scholarship out-of-bounds precisely because it is grounded in lived reality. Crain Soudien enables movement from proscribed to capacious possibilities for personhood, sociality and for knowledge (un)making and sharing. From this place of ‘big mind’ he writes not only against but through ‘race’, piercing its countless mutations en route to wide-open anti-racial reasoning. Steeped in history, Soudien’s ‘new critical sociology’ walks with history into a possible future. Realising the Dream will have prize place on the shelves of readers interested in difference as a catalyst for – not a hindrance to – becoming more human. This work is saturated with an ethic of care and quiet defiance. It is both seminal and beautiful.” – Zimitri Erasmus, Department of Sociology, University of Cape Town and Mandela Mellon Fellow at W.E.B du Bois Institute at Harvard
About the author
Professor Crain Soudien is formerly the Director of the School of Education at the University of Cape Town and currently a Deputy Vice-Chancellor. He has written over 120 articles, reviews, reports, and book chapters in the areas of social difference, culture, educational policy, comparative education, educational change, public history and popular culture. He is the co-editor of three books on District Six, Cape Town and another on comparative education, the author of The Making of Youth Identity in Contemporary South Africa: Race, Culture and Schooling,and the co-author of Inclusion and Exclusion in South African and Indian Schools. He was educated at the University of Cape Town, South Africa and holds a PhD from the State University of New York at Buffalo. He is involved in a number of local, national and international social and cultural organisations and is the Chairperson of the District Six Museum Foundation, a Board member of the Cape Town Festival, immediate Past-President of the World Council of Comparative Education Societies and was the Chair of a Ministerial Committee on Transformation in Higher Education.
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by HSRC Press on Apr 10th, 2012
Attendant fears for Mali, in light of the recent coup, include the survival of an ancient heritage – the Timbuktu Manuscripts. Shamil Jeppie, author of The Meanings of Timbuktu and head of UCT‘s Timbuktu Manuscripts Project, has expressed concerns regarding the fate of these extraordinary documents:
The ancient African manuscripts of Timbuktu seem to have survived the capture of the city at the weekend by Tuareg and other rebels trying to topple the new military government of Mali. Rantobeng Mokou, SA’s ambassador to Mali, said last night he had spoken to people in Timbuktu who told him the rebels had stolen cars, money and other goods from the SA-sponsored library holding many of the manuscripts.
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