Renowned scholar Mahmood Mamdani, who has been described as “perhaps the greatest living African scholar”, is to receive an honorary degree from the University of KwaZulu-Natal for his outstanding contribution to academia.
In April, Mamdani will be awarded the honour alongside musician Yvonne Chaka Chaka, community worker Thudiso Gcabashe, birdman Hugh Chittenden and Zuleikha Mayat, the author of the legendary South African cookbook, Indian Delights. Mayat’s cookbook was the focus of the HSRC Press book, Gender, Modernity and Indian Delights, written by Goolam Vahed and Thembisa Waetjen.
Francis Kagolo states in New Vision that Mamdani’s 2007 book, Scholars in the Marketplace, “caused unease within Makerere University’s administration” (where Mamdani currently serves as director of MISR). This was because the book “criticized the commercialization of university education in Uganda and the lack of academic research and publications by professors”, says Kagolo.
Congratulations to Mamdani!
Renowned scholar, Prof. Mahmood Mamadani, is one of the six African personalities to receive honorary degrees from the University of KwaZulu-Natal for his outstanding contribution in the academia.
KwaZulu-Natal, based in South Africa, is the 8th best university in Africa, according to Webometrics rankings released last week.
Mamdani, currently the director of Makerere university institute of social research (MISR), was chosen for his “outstanding academic record as a scholar,” the university said in a statement.
Scholars in the Marketplace: The dilemmas of neo-liberal reform at Makerere University 1989-2005 by Mahmood Mamdani Book homepage
EAN: 9780796922144 Find this book with BOOK Finder!
Reflecting on COP17 held in Durban in December last year, prof Harald Winkler, author of Cleaner Energy Cooler Climate, said he was “not as depressed as he thought he would be”.
Speaking at a panel discussion titled “What happened at Cop17?”, hosted by the University of Cape Town, Winkler said that whether you see COP17 as a failure or success depends largely on “what your measuring stick is”.
“If you look at COP17 in terms of our climate needs, it was a miserable failure,” Winkler says. “But if you look at what was politically possible, the results are actually quite strong.” He qualifies this statement by adding that there were no watershed moments, but that, as a member of the South African negotiating team at COP17, he did observe some “slight shifts” that are slowly happening. He sees the agreement on a second commitment period, the Durban Platform, as one of the more positive outcomes.
Bray introduced the audience to the study of childhood and adolescence in the opening lecture, and concluded the series, together with Gooskens, in a lecture entitled “Schooling and identity”. UCT Open Content has made the presentations used by Bray, Gooskens and their colleagues available online:
Growing up in the new South Africa: Childhood and adolescence in post-apartheid Cape Town by Rachel Bray, Imke Gooskens, Sue Moses, Lauren Kahn and Jeremy Seekings Book homepage
EAN: 9780796923134 Find this book with BOOK Finder!
Ken Hill, Professor of the Practice of Global Health at Harvard School of Public Health, will be presenting a double seminar on the connection between sanitation and child mortality rates in urban slums on Tuesday, 7 February 2012, at the University of Cape Town. Hill will discuss the research which shows that large health consequences result from poor water and sanitation in low and middle income households.
The seminar takes places from 1 PM to 3 PM in the Leslie Social Sciences building. All are welcome to attend.
For information on water allocation reform in South Africa, read Synne Movik’s Fluid Rights.
The inhabitants of capital cities in Africa are increasing at spectacular rate. Lagos, Nigeria’s capital, has a current population of 10 million and a growth rate of 4.44% per year – making it the second fastest growing city in Africa. It is estimated that Lagos will have 15 million inhabitants by 2030.
Urbanisation is often positively liked to economic growth and development, but according to a Polity.org report by the Institute for Security Studies, rapid urbanisation will also result in many challenges. The report states that, “Without a clear strategy to address service delivery, employment and governance issues, African countries in transition from rural to urban population growth could experience instability in the future.”
Read the complete report:
In 2008, for the first time in human history, the number of people living in urban areas outstripped the rural population; however, the same will not occur in Africa until nearly 2050. Even so, Africa’s cities are urbanising at a profound rate, reaching 40% in 2012, up from 19% in 1960. Due to the implications of urban population growth on the economy and other social factors, it is imperative that African state leaders and policy-makers plan for these transitions adequately. The changes that will occur, and in fact have begun taking place, in terms of urbanisation, need to be factored into long term planning, as not doing so could lead to possible political and economic instability.
According to City Mayors, an organisation dedicated to the research of cities and metropolitan areas, Africa has 19 cities with a population over 1 million, and this is a conservative estimate given that most reliable city population data is 15 years old. The fastest growing city, according to Foreign Policy magazine, is Bamako, Mali, currently at 1.3 million people and growing at 4.45% a year, a result of both economic growth and desertification. Bamako, however, is dwarfed by the estimated 10 million people that live in Lagos, Nigeria, Africa’s second fastest growing city at 4.44% a year. Fifteen million people are expected to live in Lagos by 2030, overtaking Cairo, Egypt, as the continent’s largest city. The UN recently performed a study on mega-cities and concluded that an additional urban phenomenon is the growth of mega-regions, like the 600km urban stretch between Ghana, Togo, Benin and Nigeria that now links the whole region’s economy. According to Business Day, Minister of Lands, Housing and Development in Nigeria, Amal Pepple, stated that with an urbanisation rate of five percent per annum, the West-African region is recording the fastest urban growth in history, estimating that by 2020, 52 percent of the region’s populations would reside in cities. This is sure to have a profound impact for West Africa.
In an article for Business Day, Mike Muller says that South Africa needs to urgently start managing its water resources efficiently. He argues that many organisations want to work together to achieve this end, but that the government’s “delays in management arrangements” is preventing them from doing so. Some of the problems he identifies are “long delays in issuing water-use licences; incoherent licence conditions; uncontrolled illegal water use; and the widespread pollution of rivers”.
SA URGENTLY needs to manage its water resources better. The good news is that many of the people and organisations that use or enjoy the resources want to play their part. But they are frustrated by the government’s failure to put arrangements in place that would allow them to work together.
Those are the key findings of a study supported by the Water Research Commission in the Upper Vaal and Olifants, two highly stressed rivers that flow through the Free State, Gauteng, Mpumalanga and Limpopo.
The study poses an immediate challenge to Water and Environmental Affairs Minister Edna Molewa . It reports management failures that are undermining economic activity. These include long delays in issuing water-use licences; incoherent licence conditions; uncontrolled illegal water use; and the widespread pollution of rivers.
In Capital Cities in Africa, edited by Simon Bekker and Goran Therborn, the authors look at the rapid process of urbanisation – more politically than economically driven – that led to the formation of Africa’s largest capital cities, and the inevitable challenges resulting from it.
It is with these challenges in mind that Stacy Passmore, urban designer with the Chife Foundation in Nigeria, has tried to move away from the idea of an African “megacity”, towards what she calls “rurban” development – a hybridisation of the best of urban and rural sectors, “using mobile technologies to bring information and traditionally ‘urban’ opportunities to remote locations”.
It is projected that by 2025, 200 million Africans will migrate to urban areas due to political neglect and changing global economic patterns. Colonial-era policies have dismantled functioning agricultural systems of access and land ownership, while rampant environmental degradation caused by erosion, loss of biodiversity, pollution, and poor water management have diminished the productivity of farming. This failing agriculture sector means that many African countries now import vast quantities of staples such as fish, rice, wheat, and corn at the detriment to local enterprise.
Scholars, most interested in the African megacity, often neglect a key feature of African societies: migration has resulted in a highly mobile rural society with increasingly urbanized relationships, rather than a strict urban/rural dichotomy. Despite an overwhelming focus on the megacity, some scholars, including Director of the African Centre for Cities Professor Edgar Pieterse, project that in the next wave of African development “relatively small settlements of less than half a million people will dominate the urban landscape.” McKinsey Global Institute also recently issued a report that promises a similar evolution in global economic growth patterns; approximately 400 mid-size cities in emerging markets – mainly sub-Saharan Africa – are posed to generate nearly 40% of global economic growth over the next 15 years.
Simon Bekker and Göran Therborn’s Capital Cities in Africa looks at the capital cities of nine sub-Saharan African countries, examining their roles as “host centres of political power”. In Chapter 5, dedicated to Lagos, contributor Laurent Fourchard describes how the capital of Africa’s most populous country, Nigeria, is the product of both its national and colonial histories:
At the end of the 18th century, Lagos became the first slavery port in West Africa. From the 19th century onwards, like many other port cities in Africa, it was increasingly involved in the circulation of people, goods, ideas and technologies. By the 20th century, Lagos had become the main port of the most populous African country and was the federal capital of Nigeria from 1914 to 1991. Today, the city of Lagos boasts a concentration of capital assets, trading companies and public investments, a large bureaucracy and a transnational political, intellectual and religious elite. Since the 19th century, in fact, Lagos has been at the forefront of new cultural and social practices in Nigeria, despite Abuja (the new federal capital since 1991) and Port Harcourt (the oil capital in the Niger Delta) having recently acquired increasing influence.
Lagos has been shaped both by its national history as the federal capital and by remaining at the centre of political opposition to colonial rule (from 1920 to 1960), to military and civilian regimes (from 1966 to 1999) and to the current ruling party (from 1999 to 2008). This history has deeply influenced the way the city is governed, in particular in an international context.
In an article featured on Afesis-corplan, Kwandiwe Kondlo, co-editor of Africa In Focus: Governance in the 21st century, examines what we mean when we speak of “the Youth” in political discourse, and wonders whether this force in our society deserves the “weight of our expectations”:
Let these things be examined, let them be debated not only for us but for generations to come. For despite of our sense of self-importance and pride, we are all just a passing phase. The Youth is also a passing phase and can hardly claim to represent a particular historical force. It is a lie that the Youth of today, as represented by the Youth League of the ANC represents the historical force of the Youth League of Mziwakhe Lembede, AP Mda and Nelson Mandela. Without an identifiable programme, but only snippets around controversial programmes such as the nationalisation of mines, we cannot fully count on this Youth as the seedbed of the democracy to come.
Getting back to the subject – speaking of the Youth, what does one mean? To speak of the Youth is to speak not only of the future of a people or of a nation, but it is to speak of hope; it is to speak of the very ‘soul’ of a nation. Hope, as Paulo Freire (2008) indicates, is an ‘ontological need that demands an anchoring practice’. It requires a realistic practice for it to become edifying; for it to become ‘historical concreteness’. The ‘soul’ of a nation, on the other hand, infers the very seat of power; the wholeness of essence and the propelling drive to higher levels. This underlines the weight of meaning and the depth of value the Youth carries in a nation and to its people. Soren Kierkegaard in his book, ‘Either/Or’ indicates that he prefers speaking to the Youth for with them there is hope that they grow to become rational beings. This he said in the early 1800s, which shows the great hope attached to the Youth throughout generations of scholarship and throughout generations of human existence. The theme ‘the role of the Youth in participatory democracy’ invokes both the ‘performativity’and the ‘constantive’ (Derrida,2002) attributable to that section of society seen as young, fresh, capable and full of life – the Youth. But the question is: are we betting on the right horse? Are we throwing the weight of our expectations and hope where it deserves to be thrown?
Cooper’s “in development” research concerns an analysis of the transformations within academic institutions and how they correspond to changes in the global society of which they form part.
The book’s singular claim is that the driving force behind these changes is “a global post-1970s new capitalist industrial revolution”. This has had the effect of giving primacy to use-orientated research. In effect, The University in Development looks at the extent to which economic forces shape and drive research methodology.
In his introductory speech, Cooper outlined the “unusual timeline” of the history of his research, which has taken him some ten years to complete. Upon returning later to the original research group interviews he’d conducted in 2000, Cooper discovered “none of them were behaving like I wanted to predict!” However, since he does believe in some degree of prediction in the social sciences, Cooper revised his old theories and eventually completed the project.
Cooper reflected on the concept “in development” as presented in the title. “I’m arguing that the university is involved in development with the external society, so these research groups are connecting, in terms of socio-economic and cultural development, with wider society.”
Moreover, he highlighted the need for an internal reconstruction of the university. “The book says we need a revolution at UCT. We need an internal revolution; a ‘value restructuring’. We need new research centres, even though there is no money for these,” he said. Andries du Toit explored this subject in greater detail when he took up the microphone. He spoke optimistically of the discovery that many professors were organising themselves into small research units, utilising old-style “research chair” structures.
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Rebecca Pointer of PLAAS tweeted from the launch using #researchuse:
