Over the past two decades, it has not been easy for any country – let alone a newly freed one, like post-apartheid South Africa – to understand the rapidly changing world.
Producing brilliant graduates is one thing – developing and nurturing those who want to remain in academia is quite another.
Jason Reed/Reuters
Universities in South Africa have tried to “grow their own timber” in a bid to diversify staff bodies. These programs haven’t been wildly successful. Why, and what can be done differently?
21 years into democracy, are South Africa’s university students showing other citizens how best to hold the state accountable?
EPA/Ihsaan Haffejee
University students in South Africa have shown the potential of mass mobilisation to influence policy in advancing justice for their constitutional democratic rights.
Supporters of the Economic Freedom Fighters protesting outside the Johannesburg stock exchange.
Reuters/Siphiwe Sibeko
Since the 1940s, it’s been common for political moderates to move to the fore in South Africa – then, intermittently, to the background. They are replaced by radicals or exclusivist nationalists.
Nelson Mandela was a lawyer, an activist, a political prisoner and a president. He was also a man who loved learning.
Reuters
A lot has changed for the better in South Africa’s education system - but inequality remains a thorn in the country’s side. How can we disrupt educational inequality?
Supporters of the Congress of South African Trade Unions march in the streets of Johannesburg. Economic freedom has eluded the majority of South Africans.
Siphiwe Sibeko/Reuters
Economic transformation of unequal societies in a democratising context is difficult. This requires a creative mix of policy options underpinned by a commitment to social justice.
Students protest at South Africa’s Stellenbosch University demanding the right to be taught in English rather than Afrikaans, which they identify with apartheid.
Reuters/Mike Hutchings
The university should be the bastion of the right to free expression in the promotion of democracy, and has a moral and ethical obligation to provide spaces for fierce debate and critical engagement.
A bust of Hendrik Verwoerd, the architect of apartheid. Verwoerd believed that black people should know their place – and that included staying away from ‘white’ jobs.
Juda Ngwenya/Reuters
Vocational training is regarded as “low status” in South Africa. Much of the negativity around technical and vocational work seems to lie in the country’s history.
A statue of colonialist Cecil John Rhodes is removed from the University of Cape Town after student protests. Could real transformation come through changing governance structures?
Nic Bothma/EPA
How can the higher education sector guard against proposed transformation measures being merely superficial quick fixes? At least part of the answer may lie in institutional governance.
Black students at University of Stellenbosch protest against the institutions’s language policy they say discriminates against them by favouring Afrikaans.
Times Media/Adrian de Kock
Black youth are grappling with the question of the meaning of freedom in post-apartheid South Africa. They seek an antidote to their reality wherein blackness continues to be mocked and marginalised.
A still from the 2015 film ‘Necktie Youth’. Film in South Africa needs to undergo radical change if it is to shed the shackles of the past.
Urucu Media/Hanro Havenga
The impact that the system of conscription had on the roughly 600,000 white men who became both pawns and agents of the apartheid state has seldom been publicly acknowledged.
Students graduating from the National Academy of Legal Studies and Research, University of Law in Hyderabad.
Reuters/Krishnendu Halder
There are compelling educational reasons to employ more black academics in universities and to give them all the support they’ll need to become professors.
Leonardo DiCaprio plays Jay Gatsby in the The Great Gatsby. Jay’s story has been used by economists to explain the combination of unequal distribution of income and less economic mobility.
Reuters/Andrew Kelly
Evidence on the ability, or lack thereof, of children to rise above the economic status of their parents shines light on the continued persistence of inequality, including in South Africa.
Loopholes in the post-apartheid labour relations framework has created an opening for the re-creation of a cheap labour regime.
REUTERS/Rogan Ward
Failed by the institutions meant to protect them from exploitation, South African Post Offices workers gave up on the legal system, resorting to illegal means.
Consumption patterns among blacks are complicated by considerations including race, class position and personal relationships.
Reuters/Antony Kaminju
After two decades of democracy, economic inequality in South Africa remains very high. Survey comparability issues make analysing trends tricky, but it is clear that overall income inequality has not fallen…
Chief Research Specialist in Democracy and Citizenship at the Human Science Research Council and a Research Fellow Centre for African Studies, University of the Free State
South African Research Chair in Teacher Education; Director of Centre for International Teacher Education (CITE) & Professor of International Education and Development Policy (University of Sussex, UK), Cape Peninsula University of Technology