Founded in 1904, Rhodes University is a well-established University located in Grahamstown in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa.
It is a small research intensive university which enjoys the distinction of having amongst the best undergraduate pass and graduation rates in South Africa, outstanding postgraduate success rates, and the best research output per academic staff member.
The University takes pride in its motto, Where Leaders Learn, and in producing graduates who are knowledgeable intellectuals, skilled professionals, and critical, caring and compassionate citizens who can contribute to economic and social development and an equitable, just and democratic society.
The messages that adolescents receive from sexuality education classes are frequently negative. It’s time for the curriculum to become more empowering for learners and teachers.
There are very few spaces in which girls can discuss menstruation or ask questions about it.
Reuters/Zohra Bensemra
Menstruation is a fact of life – but in many parts of Africa, it’s something that young women dread. A South African research group is working to change this.
Most South Africans need serious financial support to make it through university.
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Anti-rape protests at a South African university have far bigger implications for the country’s ongoing fight against rape culture and patriarchal gender norms.
Prince performing during his ‘Diamonds and Pearls Tour’ in London in 1992.
Reuters/Dylan Martine
A violent attack on a female student at one of South Africa’s prominent universities was not an isolated incident. It told a universal tale of how patriarchy still rules.
Tunisia has the highest score on the Good African Society Index.
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The Good African Society Index provides a comparative measure of the quality of society in African states. Governments could use its findings to make targeted policy interventions.
Universities expose students to difference, providing them with a unique opportunity to learn from others.
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Hip-hop artists do it differently in a town in one of South Africa’s poorest provinces. Eschewing the archetypal hip-hop lifestyle, Grahamstown’s rappers propose a surprising alternative.
Sisters Mirusha Yogarajah (left) and Yanusha Yogarajah, who started the #unfairandlovely campaign with Pax Jones.
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Colourism - or discrimination based on the skin tone - manifests in different ways across the world. In the main it means that light skin is seen as desirable and dark skin as undesirable.
Nearly 20 million South Africans live in rural areas. Why are the country’s universities so dismissive of rurality?
Kim Ludbrook/EPA
South Africa’s educational policies and curricula tend to be biased against rural lifestyles - even though nearly 20 million people live in the country’s rural areas.
Supplication to authority – through pleading or vehement protest – is hardly the only way to bring about change in a democracy.
Sumaya Hisham/EPA
There are two concepts in education theory – the social construction of knowledge and the notion of self-efficacy for development –- that could help build a true democracy.
Research in the Eastern Cape, South Africa, shows that many young, black and poor people do not recognise themselves or their communities in the stories they see, hear or read in mainstream media.
Cecil John Rhodes: master of all he surveys - but not of a secret society.
Reuters/Eddie Keogh
The book contains major flaws, the chief of which is the lack of solid, supporting evidence. Brown claims that ‘Rhodes documented everything’ – which was not actually the case in this regard.
A student faces off with a policeman in riot gear. Private security forces on campuses are a show of dominance and control.
EPA/Nic Bothma
The way in which one group of South African student protesters has acted and engaged with university managers shows how valuable a feminist approach to protest can be.
Artworks by deceased South African artist Helen Martins. The cultural and creative industries are key for social and economic development.
EPA/Kim Ludbrook
Rhodes was an ardent white supremacist who believed Africans to be inferior. He intended his scholarships to be for white males only. This has since fallen away.