Universities in crisis : a reflection on the African experience
- Authors: Mamdani, Mahmood
- Date: 1993
- Subjects: Academic Freedom -- South Africa
- Language: English
- Type: text
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/672 , vital:19980
- Description: The real point of democratic reform, what I have been calling institutional reform, is not just to change the complexion of researchers, teachers and students, nor just to change the location of research and teaching, to be truly meaning- fill, reform has to lead to a change in the orientation of these activities. Let me take a hypothetical example, one where you succeed in adding more black and female faces to the research and leaching establishment and even to shifting the location of that establishment mainly to historically black universities - say your most advanced medical research facilities come to be located at the University of Fort Hare, with researchers mainly black and female, but the facility is still oriented to proton beam research for special types of cancer, away from the public health needs of the people - what will you have achieved? I dare say you would then have joined the ranks of independent Africa. The key issue will still remain not addressed: who should centres of research and learning serve and how? This is why I think the real challenge for all of us, whether south or north of the Limpopo, whether black or brown, yellow or white, is to begin thinking of how to root African universities in African soil.
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- Date Issued: 1993
The university and a free society
- Authors: Bengu, S M E
- Date: 1992
- Subjects: Academic Freedom -- South Africa
- Language: English
- Type: text
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/662 , vital:19979
- Description: Has the clamour for University autonomy and academic freedom in our country not served to legitimize repression in the hands of a narrow, undemocratic “oligarchy”? Has the narrow understanding of academic freedom and university autonomy excluded the freedom of individuals and groups such as women, black communities, students, and non-academics? Before we consider the relationship that will, hope fully, exist between universities and a free society that is going to emerge in this country, we ought to accept the fact that university autonomy and academic freedom are hollow in an oppressed society such as we still have in our country.
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- Date Issued: 1992
Black is beautiful, brown is beautiful, white is beautiful : towards a rainbow culture in a united South Africa
- Authors: Sachs, Albie
- Date: 1991
- Subjects: Academic Freedom -- South Africa Culture -- South Africa Music -- South Africa Dance -- South Africa Boycotts -- South Africa Apartheid Literature and society -- South Africa South Africa -- Politics and government -- 1989-1994
- Language: English
- Type: text
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/392 , vital:19955
- Description: This is the last of a trilogy of papers on culture in a future South Africa by Albie Sachs. It is crucial that we in South Africa now set about disestablishing our culture and breaking away from the conceptual and structural strangulations of the past. Long after our country was declared a republic, we remain mentally colonised. The scrapping of social apartheid has barely touched the apartheid in our minds. We take authoritarianism, secrecy and deceit as part of our way of life. As Robert Birley used to say, we hug our chains, feel naked without them.
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- Date Issued: 1991