PEACEBANTUSTAN

APPLIED "UBUNTU PSYCHOLOGY"

About South Africa Culture

Education

Transforming Tertiary Education

"UBUNTU UNIVERSITY"

After years of planning and consultation, the higher education sector is being restructured to solve problems of duplication, fragmentation and lack of access in parts of the country and to improve the quality of education on offer.

The system of apartheid left a skewed system that not only disadvantaged black students, but failed to meet the social and economic requirements of the country. Now the size and shape of the higher education sector is being transformed into a more equitable one that better meets South Africa's human resource requirements.

Education Minister Kader Asmal disclosed details of the plan last year after Cabinet approved the final draft of the National Plan for Higher Education, the culmination of an intensive process of restructuring the higher education system that began over a decade ago.

Now the legal processes have begun to facilitate the mergers. The first mergers are set to take place this year, while the second group of institutions are set to merge in 2005.

The government has also set up two National Institutions for Higher Education in Mpumalanga and the Northern Cape, two provinces which previously had no higher education institutions.

N Cape gets first varsity
Key goals of the restructuring process include increasing the number of students in the system over the next 10 to 15 years, increasing the number of black and female students in under-represented areas, establishing centres of excellence, and reducing the number of institutions from 36 to 22 through institutional mergers.
This last has met with some resistance from some affected institutions reluctant to relinquish their individual identities.

Asmal said the new system, after two years of restructuring, would comprise 11 universities, six technikons and six comprehensive institutions (offering both university and technikon programmes). Most of the country's leading universities, including the Universities of the Witwatersrand, Cape Town, Stellenbosch and Natal, will not be affected by the planned mergers.

'Comprehensive institutions'
Some changes have been made to the initial plan. For example, the University of Venda will not merge with the University of the North and the Medical University of South Africa (Medunsa), as proposed initially, but will instead be transformed into a "comprehensive institution" offering technikon-type programmes as well as a range of relevant university-oriented programmes.

Also, Border Technikon, Eastern Cape Technikon and the University of Transkei (Unitra) will be merged to establish a new comprehensive institution, offering university and technikon programmes. Initially only a technikon was envisaged.

"This new organisational form will result in the integration of academic and vocational programmes offered across the full qualification spectrum, allowing increased student access and mobility," Asmal said.

The following mergers will take place:

Universities of Natal and Durban-Westville in KwaZulu-Natal.
Universities of Potchefstroom and North West in North West Province.
Technikons Pretoria, Northern Gauteng and North West in Gauteng and North West Province.
University of Fort Hare and the East London Campus of Rhodes University in the Eastern Cape.
The incorporation of the seven Vista campuses around the country into the those universities and technikons closest to them.
University of Port Elizabeth and Port Elizabeth Technikon in the Eastern Cape.
University of Transkei/Border and Eastern Cape technikons in the Eastern Cape.
Rand Afrikaans University and Wits Technikon in Gauteng.
Cape Technikon and Peninsula Technikon in the Western Cape.
The merger of ML Sultan Technikon and Natal Technikon into the Durban Institute of Technology in KwaZulu-Natal took place in April, while the incorporation of the Qwa Qwa branch of the University of the North into the University of the Free State will take place in January 2004.
Processes have also begun to merge the University of South Africa (Unisa), Technikon SA and the distance education arm of Vista University in Gauteng.

Some mergers early next year
The national education department will enter into discussions with the affected institutions early in 2003 to determine the timing of each merger. Some mergers are expected to take place as early as January 2003, while the rest will occur in 2005.

Although there is much speculation that the mergers will result in job losses, Asmal envisages retraining rather than job losses. For example, some lecturers will have to switch from teaching academic subjects to more technically oriented ones, he said.

The restructuring process is expected to cost government at least R3.1-billion, of which R1.3-billion will be ploughed into historically disadvantaged institutions.

Resources have also been set aside for the establishment of a National Higher Education Information and Application Service, to serve as an information hub for school leavers on study opportunities, career guidance and mentoring.

Asmal said that, taken as a whole, the transformation and reconstruction proposals would foster growth and rejuvenation of higher education, especially in parts of the country which have been poorly served in the past.

A race-based system
Racial segregation of universities in South Africa was legislated with the passing of the Extension of University Education Act in 1959. This ushered in the establishment of ethnically based institutions, many which were set up in the "self-governing" states or homelands during the apartheid era, which saw "separate development" for blacks – Africans, coloureds and Indians - and whites.

In the 1970s and 1980s, universities began to open their doors to students of all races. Now, South African universities are lively, multicultural places of learning, where diversity is celebrated. Many of the historically white universities now have a majority of black students.

Whereas in the past most higher education students in the country were white, now nearly 60 percent are black. Statistics from 2000 show that of the total amount of 345 403 students in universities and technikons, 178 654 were African, 122 461 were white, 15 853 were coloured and 28 054 were Indian.

Asmal said the restructuring would "ensure the removal of the Verwoerdian legacy that created separate and unequal institutions". (Hendrik Verwoerd, who was known as the architect of apartheid, was prime minister of South Africa from 1958 to 1966, when he was assassinated).

SouthAfrica.info reporter

The Psychology of Peacekeeping by Harvey J. Langholtz (Author) (Hardcover)

Excerpt from Front Matter "... a recognized expert on the psychology of reconciliation, and Paul R Diehl, scholar ..."

See more reference to reconciliation+psychology in this book.

ethics news & views

Center for Ethics, Emory University — Igniting the Moral Imagination of Twenty-First Century Leaders

[ Posted by Edward Branch at September 1, 2002 09:20 AM]

© 2000-2003 by Edward Branch and the Center for Ethics, Emory University. Some rights reserved.

Rev. Edward B. Branch, D. Min., directs Lyke House, the Catholic Center at Atlanta University Center. He also serves as a member of the Center for Ethics’ external Advisory Council.


Beyond the dream: from ubuntu to embrace
"Recently, I remonstrated with a student concerning a set of unacceptable behaviors. He retorted that there was nothing illegal or immoral about them. I said they may be legal and “moral,” but it’s not the right thing. Ethical action—or doing the right thing—requires a new consciousness that calls many time-honored approaches into question. This is true, it seems to me, in intercultural pursuits in America these days, especially in higher education. It may be time to abandon the “I have a dream” rhetoric of the last fifty years and look to an ethic based on truth and reconciliation. The nostalgia of the Lincoln Memorial moment will have to be surrendered if the harmonious ordering of differences called peace is to reign in our country and our world.

Is racism dead?
After forty years of justice and peace struggle, a talk show guest on National Public Radio—a white, high profile journalist—declared racism dead in America and tagged anyone who thought or said differently as whiners. Her position is legal and “moral,” but it is certainly not the right thing. She not only was ignorant of history and contemporary social psychology, but she had also not read the morning paper. It was the same day as the shooting of Amadou Diallo. What could save this journalist from her danger to us all would be an ethic based not on justice, but on an appreciation of Desmond Tutu’s ubuntu philosophy of reconciliation. (Ubuntu means “I am because we are.”)

First some considerations about our traditional mantra, “if you want peace, work for justice.” Miroslov Volf suggests that our concentration on justice as a prerequisite condition for securing peace is misdirected. Even if strict justice were achievable—he argues that it is not—it would not insure peace, the harmonious ordering of differences.* Three cases in point:

Randall Robinson reviews the state of America since 1967 and finds that black and poor America is much worse off and the world situation much more treacherous in 2001 than forty years before. The March on Washington for jobs, peace, and freedom has not had the success common wisdom trumpets.†
Audrey Chapman suggests that our euphoria over the success of Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa and the victory of Tutu’s approach may be short lived.**
In what some may be termed an exercise in pessimism, Derrick Bell maintains that racism is so ingrained in the fabric of American life and spirit that it and its effects will be with us forever.‡
Now almost forty years after his great peroration at the Lincoln Memorial, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s great crescendo is still quoted and lifted up as a hopeful symbol of racial harmony in the United States. But the symbol is lifted up more than the speech’s substance. The speech in reality was not about dreaming but about a blueprint for economic justice for poor (not just black) people. Much has transpired historically on a global basis, not the least being the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Until now it has succeeded in bringing a bloodless end to apartheid in South Africa, thereby becoming a blueprint for restoration of order around the world.

Yet the dream seems still deferred and the South African summer is becoming an ominous autumn. Matters are worse, Chapman maintains, because both the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the civil rights movement share a common limitation. White South Africans and white Americans have not been enabled to own their part in perpetuating a system of inequality and oppression, not only institutionally but also at the grass roots level. The clergy have prayed, the lawyers have been paid, but everywhere there has been an individual and institutional failure to do the right thing.

The will to embrace
The intercultural and interracial dialogue and cooperation which takes place in higher education—if it is to contribute substantively to peace and justice in our society—must be an ethical dialogue which seeks not justice as its goal but reconciliation. Bishop Tutu’s African gift of an ubuntu foundation for reconciliation may be a saving grace for us all. In every conversation, memory and the ownership of past wrongs that have contemporary expression must be acknowledged. Volf suggests that an ethic of reconciliation requires four movements of embrace*:

The will to embrace the other, even the offender.
The will to determine what is just and to name what is wrong as wrong.
The will to embrace as the framework for the search for justice.
The will to seek a community in which each recognizes and is recognized by all and in which all give mutually to each other in love.
This “will to embrace” is the antithesis of the political correctness—and worse, opportunism—that has characterized much dialogue and programming to date. In too many cases, the wish to enter into dialogue has been initiated by historically white institutions as a matter of self-interest for legal or “moral” purposes. In the absence of the exercise of institutional memory, well-meaning proponents bring to the dialogue packets of psychic power that they reflexively exercise. The historically oppressed find themselves oppressed again; thus, representatives of historically black institutions are often reticent to enter into such dialogues. If on the other hand they do engage in dialogue, it is sometimes for legal, “moral,” or monetary reasons (that is, for power). It is a co-dependant behavior effecting an imposed harmony, a pacification.

An ethics of reconciliation
What I propose is an ethic of reconciliation to form the foundation for ethical dialogue among historically black colleges and universities and historically white universities. The goal in these exercises must not be to achieve justice but rather to create a sensitivity among all and in all institutional relationships which will help people live in a humane way in the absence of a final harmony*. Such an ethic requires beginning with the truth of our institutional relationships, a willingness to own what has been done and change what is being done to impede embrace. Strategies for hearing and honoring each other’s stories are the first step in embrace.

Strategies for conversion are a second step. Communities must be taught to want to embrace. Conversion from individualism to communal value is a high challenge in American culture. An ethic of reconciliation requires a visceral value for relationship with a different other. In black communities of learning that have lost so much already, it may require the risk (if not the fact) of losing a good deal more.

Strategies for helping students, faculty and staff to own their present complicity in oppressive behaviors, whether as oppressor or oppressed are imperative, are a third phase. Just as white South Africans are not being enabled to own their complicity in apartheid and its effects, white Americans are not being enabled to own their complicity either in black oppression in America or global poverty and environmental destruction.

An ethic of reconciliation based on the will to embrace affords us all a foundation of integrity and trust. It allows us to leave the table of common endeavor without sfeeling as if we just bought a new car and got “ripped off.” Such an approach assures us that what we plan and effect is not only legal and moral, but it is indeed the right thing."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

* Miroslav Volf, “Forgiveness, Reconciliation, and Justice,” in Forgiveness and Reconciliation, Edited by Ray Helmick and Rodney Peterson. Templeton, 2002.
† Randall Robinson, The Debt. Plume Publications, 2001.
** Audrey Chapman,“Truth Commissions as Instruments of Forgiveness and Reconciliation,” in Forgiveness and Reconciliation.
‡ Derrick Bell, Voices at the Bottom of the Well. Basic Books, 1992.

By Barbara Ludman
4 April 2003

"If we as a liberation movement and a nation were to be given the choice of one life story to be told, that story would have to be Walter Sisulu’s. In his life and the work of his life are captured and demonstrated the best, the noblest, the most heroic, the most deeply humane that our movement and our country represent and seek to represent."

So begins former president Nelson Mandela’s foreward to "In Our Lifetime" (David Philip), the biography of Walter and Albertina Sisulu.

The book, written by the subjects’ daughter-in-law, Elinor Sisulu, is a fortunate conjunction of first-rate storyteller and fascinating subjects.

Walter and Albertina Sisulu - In Our Lifetime
Get the book from:
Exclusive Books
Kalahari.net

The story of the Sisulus combines the personal and the political; it reflects the 20th-century history of South Africa, but at the same time it is, as their biographer puts it, "a story of persecution, bitter struggle and painful separation … and also one of patience, hope, enduring love and ultimate triumph".

Walter was a dapper, sophisticated estate agent and Albertina a naïve and beautiful young nurse when they met in Johannesburg in the early 1940s. At their wedding in 1944, the chairman of the African National Congress Youth League warned the bride: "You are marrying a man who is already married to the nation."

Their life together was marked by frequent arrests and detentions as Walter Sisulu led campaigns to defy apartheid laws. ANC secretary-general, he had been jailed more than once when he went underground in 1963. Albertina and their eldest son were detained by police frustrated in their attempts to find Walter.

He was arrested with other ANC leaders during a raid at Liliesleaf Farm later that year, and given a life sentence for treason, and Albertina was left with five children, plus her late sister’s two children, to rear on her own.

Active in ANC Women’s League affairs and, in the 1980s, co-president of the United Democratic Front, she was banned for nearly two decades, and often jailed, and two of her children went into exile. They returned only after liberation movements were unbanned in 1990, several months after Walter Sisulu was released from Robben Island.

Those are the bare bones of the story; but in this rich, well-written biography are also reflected the political debates and campaigns that characterised the liberation struggle – recounted by an author who had unprecedented access to letters, reports and other private and political documents.

Daughter-in-law, biographer
It took Elinor Sisulu nine years to write a biography of her parents-in-law. Her problem was not resistance from the subjects, or difficulty in digging up information. It was just the opposite: too much information. The biography was her idea, soon after she and her husband, Max Sisulu – now CEO of Denel – left Zimbabwe to live in South Africa. Her academic background is English literature and history, and, she says, "biography marries literature and history".

The Sisulus "had great confidence in me. That’s their success as parents, complete confidence … Walter used to say ‘I have complete confidence you’ll do a good job. I have no doubts.’"

There was pressure to be absolutely accurate because, as she says, "you’re going to live with them after that. And so obviously from that point of view you don’t want to upset anyone unnecessarily."

But upsetting people with good reason was a different issue. "The only area where I found a bit of resentment was historical disagreements. All struggle biographies face that", she says.

"If people had a quarrel in the 1940s or '50s and they patched that up, and you come along as an historian 50 years later and want to write about it, they don’t want you to. They’ve put it in the past. Quarrels especially between comrades – they are like family quarrels; you keep them behind closed doors."

There was a great deal of soul-searching, "There is a trend towards self-censorship. I hesitated a lot." But in the end, she wrote about the quarrels, simply reporting points of view - largely those of her subjects, but other views as well.

"It’s part of a historical process that you have to describe", she says.

Now and again a name is missing, but the rest is there, from anger over Winnie Mandela’s "matches and tyres" speech to debates in prison between Nelson Mandela and Govan Mbeki in this compulsively readable biography.


SA struggle biographies:

"Our generation is fast disappearing", Nelson Mandela said at the recent launch of "Walter and Albertina Sisulu: In Our Lifetime". But with more and more South African struggle biographies filling the shelves, they are leaving behind a considerable legacy in print.

SA prison biographies
Mandela books
The Essential Steve Biko
Walter & Albertina Sisulu
My Life as a Freedom Fighter
Country of My Skull
Hugh Lewin: Bandiet out of jail
Patricia de Lille


[ Fri Apr 09, 06:30:57 PM | Frederica Clare | edit ]
From: www.afriprov.org
This week's proverbs are selected from “Collection of 197 Sumbwa Proverbs, from the Geita/ Kahama Districts around the southern part of Lake Victoria in Western Tanzania." Collected by Joseph Nkumbulwa with the help of Max Tertrais, M. Afr. in conjunction with Sukuma Research Committee. This booklet is from the series "Endangered African Proverbs Collection: A Continuation of the African Proverbs Project." Kwiluzya nakani ne seko.
To pursue a rabbit and to laugh together, you will miss him.
(When you begin a serious work, don’t chat with anybody in the same time, you could not pay the needed attention. Avoid distraction.)

Ndavitogwa ndebitobolwe.
If I have decided to love somebody, I oblige myself to be patient with him/her.(Love is patience. To love includes long-suffering also.)

Ngoyo yakanga bwobo.
Hen is fighting with a mushroom which has no aggressivity!(You lose your time in a false cause. Don’t break your nails uselessly on things which are irreducible.)

Mkulu kumuleka numbiko mumulomo.
You can run quicker than an old man, but for his wiseness and his words you are behind.
(A man is a man, but the difference between a young one and an old one is wide.)

Kalomo kasoga kalalazya nfisi hizyalala.
Everybody, even he who has a bad character, can be softened by kind conversation. He will make a step that day.
(Try to be kind with everybody; you will harvest friends, even hard people.)


[ Thu Apr 08, 02:01:10 PM | Frederica Clare | edit ]
This weeks proverbs are selected from “Collection of 100 Rundi (Burundi) Proverbs” collected and explained by Jean Nyandwi, from the series “Endangered African Proverbs Collections, A Continuation of the African Proverbs Project.” The series is written up on the African Proverbs website, at www.afriprov.org. Additions are made frequently to the website, so be sure to visit regularly.

N’iritagira inkoko riraca.
A night without roosters will still end.
(Hope does not necessarily have to be based on tangible signs.)

Akanyoni katagurutse ntikamenya iyo bweze.
A bird cannot know where the sorghum is ready (to eat) unless it flies.
(A lazy person is not aware of opportunities.)

Ingona iva mu ruzi ikarigata urume.
A crocodile comes out of the river to lick the dew.
(Other people’s possessions appear to be more important or better than what one has.)

Uwutazi umuti awubishako.
He who does not know a medicine, he/she defecates on it.(Ignorance kills.)

Bene vyo nibo bene inambu.
The haves are the have-nots.(Some rich people want to get more and more possessions even when it means being unfair to the poor.)

What is a Peace Bantustan? South Africa, USA, The Caribbean?

This week's proverbs are selected from “Collection of 197 Sumbwa Proverbs, from the Geita/ Kahama Districts around the southern part of Lake Victoria in Western Tanzania." Collected by Joseph Nkumbulwa with the help of Max Tertrais, M. Afr. in conjunction with Sukuma Research Committee. This booklet is from the series "Endangered African Proverbs Collection: A Continuation of the African Proverbs Project."
Kwiluzya nakani ne seko.
To pursue a rabbit and to laugh together, you will miss him.
(When you begin a serious work, don’t chat with anybody in the same time, you could not pay the needed attention. Avoid distraction.)

Ndavitogwa ndebitobolwe.
If I have decided to love somebody, I oblige myself to be patient with him/her.
(Love is patience. To love includes long-suffering also.)

Ngoyo yakanga bwobo.
Hen is fighting with a mushroom which has no aggressivity!
(You lose your time in a false cause. Don’t break your nails uselessly on things which are irreducible.)

Mkulu kumuleka numbiko mumulomo.
You can run quicker than an old man, but for his wiseness and his words you are behind.
(A man is a man, but the difference between a young one and an old one is wide.)

Kalomo kasoga kalalazya nfisi hizyalala.
Everybody, even he who has a bad character, can be softened by kind conversation. He will make a step that day.
(Try to be kind with everybody; you will harvest friends, even hard people.)