Scholarship In South Africa Research Articles

Some sound, some fury, signifying very little: Frantz Fanon and psychological scholarship in South Africa

Frantz Fanon has been an inspirational staple to a political, social, and economic understanding of South Africa for nearly 50 years. How, though, has South African psychology wrestled with, and appropriated, Fanon over the course of this time span? A review and analysis of all published references to Fanon in the South African Journal of Psychology, over a period of 40+ years, reveal a disappointingly superficial engagement with Fanonian theory, and a glaring neglect of clinical, research, and educational implications of Fanon’s praxis. Recommendations for a recommitted engagement with Fanon’s writings are provided.

Knowledge, Skills and Competencies of the Library Information Science School’s Graduates on Digital Scholarship in South Africa

The Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) has presented a paradigm shift in a paradigm in the field of Library and Information Science (LIS). The profession necessitates digital scholarship knowledge, skills, and competencies. Academic and special research council libraries have introduced numerous functions and activities related to digital scholarship, to accommodate the demands of the 4IR. Thus, librarians who practice in these types of libraries and others are called on to revisit their related knowledge, skills and competencies. Most librarians who have been trained by LIS schools received their qualifications before the advent of the digital scholarship activities which now form part of their profession. This has created some uncertainty as far as digital scholarship job requirements are concerned. This paper forms part of a doctoral study that aimed to explore the education and training of South Africa’s LIS professionals in digital scholarship, specifically those now serving in academic and special research council libraries. The study adopted an interpretive paradigm using a qualitative approach. A multiple case study design was used, employing semi-structured interviews as data-collection tool to interview ten digital scholarship librarians and their directors from six libraries in South Africa. The researcher sought to determine to what extent digital knowledge, skills and competences, and digital scholarship units and activities were part of their job requirements. The study concluded that LIS digital scholarship librarians should acquire digital scholarship knowledge, skills and competencies through formal education, training courses, workshops and on-the-job training. LIS schools should develop short learning courses to assist librarians in gaining the relevant knowledge, skills and competencies, while parent organizations should establish the relevant infrastructure and provide funding for training.

Some Aspects of Seminal Historical Factors that led to the Redress Process in Old Testament Scholarship in South Africa

This article considers certain seminal historical markers of how South Africa arrived at the current state of Old Testament scholarship in South Africa. Taking a lead from Ramantswana’s recent denouement of the development of this discipline in South Africa, this article considers the tasks that lie ahead with due regard to Mosala’s (1986:119) recognition that for liberation theology to be effective, the lingering ideologies that confuse the issue need to be dismantled. Mosala saw the necessity for a methodological framework to undertake a “de-ideologising” hermeneutical project. For instance, the current political clamour for de-colonisation portrays the contribution of the missionaries as negative because, having arrived with colonialism, there is a perception that they colluded in the imperialist exploitation of the indigenous peoples of South Africa. One aspect of “de-ideologising” the lingering social damage is the re-assessment of the positive aspects of the missionary endeavour in the face of the Colonialist drive. Not only did the missionaries bring “knowledge of our high birth-right … We belong to the human family, and are heirs of eternal salvation”, but William Wilcox for instance, facilitated the resistance to the notion of racial and intellectual superiority. It was this resistance which eventually culminated in a peaceful transition to democracy in South Africa. Keywords: Old Testament Scholarship, Colonialism, American Board Missionaries, Congregational Church, John L. Dube, William Wilcox, Natal, ANC

A South African Perspective on Learning in Social Movement Activism

There is a body of education scholarship in South Africa that captures the role played by social movements in democratising education in post-apartheid South Africa. However, this scholarship says little about how power dynamics affect learning and intellectual labour in social movements or social movement organisations. In addition, the issue of learning in social movements or social movement organisations is hardly explored in the South African social movement literature. This lack of focus on how activists, especially grassroots activists in working-class communities, learn and produce knowledge in social movements and organisations obscures the complexity of learning and knowledge production in activist settings. This article explores how activists, especially grassroots activists, learn in social movements. Based on secondary literature and interviews, the article advances two main arguments: First, learning in social movements and organisations takes place in non-formal and informal ways. Both these forms of learning take place inside and outside formal educational settings. And they both contribute to the empowerment and critical consciousness of activists in social movements and organisations. In addition, informal learning takes place inside and outside popular educational spaces. However, it is not inevitable that non-formal and informal forms of learning in activist settings will generate critical knowledge and activist practices that disrupt the status quo. Second, power relations based on “race”, social class, gender, and sexuality, among other axes of social division, impact on how learning takes place in non-formal or popular contexts of education. This article seeks to understand how power relations shape the learning and knowledge production process in social movements and organisations.

The Evolution of Rural Tourism in South Africa: An Historical Lens

This paper utilises archival research to provide a glimpse into the historical development of rural tourism in South Africa. It points to the minimal focus on historical studies in international scholarship on rural tourism. The analysis demonstrates rural tourism in South Africa is not a new phenomenon with a recorded history going back as far as the late 19th century. Different rural spaces are shown to be associated with different niche products of rural South Africa. The earliest forms of rural tourism were promoted to both groups of domestic and international visitors. Arguably, the evolutionary pathway of rural tourism in South Africa is different to that which has been documented in the Global North. Overall, the paper represents a contribution to the limited international literature on rural tourism in its historical aspects as well as to evolving rural tourism scholarship in South Africa. In addition, it offers an historical window on issues of tourism and change in the Global South.

Peer Review Practices in Scientific Journals and Developmental Scholarship in South Africa: A Peer Reviewer Perspective

The development of science starts with investment in human capital development. Thus far arguments are that it is innovation and development of science which can assure the country of good economic, political and social development. A continuous investment in the youth in academia is a necessity to foster and continue the requirement and continuity of the development of science in academia to advance the society developmentally. This article is conceptual in approach and uses secondary literature to argue that the goal to pursue developmental scholarship, does not only lie with incapacity to mentor, but also lie with the complex peer review system which should enable the emerging researchers with an opportunity to enter the publication space. Therefore, the methodological perspective of the article is purely qualitative and based on scientific materials explored to answer the research question raised in the article. This article concludes that the goal of achieving the next generation of researchers in both academia and practice shall require a system which is highly developmental through a well-developed system of mentoring within the academic environment.
 
 Received: 19 August 2021 / Accepted: 6 October 2021 / Published: 5 November 2021

The Book of Jonah and the Hermeneutics of Ferdinand E. Deist

Ferdinand E. Deist (1944–1997) was a critical scholar and a prolific author, and had an immeasurable influence on Old Testament and ancient Near Eastern scholarship in South Africa during the last quarter of the previous century. Although he never claimed to be working within the new paradigm which dawned in Old Testament studies towards the end of the nineteenth century, it is evident that he was fully at home within this paradigm. The article does not discuss all Deist’s publications in order to vindicate the claim. It only discusses his earliest publications. His treatment of Jonah opened the doors for many of his students to follow in his wake and to acquaint themselves with historical-critical methods of studying the Bible. Willie van Heerden, who is honoured with this essay, is but one of many postgraduate students who benefitted from Deist’s expertise, courage, and wisdom.

Can COVID-19 bring about 20/20 acuity in education scholarship in South Africa?

This leading article to this special issue on “COVID-19: Opportunity to rethink and to restructure education in the world” is an overarching position paper, drawing on contributions made in papers in this issue, to argue the case that there is a compelling need to overhaul education research, in South Africa in particular, and that the COVID-19 pandemic has created an opportunity to do so. The South African education scene is surveyed and the survey reveals enormous challenges along all three dimensions of education supply: quantitative, qualitative and equality. The education sector in South Africa is clearly in need of guidance from the education research community. Education research activity, globally and in South Africa in particular, is surveyed and found to be seriously wanting in terms of the lack of theory, autochthonous and a unified, coherent theory, the small scale and fragmented nature of many research projects, the lack of practical impact, education scholars eschewing subscription to and building a normative superstructure in their research and the concrete problems of the education faculty regarding heavy teaching loads and difficulty in attracting funding for education research. The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic and the ravages it has brought to education have created the need and the opportunity to urgently and enthusiastically attend to these desiderata in Education scholarship.

Revisiting community engagement : universities in the paradoxical context of contemporary scholarship in South Africa

Much of scholarly history on the South African higher education dispensation suggests that the concept of Community Engagement (CE) was relatively unknown until the late 1990s.The rise of this concept offers a plethora of opportunities for universities to interact with communities in order to promote diversity within the Higher Education (HE) sector. The integration of both research and CE by universities contribute to the intense discourse on transformation of HE through which these institutions are required to be responsive to the needs of the communities. The article employed a qualitative research approach to assess the effectiveness of the application of CE by South African universities and in the process, used questionnaires with open-ended questions and semi-structured interviews to collect data. Secondary data was limited to a review of literature. The context of its consideration is selected universities in South Africa. Recommendations and conclusion are provided.

Heteroglossia of Changing Scholarship in South Africa: In defence of the Afrocentric Archive

Heteroglossia of Changing Scholarship in South Africa: In defence of the Afrocentric Archive

PAST THE GLORIOUS AGE: OLD TESTAMENT SCHOLARSHIP IN SOUTH AFRICA—ARE WE MOVING ANYWHERE CLOSE TO BLACKENING OLD TESTAMENT SCHOLARSHIP?

Old Testament scholarship in South Africa has deepened, broadened, and evolved over the years; and various trails can be traced within it. The article interrogates whether Old Testament scholarship has passed the glorious age. The following issues are explored: First, the retirement of scholars in recent years as a signal of the coming to an end of the second-generation of Old Testament scholars in South Africa; second, the developments in black Old Testament scholarship as a trail which developed alongside white Old Testament scholarship; and third, the prospects of Old Testament scholarship from a decolonial perspective. This article argues that the future of Old Testament Scholarship in (South) Africa is in a blackening, that is, a redress process through broadening of the scholarship to reflect the continent in which it has to thrive .

I Am Afrocentric and Pan-African: A Response to Tawanda Sydesky Nyawasha on Scholarship in South Africa

African intellectuals are debating the future of knowledge construction in the wake of the collapse of colonization, European settlerism, and apartheid. Tawanda Sydesky Nyawasha has posited the debate between Afrocentricity and Eurocentrism in his paper “I am of Popper; I am of Asante: The Polemics of Scholarship in South Africa” published in Studies in Philosophy and Education as an expression of this contested ground. This response article argues that Africans have a duty to interrogate their own epistemological discourses in order to understand the history of knowledge construction on the continent of Africa. As the construction of the first pyramid at Sakkara was a consolidating event of human study, detailed investigations, elaboration of ideas, and advancement of the sciences and arts around 2700 BCE, clearly, African studies should stand at the head of the discourses about knowledge. Therefore, in this response, the author challenges Nyawasha’s understanding of Afrocentricity and criticizes the marginalization of African perspectives as just another assertion of Eurocentric ideas as universal when in fact they arise from a specific history and culture.

Un]masking Sebola’s mythology on the politics of scholarship in South Africa : an Afrocentric youth perspective

Un]masking Sebola’s mythology on the politics of scholarship in South Africa : an Afrocentric youth perspective

‘I am of Popper’, ‘I am of Asante’: The Polemics of Scholarship in South Africa

In this article, I examine the state of knowledge construction within the South African academe. This, I do by looking at how issues of epistemology and ontology are prioritised or negated in the social construction of knowledge. Focusing on what I have called ‘the problem of perspectives’, I show how ‘epistemological narcissism’ has often limited the scope of methodological and theoretical innovativeness. I argue that by relying on a set of certain theories that scholars have known and used over the years, and dismissing those that are considered ‘foreign’ (or non-African), the exercise of knowledge construction has become largely polemical.

From the earth of Africa: Q research in South Africa

As the title indicates, this article traces the history of Q research in South Africa. It focuses on South African scholars who have made worthwhile contributions to our understanding and knowledge of the Sayings Gospel Q. An attempt is ultimately made to detect some trends in this regard. One significant finding perhaps worth mentioning in the abstract is the undeniable influence of Andries G. van Aarde on Q scholarship in South Africa.

Embracing colouredness in Cape Town: Racial formation of first-generation Eritrean refugees and asylum seekers in South Africa

Sociologists of ‘race’ studying ‘coloured’ racial identity in South Africa have exclusively focused on its socio-historical invention throughout the colonial and apartheid eras and its continuity in post-apartheid South Africa as it relates to South African nationals. What has been missing in the literature, however, is how coloured identity is being navigated by foreign-born non-South African nationals in post-apartheid South Africa, such as refugees, asylum seekers and immigrants more generally. Furthermore, migration scholarship in South Africa has paid little attention to this phenomenon to date. This article addresses this lacuna by interviewing first-generation Eritrean refugees and asylum seekers residing in Cape Town to explore the extent of their attachment to coloured racial identity in their everyday lived experiences. An interpretative phenomenological analysis was employed to examine the lived racial self-identification patterns of the participants. Convenience and snowball sampling were utilised to select study participants. This article forms part of the results from a larger project. Sixteen participants were recruited and three major themes identified: (1) awareness of one’s phenotype; (2) adopting spouse and offspring’s racial identity; and (3) embracing colouredness as a positive racial identity. The article argues that, in everyday life, coloured racial identity, which was historically created to categorise South African citizens, is being adopted by refugee and asylum-seeker communities for whom coloured identity was never socio-politically constructed. It is also argued that extra-somatic social and perceptual factors informed the racial self-identification choices of the participants rather than their racial phenotype, which has traditionally informed the racial self-identification practices of South African citizens. Furthermore, the participants redefined coloured as a positive racial identity, effectively displacing negative discourses associated with coloured racial identity.

DECONSTRUCTING SHAKTI: INVESTIGATING REPRESENTATIONS OF THE HINDU GODDESS IN SOUTH AFRICA

Several scholars have investigated and attempted to categorise the Hindu goddess. This Hindu goddess has never been a neat packaged entity, monolithic, singular or unchanging. Hinduism, itself, largely constructed from very diverse traditions is further complicated as practised in South Africa where the diaspora worship the goddess in various ways. Although this article shows an brief overview of some of the most popular of the Hindu goddesses, its main focus is on representations of Kali and Draupadi and the ways in which these representations might be interpreted as feminist, particularly within the South Indian Amman tradition in South Africa. Using a poststructural feminist theoretical framework I analyse various representations of Kali and Draupadi and juxtapose these with mainstream feminist scholarship in South Africa. Analysing, in this instance, the work of Alleyn Diesel, I interrogate how Amman goddesses, such as Kali and Draupadi (also referred to as fierce goddesses), come to be favoured by feminists, over goddesses such as Parvati, Saraswati and Laxmi (or enign goddesses), entrenching a false binary between the categories, in order to promote a liberatory feminist agenda. I contend, first, that these categories of goddesses are not in simple opposition to each other, and that their representations are continually produced and thus dynamic and complex. Second, I argue that the valourisation of these Amman goddesses within feminist scholarship precludes the lived realities of the devotees themselves and that simply having a heroic feminist role model does not necessarily liberate women devotees from their multiple oppressions such as gender, class, caste and, in South Africa, race.

Research on Higher Education in South Africa: Stocktaking and Assessment from International Comparative Perspectives

The aim of this article is to compare Higher Education research in South Africa with developments in the field of Higher Education research internationally. This will be done by means of a content analysis of Higher Education published locally compared with that published internationally during the decade 2001-2010. While local Higher Education scholarship now seems to be more aligned with international Higher Education scholarship than was the case some two decades ago, there are indications that Higher Education scholarship in South Africa allows itself be dictated to by the current societal status quo, and that critical scholarship is not as thriving as was the case two decades ago. This is a dangerous development. In the light of this, the article concludes with three suggestions for further research regarding the integration of local Higher Education scholarship with international Higher Education research.

Feminist New Testament Scholarship in South Africa

Feminist biblical scholarship in South Africa that focuses on the New Testament cannot be separated from the larger context of feminist scholarship in South Africa or even Africa. Its emergence and development was tied to the emerging consciousness of women and men who began to question the roles of women in family, society, politics and religion, especially Christianity. This happened during the 1980s, thus lagging behind the North-American and European feminist movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Rather later than never! New Testament scholarship in South Africa has contributed to feminist knowledge production. The objective of this article is to provide an understanding of the contributions by feminist and female scholarship in the New Testament Society of Southern Africa by focusing on completed doctoral theses at South African universities and theological seminaries, and feminist research produced by females and males published in Neotestamentica, the official journal of the New Testament Society of Southern Africa. The purpose is to determine the New Testament feminist themes and knowledge that have been produced; to identify obstacles that might have influenced or might influence feminist New Testament scholarship; to determine possible research areas; and to discuss the future of feminist scholarship in the New Testament Society of Southern Africa.

Ants, spiders or bees ... and ticks? A typology of Old Testament scholarship in South Africa since 1994 within its African context

Ants, spiders or bees ... and ticks? A typology of Old Testament scholarship in South Africa since 1994 within its African context