Elites abuse traditions to entrench their power

Nomalanga Mkhize, Business Day

THE "maiden bursary" offered by the uThukela district municipality affirms two points. First, it shows why the principle of constitutionalism is necessary in a pluralist society. By pluralist I mean a society in which many cultural institutions, customs and codes coexist and interact.

We can continuously debate and change the content of that Constitution over time, but a constitution is necessary to act as final arbiter lest we give way to extreme cultural relativism that can legitimise abhorrent practices.

Second, the bursary demonstrated a major ideological faultline of the postcolonial state. Not neocolonialism, but neotraditionalism. By this I mean the tendency of postcolonial political orders to express power and statecraft through a toxic mix of conservative politics, culturalist rhetoric and very masculinised political practice.

Achille Mbember: Decolonizing the University. What Now?

Anger over Rhodes vindicates Mamdani

Nomalanga Mkhize, Business Day

IN 1998 eminent Ugandan scholar Mahmood Mamdani put forward the following challenge to his colleagues at the University of Cape Town (UCT): "The key question before us is: how to teach Africa in a postapartheid academy?" This was in response to the hostile resistance he received when, as professor of the Centre for African Studies, he devised a curriculum that put at its centre African scholarship that many UCT academics had either never heard of, or whose significance they did not understand, largely due to the isolation of South African universities under apartheid.

On Language & Disruptive Pedagogy

There was a social media storm recently after a Rhodes University lecturer used isiXhosa in a history class – and then told unhappy students it was their duty to learn the local language. A version of this event posted on Facebook prompted many discussions on issues of language, privilege and power. After two weeks of debate, the lecturer, Naledi Nomalanga Mkhize, explains the reasoning behind her assertion. The Con

With almost 10 years’ experience in teaching and education activism behind me, having taught hundreds of students each year, one of the things that remains a mainstay of my career is that delicate combination of teaching through nurturing and through disruption.

SA must see its talents in midst of its dysfunction

Nomalanga Mkhize, Business Day

ABOUT a decade ago, one of my childhood friends, Michael, called me to tell me he had made it into the SA-Cuba medical training programme. Finally he could ditch his job at a Nelspruit mall, where he worked as a low-paid casual behind a shop counter.

He should never have been behind that counter in the first place. Michael was smart, gifted but had no money to get to university and, in the adverse conditions of his rural high school, produced competent but not outstanding matric results. When he left for Cuba, it felt like he had escaped the social dead-end that was our Mpumalanga village by the skin of his teeth.

EFF MPs embody local-level ANC culture

Nomalanga Mkhize, Business Day

THERE’s an African idiom that warns that if you let your child be a menace to the community, one day that same child will chase you around the house with your own sjambok. The idiom warns of the stark humiliation awaiting elders who leave the disciplining of their young so late that they develop incorrigible tendencies. One could argue that ever since his expulsion in 2012, Julius Malema has been chasing the African National Congress (ANC) all about the village with its own sjambok.

Re-opened restitution a cover for neo-traditionalist power grab

By Nomalanga Mkhize, Custom Contested

In recent weeks, South African news reports have been filled with leaders announcing claims and counter-claims to land on behalf of their “people” and royal clans under the newly amended Restitution Act of 1994.

These royal claims are said to be justified by South Africa’s history of colonial dispossession, which was the most extreme on the African continent and waged through two centuries of warfare, and 50 years of legislated discrimination.

Legacy of the racial subsidy has yet to be overcome

Nomalanga Mkhize, Business Day

WHAT dire household financial situation drove rock drillers to wage low-intensity war on their employers in Marikana in 2012? Debt and dependants. That was the conclusion I drew, not from what I knew about rock drillers, but by extrapolating from my own experience in a middle-income black family, where my parents’ salaries were expected to take care of almost everyone in the extended family.

It boggles my mind to think how my parents did it when, at one point, there were up to 20 people living in our home in the suburbs. What was happening was not some natural "clan" way of African communal living transplanting itself into modernity. It was the continuation of a model of South African industrial economic relations in which black households came to depend on a relatively small pool of income earners. Historically, the mining sector erected this archetypal labour extraction model because, for a long time, the sector paid male migrant workers as though their wives and children were healthily subsisting off the land in the so-called "native reserves" — a well-documented phenomenon that Achille Mbembe called "the racial subsidy".

Intellectual Traditions in South Africa

The History of Land Dispossession and the Consequences for Land Policy Now

Forget the skirt, arrest the fashion police!

Thought Leader

If Lindiwe Mazibuko and Angie Motshekga appear poles apart politically, there is one reality they have shared socially — being subjected to public sexist insults.

Mazibuko’s case is only the latest in a number of public incidents where women are dismissed on the basis of body, age and dress — that age old language of reminding women that even when we have earned our right to leadership, we are not truly to be taken seriously in the public sphere.

This kind of belittling manifests itself even more aggressively in public spaces outside the plush carpets of Parliament. Too often these scenes play out in our taxi ranks where black women are punished for owning their bodies.

Re-configuring South Africa’s Youth Political Sphere

by Nomalanga Mkhize, Oppidan Press

A challenge was posed to me by the Chairperson of the Rhodes University South African Students Congress (SASCO), Mthobisi Buthelezi, at the seminar on “teaching born frees”.

He asked me to define what I meant when I said there was a missing “in-between sphere” in contemporary South African youth politics.

At the seminar I defined two dominant spheres of post-apartheid “youth political activity”.

Tweeting with a conscience

by Percy Zvomuya, Mail & Guardian

Nomalanga Mkhize

It is appropriate that historian, educator and television presenter Nomalanga Mkhize’s Twitter tagline comes from ­Brazilian educator, philosopher and influential theorist of critical pedagogy, Paulo Freire.

The Brazilian wrote that “the oppressed must be their own example in the struggle for their redemption” and Mkhize’s activism and Twitter discussions attest to that.