This morning South Africa woke to the sad news of the country’s first two deaths due to Covid-19 as we entered the first day of a 21 day lockdown (later in the day the death toll was reduced to 1 after one deceased’s body tested negative). Some called …
In 2015 and 2016 students at South African universities campaigned under the banner #FeesMustFall for the abolition of tuition fees. It was widely reported that students were pushing for far-reaching change: Twenty-five years after the end of apartheid rule they were calling for the decolonisation of the country’s education …
I arrived in Namibia in the early southern winter of 1990, just over two months after the country’s day of independence. Those were exhilarating times. Wherever I went, Namibians hummed with excitement – the young and the old, urbanites and rural dwellers, the poor and the well-off, those who had …
Fifty years after student protests shook much of the Cold War world, in the ‘West’ and in the ‘East’, “Global 1968” has become the catchword to describe these profound generational revolts. West-Berlin, Paris, Berkeley spring to mind prominently, and Prague behind what was then the ‘Iron Curtain’. For most of …
Me: Okay, so we learn from anthropologists like Appadurai, and others, that critically speaking, globalisation isn’t a one-way street. On the other hand, people often are acutely aware that cultural imperialism is still a reality, right? What about Facebook, Twitter and Co? Aren’t the social media also a …