In its ideal conception, the post-apartheid education landscape is regarded as a site of transformation that promotes democratic ideals such as citizenship, freedom, and critical thought. The role of the educator is pivotal in realising this transformation in the learners she teaches, but this realisation extends beyond merely teaching the curriculum to the educator herself, as the site where these democratic ideals are embodied and enacted. The teacher is thus centrally placed as a moral agent whose behaviour, in the classroom (...) space particularly, should, ideally, represent and communicate the values we aspire to cultivate in post-apartheid South African society generally. Thus, this notion of what teaching encompasses fits broadly into the conception of a “practice” in the sense developed by Alasdair MacIntyre, in that it is a transformative activity the enactment of which not only benefits the practitioner, but also extends to and benefits the broader community as well. Furthermore, practices are grounded in features of social or moral life we hold to be significant and, importantly, it is only through their active cultivation that they can be made tangible and further developed. MacIntyre’s theory of virtue is based on a three-fold interrelationship between practices, how they meaningfully narrate and shape an individual life, and how, in turn, this builds and sustains our moral and social traditions. Using these ideas to analyse post-apartheid South Africa, and the structural transformation paradox it is in, reveals the difficult and complex nature of a society that is in this transitional space. The claim is that attentiveness to practices in the educational space, and to the way they shape and inform moral and social traditions, is necessary to more fully understand and guide this societal transformation. (shrink)

This paper explores the incongruence between white South Africans’ pre- and post-apartheid experiences of home and identity, of which a wave of emigration is arguably a result. Among the commonest reasons given for emigrating are crime and affirmative action; however, this paper uncovers a deeper motivation for emigration using Charles Taylor’s concept of the social imaginary and Martin Heidegger’s concept of dwelling. The skewed social imaginary maintained by apartheid created an unrealistic sense of dwelling for most white South Africans. After (...) 1994, the conditions supporting this imaginary disintegrated. Many white South Africans feel so strong a sense of unease they can no longer dwell in the country. Many try to escape through emigration, but carry unresolved questions of identity and belonging to their new “homes.”. (shrink)

This article argues for epistemic decolonization by developing a relational model of knowledge, which we locate within indigenous knowledges. We live in a time of ongoing global, epistemic coloniality, embedded in and shaped by colonial ideas and practices. Epistemological decolonization requires taking nondominant knowledges and their epistemes seriously to open up the possibility of interrogating and dismantling the hegemony of the Western knowledge tradition. We here ask two related questions: What are the decolonial affordances of indigenous knowledges? And how do (...) these compare to other contemporary critiques of epistemic coloniality, specifically those mounted by posthumanism? In answer, we develop three definitional senses of relational with reference to indigenous knowledges. First, we define indigenous knowledges in relation to Western knowledge, with which they share a dialectical origin at the moment of colonial contact. Second, indigenous knowledges are relational in their ontological and axiological orientations. Third, relationality in indigenous knowledge suggests a trialectic space, rather than a dialectic space. We argue for the necessity of an anticolonial framework, which assigns priority to indigenous people’s perceptions and ways of knowing for theorizing recurring colonial relations and their (imperialistic) manifestations in producing and reproducing knowledge. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe problem addressed in this paper is the need for fresh resources for enhanced ethical leadership in South Africa and elsewhere in Africa. To respond to that problem the paper uses two valuable but insufficiently known sources from the culture of the Sesotho-speaking people of southern Africa, now found in Lesotho and much of South Africa's Free State province. The first one is a set of concepts that pertain to sound human relationships. The second one is Basotho history in the (...) persons of the founding monarch of the Basotho nation, King Moshoeshoe I and to a lesser extent his remarkable mentor, Chief Mohlomi. A final section of this paper draws these sources together into a set of contentions about successful leadership in which ethical quality is seen as paramount. (shrink)

Modern knowledge of the world's religions brings to light the problem of religious plurality, meaning the problem of why there is such great religious diversity, and which set of religious beliefs, if any, can be judged to be true. In 1799 and in the later editions, the young Friedrich Schleiermacher offered a pioneering account of religion in his revolutionary work, widely known as the Reden, first rendered in English in 1893 with the title On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers, (...) which this article summarises and critically evaluates in relation to that problem. Guided by the work of Eric Sharpe on the history of the comparative study of religion, the article locates Schleiermacher in the context of the state of knowledge about the plurality of religions when he wrote the Reden, compared to our present knowledge. The evaluation takes as its primary critical criteria the requirements of the academic study of religions, not the theological interests relevant to Schleiermacher as a Christian thinker. The evaluation yields a mixed verdict, noting four significant strengths in Schleiermacher's account of religion but also three important limitations, the main one arising, understandably, from his personal faith, but nonetheless a problem in the academic study of religions. (shrink)

Australian business consultant Ted Scott and his colleague, psychologist Phil Harker, have developed a model of ethical leadership in the workplace, involving two basic and contrasting styles of business leadership. Given their location in a wealthy, Western-type society, their model, which this paper describes, generates the following question: Does the model also have validity for Africans in southern Africa? To answer this question, the paper gives a profile of a widely held, traditional African view of human existence and correlates it (...) with the Scott/ Harker model. This leads to the conclusion that the Scott/ Harker model is well suited to the challenges facing African business leaders. (shrink)