Grandmothers of the sea: Stories and lessons from five Xhosa ocean elders
- Authors: Francis, Buhle , McGarry Dylan K
- Date: 2023
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , book chapter
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/433926 , vital:73010 , ISBN 9781003355199 , https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781003355199-12/grandmothers-sea-buhle-francis-dylan-mcgarry
- Description: We surface a historical, political, spiritual, economic and cultural analysis made by five Xhosa Grandmothers based in the Eastern Cape, regarding their entangled relationship with the Ocean. A nuanced, complex relationship with the ocean and the politics of natural resource management in South Africa emerged from our interviews, as scholar-activists, with these Grandmothers, and this chapter attempts to explore how a gendered upbringing, with its associated roles and responsibilities, have created a unique relationship with the ocean that must be understood in all its nuanced and complex facets. We explore how the identities and values of these Xhosa Grandmothers are relationally entangled with the ocean and politics of South Africa, and explore the deep ecological knowledge that they hold, yet is shamelessly ignored. Through their own renderings, we unpack the rich understanding of marine species, customary rights, ocean policy and governance practices that impact, impede and complicate their lives. Working with first-hand accounts (stories translated from Xhosa), the Grandmothers provide a nuanced and brazen analysis of the status quo of ocean governance, ocean literacy and policy. They unpack what interventions are needed, and call for a response that recognises Grandmothers as central to South Africa’s wellbeing, a health that sits precariously with the complex realities of older women’s entangled and diverse vulnerabilities. Finally, the firsthand accounts and analyses made by the Grandmothers, offer a politically rigorous contribution to the field of hydrofeminism, one told in their own way, using their own idiomatic rendering, with their own metaphors and figurations.
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- Date Issued: 2023
Education in times of COVID-19: Looking for silver linings in the Southern Africa’s educational responses
- Authors: Mukute, Mutizwa , Francis, Buhle , Burt, Jane C , De Souza, Ben
- Date: 2020
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/389799 , vital:68484 , xlink:href="https://www.ajol.info/index.php/sajee/article/view/198219"
- Description: Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) has disrupted socio-economic activities, including formal and non-formal education, across the world at lightning speed. By mid-April 2020, it had interrupted the formal education of nearly 1.6 billion students in 192 countries. COVID-19’s disruption of education in Africa, and especially in southern Africa, has been severe for several reasons. However, educational responses to COVID-19 suggest that it has stimulated the appetite for developing educational innovations – silver linings to the COVID-19 cloud. This paper is based on interviews conducted with 56 parents, students and educators involved in formal and non-formal education in Botswana, Malawi, Namibia, South Africa, Zambia and Zimbabwe. We identified the main educational challenges in these countries as being concerned with adapting to: (i) online education and learning, (ii) continuity of education from home, and (iii) community-based learning in small groups. The silver linings that we identified are: (i) putting greater emphasis on finding context-specific solutions to education and health problems (improvisation), which is important for educational relevance and reveals the value of local actors, (ii) making linkages between social and ecological systems clearer, which is making the value of education for sustainable development (ESD) in this century more explicit, and (iii) revealing structural inequality and justice issues in education, which draws attention to the need for urgently addressing them as part of transformative change in education and sustainable development.
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- Date Issued: 2020