Women academics from South Africa

"The truth isn't always beauty, but the hunger for it is."

"The gap between the committed and the indifferent is a Sahara whose faint trails, followed by the mind's eye only, fade out in sand."

"I opened the telegram and said, "He's dead —" and as I looked up into Graham Mill's gaze I saw that he knew who, before I could say."

"Change the world but keep bits of it the way I like it for myself — who wouldn’t make the world over if it were to be as easy as that."

"I like the idea of a literary patchwork, novel by novel, poem by poem, by different writers, mapping out an era, 'a continent' more and more thoroughly. No one writer can do it. (1979)"

"I think that the decision to be sincere is an artistic one."

"Writing is making sense of life. You work your whole life and perhaps you've made sense of one small area."

"Novelists and short-story writers provide implicitly a critique of their society…A good writer can't help revealing the truth that is in his society and by that token there is a political implication and he is politically committed. (1983)"

"In countries like Czechoslovakia, like South Africa, like Argentina, guilt by association is a fact and therefore the friendships you form can be a political act. This circumstance, way of life, is very complex. People think that a political act is signing a declaration or planting a bomb, but there are all kinds of political acts in countries where there is a great political struggle going on."

"I think that as long as those of us in South Africa who are articulate are asked to go abroad, and we know we are going to be interviewed, we cannot refuse. There are so many people in South Africa, within the country, who are muzzled. And there are others who may not be muzzled within South Africa but whose passports are withdrawn, people like Bishop Desmond Tutu-a very important voice; you know, a writer is nothing compared with him. He is a big figure, a real leader, and he can't go abroad and speak. So I think that those of us who can, as long as we can, we have to use the opportunity."

"Responsibility is what awaits outside the Eden of Creativity."

"There was no mistaking her. She was a young woman whose cultivated gentleness of expression and shabby homespun style of dress, in the context in which she was encountered, suggested not transcendental meditation centre or environmental concern group or design studio, but a sign of identification with the humanity of those who had nothing and risked themselves."

"'Even the cat buries its dirt; I carry mine around with me.' She thought of saying it aloud many times in the weeks after she came home from the hospital."

"The creative act is not pure. History evidences it. Sociology extracts it. The writer loses Eden, writes to be read and comes to realize that he is answerable."

"Censorship is never over for those who have experienced it. It is a brand on the imagination that affects the individual who has suffered it, forever."

"In every encounter between human beings there is a pace set that belongs to them, and that will be taken up in its own rhythm whenever they are together."

"Everyone wears the uniform of how he sees himself or how he disguises himself."

"What is shameful cannot be shared. What is shameful, separates."

"You can't change a regime on the basis of compassion. There's got to be something harder."

"I shall never write an autobiography, I'm much too jealous of my privacy for that."

"Mostly I'm interviewed by white people, and identified with white society."

"Well, you know, in the fundamentalist milieu of the Afrikaners, there was a sense that they were a chosen people, that they were bringing civilization to the blacks."

"Can there be the phenomenon of a world state of mind?"

"time is on a plane of existence great writers sometimes penetrate"

"Fear. It's unacknowledged; shared by friend and foe if nothing else is."

"Dangers are relative, over time and distance; fear is relative, whether it menaces a multitude or a single life, but it always demands the same answers: a yes, or a no. Capitulate within oneself, or refuse to submit to attrition, fear that eats the soul."

"Success sometimes may be defined as a disaster put on hold. Qualified. Has to be."

"There are two kinds of leaders in the species humankind. There is the man or woman of personal ambition, and there is the man or woman who creates a self out of response to people's needs, the call of conscience against oppression, injustice, and sufferings of any nature within our human condition. To the one, the drive comes narrowly from within; to the other it is a charge of energy which comes in others needs and the demands these make on all of us who share humanity. Conscience is a form of solidarity."

"The question mark remains. It hangs over peace negotiations - that vital base for the answer an outsider who believes in justice surely must support: two fully independent states on agreed, realistic frontiers."

"Without real opposition you get dictators down the line. Idi, Amin, Mugabe. No democracy without opposition."

"No globalisation without a human face."

"There can be no global culture while there are inhabitants deprived of the ability to read, to have access to the powers of the imagination released through the written word, through literature; deprived of the intellectual and spiritual bounty of libraries."

"Art defies defeat by its very existence, representing the celebration of life, in spite of all attempts to degrade and destroy it."

"Learning to write sent me falling, falling through the surface of the South African way of life."

"Anyone who lives within a mile of the zoo hears lions on summer nights. A tourist could be fooled. Africa already; at last, even though he went to bed in yet another metropole."

"Just before light, when it's supposed to be darkest, the body's at its lowest ebb and in the hospital on the hill old people die the night opens, a Black hole between stars, and from it comes a deep panting. Very distant and at once very close, right in the year, for the sound of breath is always intimate.It grows and gorws, a rising groan lifs out of the curved bars of the cage and hangs above the whole city -- And then it drops back, sinks away, becomes panting again."

"Wait for it; it will fall so quiet, hardly more than a faint roughness snagging the air in the ear's chambers. ... And begins once more. The panting reaches up up up down down down to that awe-ful groan!"

"The zoo lions do no utter during the day. They yawn; wait for their ready-slaughtered kill to be tossed at them; keep their unused claws sheathed in huge harmless pads on which top-heavy, untidy heads rest,... gazing through lid-slats with what zoo visitors think of in sentimental prurience as yearning.Or once we were near the Baltic and the leviathan hooted from the night fog at sea. But would I dare to open my mouth now? Could I trust my breath to be sweet, these stale nights?"

"It's only on warm summer nights that the lions are restless. What they're seeing when they gaze during the day is nothing, their eyes are open but they don't see us -you can tell that when the lens of the pupil suddenlys shutters at the close swoop0 of one of the popcorn-begging pigeons through the bars of the cage. ... It's only on certain nights that their muscles flex and they begin to pant,their flanks heave as if they had been running through the dark night while other creatures shrank from their path, their jaws hang tense and wet as saliva flows as if in response to a scent of prey, at last they heave up their too-big heads, heavy, heavy heads, and out it comes. Out over the suburbs. A dreadful straining of the bowels to deliver itself; a groan that hangs above the houses in a low-lying cloud of smog and anguish."

"No one can say what it was the white soldier said over the telephone to his commanding officer, and if the commanding officer had told him what was going to be done, or whether the white soldier knew, as a matter of procedure laid down in his military training for this kind of war, what would be done. The police found the bicycle beneath his dangling shoes. So the family hanger-on still rides it; it would have been lost if it had been safe in the kitchen when the raid came. No one knows where the chief found a rope, in the ruins of the village."

"The young man outside. But he is not part of the unreality; he is for good now. Odd…somewhere there was an idea that he, that living with him, was part of the holiday, the strange places. The heat of shame mounted through her legs and body and sounded in her ears like the sound of sand pouring. Pouring, pouring. She sat there, sick. A weariness, a tastelessness, the discovery of a void made her hands slacken their grip, atrophy emptily, as if the hour was not worth their grasp. She was feeling like this again. She had thought it was something to do with singleness, with being alone and belonging too much to oneself.She sat there not wanting to move or speak, or to look at anything even; so that the mood should be associated with nothing, no object, word, or sight that might recur and so recall the feeling again….Smuts blew in grittily, settled on her hands. Her back remained at exactly the same angle, turned against the young man sitting with his hands drooping between his sprawled legs, and the lion, fallen on its side in the corner.The train had cast the station like a skin. It called out to the sky, I’m coming, I’m coming; and again, there was no answer."

"The train came out of the red horizon and bore down towards them over the single straight track."

"Creaking, jerking, jostling, gasping, the train filled the station."

"Between its vandyke teeth, in the mouth opened in a roar too terrible to be heard, it had a black tongue."

"I should have given it up long ago if it had not been for her."

"Out in the country, even ten miles out, life is better than that."

"The farm hasn’t managed that for us, of course, but it has done other things, unexpected, illogical.”"

"And for a moment I accept the triumph as I had managed it.”"

"When Johannesburg people speak of ‘tension,’ they don’t mean hurrying people in crowded streets, the struggle for money, or the general competitive character of city life. They mean the guns under the white men’s pillows and the burglar bars on the white men’s windows. They mean those strange moments on city pavements when a [B]lack man won’t stand aside for a white man.”"

"Among the group of people waiting at the fortress was a schoolgirl in a brown and yellow uniform holding a green eiderdown quilt and, by the loop at its neck, a red hot-water bottle. (First lines)"

"There are always sources of desolation that aren't taken into account because no one knows what they will be."

"Flora pretended to cuddle me against the cold, but I didn't need her kind of emotional excitation. She talked about 'the girls' in there, and my mother was one of them."

"For nearly thirty years the Communist Party allied itself as a legal organization with the African struggle for black rights and the extension of the franchise to the black majority."

"Strong emotion - faith? - has different ways of being manifested among the different disciples within which people order their behaviour."

"Conrad went off some evenings for Spanish lessons and sometimes came back with the girl who taught him."

"Communists are the last optimists."

"The will is my own. The emotion's my own. The right to be inconsolable. When I feel, there's no 'we', only 'I'."

"Sentiment is for those who don't know what to do next."

"The blackman is not fighting for equality with whites. Blackness is the blackman refusing to believe the whiteman's way of life is best for blacks."

"The main reason why we're still where we are is blacks haven't united as blacks because we're told all the time to do it is to be racist."

"Our liberation cannot be divorced from black consciousness because we cannot be conscious of ourselves and at the same time remain slaves -"

"When the body is no longer an attraction, an expression of desire, to bare your breasts and belly is simple; you lay like dogs or cats grateful for the sun."

"But there's no indemnity. You can't be afraid to do good in case evil results."

"It'll be enough to take your mind off your stomach. - When lovers cannot touch, they tease each other instead."

"after my first trip out, I realized that “home” was certainly and exclusively—Africa. It could never be anywhere else."

"It was Sinclair's The Jungle that really started me thinking about politics: I thought, good God, these people who are exploited in a meat-packing factory-they're just like blacks here. And the whole idea that people came to America, not knowing the language, having to struggle in sweat shops. . . I didn't relate this to my own father, because my father was bourgeois by then... but I related it to the blacks. Again, what a paradox that South Africa was the blacks' own country, but they were recruited just as if they had been migrant workers for the mines. So I saw the analogy. And that was the beginning of my thinking about my position vis-à-vis blacks. But though I didn't know anything-I was twelve or thirteen, and leading the odd kind of life I did, living in books-I began to think about these things before, perhaps, I was ready for them. When I got to university, it was through mixing with other people who were writing or painting that I got to know black people as equals. In a general and inclusive, non-racial way, I met people who lived in the world of ideas, in the world that interested me passionately. In the town where I lived, there was no mental food of this kind at all. I’m often amazed to think how they live, those people, and what an oppressed life it must be, because human beings must live in the world of ideas. This dimension in the human psyche is very important. It was there, but they didn’t know how to express it."

"(talking about herself while she was in university) My approach to living as a white supremacist, perforce, among blacks, was, I see now, the humanist approach, the individualistic approach. I felt that all I needed, in my own behavior, was to ignore and defy the color bar. In other words, my own attitude toward blacks seemed to be sufficient action. I didn’t see that it was pretty meaningless until much later."

"the real influence of politics on my writing is the influence of politics on people. Their lives, and I believe their very personalities, are changed by the extreme political circumstances one lives under in South Africa. I am dealing with people; here are people who are shaped and changed by politics. In that way my material is profoundly influenced by politics."

"in Burger’s Daughter, you could say on the face of it that it’s a book about white communists in South Africa. But to me, it’s something else. It’s a book about commitment. Commitment is not merely a political thing. It’s part of the whole ontological problem in life. It’s part of my feeling that what a writer does is to try to make sense of life. I think that’s what writing is, I think that’s what painting is. It’s seeking that thread of order and logic in the disorder, and the incredible waste and marvelous profligate character of life. What all artists are trying to do is to make sense of life."

"there’s a fairly good relationship between black and white writers. Literature is one of the few areas left where black and white feel some identity of purpose; we all struggle under censorship, and most white writers feel a strong sense of responsibility to promote, defend, and help black writers where possible."

"it was Proust who said that style is the moment of identification between the writer and his situation. Ideally that is what it should be—one allows the situation to dictate the style."

"Death is really the mystery of life, isn’t it? If you ask, “What happens when we die? Why do we die?” you are asking, “Why do we live?”"

"Progress is the business of making life more safe and more enjoyable . . . fuller, generally."

"If somebody is partly frivolous or superficial, has moments of cruelty or self-doubt, I don’t write them off, because I think that absolutely everybody has what are known as human failings."

"A writer doesn’t only need the time when he’s actually writing—he or she has got to have time to think and time just to let things work out. Nothing is worse for this than society. Nothing is worse for this than the abrasive, if enjoyable, effect of other people."

"I can’t understand writers who feel they shouldn’t have to do any of the ordinary things of life, because I think that this is necessary; one has got to keep in touch with that. The solitude of writing is also quite frightening. It’s quite close sometimes to madness, one just disappears for a day and loses touch. The ordinary action of taking a dress down to the dry cleaner’s or spraying some plants infected with aphids is a very sane and good thing to do. It brings one back, so to speak. It also brings the world back."

"I would like to say something about how I feel in general about what a novel, or any story, ought to be. It’s a quotation from Kafka. He said, “A book ought to be an ax to break up the frozen sea within us.”"

"The day the cease-fire was signed she was caught in a crowd. Peasant boys from Europe who had made up the colonial army and freedom fighters whose column had marched into town were staggering about together outside the barracks, not three blocks from her house in whose rooms, for ten years, she had heard the blurred parade-ground bellow of colonial troops being trained to kill and be killed."

"How to break in: with a name, a statement."

"You said: "...and I'm between two girls at the moment.' What exactly had led up to this statement that could have come at any time, that I had been ready for so long I began to forget it would ever come, and that you had been waiting to say for a specific length of time I could not know?"

"When you live in a small town far from the world you read about in municipal library books, the advent of repair men in the house is a festival. Daily life is gaily broken open, improvisation takes over."

"There were two soldiers in front of her, blocking her off by their clumsy embrace(how do you do it, how do you do what you've never done before) and the embrace opened like a door and took her in -- a pink hand with bitten nails grasping her right arm, a black hand with a big-dialled watch and thong bracelet pulling at her left elbow. Their three heads collided gaily, musk of sweat and tang of strong sweet soap clapped a mask to her nose and mouth. They all gasped with delicious shock. She put up an arm around each neck, the rough pile of an army haircut on one side, the soft negro hair on the other, and kissed them both on the cheek. The embrace broke."

"An accolade, one side a white cheek, the other a black. The white one she kissed on the left cheek, the black one on the right, as if these were two sides of one face."

"She had not kissed on the mouth, she had not sought anonymous lips and tongues in the licence of festival. Yet she had kissed. Watching herself again, she knew that. She did not tell what happened not because her husband would suspect licence in her."

"The ugly mansions of the rich who had fled stood empty on the bluff above the sea."

"She avoided walking past the barracks because of the machine guns the young sentries had in place of rifles."

"Afrikaner farmer—a regional Party leader and Commandant of the local security commando”"

"He [the victim] was my friend, I always took him hunting with me"

"city and overseas people"

"Bad enough to have killed a man,” he believes they will say to themselves, “without helping the Party’s, the government’s, the country’s enemies, as well"

"a moment of high excitement shared through the roof of the cab"

"big, calm, clever son of Willem Van der Vyver"

"He knows that the story of the Afrikaner farmer—regional Party leader and Commandant of the local security commando—shooting a black man who worked for him will fit exactly their version of South Africa."

"People in the farming community understand how he must feel. Bad enough to have killed a man, without helping the Party’s, the government’s, the country’s enemies, as well."

"Odd in-between period which sometimes inserts itself into historical time when not only the later historians but the actors and witnesses, the living themselves, become aware of an interval in time which is altogether determined by things that are no longer and by things that are not yet. In history, these intervals have shown more than once that they may contain the moment of truth."

"“[T]he isotopy of fragmentation constitutes a unifying web structurally present at the level of story, text, and narration”"

"despite the fact that the narrative demonstrates that the voice of the ‘other’ can be heard and imagined, Gordimer’s attitude toward her own whiteness […] is resentful and hostile”"

"propos[ed] a future South Africa, not only on terms of equality of races but of sexes, too”"

"She reminds me of pig. Our ancestors didn't eat pig."

"What had Aila done to assuage his anguish at Baby's attempt to end her life before it had begun? Nothing. Silence. Silence upon the other silence. Comfort and understanding he had had to find elsewhere."

"It was my mother who had talked under interrogation. I know why she did. It was to be sure neither her husband nor I would be held responsible."

"Underground: this time, as at other times, he's aware of how unsuitably abstract a term that is. To hide away, you have to be out in the open of life; too soon and easily run to ground, holed up somewhere. Best safety lies in crowds. ("Safe Houses")"

"Breathe. Breath. A baby, a chicken hatching-the first imperative is to breathe. Breathless. Breathe! Out of this concentration, in which he forgets even the rhythm of his feet, is a bellows pumped by the command, the admonition, the slap on the bottom that shocks the baby into inhalation-comes his second wind. Unless you go out like this, morning and evening, you never know what no one can remember, that first discovery of independent life: I can breathe. (beginning of "Keeping Fit")"

"That night our mother went to the shop and she didn't come back. Ever. What happened? I don't know. (beginning of "The Ultimate Safari")"

"When the six-year-old daughter of a friend of mine overheard her father telling someone that I had been awarded the Nobel Prize, she asked whether I had ever received it before. He replied that the Prize was something you could get only once. Whereupon the small girl thought a moment: 'Oh' she said, 'so it's like chicken-pox.'"

"I certainly find being the recipient at this celebratory dinner more pleasurable and rewarding than chicken-pox, having now in my life experienced both. But the small girl was not entirely wrong. Writing is indeed, some kind of affliction in its demands as the most solitary and introspective of occupations."

"We must live fully in order to secrete the substance of our work, but we have to work alone."

"When I began to write as a very young person in a rigidly racist and inhibited colonial society, I felt, as many others did, that I existed marginally on the edge of the world of ideas, of imagination and beauty. These, taking shape in poetry and fiction, drama, painting and sculpture, were exclusive to that distant realm known as 'overseas'."

"What we had to do to find the world was to enter our own world fully, first. We had to enter through the tragedy of our own particular place. If the Nobel awards have a special meaning, it is that they carry this concept further. In their global eclecticism they recognize that no single society, no country or continent can presume to create a truly human culture for the world. To be among laureates, past and present, is at least to belong to some sort of one world."

"In the beginning was the Word. The Word was with God, signified God's Word, the word that was Creation. But over the centuries of human culture the word has taken on other meanings, secular as well as religious. To have the word has come to be synonymous with ultimate authority, with prestige, with awesome, sometimes dangerous persuation, to have Prime Time, a TV talk show, to have the gift of the gab as well as that of speaking in tongues. The word flies through space, it is bounced from satellites, now nearer than it has ever been to the heaven from which it was believed to have come."

"Like the prisoners incarcerated with the jaguar in Borges' story, 'The God's Script', who was trying to read, in a ray of light which fell only once a day, the meaning of being from the marking on the creature's pelt, we spend our lives attempting to interpret through the word the readings we take in the societies, the world of which we are part. It is in this sense, this inextricable, ineffable participation, that writing is always and at once an exploration of self and of the world; of individual and collective being."

"Humans, the only self-regarding animals, blessed or cursed with this torturing higher faculty, have always wanted to know why."

"Since humans became self-regarding they have sought, as well, explanations for the common phenomena of procreation, death, the cycle of seasons, the earth, sea, wind and stars, sun and moon, plenty and disaster. With myth, the writer's ancestors, the oral story-tellers, began to feel out and formulate these mysteries, using the elements of daily life — observable reality — and the faculty of the imagination — the power of projection into the hidden — to make stories."

"Myth was the mystery plus the fantasy — gods, anthropomorphized animals and birds, chimera, phantasmagorical creatures — that posits out of the imagination some sort of explanation for the mystery. Humans and their fellow creatures were the materiality of the story, but as Nikos Kazantzakis once wrote, 'Art is the representation not of the body but of the forces which created the body.'"

"There are many proven explanations for natural phenomena now; and there are new questions of being arising out of some of the answers. For this reason, the genre of myth has never been entirely abandoned, although we are inclined to think of it as archaic. If it dwindled to the children's bedtime tale in some societies, in parts of the world protected by forests or deserts from international megaculture it has continued, alive, to offer art as a system of mediation between the individual and being. And it has made a whirling comeback out of Space, an Icarus in the avatar of Batman and his kind, who never fall into the ocean of failure to deal with the gravity forces of life."

"Perhaps it is the positive knowledge that humans now possess the means to destroy their whole planet, the fear that they have in this way themselves become the gods, dreadfully charged with their own continued existence, that has made comic-book and movie myth escapist."

"The forces of being remain. They are what the writer, as distinct from the contemporary popular mythmaker, still engage today, as myth in its ancient form attempted to do."

"The writer in relation to the nature of perceivable reality and what is beyond — imperceivable reality — is the basis for all these studies, no matter what resulting concepts are labelled, and no matter in what categorized microfiles writers are stowed away for the annals of literary historiography. Reality is constructed out of many elements and entities, seen and unseen, expressed, and left unexpressed for breathing-space in the mind."

"Literary scholars end up being some kind of storyteller, too."

"Perhaps there is no other way of reaching some understanding of being than through art? Writers themselves don't analyze what they do; to analyze would be to look down while crossing a canyon on a tightrope."

"Any writer of any worth at all hopes to play only a pocket-torch of light — and rarely, through genius, a sudden flambeau — into the bloody yet beautiful labyrinth of human experience, of being."

"I have said that nothing factual that I write or say will be as truthful as my fiction. The life, the opinions, are not the work, for it is in the tension between standing apart and being involved that the imagination transforms both. Let me give some minimal account of myself. I am what I suppose would be called a natural writer. I did not make any decision to become one. I did not, at the beginning, expect to earn a living by being read. I wrote as a child out of the joy of apprehending life through my senses — the look and scent and feel of things; and soon out of the emotions that puzzled me or raged within me and which took form, found some enlightenment, solace and delight, shaped in the written word."

"I was evidence of the theory that books are made out of other books . . . But I did not remain so for long, nor do I believe any potential writer could."

"With adolescence comes the first reaching out to otherness through the drive of sexuality. For most children, from then on the faculty of the imagination, manifest in play, is lost in the focus on day dreams of desire and love, but for those who are going to be artists of one kind or another the first life-crisis after that of birth does something else in addition: the imagination gains range and extends by the subjective flex of new and turbulent emotions. There are new perceptions. The writer begins to be able to enter into other lives. The process of standing apart and being involved has come."

"Both Borges and Sartre, from their totally different extremes of denying literature a social purpose, were certainly perfectly aware that it has its implicit and unalterable social role in exploring the state of being, from which all other roles, personal among friends, public at the protest demonstration, derive. Borges was not writing for his friends, for he published and we all have received the bounty of his work. Sartre did not stop writing, although he stood at the barricades in 1968."

"Camus dealt with the question best. He said that he liked individuals who take sides more than literatures that do. 'One either serves the whole of man or does not serve him at all. And if man needs bread and justice, and if what has to be done must be done to serve this need, he also needs pure beauty which is the bread of his heart.' So Camus called for 'Courage in and talent in one's work.' And Márquez redefined tender fiction thus: The best way a writer can serve a revolution is to write as well as he can. I believe that these two statements might be the credo for all of us who write. They do not resolve the conflicts that have come, and will continue to come, to contemporary writers. But they state plainly an honest possibility of doing so, they turn the face of the writer squarely to her and his existence, the reason to be, as a writer, and the reason to be, as a responsible human, acting, like any other, within a social context."

"Being here: in a particular time and place. That is the existential position with particular implications for literature."

"Most imprisoned writers have been shut away for their activities as citizens striving for liberation against the oppression of the general society to which they belong. Others have been condemned by repressive regimes for serving society by writing as well as they can; for this aesthetic venture of ours becomes subversive when the shameful secrets of our times are explored deeply, with the artist's rebellious integrity to the state of being manifest in life around her or him; then the writer's themes and characters inevitably are formed by the pressures and distortions of that society as the life of the fisherman is determined by the power of the sea."

"There is a paradox. In retaining this integrity, the writer sometimes must risk both the state's indictment of treason, and the liberation forces' complaint of lack of blind commitment."

"The writer must take the right to explore, warts and all, both the enemy and the beloved comrade in arms, since only a try for the truth makes sense of being, only a try for the truth edges towards justice just ahead of Yeats's beast slouching to be born."

"The writer is of service to humankind only insofar as the writer uses the word even against his or her own loyalties, trusts the state of being, as it is revealed, to hold somewhere in its complexity filaments of the cord of truth, able to be bound together, here and there, in art: trusts the state of being to yield somewhere fragmentary phrases of truth, which is the final word of words, never changed by our stumbling efforts to spell it out and write it down, never changed by lies, by semantic sophistry, by the dirtying of the word for the purposes of racism, sexism, prejudice, domination, the glorification of destruction, the curses and the praise-songs."

"When I was a child, we seemed to be living in a world remote from the rest of the world. But television has made a great difference to all of us. If something happens where I live, you see it tomorrow or perhaps even at the same time it is happening there. It's not "one world" in the sense that conflicts are resolved in the world. But we are more one world in that we know what is going on and are psychologically influenced by what goes on around us."

"for country people, things are as they were. They are very remote, very poor, very dependent on the white farmers they work for. It's very difficult to organize them. There are still huge, huge problems to be tackled."

"one of the wonderful things, in spite of all the terrible things that happen in South Africa, is the way people continue to keep their dignity. They continue to love, to laugh, to get pleasure out of life."

"This idea that revolutionaries are martyrs who go around looking gloomy and noble, this is a romantic idea for people who've never met anybody who's gone through the experiences."

"to me this is what fiction is about; it asks questions, and it doesn't answer."

"The real influence of the events in the Soviet Union was to spread a lot of unease and anxiety in the African National Congress, because the Soviet Union had been the only country, really, that had stood by us all those years. The West never lifted a finger or gave a cent to the African National Congress. America, England, Germany-everyone supported the South African government against the attempts of the African National Congress to bring about change."

"...a swarthy man (Italian or jew?) with a scarred grin, and eyes, one dark-brilliant, one blurred blind, from whom radiant vitality comes impudently since he is gesticulating with a stump in place of one arm."

"The purpose of life is to defend the body against the violence of pain."

"That kind of act isn’t in the range of emotional control in which their son’s character was formed, or the contemporary ethic that men don’t own women. Therefore the act could not have been committed."

"She would have drowned herself long ago if she had not met me. She doesn’t do that because, perhaps, I am more dreadful."

"I have the feeling you’re in some way suspicious of me. You’re trying to … get me to explain, because I’m his mother. I ought to know, I should know why. And I’m his mother. I ought to know!"

"Whatever happens to him, whatever he has done … he can come to us. There’s nothing you cannot tell us. We’re always there for you. Always."

"Duncan found her and took her to hospital. He brought her back to life. Literally. She owes her life to Duncan; or she blames him."

"Discovery is not an end. Only a new mystery."

"Two creatures caught in the headlights of catastrophe. Nothing between Duncan and the judge, passing sentence, but Motsamai and his confidence."

"Oh dear, I’m sorry, Bra[brother] and Duncan remembers that “it was exactly the manner, the words, with which the man had announced the end of the months they had lived as lovers.""

"Had not been able to tell them anything that was leading him towards that Friday night when something terrible happened to him."

"...in whom self-control has been strongly established since childhood”, and that the evening of the murder was no exception."

"...cannot distinguish which Duncan is being described in truth."

"It is not in his nature. Never. I swear on my own life."

"Disgust, a disintegration of everything."

"I suddenly picked up the gun on the table. And then he was quiet."

"Whether or not harmful intention was premeditated, when the accused picked up the gun … was he in a state of automatism in which … there was total loss of control?"

"Bring death and life together."

"Clustered predators round a kill. It's a small car with a young woman inside it. The battery has failed and taxis, cars, minibuses, vans, motorcycles butt and challenge one another, reproach and curse her, a traffic mob mounting its own confusion. Get going. Stupid bloody woman. Idikazana lomlungu, le! She throws up hands, palms open, in surrender. They continue to jostle and blare their impatience. She gets out of her car and faces them. (first lines)"

"That night they made love, the kind of love-making that is another country, a country of its own, not yours or mine. (p144)"

"All drifts together, and there is no onlooker; the desert is eternity. (p252)"

"To me, writing, from the very beginning and right until this day, is a voyage of discovery. Of the mystery of life. I am one of those people who have no religious faith, I am an atheist. I believe there is only this life. But this life is so incredible."

"The truth can only be pieced together from these different bits of knowledge, these different impressions, these different experiences. Goethe said: “You close your eyes and you dip your hand into your society and you bring up a little bit of the truth.” And that is the material of your writing."

"I’m beginning now even to see it in my own books which are written from many different points of view, very different personae, first person as a man, a child, a woman, a young person, an older person, there is the sense, looking back, that you are really writing one book all your life. Because there is this voyage of discovery of life."

"There is more truth in my fiction than in nonfiction. I think, subconsciously, [if] I am writing an article or talking to you, there is a certain amount of self-censorship going on. But in my fiction I am writing as if I were dead. I want to say it all. I want to say everything I know."

"Do we ever live really in the present? I don’t think so, not entirely, do you?...There are always intrusions, sometimes welcome, sometimes not, from the past."

"Writers don’t only listen, they also look. Though, indeed, they do listen. I started being an eavesdropper when I was a child, picking up unexplained little bits of conversation and imagining what led to that, what drama in that couple’s life, or what happened between that child and the parent when I overheard: “Stop that! You’re being very naughty.” You know, what does it all mean?"

"As a writer, I'm a composite intelligence."

"Television and newspapers show people's lives at a certain point. But novels tell you what happened after the riot, what happened when everybody went home."

"Music has no limits of a life-span."

"A desert is a place without expectation."

"Death's the discarder."

"Presence of death standing by makes a sacrament of tenuous relationships."

"I believe that women writers have not engaged or been allowed to participate in the discourse of official remembrance and that this is why their literature has been able to capture the frailty of the human spirit as well as its depth. Women writers who have contributed to the softness of remembrance can be traced from the early diary writings of young Anne Frank, to the visionary human rights declaration of Eleanor Roosevelt, and finally, to the powerful denouncing of apartheid by Nadine Gordimer."

"I will always be grateful for the presence in the world of Nadine Gordimer, who has delivered in literature a South Africa most of us could not have known without her."

"As a writer and as a human being, Nadine Gordimer responded with exemplary courage and creative energy to the great challenge of her times, the system of apartheid unjustly and heartlessly imposed on the South African people. Looking to the great realist novelists of the 19th century as models, she produced a body of work in which the South Africa of the late 20th century is indelibly recorded for all time."

"Nadine Gordimer helped me see how fiction writing can illuminate reality"

"Because I have known so many different writers I have often thought about what generosity means in a writer. Sometimes, as with other people you meet, you can tell about a writer at once. Though I only met her on one occasion I knew immediately that Nadine Gordimer was an enormously likeable, generous and admirable person, and that is what I felt over many years reading her work."

"Nadine Gordimer's work is endowed with an emotional genius so palpable one experiences it like a finger pressing steadily upon the prose."

"The South African Jewish author Nadine Gordimer, who died on Sunday, July 13, at age 90, expressed an even-handed humanism throughout her literary career. This is far from the case for every winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, which Gordimer was accorded in 1991. Her scrupulous sense of fairness, which motivated her to oppose apartheid in her native land, also led her in 2008 to resist strident calls to boycott a Jerusalem writers’ conference. Instead, Gordimer accepted the invitation from Mishkenot Sha’ananim, determined to meet with Palestinians and Israelis because the literary festival was meant to “assert vitally that whatever violent, terrible, bitter and urgent chasms of conflict lie between peoples, the only solutions for peace and justice exist and must begin with both sides talking to one another…I shall do my utmost to uphold the principles and practice I have held, and still hold, at home in our country.”"

"In the course of an impressive four-decade-long career, the Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer has mapped and remapped the spiritual and psychological landscape of South Africa."

"In South Africa, Joe Slovo, Ruth First, Albie Sachs, Nadine Gordimer, Abie Nathan, and Helen Suzman are only among the most famous of the many Jews who joined the fight to bring down apartheid."

"If ever a writer had a grasp of the umbilical connection between individual experience and historical possibility, it's Nadine Gordimer. The miracle of the Nobel prize is not only that someone got it who deserved it, but that the writer of our century who portrays most insistently how people wrestle with, resist and create political change was rewarded for her vision. An existentialist with an emphasis on both political commitment and efficacy, Gordimer is one of the few writers to depict the activist life. No surprise then to find her quoting Camus: "It is from the moment when I shall no longer be more than a writer that I shall cease to write." So far it's not a problem. A leftist publicly critical of communism since the early eighties, she named the challenge "to love truth enough, to pick up the blood-dirtied, shamed cause of the left, and attempt to recreate it in accordance with what it was meant to be, not what sixty-five years of human power-perversion have made of it." Comparisons with Doris Lessing, that other vast-minded leftist white woman writer from Southern Africa (Zimbabwe, formerly Rhodesia), seem inevitable; but Lessing left Africa and political vision. Gordimer stayed...Typical Gordimer to come out with the word, and with the truth of the character's fleeting but not trivial dilemma; typical to mix farts with colonialism. Nothing is off limits, but she's no cynic. A fierce moralist who insists on change, Gordimer summons us to our best selves: "There is no forgetting how we could live if only we could find the way. We must continue to be tormented by the ideal.""

"Nadine Gordimer writes about black people with such astounding sensibilities and sensitivity-not patronizing, not romantic, just real. And Eudora Welty does the same thing. Lillian Hellman has done it. Now, we might categorize these women as geniuses of a certain sort, but if they can write about it, it means that it is possible. They didn't say, "Oh, my God, I can't write about black people"; it didn't stop them. There are white people who do respond that way though, assuming there's some huge barrier. But if you can relate to Beowolf and Jesus Christ when you read about them, it shouldn't be so difficult to relate to black literature."

"(whom of those you have read recently have you found impressive?) AO: The South Africans: Nadine Gordimer, J. M. Coetzee, and André Brink."

""No one knows where the end of suffering will begin," writes Nadine Gordimer about the 1976 Soweto schoolchildren's uprising in her novel Burger's Daughter."

"Politics, both large and small-scale, was Nadine's subject. Speaking the truth was her passion. She wrote about injustices not only in the bad old days, but in the new. She was a model of what an engaged writer can achieve, and that's what makes her my hero."

"She remained true to her art but she also knew that the politics of struggle gave energy to her art; she was born on the other side of the colour line, but she built bridges across it. Speaking truth to power was the real power of her art. She may have passed on, but her 90 years among us were a blessing. Her presence and energy are forever alive in my memory. She remains a kindred spirit for, beyond the writing and activism, she was an unwavering supporter of writing in African languages. The quantity and quality of her literary output – from short stories and novels to essays – earned her many awards but, in the end, the biggest award for her was the affection and the respect she got from people of all races in South Africa and across the globe. Her written words will forever be an integral part of the collective memory of the world."

"She writes marvelous novels"

"Once Jews no longer obeyed the imperatives of their religion, they were virtually obliged to create new forms of identity, turning accommodation from means to end. Literature was a proving ground for the reinvention of the self. One-tenth of the Nobel Prize winners for literature in the twentieth century were born Jews, but only two of them-Shmuel Yosef Agnon (1966) and Isaac Bashevis Singer (1978)-wrote in a Jewish language and only about half thought of themselves as Jews. Paul Heyse (1910), Nellie Sachs (1966), and Elias Canetti (1981) wrote in German; Henri Bergson (1927) in French; Boris Pasternak (1958) and Joseph Brodsky (1987) in Russian; and Saul Bellow (1976) and Nadine Gordimer (1991) in English."

"If the whiteness they pursue is cool and haughty and blank, history is uncool, reaches out gawkily for affinities, asserts itself boldly, threatens to mark, to break through and stain the primed white canvas that is their life. For, having primed it, they do not know where to start, how to make a mark. They are alone in the world, a small new island of whiteness. Or so they think; they do not know, or perhaps they do not want to know, that the neighbourhood is full of people like them. Thus they are steeped in its silence."

"The newspapers were always full of stories about abandoned children found tied up or living under the bed because their families were ashamed of them on account of the colour of their skin."

"On the other hand, when I was at school, I remember kids in my class boasting about the members of their family who had 'turned white'."

"I was hot-headed, impatient, I just wanted to leave the whole oppressiveness of my own culture far behind."

"I have a ghost existence here: my whole intellectual and emotional life is in South Africa."

"I'm very, very contrary. And I want to be in control, which is what informs my attitude to publishing, editing, being interviewed. I set high standards too: as a reader, I don't read any poor novels, so I'm always aware of how much my own work falls flat by comparison. And perhaps it's because I grew up in South Africa, and it was easy there for people like me to grow up with a consciousness of inferiority."

"After several false starts, self-reflexivity offered a solution –– I decided to exploit my inability to write, to fictionalise the writer herself, and to make the actual writing of Pringle’s history the framework of the novel."

"Hinza Marossi, Pringle’s adopted son, was of interest from the outset. Not only is his story recorded in a poem, but I wanted to explore the question of interracial adoption under colonial conditions as well as what that story looks like from Hinza’s point of view."

"The character Mary Prince was an obvious choice because her slave narrative was the first by a woman. It was published in London by Pringle in spite of opposition and litigation by British people who benefitted from slavery. He was also reviled by fellow Scottish settlers at the Cape, who persisted with the myth that slavery in South Africa was an altogether more benign affair."

"Nicholas Greene, a character from Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando (one of my favourite novels) is a more controversial choice, and really I don’t remember how he entered the story. But I was drawn to the fact that he is a time-traveller and to his fictionality as opposed to the other real historical figures. Thus he enabled me to address yet another level of the real within my fictional account. Given that the novel is about the writing of Pringle’s story, Greene also offered another version of the writer."

"I’m drawn to a subject, do the necessary research, and then the problem of how to represent that subject arises. A struggle of trying to write something that may or may not lead towards a solution, and really it’s a matter of faith, of believing that something will come out of the daily routine."

"There are periods of giving up on the project, then inexplicably I return to wrestle with my material until finally the first draft shapes itself through the process of writing. Then follows many more drafts, less torturous than the first, in which I straighten out events and try to refine the prose, but doubts about the value of what I’m doing persist ––I am after all not read by many; in fact, my readership is more or less limited to students of Postcolonial Writing."

"But, you can’t ever think of yourself as belonging in Europe. In terms then of an interior life, I remained South African, through teaching and writing about South Africa – both fiction and literary criticism. I returned for a few years and taught at UWC but then I couldn’t manage the family separation, and returned to Scotland."

"I imagined that when I retired from teaching, I would live mainly in South Africa, but in the meantime the promise of liberation has been hollowed out and I’m not attracted to the pathologies of historical colonialism that persist. Still, I do spend a couple of months every year in the Cape and return to the north with great reluctance."

"The approach that dominates organizational theory, teaching, and practice for most of the twentieth century looked at organizations from the top-down, starting with a view of the CEO as the "leader" who shapes the organization's strategy, structure, culture, and performance potential. The nature of work and the role of the workforce enter the analysis much later, after considerations of technology and organization design have been considered. However, if the key source of value in the twenty-first-century organization is to be derived from the workforce itself, an inversion of the dominant approach will be needed. The new perspective will start not at the top of the organization, but at the front lines, with people and the work itself — which is where value is created. Such an inversion will lead to a transformation in the management and organization of work workers, and knowledge. This transformation was signalled by McGregor, but we must go further."

"This paper develops a new theoretical model with which to examine the interaction between technology and organizations. Early research studies assumed technology to be an objective, external force that would have deterministic impacts on organizational properties such as structure. Later researchers focused on the human aspect of technology, seeing it as the outcome of strategic choice and social action. This paper suggests that either view is incomplete, and proposes a reconceptualization of technology that takes both perspectives into account. A theoretical model-- the structurational model of technology--is built on the basis of this new conceptualization, and its workings explored through discussion of a field study of information technology. The paper suggests that the reformulation of the technology concept and the structurational model of technology allow a deeper and more dialectical understanding of the interaction between technology and organizations. This understanding provides insight into the limits and opportunities of human choice, technology development and use, and organizational design. Implications for future research of the new concept of technology and structurational model of technology are discussed."

"Technology has always been a central variable in organizational theory, informing research and practice. Despite years of investigative effort there is little agreement on the definition and measurement of technology, and no compelling evidence on the precise role of technology in organizational affairs. I will argue that the divergent definitions and opposing perspectives associated with technological research have limited our understanding of how technology interacts with organizations, and that these incompatibilities cannot be resolved by mutual concession. What is needed is a reconstruction of the concept of technology, which fundamentally re-examines our current notions of technology and its role in organizations."

"Two views on the scope of technology have pervaded (and shaped) studies of technology, reflecting the different claims to generalizability that researchers have intended with their work. The one set of studies has focused on technology as "hardware," that is, the equipment, machines, and instruments that humans use in productive activities, whether industrial or informational devices."

"Rather than positing design and use as disconnected moments or stages in a technology's lifecycle, the structurational model of technology posits artifacts as potentially modifiable throughout their existence. In attempting to understand technology as continually socially and physically constructed, it is useful to discriminate analytically between human action which affects technology and that which is affected by technology. I suggest that we recognize human interaction with technology as having two iterative modes: the design mode and the use mode. I emphasize that this distinction is an analytical convenience only, and that in reality these modes of interaction are tightly coupled."

"Technology is built and used within certain social and historical circumstances and its form and functioning will bear the imprint of those conditions."

"As both technologies and organizations undergo dramatic changes in form and function, organizational researchers are increasingly turning to concepts of innovation, emergence, and improvisation to help explain the new ways of organizing and using technology evident in practice. With a similar intent, I propose an extension to the structurational perspective on technology that develops a practice lens to examine how people, as they interact with a technology in their ongoing practices, enact structures which shape their emergent and situated use of that technology. Viewing the use of technology as a process of enactment enables a deeper understanding of the constitutive role of social practices in the ongoing use and change of technologies in the workplace. After developing this lens, I offer an example of its use in research, and then suggest some implications for the study of technology in organizations."

"Technology - and its relationship to organizational structures, processes, and outcomes - has long been of interest to organizational researchers. Over the years, different research perspectives on technology have developed in parallel with research perspectives on organizations - for example, contingency theory (Woodward 1965, Galbraith 1977, Carter 1984, Daft and Lengel 1986), strategic choice models (Child 1972, Buchanan and Boddy 1983, Davis and Taylor 1986, Zuboff 1988), Marxist studies (Braverman 1974, Edwards 1979, Shaiken 1985, Perrolle 1986), symbolic interactionist approaches (Kling 1991, Prasad 1993), transaction-cost economics (Malone et al. 1987, Ciborra 1993); network analyses (Barley 1990, Burkhardt and Brass 1990, Rice and Aydin 1991), practice theories (Suchman 1987, Button 1993, Hutchins 1995, Orr 1996), and structurational models (Barley 1986, Orlikowski 1992, DeSanctis and Poole 1994)."

"Go and see for yourself."

"You say your people brought the Bible over the mountains and ask what mine did. They wrote it, my dear."

"It is not my questions that embarrass South Africa; it is your answers."

"I do not know why we equate—and with such examples before us—a white skin with civilisation."

"Are you going to put me under house arrest or put me on Robben Island?"

"Every Nationalist MP should go to at least one funeral for unrest victims heavily disguised as human beings, instead of sitting on their green benches in parliament, insulated like fish in an aquarium."

"[T]he prime minister has been trying to bully me for twenty-eight years and he has not succeeded yet. I am not frightened of you. I never have been and I never will be. I think nothing of you."

"I had hoped for something much better... [T]he poor in this country have not benefited at all from the ANC. This government spends "like a drunken sailor". Instead of investing in projects to give people jobs, they spend millions buying weapons and private jets, and sending gifts to Haiti."

"Mugabe has destroyed that country while South Africa has stood by and done nothing. The way Mugabe was feted at the inauguration last month was an embarrassing disgrace. But it served well to illustrate very clearly Mbeki's point of view."

"Don't think for a moment that Mbeki is not anti-white - he is, most definitely. His speeches all have anti-white themes and he continues to convince everyone that there are two types of South African - the poor black and the rich white."

"For all my criticisms of the current system, it doesn't mean that I would like to return to the old one. I don't think we will ever go the way of Zimbabwe, but people are entitled to be concerned. I am hopeful about any future for whites in this country - but not entirely optimistic."

"In South Africa, Joe Slovo, Ruth First, Albie Sachs, Nadine Gordimer, Abie Nathan, and Helen Suzman are only among the most famous of the many Jews who joined the fight to bring down apartheid."

"I'm a poet. I distrust anything that starts with a capital letter and ends with a full stop because people don't think in full, clear sentences."

"And everyone wants to know: Who? Why? The victims ask the hardest of all the questions: How is it possible that the person I loved so much lit no spark of humanity in you?"

"By not dealing with past human rights violations, we are not simply protecting the perpetrators' trivial old age ; we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations."

"It's hard for me to speak, whether in English or Afrikaans. The reason I write is because I cannot speak. I feel blunt."

"Transformation must happen in a way that sees disadvantaged communities receive the resourcing they need."

"My move was controversial because it stepped on a few toes"

"The global crisis we are experiencing right now I believe, is showing us the need for universities."

"Success is built on persistence, patience and consistence"

"Life is going to be challenging, unfair and difficult. Whatever happens, make sure you never ever give up."

"Turbulent times taught me a lot about life. I learned that some of life’s brightest moments come in the darkest hours. I learned to never lose hope."

"When things are tough, I remind myself of what big dreams, faith and optimism can produce."

"Human beings have a tendency to be mean to others in order to feel better about themselves."

"The world out there will test your ethics and therefore teach you ethics every day."

"You do not have to agree with me. A disagreement does not mean that we are enemies or that we have to be disrespectful to one another."

"Go ahead and be ambitious, but be ready for the hard work."

"Smart work only happens after hard work. There is no substitute for hard work.There is no smart work without hard work."

"With hard work and consistency, anything is possible."

"Everyone can get better over time through hard work"

"You can change your life and your situation by working hard"

"Hard workers take on the responsibility of changing their lives."

"The lack of a desire to work hard is a great weakness."

"Hard workers do not wait for things to be done for them. They make things happen."

"There is no doubt that I work hard."

"If you want to travel, be clear about why you want to travel."

"There are people today, who tell our young people not to work hard but to work smart."

"A sense of urgency in our young people about succeeding in higher education."

"Stay true to your dream. Believe in your dream and keep pushing until you see it happen."

"It is only through “doing” that we can find solutions."

"You can’t win on talent alone. Talent on its own does not produce success."

"Start with the “why” and then the “what” and the “how” will be clear"

"Success requires hard work whether you are a tennis player, an artist, a scientist, a writer or an entrepreneur."

"Talent that is not supported by hard work ultimately runs out of steam and fails."

"Nowadays, everyone wants to be an overnight success."

"Starting at the bottom builds character. It is the best way to learn."

"Starting at the bottom makes you hungry and determined."

"If you ever have an opportunity to start at the bottom, don’t look down on it."

"Go out there, be free and achieve your goals."

"The right attitude is to believe that you can cultivate your abilities and develop talents through practice."

"When given an opportunity, use it well."

"It is within you to carve out your future and create your own destiny."

"Keep the feeling of endless possibilities alive for as long as possible"

"There was a time in my life when I thought everything about me was not right and needed fixing. I thought I was not smart enough, I thought my bum was too big and my eyes too small. It has taken me many years to be okay with being different."

"We are always in the process of becoming and so I remain a work in progress."

"Most of my life is faith. When I have a dream, I pursue it without thinking about what would happen if it doesn’t work and this is what makes me"

"Your actions have consequences. When you choose an action, you are also choosing its consequences"

"Your good name and reputation make you who you are. Don’t give them away"

"It’s never too early or too late to learn or get your ethical act together."

"Your good name and reputation are bigger than the job, the deal, the promotion and the money."

"Make sure you choose mentors whose ethical choices you admire"

"I have become my own cheerleader and because of that, positive things are happening around me."

"Sometimes, all you need to do is take the first step with the faith that everything will be fine."

"Believe that something positive will happen even in the absence of any supporting evidence."

"Truth is that you cannot make a comeback if you are never lost."

"Those of us in positions of power should be willing to invest our time in supporting those who are willing to be the ‘right people’. Don’t always look for the finished product, get involved in the process of creating the right people."

"As a leader, my priorities are transformation, excellence and sustainability. These priorities are interrelated because excellence without transformation is not sustainable, and where there is transformation without excellence, there is no integrity."

"When you work with young people, it’s important to be visible on social media because that’s where young people hang out."

"In a place where patriarchy is the norm, public space is defined as belonging to men, and women are outsiders made to live in accordance with parameters set by men. How women dress, act, and engage in those spaces is strictly regulated by these social habits/norms."

"Places, where patriarchy is the norm, allow men to cause discomfort, embarrass, berate, harass, and sometimes even violently attack women for their existence as the opposite sex."

"We women in leadership need to be mindful that we are [doing this] not just for ourselves but for the women who come after us. So, let’s get on and do it boldly."

"The issue is that women have to realise how phenomenal, creative and innovative they are. We don’t believe that we need to “fix” women for success in the corporate world. Rather, we need to get them to appreciate their potential and their power."

"I want to help women achieve their career goals and navigate obstacles, and provide our alumnae with ongoing education and the opportunity to share their experiences."

"In corporate culture there is a language of gender bias that we are unaware of: it’s called “benevolent sexism”.’ An example of this is when a male colleague or supervisor refers to a highly trained, qualified female engineer as “honey” or “meisje”. ‘Everyone acts as if it’s okay. It’s not. Deconstruct it. It’s not being friendly. It’s a power thing."

"I’m always slightly embarrassed thinking back to how I just didn’t see things that are often blindingly obvious to me today. For instance, the way business education often perpetuates gender bias, through texts, cases, business speakers, and even faculty. The turning point came when I undertook research into social networks amongst our MBA students. I wanting to see if there was real collaboration amongst the extremely diverse student population in the RSM classroom. Were the Japanese working with the Spanish? Were the Nigerians socialising with the Dutch? Were the Mexicans exploring innovative ideas with the Chinese?"

"The results of the research showed that women skewed towards men in trust situations at work. The question I had asked was, if you had a risky project, who would you ask to be on your team, and many women chose men. At first, I blamed the women. This is ridiculous; I wanted to say to them! Open your eyes! Thankfully, we had some very good reviewers who thought that the results of the research were good but suggested that a more critical appraisal was necessary."

"I wanted to show people that although I had cancer, was not ill. I was still able to add value and do things in spite of the chemo and the damned tumours it was desperately fighting. This was important to me because a cancer diagnosis often gets one marginalised."

"Many women stay in job or remain in a toxic environment because they are scared. My message to them is do not sell out who they are in exchange for safety. It takes courage to move because it takes you outside your comfort zone, especially the first time you do it. However, you will soon realise that your world does not collapse when you find the courage to change and get off the hamster wheel."

"Throughout my life, I have had great mentors and sponsors who believed in me, probably more than I believed in myself. They gave me the courage to do what I wanted to do."

"If you cannot find something positive to say about another woman, say nothing at all."

"Go out of your way to find reasons to amplify the good work women in your organisation and network are doing."

"Your credibility is built when others speak positively about you. Do the same for them whenever, and wherever, you can."

"You can lead from wherever you are. Even if you are in a junior position, you can mentor and speak positively about other women. It is wrong to think that you can only lead when you are in a leadership role."

"Leadership is about helping reveal the talents that everyone is born with. As women, our talents are frequently ignored or overlooked. As a leader, and as colleagues and friends, you can help reveal these talents and give people the space, encouragement and courage to explore them. This is what I have built ECWO on: giving women the research-backed understanding that it is not their fault if they are in a toxic environment or if their boss does not want to promote them."

"It will push women to move outside their comfort zone and give them the confidence to be less modest and allow their talent to shine. They will learn to push boundaries in innovation, accept risk, and welcome leadership roles."

"The bias against women’s progression is more of a systemic problem. What needs to change are the social views and attitudes in society that hold women back from taking leading roles in organizations of all types."

"I would advise that women remain aware of gender stereotypes and the implicit bias that this produces—in others and in themselves. They should not be afraid to debate and question issues of diversity within and beyond the classroom."

"An MBA is a movable asset, you take it with you wherever you go."

"An MBA is truly a transformational experience. You learn so much about yourself, you gain business knowledge, and you make invaluable and lasting friendships. I would encourage more women to think about doing an MBA."

"Exploring pathways to reach such futures is, I think, one of the most exciting and important research areas in the sustainability field, and where the broader CST team and I plan to focus much of our future work."

"This dream is rapidly becoming a reality through the development of the CST, which like other leading sustainability centres globally is pioneering new inter- and transdisciplinary institutional structures. It is also helping to position Stellenbosch University as a national and international leader in the fast-emerging sustainability arena."

"Balancing the demands of raising a young family with the demands of research and students can be tough, and a supportive partner and family make a huge difference. The COVID pandemic has highlighted some key gender inequalities, but also opened up some new possibilities for flexibility in the way we work that could facilitate greater engagement of women in senior research and leadership positions."

"As a relatively young woman in a male dominated senior leadership environment, it can sometimes feel difficult to be taken seriously and, consequently, to believe in oneself. So this is a big confidence booster in my intellectual leadership and a green light to venture out and continue forging new pathways."

"In one way, in Africa, we have an advantage because we're behind everyone else on the development trajectory." Now is the time to think more cleverly about different models for how poorer countries could develop in a completely different way that doesn't have such a high impact on the environment as has happened in most other places."

"The framework we're using assumes the planet, and human societies that live upon it, are complex and constantly evolving, so we need to continually learn about and adapt to these ongoing changes."

"People see certain things and draw conclusions that are actually valid for the data they have. But then somebody else goes to investigate, maybe at a different time or using a bit of a different approach, collects a different set of data, and they get a different answer."

"Once you engage the people who are managing a system, they can change the way they're thinking about it and actually influence the future, so it's very interactive."

"As far as women go, there's a lot more we still need to do."

"The vulnerability of young women is very much tied into gender power differences in society."

"For most of my life I thought about science and its application to leaving people better off, so I wanted to be a scientist and do something that would help people."

"Women continue to inspire me to persist with my scientific endeavors. While some progress has been made, much more remains to be done to ensure a non-sexist and just society."

"When we come together with unity of purpose, we can achieve great things."

"When solutions are not shared fairly or equitably, the pathogen thrives, as we witnessed during COVID-19, and another example where sharing information openly as South African scientists did during the emergence of the Omicron variant resulted in a travel ban by several countries in the Global North for the entire southern African region."

"We have to balance mission-oriented investments with curiosity investments, because the discoveries from curiosity research enable the innovation for mission-driven science. Undertaking biomedical research is high-risk, and more often than not does not produce the desired outcomes. However, we learn and understand the phenomenon better and move forward incrementally. This persistence and perseverance is a hallmark of scientific endeavours together with vigorous debates and discussions of findings."

"And it’s not a token affirmative action process, but creating the space for women’s voices to be heard, women to contribute in the context of complex challenges that face us is no longer a luxury – we need all voices heard and opportunities created for all to contribute."

"Environments can be created where women feel they belong, and we can see from the 20 years of CAPRISA’s existence how creating a supportive space for women has enabled a lot of women to thrive, to make their contributions and be constantly making cutting-edge contributions. So this is a concrete example. It’s not just rhetoric; it's not idealism that we can make it happen, and we need to illustrate that more and more because that means inclusivity at all levels, which bodes well for human security and planetary health."

"We focused on developing and testing technologies that empowered women."

"We can’t think of problems in the global south as just problems for the global south."

"The idea behind access and benefit sharing policy is laudable: it was created to try to harness the economic benefits of biodiversity and indigenous knowledge as a way to achieve economic and social justice, and to fund biodiversity conservation."

"Although access and benefit sharing has encouraged more equitable research partnerships in certain cases, from early on it became clear that that commercial demand for genetic resources was insufficient to incentivise biodiversity conservation."

"We live in a different time than we lived in a year ago. And I wish we were sitting here talking about this dystopian fictional world, and how glad we are that we’re not intent."

"Christian idea of sin — that tragic flaw at the core of human experience provides one of the best tools for understanding the evils of sexism, patriarchy, and traditional sin-talk itself."

"Gender violence should be seen as a patriarchy control mechanism, since it is systemic and rooted in sexist cultural practices and perspectives and it leads women to adjust behavior in order to avoid violence"

"There is no doubt that media consumption habits are going to change quite fundamentally in the future, with an increasing reliance on the internet as a source of information and as a communicative tool."

"Internet rights are not as important as media rights at the moment, but any freedom of information lobby with some foresight needs to recognise that the internet will be at the heart of future media systems, and they need to adapt their advocacy strategies accordingly by including an internet component."

"If netizens want to live free from fear and want, offline and on, then they will not achieve this by handing decision-making about the internet to increasingly secretive, unaccountable governments. Trading freedom for security is no security at all."

"Protests that are sustained over a period of time are usually part of a cycle that unfolds in interaction with the authorities and other protesters."

"State repression creates solidarity among movement participants, who justify the need for violence as a form of self-defence."

"It is the easier route for universities to say and do “security” in response to growing campus unrest. But it is also the more simplistic road. There is enough scholarship to show that this road leads nowhere. University actors must do more to break with this self-fulfilling prophecy."

"Municipal decision-making sets a framework for police actions — in that prohibited protests are more likely to trigger police actions than ones that aren’t — but the police can exercise discretion in how they respond to such collective action."

"If a protest does not pose a serious threat to public safety, it should not be prevented, even if the municipality had not been informed about it. The Constitution protects people’s right to assemble."

"Failure to notify is not, in itself, sufficient reason to break up a protest if it is peaceful and unarmed."

"The police service is clearly a stressed institution. Considering the high levels of crime in South Africa, the ratio of police to population is on the lower end of the global scale. Those who can afford it opt for private security, which lacks accountability."

"Violence against the police has also been a persistent problem, reducing morale and driving up violent responses. The police have claimed to be under siege from violent protesters but, at the same time, the police have proved to be far from impartial in responding to these protests."

"If a protest takes place without notice but is premeditated, even if it is peaceful, it can be classified as a crime, triggering the opening of a docket."

"When you come up to postgraduate level, you do get that the numbers percentage of female to male students become smaller. By the time you come to PhD level, that percentage reduces. It’s almost like looking at a pipeline and that pipeline leaks as you go along before you reach the end of the pipe itself."

"I am incredibly grateful for the hard work and dedication of our administrative staff, they are an essential part of our university community, and I am proud to have them on our team."

"Many women were afraid to report abuse,"

"You do not have to be collaborators. You do not"

"Part of the issue is whether higher education institutions create an enabling environment for female academics to thrive."

"You have made valuable contribution to the Faculty of Education and for that we will forever remember you. You have served this institution with wisdom, with respect and the humility that is in you. Your return to the university in 2016 was a confirmation that we believe in developing our own timber and today I want to say that we are planting you where you are going but you will return to this university once more."

"I can say that you managed to increase staff research capacity and the development of staff in the faculty. You generated research outputs by promoting co-publishing, in particular. Your mentoring skills and supervision skills made such great impact for that faculty. You nurtured emerging scholars (and) promoted knowledge dissemination through encouraging students to attend conferences and present papers and attend seminars, particularly masters and doctoral workshops. We have seen the fruits of the work that you have done"

"I define success by my well-being and privilege to live a location-independent lifestyle that is filled with options and freedom of choice to live my life based on what’s best for me."

"I’m not naïve and I’m not belittling anyone’s experience, I just personally have not felt the discrimination and the idea that I’m not wanted here."

"Rituals reveal values at their deepest level...it is the values of the group that are revealed. I see in the study of rituals the key to an understanding of the essential constitution of human societies."

"It suggests that we should move through and beyond a dignity-based concern with social inclusion and sufficiency towards an idea of systemic and material justice"

"It proposes that the value of equality can be developed as an idea of ‘equality of condition’, aligned with an idea of substantive freedom, that would better resonate with the struggles of our past and present, and suggests how the right could be subject to more transformative interpretation and application."

"The article identifies these differences and suggests how we might reinterpret constitutional equality within a transformative approach to better address the deep and systemic inequalities in our society."

"This jurisprudence was often powerfully inclusive, but less likely to be transformative, would prefer process over substance (especially in socio-economic rights) and was better at addressing inequalities of recognition than redistribution."

"It then suggests that the equality-centred, democratic Constitution represented an important anti-colonial and anti-patriarchal achievement, but that the plasticity of equality meant that it would always be open to different interpretations by the executive and parliament, as well as by courts tasked with enforcing the Constitution."

"My first degree was in Journalism and English Literature so I have always had a strong interest in media. In my postgraduate work, I was soon drawn into archival research and working with old newspapers and magazines."

"My early research focused on questions of orality and literacy, an area that inevitably lead to scholarship on the early modern world and from there to the field of book history and print culture. I then began teaching a course on South African book history, edited a special issue of the South African Historical Journal on this theme and also began supervising graduates working on these themes."

"The Internet has created both possibilities and problems. There is now much more archival material online and an astonishing array of digital books. In my generation, part of one’s training was in how to locate material in obscure archives. That now seems a bit comical, given the easy access one can have to troves and troves of material. These developments do however mean that the materiality of the objects is often obscured. One can’t see the actual document so some of the key methods of book history can’t be deployed."

"I write furiously, admonishing myself when I seem about to fall into the old habit of editing sentences as they appear. I want to discover what it is I am going to be writing about, who is in the story and what they are doing there."

"Since I am a slow writer and a compulsive editor, I try not to stop too often"

"At the start of a new fiction project, there is always a piece written quickly, assuredly, with little hesitation, and with the euphoric feeling that comes with knowing one has found somewhere to begin"

"What are we to make of the growing chorus of fears about the possible collapse of the dollar? Is it a case of crying wolf again? Those fears link four elements: Iran’s stated intention soon to open its own electronic International Oil Bourse; its resolve to sell oil there in euros, not dollars; the expectation that the price of oil will rise to over $100 a barrel, triggering world recession; and the demand for gold, rather than dollars, as a store of value."

"Since the US is deep in debt, nationally and internationally, the dollar’s value depends entirely on the fact that it is a reserve currency for other nations. We all have to keep reserves in dollars for two reasons. First, by an agreement made in the 1940’s, the oil producing countries of OPEC agreed to sell oil only in dollars. That meant everyone had to hold dollars if they wanted to buy oil, resulting in two-thirds of all central bank reserves being in dollars. That in turn means that the Americans have the privilege of producing the international currency. Creating money is nice work if you can get it. It is the equivalent of having a mint in your backyard. You can buy what you want with the new money, without having to supply the equivalent value of goods. America has been financing its annual deficit with the rest of the world – it borrows over $2 trillion a day - by simply making new money and spending it into circulation."

"They will not be able to do that if we no longer have to buy our oil in dollars. Its value would fall as nations switch to other currencies to buy oil or to gold as a reliable store of value. The creation of dollars would not be available as a mechanism to cover the huge international debt. If that process began, there could be the kind of flight from the currency that has wrecked the economy of many nations within the past decade. Even more alarming are suggestions that to avoid this possibility the American government is planning to invade Iran. The fact that the invasion of Iraq was preceded by unwarranted accusations of weapons of mass destruction, and that Hussein had threatened to switch sales of oil from dollars to euros, gives credence to such fears. The fact that Iraq’s current chaos makes it a net importer of oil seems not to deflect American resolve."

"What is the evidence for the possible imminence of this scenario? Associated Press on May 5 quoted top Wall Street analyst Bill O’Grady of A.G. Commodities: ‘If one day the world’s largest oil producers allowed, or worse demanded, euros for their barrels, it would be the financial equivalent of a nuclear strike."

"Gold is now at a 20-year high against the dollar, and the dollar at a one-year low against the euro. The Financial Times of May 16th, under the headline: “Fears for Dollar as Central Banks Sell US assets” reported that ‘central banks sold a net $14.4 billion during the month, the largest sale since August 1998."

"At the opening of the IMF meeting on April 21, Russia’s Finance Minister said his country ‘could not consider the dollar a reliable reserve currency because of its instability’. The same day the Swedish Riksbank halved its dollar holdings to buy euro."

"At that IMF meeting the 2006 World Economic Outlook was launched, warning of a dollar collapse – due to global trade imbalances, spiraling US debt and the demise of the petro-dollar reserve standard. In the language beloved of obfuscating economists who hope thereby to soften the truth, it stated: ‘Global current account imbalances are likely to remain at elevated levels for longer than would otherwise have been the case, heightening the risk of sudden disorderly adjustment. Sudden disorderly adjustment’ is the current bankers’ euphemism for the consequences of a dollar collapse. Others, including Morgan Stanley economist Stephen Roach, as well as financiers Soros and Warren Buffet, refer to it as ‘economic Armageddon’. How close are we to that?"

"I didn’t expect that the funding lines would be as slim as they were, and that they were cobbling together."

"Just the focus on trauma and healing … is not something you see much in the criminal justice system,’ said Mullins. However, this is seen now through TRCs. I think it really has become very central to communities as a place of safety, where you can go and get what you need .… I think they really are a shining example of the direction we should be moving."

"On Parole, Staying Free Means Staying Clean and Sober."

"You’ve got to make modifications based on what works for your culture."

"There are many who find it hard to embrace the idea of forgiveness. And it is easy to see why. In order to maintain some sort of moral compass, to hold on to some sort of clear distinction between what is depraved but conceivable and what is simply off the scale of human acceptability, we feel an inward emotional and mental pressure not to forgive, since forgiveness can signal acceptability, and acceptability signals some amount, however small, of condoning. There is a desire to draw a line and say, "Where you have been, I cannot follow you, Your actions can never be regarded as part of what it means to be human." Yet not to forgive means closing the door to the possibility of transformation."

"A genuine apology focuses on the feelings of the other rather than on how the one who is apologizing is going to benefit in the end. It seeks to acknowledge full responsibility for an act, and does not use self-serving language to justify the behavior of the person asking forgiveness. A sincere apology does not seek to erase what was done. No amount of words can undo past wrongs. Nothing can ever reverse injustices committed against others. But an apology pronounced in the context of horrible acts has the potential for transformation. It clears or ‘settles’ the air in order to begin reconstructing the broken connections between two human beings."

"Perpetrators of human rights violations redefine morality and start believing that they can commit systematic murder and other atrocities "for the greater good." The distance between evil and sickness is not that great. The evil component of crimes against humanity is the moral failing. The sickness aspect is the defect in perspective, the distortion in mental processing that both precedes the evil and is intensified by it."

"It is a new discipline in medicine which focuses on access to surgery and improving quality of care and outcomes. I like to describe it as the interface between surgical services and surgical systems."

"My research is working on improving perinatal outcomes and stillbirth auditing across Africa. In many countries, we don’t know what the real numbers are at the end of the day, so we have to start counting."

"More importantly though, the role of women in their societies can tell us a lot. Communities that protect their women seem to have better health outcomes."

"t's always the elephant in the room. When you walk into a room, and you don't see anyone that looks like you, sometimes you don't know if you are welcome or not. Luckily, i am comfortable with situations where I am minority."

"But I am very clear about what my expertise is. It is also a sense of pressure and responsibility because I often feel that if a wrong decision is made, I am not speaking just for me, but for many."

"I especially enjoy doing research that provides the opportunity for collaboration. Research and writing can be a lonely endeavour, so the opportunity to engage with others in your field can be hugely enriching and my experience suggests that it advances innovative, creative and novel scholarship. I especially enjoy opening collaborative spaces through supervision of master’s and doctoral students and have often learned more from the students I supervise rather than the other way around."

"Ending men’s violence toward women is a key concern, not only for women’s well-being, but for the well-being of society as a whole. South Africa is notorious for its excessively high levels of gendered violence. My work has made practical recommendations for ending men’s violence and contributing to gender equity that have been taken up by a number of organisations."

"My research allows me to work against representations on violence and marginalised people, representations that include me, as a black woman from a working-class background."

"Pursue research interests that drive and sustain your passions – but also look around you and consider the contexts in which you work and what your work might be doing at the level of ethics, politics and representation."

"It is important to think critically and to reflect on the ethical and political impact of your research – regardless of the ‘kind’ of psychology you end up doing. The contexts in which we work as researchers and psychologists – that involve deepening global and local inequalities, growing legitimised and institutionalised forms of racism, sexism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, and increasing poverty and dispossession – demand that we think carefully about how or whether our work advances social justice."

"If these thoughts are on the right track, at least three concepts in the post-Fricker literature on epistemic injustice can help us theorise epistemic decolonisation in good ways, i.e. ways that meet the desiderata for just use of epistemic injustice tools. Moreover, these three concepts aren’t lone outliers in a sea of useless and WPS-prone concepts. On the contrary, they are related to many other concepts in the literature that are equally theoretically fruitful and attuned to the desiderata inspired by the WPS challenge.Footnote22 Instead of pursuing this line, which is bound to turn tedious given the size of the literature, I wish to conclude by addressing a concern that the reader may have had throughout the discussion so far."

"A plausible worry with my argument is that the very fact that I am a white person based at an academic institution automatically means that the epistemic injustice tools I am using are likely to fail at least the second and third desiderata on good use of epistemic injustice concepts. They may be thought to violate the second because given my identity and institution-base, whatever version of the epistemic oppression tool I am using is both institutionalised and bound to serve dominant, white, interests. And given my belonging to the oppressor’s social group, the use of this tool is bound to adopt the perspective of the oppressor."

"Let me start by saying what wouldn’t be a good reply – pointing to the fact that I am based in South Africa, where political power is in the hands of the victims of colonialism. The reason this reply won’t do is that it is a terrible mistake to assume that the event of political decolonisation amounts to epistemic decolonisation. Although the event of political decolonisation is long past, as discussed in section 2, epistemic decolonisation is a dynamic and ongoing process, which has still a long way to go. Hence, individual academic institutions have a long way to go. This means that the larger institution of academia still allows for the bad, un-decolonised institutionalisation of epistemic resources and the systematic favouring of the perspective of the oppressor. The fact that the 2015 Rhodes Must Fall movement started in South Africa bears witness to this."

"Although this quick reply doesn’t work, I don’t think that the objector’s worry is warranted at least in the context of the argument of this paper. Suppose that it was indeed inevitable that a white academic perpetuates the institutionalisation of these tools in ways that favour dominant interests and privilege the oppressor’s perspective. (I don’t think that this is the case, but let us suppose it is.) This would still not threaten the present argument, because I am not in fact using these tools. Instead, I am setting constraints – developed by non-dominant knowers – for good ways of using such tools. Whether I can use them myself in these ways is a moot point. (If the objector is right, I can’t.) But I hope to have at least persuaded the reader that they can be used in these ways to advance the project of epistemic decolonisation. I take this as a big win in light of increasing WPS-style doubts about some of the epistemic injustice literature."

"Kant's distinction between things in themselves and things as they appear to us has both epistemological and metaphysical components. He is committed to a genuine idealism about things as they appear to us, but this is not a phenomenalist idealism. He is committed to the claim that there is an aspect of reality that grounds mind-dependent spatio-temporal objects, and which we cannot cognize, but he does not assert the existence of distinct non-spatio-temporal objects."

"Kant's idealism can be understood as limiting empirical reality to that with which we can have acquaintance. He thinks that this empirical reality is mind-dependent in the sense that it is not experience-transcendent, rather than holding that it exists literally in our minds. Reading intuition in this way enables us to make sense of Kant's central argument for his idealism in the Transcendental Aesthetic, and to see why he takes the complete idealist position to be established there. This shows that reading a central part of his argument in the Transcendental Deduction as epistemological is compatible with a metaphysical, idealist reading of transcendental idealism."

"My aim in this chapter is to characterize the change of heart that plays a role in forgiveness—in giving up warranted blaming reactive attitudes. I present this in the context of developing a Kantian account of what forgiveness is and why we need it, drawing on his moral psychology to characterize the relevant change of heart."

"I appeal in particular to Kant’s account of human frailty and its relation to his account of human evil. I argue that it is frail and flawed agents who lack an entirely fixed and stable character for whom forgiveness is a live option and a need. For such agents, there may be space to interpret us in the light of better willing than our wrongdoing indicates."

"It is a summer of songs composed in blood, tuned with guns and arranged in conversations. It is a summer of songs I sing in swelling volumes."

"I write poetry from my personal space, in my personal voice. I say “I am here”. I address women in the world."

"I first encountered your 2019 debut collection Agringada: Like a Gringa, Like a Foreigner (Modjaji Books) at the Rosebank branch of Exclusive Books. I spent so much time trying to read the two words on the cover, the ones in a small black font. After numerous failed attempts I decided I would use my magnifying glass when I got back home. It was in that moment that I realised: Oh, they are using the very cover to give me the visceral experience of what I am about to read! Then I thought: Effective! Smart! I love it! I am buying this book!"

"I was still in the queue at the bookshop when I read the contents page, and I began to smile, because Tongues of their Mothers—my second poetry collection—is also divided into four sections using the names of seasons. In your book, there are eleven poems in Winter, fifteen in Summer, three in Spring and thirteen in Autumn."

"These hands have Moulded monuments, created crafts, healed hearts."

"Whiteness Just Isn't What It Used To Be."

"The central question for whiteness in post-apartheid South Africa can be put simply: how to maintain privilege in a situation in which black people have achieved political power. Many stances to the new dispensation are available to white South Africans, but this article concerns only resistant white discourses, referred to as White Talk."

"Working with the recollections of everyday experiences of apartheid collected by the Apartheid Archives project, and drawing on the emerging theorization of ignorance in the critical philosophy of race, this article explores how an ‘ignorance contract’ – the tacit agreement to entertain ignorance – lies at the heart of a society structured in racial hierarchy. Unlike the conventional theorization of ignorance that regards ignorance as a matter of faulty individual cognition, or a collective absence of yet-to-be-acquired knowledge, ignorance is understood as a social achievement with strategic value."

"The apartheid narratives illustrate that for ignorance to function as social regulation, subjectivities must be formed that are appropriate performers of ignorance, disciplined in cognition, affect and ethics."

"Both white and black South Africans produced epistemologies of ignorance, although the terms of the contract were set by white society as the group with the dominant power."

"Contemporary post-colonial geopolitics has witnessed the changing nature of the nation state. Initially conceived of as the territorial “home” of an ethnically and racially homogenous group, the notion of the nation state is increasingly characterised by difference and complexity. There are few contexts where people are not confronted by difference in the workplace, in organisations and public spaces, and as an aspect of the general body politic. The challenge therefore is how to value what different groups may bring to the collective while, at the same time, maintaining cohesive societies. In difficult economic times, this includes rejecting policies that approach difference through segregation, expulsion and ethnic cleansing in favour of inclusive political and economic measures and equitable sharing of resources. It also requires public spaces that are characterised by accessibility and safety for all raced, gendered and differently abled bodies. For organisations, the challenges cluster around such issues as how to create environments that can bring into play the strengths of difference to promote organisational goals, while at the same time enabling employees to reach their full potential, to have their contribution valued and to feel recognised and respected."

"Can I touch your hair? Where are you from? I cannot do anything with your hair unless I texturise it!"

"We don’t have anything to do with it, it’s dramatic, it doesn’t ‘flow"

"People don’t know how much money is made in telling black women that they need straight hair"

"If black people are not trained to care for their hair, then who?"

"We should want to cultivate our minds and intellect because we think that it makes us better human beings, especially that it enhances our ethical sensibility."

"An education that is devoid of ethics is empty and meaningless and will produce smart but reckless human beings."

"The benefits to society of having an intelligent and articulate citizenry are priceless; they cannot be measured in terms of GDP per capita or literacy rates or productivity"

"We need to start the conversation at primary school level. At the core of an academic mind is curiosity, and curiosity cannot be taught - it can only be nurtured."

"Children are naturally curious and I would argue that our education system destroys this curiosity and replaces it with anxiety about performance"

"Learning should be a joyous experience."

"While ontology deals with existence in general, its intimate companion, cosmology, provides a map for understanding the universe in its totality—its origin, purpose, and destiny, including the human being’s place within it. Cosmology concerns an understanding of the order and relationships between the various parts of the created universe. Questions that arise in relation to cosmology might include the following: What is the nature of the universe? How was it created? For what purpose and toward what des-tiny was it created? What are a human being’s origin, place, and purpose in this universe? Thus, a cosmological level of inquiry in Islam enables the inquirer to situate notions of human nature and existence within a broader framework of understanding the nature of all creation. In a study of Islamic cosmology, one also finds macrocosmic mappings of gender that resonate in varying ways with understandings of human genderedness."

"Litating the coming into existence of creation. Comprising the vital con-duit for humankind’s existence in relation to the essence, the divine names simultaneously veil us from It. The divine essence is at once a profound and unknowable mystery and that from which all else derives its being. It is en-tirely transcendent, yet nothing in creation is separate from its qualities. It is the pervasive center in which all contradictions are transcended."

"Hardly have the words left his lips when a hand softer than silk touches his shoulder. He turns. A young woman of breathtaking beauty gazes intently at him. As if omniscient, she responds to his poetic rumination with a depth of spiritual discernment, subjecting each line of his poem to careful scrutiny, culminating in a reprimand: How can “the great mystic of the time” pos-sibly question God’s knowledge of his state? A true lover is content with the desires of the Beloved even when they entail absence and separation."

"I came of age during apartheid in the 80s in a Muslim community in a society that was deeply segregated, and so all of those kinds of influences were deeply impacted me quite deeply."

"I grew up in a Muslim community, particularly with parents and a father that used to tell me the most extraordinary stories and which inspired me. So, I grew up on stories of Shaykh Abdulkad Jaylani Sheikh Rabia, and those were not stories that was told to me as if they were Sufi stories; they were told to me as stories of what good Muslims were, and so my imagination and my heart was fired up."

"As a child, I used to relish these greatly, and it was the part of Islam that resonated for me; they were pretty much for me. These people that my father used to tell me stories about struck me a little bit like superheroes; they were my spiritual superheroes, and I was very inspired by them. So that was quite influential in my life and in my formation."

"My relationship to religion became a little bit more fraught. So, that initial relationship to religion was all about these beautiful characters who had incredible virtue and valour and courage and spiritual refinement and beautiful adap. That was formative for me thinking about in living Islam and the things that inspired me and the things that were shown up to me as a mirror of goodness."

"A lot of my engagements with religion emerged out of those kinds of formative experiences: a deep kind of immersion and a desire and a yearning for the kinds of spiritual treasures that were part of the stories of my childhood, and then wrestling with injustice and thinking about human dignity, human equality, and justice as being central to thinking about a relationship with God."

"I map how Sufism resides at the heart of Muslim spirituality and has fundamental implications for thinking about gender in terms of law, virtue and ethics."

"My book is about reading critically and constructively against the grain, and claiming a particular space within the Muslim tradition to talk back to patriarchy. It is about claiming an authority within the tradition not for me, but for a certain voice of radical human equality which resides within the tradition."

"I was sitting with another graduate student reading (Ibn 'Arabi) texts in Arabic and English, and it was one of those moments that time seemed to have condensed: the sun had set, hours had passed and the two of us didn't notice the entire world go by. It was a moment of genuine, absolute awe. I came out of it marvelling at the vastness and possibilities of being human. The questions of what it means to be human within the Muslim tradition, and how gender influences one's understandings of a person's humanity remained with me."

"Sufism is about embodying virtue. That virtue should extend from within oneself to society, an integral part of the spiritual life. Importantly justice is one of the central virtues in this tradition. The challenge to contemporary Muslims is to formulate dynamic and relevant understandings of justice for our times."

"Feminism gives me a language with which I can speak to my comrades and sisters in other (religious) traditions or those in no traditions who are struggling with injustice because as human beings we share, confront and resist these realities collectively and as part of diverse communities of belonging."

"For justice to ripen into a truly transformative and sustaining force, it must draw back from that deep current of love, and this is where we dive into for respite, rest, rejuvenation, replenishment, and creativity."

"The relationship between part-time and full-time forces can best be understood in terms of the typical Defence Force career of a white male. All white men must register for military service at sixteen, while still at school. They are then liable for service in the full-time force. Those who do not make a career in the permanent force are required either before or after tertiary education to render two years of national service in one of the five arms of the Defence Force. After this they are placed in the part-time citizen force for twelve years, during which time they must serve up to 720 days in annual thirty-, sixty-, or ninety-day ‘camps’. Then they are placed in the active citizen force reserve for five years and may be required to serve twelve days a year in a local commando until the age of fifty-five. Finally, they are placed on the national reserve until they are sixty-five."

"There is something about glass that seems so unattainable. It’s so fragile and expensive. There’s also a certain danger level involved that discourages people from accessing it. Many people in this area haven’t experienced glass art to its fullest. We haven’t had an entire glass exhibit in a long time and I feel really honored to have opportunity to co-curate this show."

"To encourage people to look at glass critically in an artistic way. I am hoping that individuals will look into other pieces by theses artists, and other glass artists in general."

"Going to pick up the pieces! Being able to see the studios that these glass artists work in, and just talking with the artists has been so amazing."

"We thought about eye flow and how to keep the viewers eyes moving from piece to piece, yet still allowing them to rest and observe certain pieces. The more sculptural objects are meant to be viewed in the round and are more interactive. A lot of these were meant to be displayed on a wall. To discourage people from interacting with certain fragile pieces we put them towards the edge of the room."

"I’d really like to expand the amount of adult classes we teach here, and hope to do so if there is interest. Aside from that, I’m excited to work with glass this summer in my outside studio. I hope to go on more nature walks, and sketch more in general."

"On the southern tip of Africa, the Western Cape faces its own questions of autonomy. With its unique cultural identity and starkly different economic and political realities compared to the rest of South Africa"

"One of the key reasons people across the world seek independence is the desire to protect their cultural heritage and identity."

"The path to independence is never easy, and it is often fraught with political obstacles. Puerto Rico’s referendum may not deliver a clear or immediate answer, just as the Western Cape’s future remains uncharted."

"But what is certain is that referendums, whether binding or not, are important barometers of political will. They provide a peaceful and democratic mechanism for expressing the people’s desires, and they can shift the course of history."

"What are the distributional implications of halving poverty in South Africa when growth alone is not enough."

"A new growth path for South Africa."

"The South African governmentrecently released a new economic policyframework, the New Growth Path (NGP).This policy is intended to facilitate ‘arestructuring of the South Africaneconomy to improve its performance interms of labour absorption as well as thecomposition and rate of growth’ (EconomicDevelopment Department)."

"The macroeconomic policies presentedin the NGP are mixed. The monetarypolicy on the one hand commits to lowerreal interest rates and continued targetingof low and stable inflation."

"The poorest 40% of people accrue about 6% of total income, while the richest 10% of people are earning about 57% of income. This shows a very stark picture of income inequality."

"We need to push harder on improving access and the provision of enhanced financial and learning support for students from poor and marginalised communities."

"When the Dean of FEB from Groningen approached me about the application, I was speechless, I really didn’t expect it."

"We understand that we really need to invest in this relationship as this is a fantastic opportunity for us to partner with a top global university."

"One place that we are hoping to see a deep collaboration is in the School of Accountancy. For us, this is very valuable"

"Organizations depend on a happy customer base for sustainable growth and long-term success."

"Hire for character, then focus on training"

"Treat your customers as an extension of your company"

"Setting goals and working toward them keep employees driven to succeed. Where possible, extend goal setting to customer-service by setting up a system of daily benchmarks or gamifying the process."

"I am a behavioural economist, working on issues of identity, discrimination, trust, social cohesion and collective action."

"I examine the impact of racial identity on behaviour in trust games played by White, Black and Coloured high school students in South Africa."

"Psychology has a chequered past in South Africa. On the one hand, it was used to bolster the apartheid regime’s racializing project, and was silent on the abuses meted out by the state. On the other hand, there was a small, but important, set of psychologists who wrote cogently about how psychology should be practiced in progressive and contextualized ways, and who provided support for people who suffered in opposing apartheid (e.g. detainees)."

"I tend to steer clear of providing advice, because it sets me up as some kind of expert on somebody else’s life. All I can say is that I am passionate about my work, and I enjoy going to the office each day"

"Teenage pregnancy is seen, on the whole, by researchers and service providers as a social problem."

"Why sexuality education in schools needs a major overhaul."

"Teachers find it challenging to create open dialogue in sexuality education while at the same time maintaining discipline."

"According to this discovery, the oldest bows and bone arrows are now dated to just over 60 000 years old,”"

"These sites provide clues to the behaviour of early humans. The people who lived here were of the Homo sapiens species and there are signs that they lived as hunters as opposed to scavengers, as may have been the case with other human species such as Homo erectus and Homo ergaster."

"The structure of the human body, with its rotating hips and shoulders, enabled humans to use the throwing skill to great effect. It was only a matter of time before the early hurled objects began to take on the shapes of darts and arrows, followed at a later stage by the manufacture of arrowheads made from bone"

"I'll make me a world."

"Learning disabilities in childhood - some guidelines and cautions."

"The management of a child with a learning disability"

"Summary:Traces the lives and careers of the following doctors."

"As a competitive athlete I know full well the highs and lows of winning and losing. Athletes experience sport participation on different levels."

"Sport participation is a lifelong pursuit for many people, especially with people becoming more active and appreciating the value of being fit and healthy."

"believe good mental preparation starts with our youth and that it is important for them to learn about mental skills."

"Just without all the frills and complicated academic jargon."

"In this research report I introduced Stabilis Treatment Centre by exploring and providing an overview of their existing programmes."

"I have stated the research problem and the subsequent research question and goals."

"A literature review is included where information with regards to drug abuse, exercise psychology and the use of chess in various contexts is provided."

"The final push to write my book came as I needed to find a way to offer sport psychology to children. My goal is to make sport psychology accessible to as many children as possible."

"The apparent aim of this paper is to reveal the contribution of archaeology to understanding the social relations of capitalism."

"The burden of this particular study of rural settlement in the Scottish Highlands is to show that archaeology helps to achieve a deeper understanding of the transition from clan ownership to individual ownership during the period of Improvement that heralded the dawn of the new commercial age in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries."

"If ever one wondered whether the life of a single man could illuminate a century, [this] brilliant biography … proves the point.”"

"In this area, people were able to choose from a long menu of foods including venison and the meat of other wild animals, berries, edible roots and corms, particularly of plants in the iris family, seafood including shellfish, fish, seabirds, stranded dolphins or whales, and much else. All these items have been identified in excavated food remains. It is, however, harder to know their relative importance."

"Bone tissue accumulates over many years, so this was a long-term dietary pattern. People buried at Matjes River Rock Shelter, on the other hand, ate much more mixed diets, with more terrestrial food or low trophic level [low on the food chain] marine foods, such as shellfish."

"What's surprising about it is the degree of specialisation in local resources, from which we can infer that these people were living within relatively small areas, rather than trekking regularly across large areas of landscape. This is unexpected, given the very mobile lifestyle of most recent southern African hunter-gatherers."

"There is an extensive literature on the use of ethnography in archaeology and the dangers of simplistic assumptions that past societies were necessarily like recent ones."

"It is often very hard to recognize when similar elements were deployed in different social and cultural systems in the past, as I argue is the case here."

"It is true that many burials were isolated interments in scattered localities, but other caves also contained large numbers of graves--Whitchers Cave, for example. Unfortunately, this was excavated early in the twentieth century, and most of the remains recovered have been lost. We are interested in what the placement of graves meant to the survivors, and how this fitted in with peoples' concepts of the landscape."

"Gender roles changed with environmental shifts, and certain tasks such as big-game hunting disappeared as a result. In other cases, gender roles were revised because of social pressures imposed on specific communities."

"Gender roles can be identified in some archaeological sites in parts of Africa, and these roles sometimes appear to have altered through time."

"In some parts of Africa such as Mali, men and women are buried with the artifacts they owned in life, while in Ethiopia, stelae mark the gender of the deceased. Elsewhere, as in the Stone Age of southern Africa, gender-undifferentiated grave goods are placed with men, women, and children, suggesting a genderless ancestral world."

"Some aspects of initiation rites may be detected archaeologically through skeletal alterations, rock art motifs, and props such as scarified dolls."

"The initiations are largely designed to instruct initiates about behavior appropriate for men and women of reproductive age belonging to a specific community"

"Sub-Saharan African rites of passage into adulthood are sometimes marked by gender-specific physical mutilations such as circumcision, dental modification or scarification, together with other forms of symbolic marking that invariably adopt a binary gender system as the norm."

"I have dedicated my life to African archaeology because the deep past in Africa is everyone’s heritage and it must be protected."

"We have incredible archaeological sites in this country and we frequently recover new and exciting data."

"The best way to preserve our heritage for future generations is to teach young people about it and involve them in the process of acquiring such knowledge for themselves"

"It is a personal honour to be elected to the British Academy, but I particularly hope that my appointment will contribute towards raising the international profile of Wits University."

"We have always written against the grain, which is the point of critique … of any weight"

"Many see this as “progressive,” but it’s retrogressive as imaginable. A discipline that for a century of its history was anti-essentialist is now sanctioning essentialisms of every kind."

"But not only white people should write about whites, or only men about men, or Navajos about the Navajo, or any human subjects only about themselves and their experiences of the world."

"I wrote an essay some years back in which I made the argument that anthropology is not defined by its content but by its methodological curiosity, by defamiliarization of the world."

"But beneath the phenomenon lie economic and political forces that have to do with the transformative history of the present"

"So if I look in the mirror and I look like crap, I feel like crap, then if I suddenly put a face on, I suddenly feel a little bit better, and I think it's part of my coping strategy."

"It's so funny isn't it, when you suddenly have something to write about you find your voice, and it's amazing the opportunities. I'm petrified of flying, but I actually flew a plane myself."

"I probably have always been an exhibitionist, but I've done things that I never thought I could do, and it is because of cancer. I'm dyslexic and I've just written a book. I'm not saying dyslexia stops you, but I never thought I was a writer."

"I was given this lifeline of targeted therapy and it put my cancer to sleep, but what people don't get about it is that on average people get about six months extra life and I got two and a half years."

"To be reunited with society through cure was to effect a desired situation in life, whether that be social, biological or spiritual."

"This deeply anthropological understanding of health considered that it is in fact the process of achieving a desired state is of most significance to the sufferer."

"the importance of red symbols as representing the change from sickness to good health because of the therapeutic power of symbolism for the sufferer"

"In spite of Christianity the permeating influence in the Nyuswa reserve is based more on Zulu culture than on any foreign culture’"

"In most aspects of daily life, outlook and habits, I am Zulu in spite of my mission background’."

"Important aspects of Zulu culture were unrecognised and denied by Catholicism, including the recognition of ancestral power, the consulting of a diviner and certain forms of marriage."

"Many white South Africans, including myself, are committed to contributing to South Africa. This is our home and at the same time we experience the tension of feeling we benefited from a long history of injustice and we wonder whether there is a place and role here for us now."

"The whole question makes me feel deeply uncomfortable and I have been trying to work through this, in both a personal and academic context, for many years.”"

"At the same time there is no question that Philosophy Departments should be teaching African Philosophy and Non-Western Philosophy."

"Part of eradicating racism would be to eradicate the forced identification of oneself as a particular public and political products."

"How Do I Live in This Strange Place?"

"It is appropriate for white South Africans to feel shame because of their association with the brutality, oppression and dispossession that were part of the apartheid past, particularly when it is likely that they have benefited from it."

"I am ashamed of my brother for beating his wife."

"I have been characterised as a self-hating attention-seeker and directed to commit suicide."

"While we endeavour to assist our Clients as much as possible, we require artwork(s) to be delivered and/or collected from our premises by the Client."

"The cost for this will be for the Client’s account, with an additional Handling Fee of 15% charged on top of the Service Provider’s invoice."

"What we must be careful of is not to be afraid of our borrowings. I think myself that there is a sort of over-anxious desire for national art in this country."

"concurrently victims and aggressors, their weapons are their vicious claws and beaks, but their wings have been replaced by brightly coloured targets"

"The target was on the bird originally as a decorative device which derived from my tapestry designs in 1973."

"The objection that one cannot legislate to change "the hearts and minds of men" is a red herring, when the law seeks to hit at actions not at attitudes."

"Whereas it is essential, if man is not to be compelled to have recourse as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression, that human rights should be protected by the rule of law."

"We are not satisfied that complaints against the security forces are always investigated with the vigour which they deserve if public confidence in the general conduct of the security forces is to be maintained."

"I was soon to learn that Manchester was unusual in its favourable gender balance in 1968."

"In my year at Manchester about 10% of the class were women. Many had been discouraged from applying to do law."

"Young people need to know that there is a difference between being anxious and having an anxiety condition."

"I would like us to find ways to talk about mental health with young people where it didn’t have to take on this illness identity to get help"

"There is clearly a need for a protocol for managing change in the public sector particularly when getting it wrong can have serious consequences for the health and wellbeing of the public."

"The most important thing now is to ensure that those seeking ACC’s sensitive claims assistance get the help they need as soon as possible."

"Teens and young adults typically spend their days learning or working on screens, while their phones have become so multifunctional that they use them to socialise and to connect, to find information and to be entertained"

"When I was a kid, when I was reading a book, my parents might ask me what I was reading."

"Inevitably, the admission of women to the rank of exhibitors upsets the patriarchal hegemony of avant-garde creativity and introduces new relationships of power between people in the group."

"It is clear that aspects of the performative are relevant to psychoanalytical theory in general and feminist art historical enquiry in particular."

"This is not to say that fantasy is free of social relations and power, but she argues that its process “orchestrates and shatters relations of power."

"I am not cowardly and I keep my word. I am faithful to myself, ferocious to myself, and indulgent to others. That is I, the man. I love the song of love—that is I, the woman. I consciously create for myself illusions and dreams, that is I the artist … I am much more a man than a woman. The desire to please and to pity alone make me a woman. I hear and I take note … I am neither man nor woman—I am I."

"I am deeply honoured and appreciative of the confidence expressed by the University Council in me. I am committed together with the University’s management to advancing the university’s mission of Shaping Africa’s Intellectual Futures and to continue to create opportunities for students and staff alike to succeed. I look forward to working closely with the various university communities, alumni and diverse stakeholders to bring this vision to life."

"I try not to have a victim mentality … there’s racism, there’s the question of women, etc. I always say to myself, “Okay, what can I do to change the status quo?” It’s about making things better."

"Try to work with like-minded people. You will knock on many doors, but don’t give up, believe in yourself and believe in what you are doing."

"I think deep down I’m an eternal optimist. So, those things to me said, “I have a social and political responsibility to create more like me, or not even like me, even better than me.” I realised that when I finished my dermatology [degree] and I was the only African there. But I must say, in the department there were consultants who were very sensitive to my cause and very supportive. So I leaned towards those individuals and they kept encouraging me. I try not to have a victim mentality … there’s racism, there’s the question of women, etc. I always say to myself, “Okay, what can I do to change the status quo?” It’s about making things better."

"It is a balancing act. I think one has to set one’s own standards. Don’t compete with anyone because everyone’s situation is unique. I always say to women colleagues, I have one child and that was intentional, because that was the only way I could balance raising my child with having my career. Then again, you find people who have four or five children. You have to carve your own path. With mundane tasks, I delegate at home. For example, I’ve made sure that my helper is amazing. If I get a salary increase, hers also increases, because she’s my home manager. The third point is have a supporting husband, a supporting family. So, in a nutshell, it’s important to understand your own situation and not compete with others; instead, compete with yourself, be the best version of yourself. And you must love what you are doing. Talking about she balance academics with leadership."

"One of my role models was my brother, Mluleki Dlova. He died at a young age, and it was at his funeral that I learned how much he used to do at Gillette, as CEO of a department. I learned how much he was doing to help the staff and create bursaries for students because he was in a position of power. That was also something that planted a seed."

"I examined the personal names occurring on the Knossos. As tablets as evidence for the social structure of Crete in the Late Minoan II period."

"The main conclusion that I drew from this examination was that Greek and non-Greek names were almost inextricably mixed in the lists of men recorded on the tablets, which suggested that at the time when the tablets were written, the Mycenaean newcomers had merged to such an extent with the local inhabitants that there were no social distinctions between the two groups."

"I hope in a future publication to expand the examination of the Knossos tablets to cover the rest of the personal names, and the present study is a step in that direction."

"As in the case of the As tablets, the names of the women are recorded in a number of different ways. Some tablets, e.g. Ap 639, Ap 769 and Ap 5864 (which may be part of Ap 639), contain the names of women."

"SMID was both complex and comprehensive, with indices of linguistic, archaeological, historical, religious, and cultural topics, as well as individual words and phrases in the tablets."

"Because I had to choose some teaching subjects, I chose mathematics."

"As a mathematician, your work consists of building a knowledge base, almost like building a house of bricks,each layer of bricks you lay has a solid foundation underneath it with no holes, gaps, or errors."

"Mark my words,” as Paul said in verse 2, “Do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery”. We slave ourselves into sadness with our sinful nature."

"International mobility and the opening up of borders linked to increasing globalisation have given rise to serious risks for children caught up in cross-border situations."

"On one hand, there is the risk of cross-border trafficking of children for economic, sexual or other exploitation."

"Delegates from various disciplines, Government Ministries and Departments, judges and child protection specialists from South Africa, other countries in Africa and the rest of the world, including England, Scotland, France, the Netherlands, Israel, Japan, New Zealand, the USA and others have already secured their places at the Conference."

"The 1996 Constitution came into force and South Africa has also ratified a number of international conventions such as the International Convention on the Rights of the Child, the United Nations Convention of the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination against Women, and the Hague Convention on Child Abduction."

"It’s important for supervisors to take the time to understand the students they are working with or training, so that you do not make assumptions. This understanding allows them not to be scared and to do the work in a respectful, friendly and comfortable environment."

"My research is motivated by the need to develop efficient methodologies for analysing heavy metals and other contaminants in water, especially in areas where drinking water is drawn from untreated rivers and boreholes."

"Once the pollutants are identified, treatment processes need to be developed, and the focus of my group’s research is the use of environmentally-friendly nanomaterials such as absorbents and fillers in membrane systems, as potential next-generation water treatment methods that can be used in rural areas."

"Seeing students under my supervision publish papers and graduate, and others winning national and international awards are standout moments for me, as much as seeing former students that I mentored excel in their workplaces."

"I commit to maintain and exemplify the highest standards of scientific integrity and agree to follow the Academy’s Code of Conduct."

"I can't see that happening because the White Paper has been approved by Parliament, even the Decadal Plan, so the wheels are running. And at the end of the day, the politicians can't stall the momentum at which this is going. I mean, they may be able to chirp about certain things, but the doing is actually in the hands of the scientists. And therein lies, you know, some of the frustrations we feel are scientists. We come from a sporting nation. I mean, you know, we all know that the Springboks (national rugby team) are playing on Saturday. There'll be an overwhelming voice of support for that level of stuff. When it comes to politics, we are all very opinionated. You know we can, we can air our opinions, whether we have supported the evidence, etcetera. But at least with the science, even though we don't get the same recognition as scientists and what science can do, the value of science is that it is evidence based. There's a line of evidence, a chain of evidence in terms of support of what it is we are doing. But sadly, during the COVID era, the trust in science was kind of obliterated. And so we have a lot of work to do to rebuild the trust, the confidence and to allow people to see why science, whether it is the, you know, the physical sciences, the hard sciences or the social sciences, to just stand back a little and watch the way science rolls in motion."

"Yes, the private sector is dependent on the public sector to produce the students. And they wait at the end of the pipeline and they suck them all up. So, yes, public-private partnerships early on are desirable, but I think there are challenges on all sides. I'm not so sure I'm not an economist, but I get a sense that, you know, having just been squeezed through the COVID pandemic, that there's challenges on all sides. So let's just hope that in years to come, there's better will, and that the private sector is more amenable to putting in more money into the system."

"I know you think you are poor. You have to wear second hand clothes and often walked barefoot to school in winter when you were young. The other learners laugh at you since you are not as well off as they are. But you get the top marks in mathematics and science. You see, being poor in material things does not make your brain also poor. What matters is that you are focused, disciplined and respectful. * Remember you grew up herding sheep and had to fend for yourself from the boys in the fields? That you had to go to school on alternate days and you had to do many other jobs which boys had to do such as working in the construction company, which involved mixing cement, laying bricks, etc? All this hard work was good for you. It gave you discipline and taught you never to shy away from hard work. It gave you the strong belief in yourself and capabilities. And you you learned all you had to do while maintaining your pride and dignity. What about your family? Will they understand why you need to go to University? Let me tell you, they will not. They would like you to work and support your brother and sister so they can complete their schooling. Also Tebello, remember that even though you are good in mathematics and general science, you decided not to do these two subjects when you entered high school? Do you know why? Let me tell you. You listened to your peers. Be wary of peers. You have always been an independent thinker. You never went along with the crowd. Why start now? Eventually, with two years of high school left, you realize that arts is not for you. So you are now doing Physics, Biology and Chemistry and an advanced mathematics course. You are worried that you cannot do all the courses in two years. But you will, since you are excited about being a scientist. Do you doubt you can make it? Do you think you have what it takes to be a scientist? Let me tell you this: you do have what it takes. You like nature, this may have come from your shepherd days. You like to ask deep questions about your environment and you like to fix things around the house. You like to see plants grow, you love to listen to birds and identify them. You do not realize that this is what science is about. Being a scientist means being in touch with your environment, having an inquisitive mind and asking questions about how things work. You like challenges, you like to do the impossible. All the hard work you did when you were younger was preparing you for the discipline needed for doing in TWO years what others did in THREE years. Yes, you will have to work very hard to catch up with the others, but then I know you would never shy away. You will thinking of going to University, later. Your peers will be there again, telling you that you will never get married if you are too educated. They will say men do not like educated women. Are you going to listen to them again after your experience in high school? I know you, you learn your lessons very quickly. You will ignore peers this time. In fact you will encourage some of your peers to go to University with you. What about your family? Will they understand why you need to go to University? Let me tell you, they will not. They would like you to work and support your brother and sister so they can complete their schooling. You know this is fair since you were supported. The family believes you have enough education. All they wanted was for you to be more educated than they were. Now you are going too far, they are now worried about when you will get married and have children. So what are you going to do? You cannot disrespect your family. But I know you, you will find a way out. You want to remain challenged by science. So you will decide to work for a year to support your family and to see your younger sister complete her high school. And you will be even more determined to go to University. The reason is you will not enjoy your job. It will not be challenging enough for you! You believe education will equip you to have a more fulfilling career. But you have been told endlessly that women do not need a career, they just have to marry well. But you are different. You have an independent mind. You believe you can be a wife and a mother and still be a bread winner and contribute to society. And you will."

"You didn’t dream too far because in that environment, there aren’t many people who have gone far."

"I completely object to the notion that there is anybody special in this world. We are all good at what we do. We just have to find a way of understanding what we want to do, and not ask for short cuts.”"

"After school, I knew that I was a scientist, one way or the other. How far I would go with the science, I did not know. I didn’t know what chemistry was about, I didn’t even know what I would do with chemistry, but it was challenging and I liked it."

"I learnt a lot from being in the fields. You have to learn about the birds. You have to learn the sounds. That is science, you know. You had to learn in the field what kind of plants are edible, and so science started there in my view. I think that is when a scientist was born."

"Our whole aim is to make molecules that are cancer-specific so that healthy tissue will not be affected."

"In our research, PDT is combined with nanoparticles that absorb and re-emit light, thus enabling for visualization in addition to cancer treatment. In cancer therapy, nanoparticles act as delivery agents of the drugs selectively to the cancer tissue."

"At the start my father influenced my path. He believed that the apartheid system could only be defeated through education and I was encouraged to excel at a very young age."

"The teachers accepted me after this mad move from arts to science and when I entered the University of Lesotho, I was greatly influenced by my lecturer, Dr Gray. After that I was driven by my desire to beat the odds."

"I had academic loneliness, since there were very few women when I started. Now my past students have become professors and are my academic colleagues."

"I am driven by being an African, completely, I’m passionate to see us succeed."

"I urge all young people in the country to study to the highest possible level [PhD]. The development of South Africa will depend on highly skilled labor. No country can have lasting economic."

"Sometimes I think gosh, that is not me. I’m just doing my work, that’s all it is. I love my students and I embarrass them a lot sometimes."

"I keep telling people I’m no longer a role model, I’m too old, too straight and not hip enough."

"There were no role models to look up to back then. You just learned to follow your peers. They told me science was too hard and way beyond me, but I was adamant I wanted to do it and with two years left switched courses."

"I was brought up to work hard, whether it was as a young shepherd or working long hours mixing cement and concrete for my father’s company. I was just used to touching things. Now when I talk to schools or parents, the first thing I say, is let your children touch and explore, it’s the first path to science."

"In South Africa we have this system that constantly strives for 100% pass rates at schools. Many of the teachers themselves find science hard, as very few are trained in teaching the discipline, and therefore under great pressure, they discourage students from courses. It is a deeply flawed system."

"Science is not just part of our culture, it is part of our everyday life, and role models are crucial in promoting this. I didn’t have any, other than my teachers. Nobody knew what a chemist was back then. Students need people to look up to, as well as a mentality of if someone from that background can do it, why can’t I?” exclaims Nyokong, who often refers to her humble background as proof of this."

"Over the years I have become very passionate in making people aware of science in the marketplace. I used to run a programme for high school learners where I would take them to the supermarket and show them how the products they buy everyday are influenced or impacted on by science."

"South Africa has made the right policies and in terms of output is beginning to show on the world map. Where the limitations are noticeable and the government is very aware of, is taking those outputs, not all but some, and turning them into products through innovation. That is where we really struggle.”"

"When I collaborate internationally, I see a culture where scientists will pitch an innovative idea to the industry and a company can choose to take or fund it if they are interested. However in South Africa, we just don’t have that, which puts a lot of strain on the market. My frustration comes on the medical side. I’m not into development, I’m into research and training young people to develop, and if industries, particularly pharmaceutical industries and others were to really invest in research, we would see a massive boost in productivity.”"

"Many students in Africa have excellent theoretical scientific knowledge, but lack the tools for research. It is a travesty in a continent where we need that critical mass of young people with great ideas coming through academia. It is worrying because many of the productive researchers at African universities are aging and there is a major gap in between developing."

"We immediately needed engineers and could have trained many in South Africa and neighbouring African countries if we had young people with maths and science from high school. Sadly, the harsh truth was we didn’t have enough and work was outsourced."

"The aim is to take African lecturers in and equip them with the right training before sending them back to their respective classrooms. Many go back with a renewed confidence and vigour, but frustratingly return to facilities that are not fit to teach or carry out research."

"I can do nothingon my own. I am achemist - we candevelop things –but collaborationis what’simportant to see ifthey work."

"There are very poorpeople, eating from bins out there, and very rich.The infrastructure is there and the governmenthas made a conscious decision that they are notjust going to combat poverty, they will alsodevelop science and technology."

"I want to see Africa become less dependent on the West and find solutions to our own problems through science. No country has ever developed without a good science base."

"All awards are important. They are a privilege. But the awards that give me an opportunity to educate the public have huge significance."

"It is important to place science as a priority in African countries. No country has ever developed without a good science base."

"I think women need to remove the fear of science and the fear of a male dominated workplace. If somebody tells you “it’s not for women,” remove that fear, it’s not difficult. Like anything else, when you work at it, you can make it."

"Young women and girls who would wish to pursue science careers should seek education to the highest level and work hard to excel in their careers."

"They should work hard and consistently. I believe strongly in putting a lot of time in what you do. They should not choose a career based on money, they should base their choice on passion. Yes, we need money to survive, but choose a career which will make you happy, fulfilled and challenged. That will make you want to wake up and go to work."

"Electroanalysis and electrocatalysis are electrochemically driven analytical protocols for measurement and monitoring of a wide range of environmental pollutants, depending on the chemical transformations that give rise to the pollution effect."

"Each environmental problem requires careful analysis of the chemical nature of the problem before the best suited methods for analysis and monitoring may be developed."

"The common factor between all these projects is the interest in novel high surface area electrochemically active nanomaterials which could benefit the focus of either sensors or energy applications."

"Preliminary work includes the development of polymer electrodes for sulphonamide detection, with very sensitive and reproducible analytical reporting in laboratory standard solutions as well as municipal tap."

"This is very important for capacity building, research training of postgraduate students and for developing teaching capacity in teaching current hot topics in science."

"Nobody gives you opportunities; they present themselves to you. And it's up to you to see them and to seize them, no matter what other people may say – you can achieve what you believe"

"Follow your passion, but understand that passions shift over time, and that’s okay. Balance motherhood and ambition, reflect often, and always be building towards a purposeful legacy."

"Make it count, because how we use these opportunities now will shape what’s possible for generations of women after us."

"My story is not just about overcoming barriers—it’s about building bridges for others"

"The practical component of oceanography required long periods at sea, but the boats weren’t equipped for women, and the crew were not ready to accept a person of colour as a professional... By actively sharing my journey, I’ve become a tangible example for female students to explore careers based on capability, not stereotypes"

"Most current medical interventions are designed for ex post facto implementation"

"The major shortcoming of modern medicine lies in the absence of continuous monitoring tools to inform medical practitioners of the early onset and progression of a disease"

"We are bridging a crucial gap in healthcare knowledge and implementation"

"Collaborative research sharpens our skills and pushes us to think beyond our comfort zones"

"Women often remain primary caregivers, facing career interruptions due to maternity leave and family demands - factors rarely accounted for in promotions"

"Surround yourself with leaders who embody excellence, kindness and fairness. We must create spaces where all can thrive"

"The Fellow in residence programme has allowed me to integrate as an active team member with the LPPI researchers, to develop joint interests in a diverse range of projects centred around sensor development and energy applications. The common factor between all these projects is the interest in novel high surface area electrochemically active nanomaterials which could benefit the focus of either sensors or energy applications. During the 4 month FIR stay, the initial contact with LPPI has been expanded to a fully representative consortium working on mutually beneficial materials and technology outcomes. This is very important for capacity building, research training of postgraduate students and for developing teaching capacity in teaching current hot topics in science. The consortium partnership established between SensorLab (University of the Western Cape ) and the LPPI laboratory (CY Cergy Paris) is a unique innovation in science knowledge sharing and capacity building between South Africa and France."

"These chemical transformations include highly specific binding reactions, electrolysis, energy efficient catalytic conversion of chemical reactants, adsorption reactions, diffusion controlled reactions and coupled chemical reactions **"

"I hope that my work and determination inspire young scientists to persevere in their efforts until we find lasting solutions to address cancer in Africa."

"This achievement reaffirms that my dedication to addressing the urgent cancer challenges in the African region is both recognised and valued."

"I also want to encourage more young women to pursue careers in STEM. The opportunities are boundless – embrace them, and together, we can change the world."

"The mixed method design was adopted for this study which triangulated focus group semi structured interview, documentary analysis and lesson observation."

"Writing is dominant in schools and continues to be important for effective communication. Therefore, learners need to be up- skilled in writing skills as their everyday activities."

"Education has the power both to include and exclude, and the effects it has are down to the Higher Education (HE) professionals working in institutions and taking responsibility for what the student experience looks like."

"I am motivated by a vision of equity in society, a belief that opportunity in education can help transform society into a more equal community."

"I passionately believe we can take such students through an immersive university experience which they enjoy and through which they succeed. It is a complex journey for our students, and I appreciate that the scaffolding needs to be in place throughout their journey. Perhaps even before and post-graduation."

"We learn a lot through interaction in real time and in a real shared physical space. Of course, we have attentive support for transition to campus learning and counselling for any student facing difficulty balancing campus presence, online learning and interaction."

"Our students need to feel accepted and valued, we need to make sure that we work with them and not decide for them what this might mean in practice. Part of this work on belonging and inclusion is knowing who our students are. I need to know where they come from, their concerns, what inspires them, and their ambitions; therefore, I must create and align resources."

"I believe that African women have the capability to excel in the sciences and make Africa advance a lot in socio economic development."

"I hope we can achieve gender equality where women and girls are empowered to ensure inclusive and quality education for all."

"Well, I climbed the academic ladder from tutorial fellow to full professor. In the university there are four to five key performance areas: teaching undergraduate and supervising postgraduate students; research, development and innovation; community outreach; international networks and management or leadership. I have had significant outputs in the five areas."

"I am particularly interested in water research because water is simply vital. Nanotechnology has an essential role to play in purification techniques. Our current methods can filter water to levels that are safe for domestic use, or by up to 80%, but we want to refine them to filter [out] about 100% of water contaminants in one filtration cycle."

"I want us [Africans] to have access to safe drinking water, just as is the case in developed countries such as USA and in Europe."

"We drew water from a river about two miles [about 3km] away. The river where kids went to swim and women laundered their dirty clothes, was the same river we drew water from to fill our calabashes and plastic jerrycans."

"We need these technologies, not just for industrial use, but also for domestic use, for everyday use. So that individual households can mount them in their homes."

"My dream is to produce a commercially viable water nanofilter that removes contaminants in one filtration cycle, enabling rural African families to install affordable water filters in their homes. It is to have a continent where everyone can access safe and clean drinking water."

"My analysis is underpinned by relevant life writing and feminist criticism, such as the notion of female."

"It investigates questions of nationalism, gender and sexuality in the autobiographical texts of Petronella van Heerden and Elsa Joubert."

"As political scientist De Klerk (1975:xiv) claims, ‘[t]he key to the Afrikaners is Calvinism’ and the strict doctrines enforced by the state and church can be said to have inhibited Van Heerden’s self-defining quest in her writing since she might have been ostracised (or imprisoned), in my opinion, if she imparted her more radical political opinions or openly discussed her sexuality as ‘mannish [lesbian]'."

"Through focusing on childhood experiences in Kerssnuitsels, marketed as a youth memoir, Van Heerden succeeds to convey her gradual awakening to the discriminating binaries imposed on women of her cultural and historical context in late 19th century and early 20th century South Africa."

"She gave up practicing medicine and came to Harrismith to farm cattle and was legendary among the boere here."

"In August 1996, while I was a Research Fellow at the University of Cape Town, I was struck by a series of news stories in South African newspapers in which the visual and verbal imagery seemed to me highly distinctive. I kept a collection of clippings and eventually these became the basis for my PhD on images of Islam. In the course of my studies, I conducted archival research into colonial-era paintings, newspapers and popular cultures in South Africa, and read these in juxtaposition with contemporary literary representations of Islam. This trajectory of images across two centuries became the material for a theory about representations of slavery and Islam in South Africa."

"I enjoy the reading and thinking as well as the discussion and exchange that an academic life involves. I love the smell of old books and newspapers in libraries and archives, and the possibility of original ideas that emerge from long hours in a quiet place."

"I love the creativity that emerges from a university community. Working at Penn State with my colleagues and students feels like being exposed to a constant series of illuminating ideas and opportunities for creative collaborations."

"I love reading and visiting museums and galleries, which is also part of my work. Talking with friends over a home-cooked meal is my favorite way to spend an evening."

"I hope we will have developed partnerships and cooperative relations with scholars in other parts of the world, especially in the Global South. For me, such pooling of intellectual and material resources will generate new and necessary ways of engaging with the world's challenges."

"They say God laughs when we make plans: He's watched me trace my path away from war-scarred foreign lands, Where AIDS cases and unmarked graves are common as grains of desert sand, Where solemn bargains for slaves are made each day by neighbouring clans; Where I grew up. Soon as I left the womb, I was running; There was always something to escape, be it Ebola Or just that drunkard driving that Range Rover, Racing over potholes, ten shots from being sober... That was me; ever escaping, Hoping, praying and close-shaving, Evading nature's worst and Mankind at its most perverse; No helping hand to rescue me, I was the perfect refugee - See, Ive been arrested, beaten, Seized by police for no reason, Always fleeing by my teeth's skin, Till leaving, Coming to Heathrow, And finding work, and peace, and love With running no longer in my blood."

"I always loved mathematics, and was inspired by particular teachers in both primary and secondary schools, and so I went to University to study mathematics."

"I gave “extra mathematics lessons” while I was doing my degree and enjoyed this (as well as earning quite well from it) and so went on from a B Sc to do my professional teaching diploma."

"Psychology was my second major – this also wasn’t in my original plan – I had thought I would do Applied Maths, but I enjoyed Psychology in first year and so continued, and then enjoyed work on child development, learning and so on."

"I moved into teaching – rather than set out to teach, or work in education. When I began my working career as a secondary mathematics teacher, I had no intention of becoming an academic and researcher in education. My first post was in a so-called ‘coloured’ school in Cape Town, a school with a strong political identity tied to the Unity Movement."

"We need really curious leaders"

"because then you don’t make assumptions, you don’t take diversity views for granted."

"Once you get a big role, that's the starting line, not the finishing line. So it's really, how do you understand what the need is from your organization and in society?"

"If you don't know as a leader what your license to operate is from society, then you've got tunnel vision. So it's understanding the context, what society expects, what the organization needs, and having to adapt yourself and evolve.” Asked about the way forward"

"You have to be vulnerable. You have to recognize you don't know the answers. Good ideas can come from anywhere"

"Broadly my time is shared between supporting the professional development work we do in schools, and doing and supporting the research that is linked to this work, with a large proportion of time supporting full time doctoral students in the project. I teach less than I did before. I travel internationally a fair amount, to conferences and for other international work I do."

"I think our whole field of educational research in South Africa is relatively young. There is so much we need to know more about, and from the empirical base of our schools, classrooms and learners. I think the transition years from primary into secondary mathematics what teachers need to know and do to teach across subjects at that level are very poorly understood. This is critical in mathematics where the move to greater abstraction and working with symbolic forms emerges. It is also a critical point where we need to know more about what it means to learn and teach mathematics in a dominant minority but extremely powerful language (English)."

"Interesting as I think about this, Eva Hoffman’s Lost in Translation had an immense effect on me. I happened to read this while I was working on my PhD, and it provided a different gaze on what it meant to learn and live in a language that was not your mother tongue, or as she called it, the language of her heart and emotions. I have since read much of her work, the most powerful of which was After Such Knowledge: Meditations on the Holocaust. The latter, a philosophical and social commentary rather than an academic text, has contributed significantly to my understanding of the social world, as well as some of my own location in history."

"Most influential at the start of my academic career was Lev Vygotsky’s work: Mind in Society and Thought and Language. As a mathematics education researcher I am always working between educational theory and literature in mathematics education. With my early work on teaching mathematics in multilingual classrooms, David Pimm’s book Speaking Mathematically was pivotal in turning my attention to mathematical language more generally. More recently, with my interest in mathematical knowledge in and for teaching and particularly what is produced as mathematics in teacher education practice, influential resources are Basil Bernstein’s Pedagogy, Symbolic Control and Identity, and Anna Sfard’s Thinking as Communicating and then the extensive work done by Deborah Ball in the past decade. I could go on, as I enjoy reading, and spend time relaxing with whodunnit."

"For me it was worth trying out a few different things until I found what I liked. Even though it might have seemed undirected at the time, I ended up with some really useful skills"

"My research helps create the landscapes and environments that support us"

"Being creative is a huge part of being a good scientist. You need to find new ways to look at old problems and you must be able to design experiments that reveal new information"

"In other words, a scientist needs vision."

"Young people still care about the problems of the world and are willing to solve them, and they know that having fun is part of life"

"I work on understanding the dynamics of savanna ecosystems in the context of global change. My work integrates field ecological data, remote sensing, modelling, and biogeochemistry."

"I am involved in collaborative research projects with Yale University, Edinburgh University and the University of Liverpool among others which variously work on fire-grazer interactions, inter-continental savanna comparisons, the importance of land-atmosphere feedbacks, and pursuing a global theory of fire."

"I’m constantly looking for new ways to reach people"

"So we’ve had a youth centre down in Masiphumelele for years. But we realised that we were missing young men aged between 17 and 29. So we have built a health park alongside the youth centre, basically it’s a gym with all the latest equipment."

"So the message now is: ‘get ripped, get prepped.’ You know, if you want to look gorgeous, if you wanna be attractive, build your muscles, but have a healthy penis too."

"And in the middle of the health park, we still have the sexual reproductive health clinic"

"Plus a mental health support component. We are seeing a ton of mental health difficulties post-COVID. So just some basic support. Somebody who can sit next to you and say: ‘I see you, I feel your pain. If you are using substances, can you use less? If you’re smoking, can you smoke less?’ We’re trying to address the non-communicable diseases as well."

"There is an epidemic of obesity now. So we are trying to say to young women: ‘this BMI [Body Mass Index] is going to get you into trouble. What can we do, sister? How can we help you? What’s your diet? Can we advise around the dietary side?’ You know, gentle engagement around non-communicable diseases"

"To be honest, I’m 62, so I kind of feel like my career is – with the lens that the glass is half full – that I am at a career summit somehow. I suppose I’ve been quite reflective in thinking what has been achieved and what still needs to be done."

"I’ve got a lot of thoughts now about ensuring that the Desmond Tutu Health Foundation and the Desmond Tutu HIV Centre are in stable and sustainable spaces. But you’re right, it’s such an exciting time in prevention, particularly antiretroviral-based prevention. I’ve also been looking back on 40 years of the epidemic: What have we done?"

"I’m a paleontologist, and a biologist. The particular area that I work in is called paleobiology. I use my understanding of bone structures of modern animals to make extrapolations to the fossil record."

"When fossils are found, people try to identify and understand the fossil itself. But my research goes beyond that. I want to try and understand something about the animal when it was living — how long did it take to grow, what kind of factors affected its growth, did it have any disease, was it male or female."

"My second book is called . This book is about is the history of life on earth from a perspective of the African continent. It’s like a big picture story. The book was aimed at the high school level but can also be enjoyed equally by adults.One of my very big interests is to promote science through different platforms."

"Kids have so much information about the prehistoric world, it is unreal. They know the geological time, they know about predators and prey and the names of so many dinosaurs."

"South Africa certainly has unique issues. As you know, our country has the legacy of the apartheid. So for me, as an Indian woman, growing up in South Africa meant that there were certain restrictions — which universities I could attend, what I could do. If you look at the numbers of black women in science in South Africa"

"I often work with the Association for South African Women in Science and Engineering and I’m very involved in trying to promote and encourage young people to come into science"

"I was lucky enough to be mentored by Dr. Botha de Meillon, the doyen of African Anopheles mosquitoes and author of several books on the topic, who encouraged me to embark on post-graduate studies at Wits University."

"Throughout my career, my research has focussed on the mosquitoes that transmit malaria parasites and how to control them. I have studied their morphology, chromosomes, and isoenzymes, cross-mated them, and bred them in huge numbers in the laboratory."

"The project I was involved in, in northern South Africa, looked at the effectiveness of reactive or targeted IRS (responding only when there was a malaria case) versus proactive IRS (the standard IRS blanket spraying program carried out at the beginning of the season) and how much each cost per annum."

"Entomology is quite often neglected but is critically important if real control or elimination is to be achieved. Capacity building in entomology would also be a crucial aspect that could be addressed by the savings made in targeted IRS."

"It's hard for anybody. There are people who are comfortable -- I don't know what the percentage of the people who are comfortable or are not comfortable [is], with people being differently able. I wrote in my book"

"It might have to do with how my mother was, and I observed her dealing with people who were different and as matter of fact and equal to anybody else, as deserving of respect and kindness. People have asked me over the years, "How do you work with people who are differently abled?" I always say,"

"I just have to learn what their special needs are. And what I'm going to do with them, I do with everybody. I want to find out what they're capable of, not what they're not capable of -- I mean, we know what they're not capable of, but it's so different for everyone, even if you don't have a physical disability."

"Everybody underestimates. And then there are people that think, am I a freak? Am I kinky? Is this strange? And I always say, "No." Find the person who loves to do what you love to do, and then you'll have the best relationship."

"If you're with somebody you feel is judging you when you make a suggestion, give it a try if you're really attracted to the person, but I wouldn't stick around for that."

"The Role of Gender-Responsive Organizations in Global Science," explaining the concept and expanding on it. Being gender-responsive, she said, means creating an environment that promotes an inclusive approach, recognizing the needs of both women and men."

"There are still many unconscious biases that prevent building a workplace where everybody is appreciated, respected and treated equally. Unfortunately."

"We tend to think that numerical gender parity is a good achievement in itself and that increasing the number of women fellows within institutes and academies is a valuable milestone," Diab said in her presentation."

"She continued, “However, gender transformation involves far more than achieving gender parity. It is a shift from a focus on statistics to a deeper dimension that embraces an understanding of the needs and aspirations of all people, especially women."

"Addressing only the notion of parity in numbers is not enough. We need to take bolder steps,"

"Institutions and academies worldwide should give more visibility to women scientists."

"TWAS has great potential to play a powerful gender-transformative role and to influence norms and practices in science academies across the developing world. TWAS draws its fellows, prize winners and attendees at events from multiple countries and also has five regional partners through which it can play an influential role.” And finally"

"Achieving gender transformation requires the engagement of both men and women. It's not only a men's or women's responsibility: we can travel this journey together"

"Our goal is to build relationships with companies so we can help meet their needs and solve their problems in ways that benefit our students, too"

"That may be talent development, industry research, or even developing innovative curriculum to meet emerging workforce needs"

"Apart from enjoying and having an aptitude for math and science at school, I decided to pursue a career in physics because there are very few female scientists in South Africa. Having a degree in physics opens the door to a variety of careers across a variety of sectors. And since only a few women pursue these careers it means more opportunities for those who do."

"My responsibilities involve implementing structured light to increase the bandwidth of optical communications systems. I design and construct optical experiments as well as develop code to automate measurement processes and analyze data."

"I also assist on the business process and program development of our prototyping facility which develops photonics prototypes well-aligned to market needs."

"In terms of what I want to do, Africa, Africa, Africa. We are a continent that’s reliant on rain for our crops: we are already a poor continent so we cannot put in a lot of irrigation."

"It is also the continent where there is the greatest predicted food shortage compared to the population growth. The United Nations has projected the African population to double to 2.4 billion by 2050, while global warming is likely to worsen droughts and reduce crop yields. But apart from all of that, it is my passion to do this for Africa."

"No, definitely not. It can be a solution for only a small amount of crops that are going to help with food security. People are thinking about aeroponics, hydroponics, eating insects, eating all sorts of other foods. Resurrection crops is one solution of many – but I think it is a very important one."

"Without trying to be rude, they are very ignorant about the subject. Genetic modification of plants is probably the safest kind of GM, yet it is the most vilified one."

"The crops that we are eating [today] are highly genetically modified. Through conventional breeding, thousands of gene changes happened without us knowing that we were doing GM all along."

"I want to cater to the subsistence farmer, the person who wants to make enough food to live"

"Farmers are becoming more and more dispirited, and droughts are killing them."

"We should make agriculture part of the solution to our issues… the climate change problem is so huge everything should be on the table"

"Global Learning – is that the field becomes increasingly more than just knowledge, but it becomes a field that is about what you do with that knowledge."

"In terms of the health of a person, this is really a difficult thing to study because there are endless combinations, and trying to understand what is relevant and important is not so easy."

"Because when I started, so little was known about the human genome. It was unthinkable that we could look at a person’s DNA and make a diagnosis for a disease or perform a prenatal diagnosis where we could diagnose babies in utero to see if they inherited a genetic disease from their parents. I feel that I have been so fortunate in my career to have experienced all these changes and to work in a field that has its heyday right now."

"I’m talking about the whole social justice system because it's not just the perpetrators. It is the victims, their families, everybody around them. So, this whole matter of bringing justice to victims has many dimensions."

"I would also like to see more South African and African plants being commercialised nationally by a completely local supply chain – from researchers, manufacturers and formulators to the promotion of indigenous knowledge systems and traditional knowledge holders."

"Over the past 18 months, we have been working to identify natural preservatives in indigenous biological resources that can be used in the preservation of cosmeceutical products."

"We already know a lot about human history from archaeology and anthropology, but recently genetics has provided a wonderful boost to the field."

"we could actually look and say: ‘We see a Neanderthal version of the gene and we can measure its effect on phenotype in many people—how often they get sunburned, what color their hair is, and what color their eyes are."

"I use lasers to optically manipulate cells … my goal is to translate my research from petri dishes to human testing."

"I am concerned about the brain drain of African scientists out of South Africa."

"We are using laser technology or laser-based technology for drug delivery."

"I have dwelt on the events which led to the founding of the Hydrological Research Institute."

"What of the work for which the HRI was intended."

"It was clearly the view of the "founding fathers."

"The Interdepartmental Commission which, to counter the growing fragmentation of hydrological research, recommended the establishment of a central, unifying division of hydrological research that hydrology was, and should be nurtured as, a HOLISTIC science."

"This is a view I still uphold."

"At the risk of being trite, let me repeat what is well-known but tends to be overlooked."

"That our planet's water resources, dating back to its creation, are substantially fixed but are both highly mobile and subject to constant changes in form between the gaseous form."

"Interacting powerfully with other substances."

"Our water resources are also highly variable and sensitive as regards quality."

"The many hydrological processes are intricately interrelated."

"With the result that a change in any one has a chain reaction on others, often with far-reaching consequences."

"Even common practices such as burning large expanses of veld or ploughing them and planting mielies alter the quantity."

"Time disposition and quality of runoff, base flow, and groundwater accrual, not to mention the quantity and quality of water reaching users downstream."

"More often than not these changes, sometimes damaging, occur inadvertently and may be difficult to remedy."

"They could have been anticipated by the foreknowledge whose acquisition is the task of the hydrological researcher."

"Such foreknowledge also enables us to manipulate hydrological processes beneficially."

"One example being mulching to curb unproductive evaporation of soil moisture, so as to make more available for assimilation and thus the growth and yield of crops."

"Cloud seeding, again, is an example of an intervention with potential for both harm and good."

"As you all well know, it is because South Africa's water supplies are at best undependable, and at worst grossly inadequate."

"They are infinitely more precious than our much vaunted gold for they are vital not only to all sectors of our economy."

"Small wonder therefore that South Africa has a long and creditable history of water research and development."

"I recall hearing vivid accounts by the late Dr M S du Toit, an eminent soil scientist who later became Secretary for Agriculture."

"In another sphere the late Prof. CL Wicht put forest hydrology on the world map with his catchment experiments at Jonkershoek on the effects of afforestation and forest management on stream flow."

"Which he was a pioneer in the statistical design and evaluation of controlled catchment Experiments."

"We can also look back with admiration on the construction, largely by manual labour, of the Vaal-Hartz Irrigation Scheme."

"A major scheme by any standards, which was undertaken primarily to give employment to many of those hit by the great depression of the early '30's."

"That the entire scheme was completed without provision of drainage canals for the return flow was certainly an oversight."

"Later came bold and imaginative schemes in yet another sphere, that of large-scale transfer of surplus water from some catchments to make good deficiencies in others."

"The Tugela-Vaal and Orange-Fish being two major examples."

"When the need arose to start thinking of desalinating and reusing water, Dr Stander of the CSIR earned world recognition."

"It seems to me that during the first 60 years of this century we relied more on the vision, initiative and drive of gifted individuals."

"The corporate style of management via a plethora of committees, which is so prevalent today."

"Engaged research is not merely about conducting studies; it's about creating meaningful partnerships that translate scientific innovation into tangible benefits for communities."

"Our mission is to use biotechnology and nanotechnology to develop accessible and affordable diagnostics for disease detection and monitoring."

"Science became my life’s work, research my passion and mentoring students my mission."

"I always knew I wanted to work with nature. Plant pathology became a calling, combining my love of biology with real-world impact. It connected my scientific interest with a moral purpose: to make food safer for everyone."

"We have come to tolerate ineptitude and leadership, management and governance failures; we do not have a fully functional district health system (DHS), which is the main vehicle for the delivery of primary health care; and we have not dealt decisively with the health workforce crisis."

"I know what it feels like to be at the bottom of the health hierarchy, in a racially segregated and unequal health care system."

"The development of skills for sustainable manufacturing is crucial to ensuring an efficient transition to a competitive economy by matching supply and demand for key skills."

"Skill development within the manufacturing sector presents the advantage of high-quality products and can as well address long-term employment concerns through job creation."

"A number of factors ranging from green innovation, climate change, advances in technology, and global economic downturn are driving the need for a competitive and sustainable manufacturing value chain."

"The complexity of today's factories calls for new and existing workers to up-skill in order to influence design changes and production efficiency toward sustainable manufacturing."

"“Uncontrolled waste disposal as far reaching consequences for both human health and the planet. Aside from methane, poorly managed waste contributes to black carbon emissions from open burning, leachate pollution in soil and groundwater, and microplastic release in aquatic ecosystems.”"

"“Decentralization of waste collection by creating local waste stations connected to regional waste treatment and recovery facilities, as a quick-win measure to salvage the situation. This approach will reduce transport-related emissions, promote community involvement in the circular economy, and create localized employment opportunities ensuring environmental, economic, and social co-benefits.”"

"People who are immunocompromised face greater risks of adverse outcomes from infection with SARS-CoV-2."