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Volume 12, Issue 1  
REGIONAL NEWS
PRACTICAL INFORMATION
RESEARCH
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REGIONAL NEWS
Anticipating cutbacks in state subsidies, the University of Cape Town recently reported that it plans to downsize its faculty and staff by 10 percent over the next two years. Many of the country’s universities have been eliminating faculty positions and laying off administrators in response to the government’s restructuring of South Africa’s system of higher education.
Cape Town currently has 10 faculties, but by next year that number will be reduced to six, according to university officials. The biggest change in this respect is that the now separate faculties of the arts, education, and the social sciences and humanities will be collapsed into a new faculty of humanities.
Compounding matters is the fact that Cape Town is undergoing a painful transition from being largely an all-white university to becoming a first-class “post-apartheid institution.” In compliance with the country’s new employment-equity laws, Cape Town University is hiring more blacks and women — sometimes at the expense of white males, who feel that they are being unfairly targeted.
But the university’s director of communications, Helen Zille, claimed that the cutbacks were not racially motivated. She stressed that the school was merely trying to expand in some disciplines, like information technology, and that other faculties need to be pared down.
— The Chronicle of Higher Education
Officials in the Senegalese Ministry of Education recently confessed to selling diplomas to students looking to travel to the west. The baccalaureat diplomas can be used to gain entrance to universities overseas.
Once accepted, would-be students submit their admission letters from the host universities to European and North American embassies in Dakar.
This documentation, along with proof of their academic standing provided by the illegitimate diploma, significantly increases their chances of acquiring a student visa abroad. In reality however they use the visa to travel to western countries to work illegally.
— The Times Higher Education Supplement
Western-style schools are currently being built for Niger’s Touareg nomads to replace traditional modes of education in the bush. The Touaregs have been herdsmen for generations, moving from place to place with the changing of the seasons. Hence their nomadic life-style has not been compatible with the kind of schooling found in large towns and villages.
And ever since the days of French colonialism, when western schooling was first introduced in Niger, the Touaregs have been resistant to educational programs that threaten their traditions or take away their children for extended periods of time.
The goal of the new primary schools then is to provide nomadic children with a modern education complete with curricula, class schedules and vacations while, at the same time, maintaining sensitivity towards Touareg culture and life-styles.
The curriculum at the school presently under construction in the Erough Valley, for instance, will combine basic reading, writing and math courses (taught in French) with practical training in animal husbandry and agriculture. The courses are aimed at helping the Touaregs to better manage their lives in the wilderness.
Ideally, the new bush schools will not require that children be separated from their families and will strive to preserve the nomadic way of life.
The northern-Niger project, financed by the French government, is not the only one of its kind. There are many other such projects in the making. However funding and resources are slow in coming. In general, school supplies are scarce and the objective of one book for every two students is rarely met. Another goal is to help the nomads find alternative means of making a living without uprooting them from their pasturelands.
The successive droughts of 1968-1972 and 1983-1985 wreaked havoc on the Touaregs, killing off their livestock and driving many nomads into large cities where they were quickly reduced to beggars and squatters.
In this respect, the bush schools could prepare them for jobs suitable to the nomadic way of life.
— Le Monde de l’Education
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