The authors of this paper adopted a transformative framework in this article to examine how the legacy of apartheid continues to manifest within higher education in South Africa. In particular, the authors analyzed (a) how mainstream mentoring knowledge of 'black' and 'marginalized' people have influenced mentoring in post-apartheid South Africa;…

The South African government continues to work tirelessly to reverse the effects of apartheid by addressing social inequalities and transforming the higher education sector by dismantling structural, cultural, institutional, and interpersonal discrimination. The use of the lowercase "w" for white or whiteness in this article is the…

This paper draws on the compelling example of a political movement in South Africa in the 1960s and 1970s to explore both how epistemic justice conditions of possibility and of failure play out in practice. It provides a springboard to understand how and why failures of epistemic justice matter tremendously for democratic and inclusive lives and…

South Africa's first national democratic elections in 1994 marked a turning point in the history of the country. Since democracy much of the focus of African National Congress (ANC)-led government has been on redress and transformation across all spheres of society, including higher education. This paper examines one important aspect inherent in…

Calls for the decolonisation of higher education in South Africa have been punctuated by comments on black pain. This is not surprising if it is acknowledged that violence inordinately marks so much of South African life. What is rarely discussed though is the idea that pain has also come to be fetishised. Pain, for example, is valued as a…

This article addresses the challenge of reclaiming higher education (HE) as a public good for building effective democracies. We use Bernstein's model of pedagogic rights and Fraser's model of social justice to develop a normative framework for discussing how universities in unequal societies might mitigate social injustice. Referring to recent…

Student affairs and student engagement are becoming important mechanisms for social change within South African tertiary education. We explored the relationship between student involvement in cocurricular activities and learning outcomes related to collective leadership for social change. Data were collected via a survey of 1,309 students that…

This article is an attempt to bring theoretical concepts offered by decolonial theories into conversation with 'humanising pedagogy.' The question that drives this analysis is: What are the links between humanisation and the decolonisation of higher education, and what does this imply for pedagogical praxis? This intervention offers valuable…

The colonial nature of South African universities remains a source of debate among students and academics. Decolonization as rethinking academic institutional practices seems less controversial; the specificity of how to decolonize the academia is the core of divergent arguments and contesting ideologies. Consequently, many suggestions and methods…

South Africa has undergone transformation since the end of apartheid governance in 1994. Legislatively enforced, this transformation has permeated most sectors of society, including higher education. Questions remain, however, about the extent to which transformation has occurred in Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) in general, and across the…

In South Africa, inequalities endemic to HE systems worldwide are further compounded by apartheid legacies. Despite an intensive focus for over twenty years on how pedagogic intervention could be harnessed to address these inequalities, black students' participation and success rates in South African HE remain stubbornly low, suggesting a need for…

Formal education was used by the apartheid government to prepare black South Africans for manual labour, thus there was little curricular focus on the development of higher-order cognitive skills. With the abolition of apartheid in 1994, the education system was re-valued and re-evaluated to provide wider access to quality education; the focus of…

This dissertation recognizes that the emergence of post-apartheid South Africa as the most popular study destination in Africa follows racial segregation, regional destabilization, and international isolation during apartheid. Today, the country's public higher education institutions face intensifying pressures to respond simultaneously to…

South African government has been promulgating pieces of legislation aimed at ensuring racial integration, especially in higher education, and indirectly enforcing acculturation in historically white universities. Studies have proven that institutional cultures in historically white universities alienate and exclude black students' identities.…

The post-apartheid higher education transformation project is faced with the challenge of recruiting and retaining black academics and other senior staff. But when we shift the focus from participation rates to equality-inequality within historically white universities (HWUs), then the discourse changes from demographic equity and redress to…