9Advertorial independentMARCH 13 2016

THE SUNDAY

THE NATIONAL Insti-tute for the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIHSS) First Annual Book, Creative Collec-tion and Digital Con-

tribution Awards have received an overwhelming response from a host of academics, curators and artists all working to advance the humanities and social sciences in South Africa.

Launched in 2015, the NIHSS Award aim to give some special recognition and celebrate those members of the humanities and social sciences (HSS) community who are undertaking the necessary work required to create post-apart-heid forms of scholarship, creative and digital humanities produc-tions.

The awards will honour out-standing, innovative, and socially responsive scholarship and contri-butions.

The NIHSS Awards provide an opportunity to cast a celebratory light on those intellectual-creative scholars whose contributions often go unnoticed both in the academy and society at large.

These include the tenacious authors and playwrights, the risk-taking poets and artists, cur- ators and publishers who ensure we can all view and enjoy these final products.

Finally, the NIHSS Awards will give life to the ideas expressed in the founding document of the institute, the Humanities Char-ter, to increase the recognition afforded to book and creative out-puts; reposition these scholarly contributions as having public value; increase appreciation and the role they play in sustainable social cohesion and the re-imagin-ing of the HSS.

According to NIHSS chief exec-utive Sarah Mosoetsa, the awards are about celebrating great HSS scholarship in our country that often gets sidelined or ignored because such contributions don’t resonate with the dominant, yet subtle, process of commodification of knowledge that is widespread globally.

“Such a process has under- mined the very essence of HSS, scholarship in the field, and the one thing they do best.

“It’s about challenging the com-modification logic of our know-ledge project, and ensuring that true HSS work is valued... This work should at all times be judged by our fellow peers and they are better placed to validate their own worth.

“Our intention is to reimagine and ignite the true status of the HSS in South Africa so it occupies its rightful position.

“It’s part of a concerted effort by the institute to show the value of what has generally been deval-ued over time and to celebrate HSS contribution.

“The awards are about encour-aging scholars to produce their best work without fear or pressure of citations, for example.”

They are open to the following South African-based academics and artists and each award goes with a cash prize of R60000:

■ Academics based in South African universities, located in the humanities and social science fields.

■ South African-based curators and artists of various forms of cre-ative work, based in South African universities

■ Submissions for more than one category were accepted in any South African language.

A total of 10 awards will be allocated within three categories:

Books, Creative Collections and Digital Humanities.

The Books category has four sub-categories – best non-fiction, best non-fiction edited volume, best fiction book and best fiction edited volume.

The Creative Collections cat-egory has three sub-categories – best public performance, best musical performance, best musical composition/arrangement and best fine art (paintings, sculpture and ceramics).

Digital Humanities include categories for visualization or infographics, tools and community engagement.

The NIHSS Awards cannot be viewed in isolation, however.

They need to be seen in the context of the role the NIHSS continuously plays in South Afri-ca, especially in the context of the recent student uprisings regarding fees and other issues around uni-versities.

According Mosoetsa, the NIHSS has two strategic goals – to advance postgraduate scholarship and to dynamise the fields of research and teaching in the humanities and social sciences in South Afri-can universities.

“NIHSS is a statutory body established in 2013 with the pur-pose of contributing significantly to ensuring the excellence, integ-rity and dynamism of the human-ities and social sciences by enhan-cing and co-ordinating scholarship, research and ethical practice in the HSS fields.

“Long before the ‘#FeesMust- Fall’, the Department of Higher Education and Training set up this institute to respond to the chal-lenge of funding in higher educa-tion, especially in the humanities and sciences” Mosoetsa says.

“While we provide scholarships to doctoral scholars, our catalytic research programme funds Mas-ter’s students.

One of the key objectives of the institute is to advance equity, jus-tice and social responsibility.

“We are fulfilling this mandate through our programmes such as our doctoral school programme that has, to date, awarded over 300 PhD scholarships to deserving students and a significant number of those are African women.

“We have more females in our programme with 65 percent of stu-dents awarded with scholarships in 2014 being women. In 2015 this number increased to 74 percent.

“Of the total number of our students, 90 percent are Africans.”

On the issue of transformation, Mosoetsa says in the next two to three years the NIHSS is expecting to make a significant contribution by bringing in highly qualified academics in the system.

“We view transformation broad-ly in that it is about capacity-build-ing for our country. South Africa will transform if we have a critical mass of qualified and competent people.

“We will fulfil our transform-ation agenda as a country if we resolve and all work towards a shared vision of capacity-building.

“What is needed is a critical mass of individuals who tell our stories (political, eco- nomic and social) ... theorise from our current and historical context and experi-ences... who teach at our univer-sities and contribute significantly in building our higher education institutions.

“To date, less than three years into our existence, these are our performance numbers: 312 doctoral scholarships have been awarded to students in the 18 public universi-ties.

Awards celebrate scholarshipRewarding those who create excellent post- apartheid bodies of knowledge

THE child of 1994 will enter the univer-sity gate of 2013 to study Aeronautical Engineering, confident that she is not driftwood and that her clan comes from a long way back.

She will be bilingual, and her mother tongue and her English will be interchangeably strong – she can write and she can talk and, if need be, compose poems on periodic tables.

There at the University of 2030 she’ll be exposed to a deeper under-standing of diversity, and to the experience that all Othersare won-der-full in their own ways.

She will come to meet quite a number of them. If she needs to study the poetry of Aimé Césaire in the ori-ginal because her Caribbean teacher inspired her, she might take timeoff to study in Dakar, Cairo or Paris.

If she wants to strengthen her quantum physics, there will be Hyderabad, Beijing or Stanford.

If she wants to take a breather

from complicated equations about the stress modules in variegated met-als, she could do an elective on VhaV-enda art or the Nando song cycles of the ironsmiths of the past.

She will be an engineer, but the humanities and the social sciences will have played their part in the mak-ing of a good and educated engineer.

And she will look back and won-der about the dark timesof confusion that her parents speak about, and hopefully she will stop with a smile at the thought of that interregnum year of her birth, and perchance this Charter is on some shelf gathering dust and it so happens that she pages through it, we hope that she does in amazement; such a plain, obvious and trivial piece of text.

Our work will have been done.

Yet for her to be “there” would mean that the Humanities and the Social Sciences had become stronger than ever in this country. Most cer-tainly, they would have to be more than an “adjunct” to Engineering, Science, Technology, Medicine and/or Actuarial Qualification. They would be what this charter intended.

First, for her to know that she was not driftwood and that her clans came from a long way back, presup-poses a close link between the teach-ers of tomorrow and deep Human-ities research. The metaphor comes from Mazisi Kunene’s poetry, and to get the metaphor right we need to understand his discord, the Zulu intellectuals’ metaphors were linked to other sentiments of alienation, and we need to link all that to a his-

toriography that traces how polities and clans emerged after the declines of Great Zimbabwe and how people live – who moved where, and how her clans, their own oral poetry and mem-ory fit into the bigger pictures.

She would enter the university system already an African.

Second, it would have meant that what the current Minister of Higher Education is trying to achieve at uni-versity level would’ve been deepened, and would have become the main-stay of the Basic Education system.

The fact that she would compose and play with at least two languages is not to be taken for granted. The fact that there could have been such a dexterity in her schooling system presupposes a generation of teachers that would know not only their per-

iodic table but would also have been schooled in creative writing – and would know that the fact that one is born Greek or South African does not make one a Homer or a Plaatje.

Third, for her to have been exposed to others presupposes spaces where the Gandhian meta-phors of appreciating the Other’s “wonders” can be concretised without losing one’s integrity.

It would have meant a depth of scholarship in Humanities and Social Sciences which would have overcome classifications of race and ethnicity, and their deep historical and oppres-sive roots.

Fourth, it would have meant that despite her aptitude for mathematics and science she’d have a thirst for culture, a capacity to seek the roots of

what has been a powerful contribu-tion to a transatlantic African sense of the aesthetic and the sublime. To understand Aimé Césaire fully would have meant reading him in French and to do so would’ve presupposed an African-wide system for student mobility in which the colonial div-ides of francophone, lusophone and anglophone Africa had melted away.

It presupposes an African Re- naissance.

Fifth, in terms of her own aero-nautical flight she’d be able to think of a world that was about the South (Hyderabad) or the North (Stanford) or the Far East (Beijing). A new global geography, an ability to be unafraid of boundaries, and a system that allowed for transcultural competence.

Sixth, it would connect her to the

Nando cycles, which are not some tourist-linked gimmick. They were the songs of the ironmongers and smiths of the areas from the Soutpansberg to the Limpopo, the secret songs of their craft and their apprenticeship.

They were not just songs; they were ways through which “know-hows” about the craft of iron-working were passed on from generation to generation. She would be expected to be a sophisticated engineer of metals in days to come, and it would not be strange for her to appreciate their importance in the university seminars of tomorrow.

Seventh, as a woman engineer she would be the exemplar of our consti-tutional integrity. It would have taken a revolution in the Humanities and the Social Sciences of South Africa to get her to that point. Excellence would be a precondition for this.

The Humanities Charter of the NIHSS is about that precondition.

Fast forward 1994 to 2030 – wonder at how our children grew

ON THE MOVE: Dr Sarah Mosoetsa, chief executive of the National Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences. PICTURE: ANTOINE DE RAS