“Taking into account the demands on academics in the form of teaching, administration, community engagement and research, the publication of a book by a colleague is an event to be celebrated.”
“Taking into account the demands on academics in the form of teaching, administration, community engagement and research, the publication of a book by a colleague is an event to be celebrated.”
The remark by Vice-Chancellor, Dr Saleem Badat summed up the motivation for an event at Rhodes University last week A collection of essays entitled
He explained why he had set out to put this book together. “For me this is a landmark book. There seemed to be a huge gap on literature on the economic, social and political challenges of the Eastern Cape, and I thought, shouldn’t we have a book on the Eastern Cape? This book is essentially a biography of a province. The opening conundrum of the book is the question of the architecture of our governmental system.”
Contributor and Professor of Social Policy and current Director at ISER, Professor Robert van Niekerk, said Ruiters’s “socio-political imagination” was reflected powerfully in the book, which considered social problems in an imaginative way.
In exploring economics, the environment, development and service delivery, with reference to various case studies, the book recounts the biography of post-1994 Eastern Cape, and contributes to debates about future policy prescriptions and the future of provinces in South Africa.
Other books celebrated at the launch included Paul Maylam’s
