Johannes Andreas Smit

University of KwaZulu-Natal | ukzn · School of Religion, Philosophy and Classics

The book was conceptualised in the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic and focused on how universities within South Africa responded to the pandemic in this early stage, with a specific focus on the Humanities curriculum. The book therefore captures response to the early indications of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and implications that the...

Over the past decade, we have witnessed a comic book renaissance. The impact of this renaissance can be described as threefold. First, we have seen comic books emerge as a compelling component of popular culture; second, as a "hybrid" form of texts and graphics, comic books have attained a new level of literary acceptance; and third, we have seen t...

This article primarily outlines the discursive threads in Prozesky's 'Implications of Apartheid for Christianity in South Africa' in the book he edited, Christianity Amidst Apartheid: Selected Perspectives on the Church in South Africa ([1985] 1990); his first book, Religion and Ultimate Well-Being: An Explanatory Theory (1984); and his latest book...

This article provides a few brief, historicisable perspectives on what we may call the Truth, or Knowledge, of the Decolonial in the history of thought in South Africa. It explores what we may mean when we talk of the Colonial and the Decolonial, their Truth(s) and Knowledge(s), as well as how we could contribute to the continuous developing of the...

Post-Apartheid South Africa witnessed a major shift from Christian National Education to a multi-religion educational approach that sought to treat all religions within an impartial academic context. The National Policy on Religion Education (2003) provided the framework in which the objectives of a multi-religion education found its expression in...

As first London Missionary Society (LMS) President of African Missions in South Africa, J.T. van der Kemp came into conflict with the settler farmers on the South African frontier (1799-1811). This revolves around the fact that the settler farmers saw themselves as settled in South Africa (and not as a temporary phenomenon as perceived by the D.E.I...

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Beyers Naudé (1915 - 2004) was the foremost anti-apartheid and liberation theologian that emerged from the Dutch Reformed Church (DRC) in South Africa during the twentieth century. In his early life and early years as a minister, he was formatively influenced by his family’s anticolonial (read ‘anti-British’) loyalty in the wake of the Anglo-Boer w...

Initiated in 2000, the study of religion at UKZN, Durban campus, takes place via three programmes, viz. the UG programme in Religion, and the two PG programmes in Religion and Social Transformation and Religion Education. This article reviews some of the seminal considerations for the developing of the programmes as well as the dynamics and main co...

The Humanities should be re-imaged in terms of interdisciplinarity and that as a collaborative 'digital Humanities' in Africa. Where student numbers and financial viability often trump the intellectualization of disciplines, the humanities more often than not find itself victim to higher education 'cut backs'. In addition, major shifts in society,...

Founded in 2000, and conceptualised in a consciously positioned postapartheid paradigm, the relatively new undergraduate Programme in Religion at the University of KwaZulu-Natal has been offered at the Howard College campus since 2005. This article provides a brief background for the programme, and then proceeds to analyse a selection of the first...

Whereas the struggle for liberation was characterised by the prominent participation of religious formations vis-à-vis the apartheid state, their significance in the public domain has significantly diminished since 1994. This raises questions not only about the state’s relationship and articulation with the religions, but also about the relationshi...

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A cross-section of research on southern African literature. Some of these essays were papers at the 2nd CSSALL conference in 1998.

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In this article it is argued that the materiality of religious discourse necessitates a description of its strategies of power and control. Since Christian religious discourse reactivates the discourses of canonical writings, the description of the materiality of the discursive practices of the canonical writings themselves is imperative. Focusing...

Since the promulgation of the National Policy on Religion and Education (2003), Faculties of Education have worked hard to develop the Religious Component of the Life Orientation curriculum—Religion Education. Schools also started to offer Religion Studies as a full Grade 12 subject. This paper investigates the background to and current state of th...

This article provides a detailed overview of Dennis Vincent Brutus's anti-apartheid sports activism. Focusing primarily on the period of 1948 – 1970, it traces Brutus's activism from his earliest critical consciousness of racism in the apartheid state's sport codes, positions it vis-à-vis apartheid as part of the struggle for freedom in 1950s South...

The successive and interdependent systems of colonisation, imperialism and apartheid produced a multiplex race-and gender-based country-wide national system of inequality, that currently makes South Africa one of the countries with the largest wealth gap in the world. Focusing on two of the Christian missionary pioneers, Johannes Theodorus van der...

Alternation was established as an interdisciplinary journal in the Arts and Humanities in 1994. Fifteen years on, this article provides a brief timeline of the thirty-three book-length issues published, Alternation's discursive themes, the managing, refereeing and administrative systems with a special focus on the guest-editing system, and the jour...