Essay Review: Turmoil and Tenacity: The Road to the Unity Accord

A Zambezia book review on Zimbabwean political history.Turmoil and Tenacity is both an academic and political study. It could not have been otherwise given its inspiration and the occupations of its contributors. The project was inspired by the signing of the Unity Accord between ZANU(PF) and PF-ZAPU on 22 December 1987, which ended the second part of a ‘two-fold’ struggle which, in Banana’s words, was firstly ‘a struggle against a common enemy’, and secondly, an ‘internal struggle for national unity.The chapters in this book are uneven in size and quality, adding to variety but also to annoyance. Four chapters are very short, ranging from 3 to 7 pages; eight are slightly longer, ranging from 12 to 17 pages; another four chapters have between 25 and 35 pages; one chapter has 46 pages, and the longest has 66 pages. Five chapters do not have footnotes, twelve have endnotes, while two cite references within the text. The editor of this volume should have given the authors guidance on both these issues of length and preferred referencing system. My suspicion is that he did in fact do so, but, as is often the case when an assortment of people with varied backgrounds are involved in an assignment, there are bound to be some oversights and misreading of instructions. This confusion spoils an otherwise worthwhile effort, several chapters of which, particularly those by academics, could be developed into book-length manuscripts

Nhimbe practice in Zimbabwe revisited: Not only a method of socio-economic assistance but also a communal mechanism for conflict prevention and peacebuilding

Nhimbe is an endogenous knowledge practice used in community-based development for community members to provide socio-economic assistance as required. The practice is couched in people’s socio-cultural and moral compass. Households in rural areas use it to assist one another on a wide range of development initiatives, especially agricultural activities to promote and sustain food security and community values. In Africa, practices similar to nhimbe are Harambee in Kenya, Chilimba in Zambia and Letsema in South Africa and Botswana. Since the 1800s or earlier, economic and social benefits have been the known key motivations for the practice of nhimbe. This article is a re-visit of nhimbe from the perspective of its contribution to conflict prevention and peacebuilding in the communities where it is practised. No in-depth studies have been published concerning the conflict and peacebuilding potentials of nhimbe, but it is quite clear that it plays a fundamental role which emanates from its relatedness to social dimensions and community cohesiveness. The analysis here shows that the practice has inherent capacities for pre-conflict prevention, in-conflict mitigation, conflictmanagement, conflict resolution, conflict transformation and postconflict peacebuilding

The Substance of Identity: Territoriality, Culture, Roots and the Politics of Belonging

Post-apartheid South Africa is at the interface of defining its social fibre, but at the same time, it is faced with the challenge of dealing with historical mishaps such as acute socio-economic inequality, and all forms of social engineering of notions of identity. This has led thinkers and researchers to probe into what it means to be a South African. In a recent book titled ‘Do South Africans Exist”, Chipkin (2007: 178) introduced a discourse, questioning the notion of South “Africaness” based on territory and geography. Other recent writings on race and identity continue to question the wisdom of framing identities in terms of culture and other primordial substances. Such substances have brought about a notion of identity that has led to human catastrophes framed in terms of ethnic identities and racial differences. While this paper capitalizes on such criticism, it interrogates academic discourse for not ‘coming out’ with durable explanations of what identities are about and especially what constitutes them. This paper proposes a conceptual analysis and framing of the substance of identities that balances emic and etic explanations. In this formulation an exploration of a range of elements affecting conceptualization of identities is done, including notions of territoriality culture and roots

Irrigation and food security in Swaziland: current status and research priorities

A research paper on food security and irrigation agriculture in Swaziland.Swaziland is a small, landlocked country bordering the Republic of South Africa in the north, west and south, and Mozambique in the east. The country has four distinctive ecological zones, ranging for the wet highveld in the west with an elevation of over 2,000 metres to the dry lowveld in the east, with an average altitude of 100 metres. The population is currently about 676,000, growing at a high rate of 3.2% annually. Agriculture is the main economic activity, providing a livelihood for more than 50,000 rural homesteads and serving as the basis for agro industries. The striking characteristic of the rural economy is the division of land, where freehold tenure in the form of Title Deed Land (TDL) and communal tenure on Swazi Nation Land (SNL) exist side by side. The latter, about 60% of the total land, is held by the King in trust for the Swazi Nation, and provides a living for some 80% of the total population. Some 850 farms and estates on TDL, with an average of about 800 ha, are technologically advanced, with about 60% of the arable land under irrigation. The main crops in this fully-commercialized sector are citrus fruits, sugarcane, cotton, and pineapples. By contrast, holdings on SNL which average less than 2 ha, employ a low level of technology and produce mainly maize. The contribution to the Gross Domestic Product (1981-1985) of crop production on TDL amounted to 14.6%; the contribution of SNL crop production was only 3.4% over the same period (Swaziland Government, 1988, p.6). This paper deals with the contribution of irrigation to food security in Swaziland, defined in terms of both food availability and the ability to acquire food. Irrigation will thus be looked at in the light of food production, as well as providing employment to enable access to food. Finally, areas for further research will be identified

Lecturers' perspectives of pedagogical training initiates at a University of Technology in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa

Professional development of academics in higher education in South Africa has been offered in an uncoordinated and unsustainable manner. Ever since the new dispensation, concerted efforts have been implemented to address this problem. As part of the solution, universities through their academic development units, have introduced various pedagogical training workshops to equip academics with teaching skills. This study investigates perceptions of academics pertaining to this training. A multi-method cross-sectional research design was adopted to understand lecturers’ perspectives regarding professional development. A total of 45 participants were purposefully selected to participate in the study from the academics who attended the pedagogical training. A questionnaire (closed and open-ended) was used to collect data. Quantitative data were analysed using the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS), while thematic analysis was applied to analyse qualitative data. Results of the study revealed that the training was well-received and academic staff members felt motivated and confident to implement various instructional strategies acquired from the training. Participants expressed a need and willingness to learn and develop new instructional techniques and acquired a positive outlook on teaching and learning following the professional development training. The study recommends redesigning the pedagogical training to include ongoing support activities and customisation in addition to the generic version

Applying Alternative Teaching Methods to Impart a Rounded, Liberal Arts and Sciences (LAS) Education: Students’ Reflections on the Role of Magazines as Instructional Tools

In a constantly and rapidly changing social world, students from all disciplines ought to attain a rounded education within the tradition of a “Liberal Arts and Sciences” (LAS) context. Students outside of the natural sciences must be encouraged to appreciate the place of those sciences in their lives. Conversely, students in the natural sciences must be encouraged to envision the role of other subjects in their lives. In order to accomplish this, however, we need to go beyond basic instructional approaches by applying alternatives such as using magazines and newspapers. This paper reports students’ reflections on the use of newspapers as supplementary instructional materials to enhance learning. Data were collected from an introductory liberal arts physics course using a survey instrument. The survey had five descriptive measures: student perceptions; creativity based on activities learned; ability to link concepts learned in class to articles in the news journal; ability to impart knowledge acquired; and identifying lessons based on a case study of a selected news article from the newspaper. Student reflections indicate that magazines can effect a positive learning experience and stimulate curiosity to read. It is concluded that this approach can be used to enhance student motivation and persistence in introductory classes, particularly in schools where resources are limited. Keywords: improvisation, Liberal Arts and Science education, magazines, student reflections

Improving 3d pedestrian detection for wearable sensor data with 2d human pose

Collisions and safety are important concepts when dealing with urban designs like shared spaces. As pedestrians (especially the elderly and disabled people) are more vulnerable to accidents, realising an intelligent mobility aid to avoid collisions is a direction of research that could improve safety using a wearable device. Also, with the improvements in technologies for visualisation and their capabilities to render 3D virtual content, AR devices could be used to realise virtual infrastructure and virtual traffic systems. Such devices (e.g., Hololens) scan the environment using stereo and ToF (Time-of-Flight) sensors, which in principle can be used to detect surrounding objects, including dynamic agents such as pedestrians. This can be used as basis to predict collisions. To envision an AR device as a safety aid and demonstrate its 3D object detection capability (in particular: pedestrian detection), we propose an improvement to the 3D object detection framework Frustum Pointnet with human pose and apply it on the data from an AR device. Using the data from such a device in an indoor setting, we conducted a comparative study to investigate how high level 2D human pose features in our approach could help to improve the detection performance of orientated 3D pedestrian instances over Frustum Pointnet

Traffic Control Recognition with AN Attention Mechanism Using Speed-Profile and Satellite Imagery Data

Traffic regulators at intersections act as an essential factor that influences traffic flow and, subsequently, the route choices of commuters. A digital map that provides up-to-date traffic control information is beneficial not only for facilitating the commuters’ trips, but also for energy-saving and environmental protection. In this paper, instead of using expensive surveying methods, we propose an automatic way based on a Conditional Variational Autoencoder (CVAE) to recognize traffic regulators, i. e., arm rules at intersections, by leveraging the GPS data collected from vehicles and the satellite imagery retrieved from digital maps, i. e., Google Maps. We apply a Long Short-Term Memory to extract the motion dynamics over a GPS sequence traversed through the intersection. Simultaneously, we build a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to extract the grid-based local imagery information associated with each step of the GPS positions. Moreover, a self-attention mechanism is adopted to extract the spatial and temporal features over both the GPS and grid sequences. The extracted temporal and spatial features are then combined for detecting the traffic arm rules. To analyze the performance of our method, we tested it on a GPS dataset collected by driving vehicles in Hannover, a medium-sized German city. Compared to a Random Forest model and an Encoder-Decoder model, our proposed model achieved better results with both accuracy and F1-score of 0.90 for the three-class (arm rules of uncontrolled, traffic light, and priority sign) task. We also carried out ablation studies to further investigate the effectiveness of the GPS input branch, the image input branch, and the self-attention mechanism in our model

Automated Classification of Airborne Laser Scanning Point Clouds

Making sense of the physical world has always been at the core of mapping. Up until recently, this has always dependent on using the human eye. Using airborne lasers, it has become possible to quickly "see" more of the world in many more dimensions. The resulting enormous point clouds serve as data sources for applications far beyond the original mapping purposes ranging from flooding protection and forestry to threat mitigation. In order to process these large quantities of data, novel methods are required. In this contribution, we develop models to automatically classify ground cover and soil types. Using the logic of machine learning, we critically review the advantages of supervised and unsupervised methods. Focusing on decision trees, we improve accuracy by including beam vector components and using a genetic algorithm. We find that our approach delivers consistently high quality classifications, surpassing classical methods