Posted on by mauro95cesar

In 2021 I would like to travel… around South Africa.

In any other year, the title of this blog would be ‘in 2017/2018/2019 I would like to travel the world’. Travelling makes me happy, from the moment I start planning my trip to the day I return home and many years later. Travelling has always given me a sense of freedom and independence, and has provided long lasting memories and friendships. Some of the absolute best memories of my life are from my experiences travelling overseas. I often share these memories and stories to friends and family whenever I reminisce about my experiences. I have been fortunate to visit Portugal, Brazil, Australia, America, and Indonesia.

My personal travel plans have revolved around overseas trips. Regrettably, I have not made similar plans to travel around my home country, South Africa. South Africa is an incredibly attractive destination for overseas tourists, and I have not taken advantage of enjoying what my country has to offer.

South Africa is an amazingly diverse nation. The diversity of this beautiful country is not limited to its people, cultures, and languages. The rainbow nation is also home to a wide range of travel destinations. We have deserts, forests, snow-capped mountains, warm and cold oceans, vineyards, and sandy beaches. It saddens me that with all these attractions, I have somehow always looked to travel overseas, and I have not fully explored my country. With the global pandemic, this is the perfect opportunity for me to travel local.    

Images from South Africa’s nine provinces. Click here for more info.

As South Africa is currently on national lockdown level one, locals have been encouraged by SA tourism to travel locally whilst adhering to the National Institute for Communicable Diseases (NICD) Covid-19 guidelines. Local support of the tourism industry is especially important as many countries have placed continued and far stricter restrictions on travel to South Africa due to the new coronavirus variant which was identified in December 2020.

The tourism sector is extremely important component of the South African economy, directly contributing 2.9% to the gross domestic product in 2016. An estimated R68 billion has been lost to the tourism industry, including 300,000 job losses during the pandemic due to national lockdowns and restricted international travel to South Africa. 

The advantages of travel and tourism in this country are now extremely enticing to me. This is even more so now during the pandemic, when South Africans have limited international travel options. Upon arrival to a new country, South Africans are likely to be denied entry or have to undergo a period of quarantine, not much of a holiday.

Many local activities can be enjoyed outside and in open-air spaces under the warm South African sun. Travel destinations are not limited to specific provinces and are country wide, meaning that I can enjoy these areas without having to travel too far or book an overnight stay. So far, I have enjoyed day event activities including hiking/trail walking, mountain bike riding and an Acrobranch adventure course from areas in Gauteng. Of course, these activities were much cheaper than travelling to another country, are relatively Covid-19 friendly, and I get to share experiences with friends that usually would not be able to accompany me on an overseas trip.

Walter Sisulu National Botanical Garden, Roodepoort

My plan is to visit each of Gauteng’s nature reserves, once per week, for the foreseeable future – I have counted at least ten great destinations that I have not been to, yet. Small plans can turn into bigger plans and I am hoping to explore other provinces this year.

In recent months, I have noticed that social media is filled with South Africans enjoying the outdoors. Posts that used to show people in crowded clubs before the pandemic are now showing people posing in front of waterfalls with their masks on. These posts have had a great knock-on effect as many people are keen to spend more time in outdoor spaces, where perhaps they would never have even thought about venturing outside before the pandemic.

Suikerbosrand Nature Reserve, Heidelberg

I have always been an outdoorsy person, I am sure that many more South Africans have caught the adventure bug and would most probably look to travel local, not only during the pandemic, but far into the future. Clearly South Africa is extremely attractive to overseas tourists, so I thought to myself, why not enjoy what your country has to offer? I am planning to put that thought into action this year.

Posted on by Maseteditshego

The realities of the COVID-19 pandemic in the Higher Education Sector

In early March 2020, the president put the entire country under hard lockdown. This resulted in limited movement and interaction of people outside the home environment. The lockdown disrupted academic calendars and activities of institutions of higher learning in the country, especially for rural-based universities. The decision to close institutions of higher learning was an attempt by the government to curb the spread of the virus and mortality in the country as it was done by other countries across the world.

Despite these continued COVID-19 disruptions and restrictions to normal lives and academic operations, we had to find ways to continue teaching and learning activities to complete the 2020 academic calendar. When this happened I was on the verge of completing my Master of Arts degree by research and I had just been allocated some groups of students to tutor. You can imagine the frustration and confusion. Tutoring has always been done face to face in most universities, especially full-time universities. So, it has never been a challenge to walk into a lecture theatre and present a tutorial on any selected topic.  If anything, it has always been quite an enjoyable process. It is a relaxing two hours outside the library while one is still engaged with academic activities.

However, with the COVID-19 lockdown and restrictions, I had to go home, my students had to go home, and we had to learn how to teach and learn online. Most of these students, like me, are from the deep rural spaces of Limpopo and Mpumalanga. We share similar experiences of signal difficulties when trying to connect to the internet. I personally often have to travel some 20-25km away from my village almost into the town of Tzaneen just to read my email – that’s how bad it gets. However, because the University was making provisions for data as a means of facilitating an eased remote teaching and learning process, it was assumed that we will all connect to various ICT platforms to stay academically engaged. Of course, that was not the reality.

The miscalculation in this equation was that, even though my students had access to enough data, just like me, we did not have the network to connect via any of the online platforms. So it was a struggle. The reality is that being on campus bridges the gap between the have and the have nots because we have similar access to facilities and other resources. However, being home, especially during the lockdown in 2020, proved that there remains a huge gap between us as a society. The inability to connect with my students easily proved that South Africa remains a divided society and that rural spaces are exactly that – rural spaces. This proved ICT inequalities between the urban and the rural spaces, an injustice I deeply feel must be addressed.

My frustrations were not only with my inability to connect with my students but the fact that I also could not swiftly carry on with my research for the same reasons – network. Although I did talk to my research supervisor from time to time on the phone, it was difficult for me to achieve anything tangible because I could not access my chapter corrections in time, nor some of the material he would share with me to enrich my arguments.

Rural universities have a long way to go in their ICT learning integrations. And from what I have observed during the height of the pandemic in 2020, the problem cannot be solved by the Department of Higher Education only. The solutions require a collective approach by the Department of Science and Innovation in collaboration with relevant researchers on Information Communication Technology on rural communities and other key stakeholders.