Fault Lines

What is the link, if any, between race and disease? How did the term baster as ‘mixed race’ come to be mistranslated from ‘incest’ in the Hebrew Bible? What are the roots of racial thinking in South African universities? How does music fall on the ear of black and white listeners? Are new developments in genetics simply a backdoor for the return of eugenics? For the first time, leading scholars in South Africa from different disciplines take on some of these difficult questions about race, science and society in the aftermath of apartheid. This book offers an important foundation for students pursuing a broader education than what a typical degree provides, and a must-read resource for every citizen concerned about the lingering effects of race and racism in South Africa and other parts of the world.

Jonathan Jansen is a distinguished professor of education at Stellenbosch University. He is President of the Academy of Science of South Africa and Chairman of the Jakes Gerwel Fellowship, as well as an author and co-editor of Schooling in South Africa: The Enigma of Inequality (Springer, 2019).

Cyrill Walters is a postdoctoral fellow in Higher Education Studies at Stellenbosch University. She is a scholar of organisations with a special interest in complexity theories of leadership and institutional theories of curriculum. She is co-author of a forthcoming book on the uptake of decolonisation within South African universities.