On 21st October, eleven Weidenfeld-Hoffmann Scholars had the opportunity to travel to Cambridge to attend a lecture on “In Order to Succeed in Peace Mediation You have to be an Honest Broker” by Mr. Martti Ahtisaari, former President of Finland (1994-2000). Mr. Ahtisaari is a Nobel Peace Prize laureate and also served as a United Nations diplomat. He is a mediator, widely respected for his international peace work.

Just like our previous program on Moral Philosophy and Leadership, the scholars were highly excited about Humanities lecture at the University of Cambridge for distinct reasons. Created by Lord Weidenfeld, the program is managed by Weidenfeld-Hoffmann Trust in coordination with Cambridge Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciencs and Humanities (CRASSH). It took us around 2 hours to get there in our coach and during our travel time, the scholars indulged in discussions about their studies and living experience in Oxford.

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The article was originally published on the website of the Louis Dreyfus Fondation d’entreprise, one of the Scholarship Programme’s generous donors. The Foundation’s work includes promoting sustainable agriculture and improving food security throughout the developing world. 

The behaviour of small-scale farmers has changed in many areas of rural South Africa. This is a result of a complex mix of factors that impact on one another in various ways undermining the ability and the desire to cultivate. My research was conducted in Mbotyi, a small coastal village in the ex-Transkei region of South Africa, previously a semi-independent ‘homeland’ during Apartheid. It is in regions like this that the bulk of South Africa’s rural poverty is concentrated and that the greatest challenges for rural development exist (See below, notes 2 & 5). The problem I address is one noted by a handful of authors (notes 1,4 & 7): There has been a marked movement away from the cultivation of arable fields in the former homeland areas of South Africa, leaving available land underutilised. I set out to gain a better understanding of why rural South Africans, in a context of relatively high levels of unemployment and poverty, are leaving fertile fields fallow in regions where agriculture has historically been a cornerstone of livelihoods. Read more…

You get a strange feeling when you’re about to leave a place – like you’ll not only miss the people you love but you’ll also miss the person you are now at this time and in this place, because you’ll never be this way ever again.

Oxford for me – with its rigorous academic schedule, a social climate so far removed from my previous world, the love of knowledge and coming to regard my Weidenfeld scholarship friends as family – will always be the place that transformed me and forced me to grow up, all over again; the place I will always miss for the person I became there. Read more…

The International Monetary Fund’s now much maligned Structural Adjustment Programmes rolled through Africa in the late 1980’s, liberalising markets, trimming the reach of the African state and re-orienting the continent towards the prevailing market economic status quo. A key aspect of these interventions was the privatization of state enterprises. Tanzania’s long experiment with ‘African Socialism’ under Julius Nyerere came to an end in 1987 with the implementation of an IMF Economic Recovery Program that brought these reforms to bear on its struggling economy[1]. It was in this climate that Tanzania’s first independent power producer, Independent Power Tanzania Ltd (IPTL) was established to construct a power plant, as a partnership between VIP Engineering and Marketing, a Tanzanian company, and Mechmar corporation, its Malaysian partner. The resulting deal, like so many at the time, was marred by corruption, fraud and theft as VIP’s foreign partner’s allegedly moved to extract huge sums of money from the company, at the expense of VIP and the Tanzanian people, precipitating what was recently described as a “20 year-long nightmare”[2], littered with scandal and litigation. As another example of mismanagement and corruption at the expense of an impoverished people, this story is perhaps unremarkable on the continent. However it is instructive, taking recent developments into account, when one considers the persistent issue of illicit financial flows from Africa and the role of foreign courts in what are arguably domestic issues.

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