Colin Darch

Freedom of Information and the Developing World

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Academic library consortia in contemporary South Africa

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The Research Commons: a new creature in the library?

Academic library consortia in South Africa are indeed beasts whose time has come at last, although whether they constitute a second coming for our profession or our end‐users remains to be seen. They can probably be described as a group of diverse entities, rough and as‐yet unsure of their destination. In this descriptive text, we attempt to outline, for a mainly North American audience, the specifics which distinguish the developing consortia in a newly democratic and newly globalised South Africa from those in other more economically advantaged parts of the world. It remains to be seen whether the center will in fact hold. Letting go reluctantly of this literary conceit, for the time being at least, we describe the all‐important social and political background in which our institutions must operate, moving on to an analysis of the impulse to cooperate and the obstacles that have emerged to stifle that impulse. In our conclusion we risk some predictions about where academic library consortia may be headed in our part of the world.

Dirt road or yellow brick superhighway? Information and communication technology in academic libraries of South Africa

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore the use made of the Research Commons during its first year of operation in an attempt to establish whether it actually provides a genuinely new and different service from the point of view of the end‐users, and whether a facility such as this could indeed be presumed to support research and enhance research output at the university.Design/methodology/approach – Using Lippincotts assessment grid, an attempt was made to assess activities in the Research Commons according to the dimensions of extensiveness, efficiency, effectiveness, service quality and usefulness. Methodology was mixed, with quantitative and qualitative components that logged the extent and nature of the use of the various facilities in the Research Commons and sought to establish from stakeholder perceptions whether the services on offer are regarded as substantially different from those in the undergraduate Knowledge Commons and whether they are indeed seen to be supporting research activ...

Are there warlords in provincial Mozambique? Questions of the social base of MNR banditry

Information and communication technology (ICT) development in South African libraries cannot be understood outside the context of the post‐apartheid period. The society consists of a technologically sophisticated sector, and an underdeveloped Third World sector. Higher education and other libraries attempt to straddle this divide. Government policy emphasises the importance of connectivity in redressing inequality. Policy is a contested area, and investigations have been conducted with little concrete result. The main development has been the emergence of academic library consortia, which have succeeded in attracting funding from the USA and other foundations. But without information literacy, these developments will have little impact. There are grounds for techno‐pessimism, as digital information resources are seen by advanced countries as commodities for which payment must be made, even if knowledge production originally took place in the South.

Are pre-compiled citation indexes of peer-reviewed journals an adequate control for research quality? A case study of library and information science

Exploring the origins, nature and consequences of MNR violence and murder, this article argues that Renamo does not conform to the classical characteristics of warlordism. It does not represent a cession of central control to local interests; rather it is an attack on the national sovereignty of Mozambique created and perpetuated by external powers. Nevertheless, in some areas the externally imposed proxy war may have been able to achieve a certain local dynamic and so, to this extent, the warlord concept may have some limited usefulness. Darch also completely rejects the idea that the MNR can be considered to be a case of ‘social banditry’, even allowing for the weaknesses inherent in this concept.

Separatist tensions and violence in the ‘model post-conflict state’: Mozambique since the 1990s

Looks at the South African Department of Educations new recommendations for the evaluation of higher education research in South Africa, and examines two primary aspects: the use of pre-compiled journal lists from overseas, and the apparent reliance on peer review as a guarantee of quality. Pointing out that these are tried and tested standards of quality, the authors argue that there are nonetheless disciplinary differences between experimental sciences - such as physics or chemistry - and other disciplines that make these measures difficult to apply across the spectrum. They present an analysis of library and information science publications in the chosen lists and point to the weakness of the selection of titles in this discipline. In addition, there are extra difficulties for scientists from South Africa and the developing world in securing publication in premier international library and information science journals. The authors conclude by calling for the employment of other, additional evaluation measures in an integrated system.

Remembering Ruth First at the CEA

The assassination of Professor Gilles Cistac, shot down in a busy Maputo street in broad daylight on 3 March, sent shockwaves across southern Africa and focused renewed attention on the worrying and complex condition of contemporary Mozambican politics. As a French-born Mozambican citizen Cistac was both insider and outsider: he was also professor in constitutional law at Eduardo Mondlane University, a discipline widely regarded as fundamentally incompatible with leftist or progressive politics (Seidman 2008). At the time of writing his assassins have not been identified, let alone arrested, and their motives have consequently not been definitively established. Nonetheless, passions have run high, and observers have cited Cistac’s recent and publicly expressed opinions on constitutional matters as a plausible and indeed probable reason for his murder. The current constitutional question on which Cistac took a controversial position goes to the very core of Frelimo’s conception of Mozambique as a unitary state, a key idea that can be traced back to the years of the armed struggle against the Portuguese. Frelimo was originally formed by the merging of different nationalist movements, and in the conditions of armed struggle the fear of ethnic, regional or ideological fragmentation and the need to prevent it was a political constant, fuelled to some extent by the negative example of Angola. Key Frelimo figures such as Uria Simango were eventually sidelined and indeed killed primarily over this issue. The assertion of a need for national unity is an unbroken thread running through the discourse of Samora Machel especially – and Frelimo in general – from the 1960s onwards. But Renamo has no such deeply rooted tradition, and has indeed raised secessionist proposals from time to time, challenging Frelimo ideologically at a fundamental level. After its fifth successive defeat in the general elections of late 2014, Renamo began, in February this year, to demand autonomous control of those central and northern ‘regions’ (a term that it subsequently abandoned) where it could claim significant support – Manica, Nampula, Niassa, Sofala, Tete and Zambezia. This was not a new demand. If such control were not conceded juridically through legislation, the party threatened, then it would seize it by means of a ‘generalised rebellion’ (Anon. 2015b). Several separate issues can be distinguished here, quite apart from the historic enmity between Frelimo and Renamo. One is a judicial question: are ‘autonomous provinces’ legally permissible? Another is the incoherence and opportunism of Renamo’s position: would such provinces be workable? But it is also important to recognise that broader anxiety over the implications for nation-building of decentralisation of

Soviet Military Specialists and Instructors in Angola

Ruth changed in Mozambique; she softened. I think she belonged in Mozambique in a way that she never belonged to England. It was her home, and she meant something to that society. (Gillian Slovo, interview, 1989) This article traces the evolution of research at the Centro de Estudos Africanos (CEA) from before the time of Ruth Firsts arrival. It divides her work there into two periods: the work on the Mozambican Miner, in which she was heavily involved personally, and the later period when she was much more involved in recruiting permanent staff and in creating conditions for successful research, including building up the Documentation Centre within the CEA. This objective included work on maintaining the administrative independence of the CEA within the university to ensure flexibility in responding to rapidly changing research conditions. Research was not simply determined by political priorities, although it engaged with them. The evolution of the key Development Course is also traced, and the work of the Oficina de Historia (History Workshop) is briefly described.

‘Catalyst, Stake, Pretext, Symbol, Mask’: On the History of Relations between the Comintern, the Soviet Union and Southern Africa

This volume of reminiscences, edited by Andrei Tokarev and the late Gennady Shubin, presents accounts by former Soviet military interpreters and advisers who were sent to assist the Movimento Popul...