The issue of gender-based violence (GBV) against women in South Africa is prevalent in mainstream and online social media. Women and girls are targeted in what is seemingly becoming a prolonged cycle of GBV in the country. Human right activists, organisations, and political leaders condemn this violence through various platforms, including the media. Civil society in South Africa have organised and mobilised marches and protests, tirelessly speaking out against the issue of violence against women in the country. The focus of this study is to explore and analyse how counter-discourse has been used against GBV in the country and used to reject commonly held assumptions about GBV. Through the purposive sampling of selected posts/placards used during marches and protests collected from online sources, this article examines how language is being used to combat and expose the issue of GBV and how language, when used mindfully and purposefully, could be a crucial tool in curbing GBV, including femicide, abuse, assault, rape, and violence, amongst other crimes.

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Public relations agencies are continuously tasked to create exceptional images and elevated narratives to describe the products of fast food outlets. This becomes problematic when it negatively impacts the financial resources and health outcomes of consumers. Using a semiotic approach, this article identifies visual embellishments in South African fast food advertisements. A descriptive analysis of six purposively sampled adverts from South African fast food brands is applied. The advertisements were sampled using three criteria: popularity; patronage and accessibility. The visual embellishments in these adverts are analysed. The authors investigate whether messages in these advertisements fall short of reality, meets, or exaggerates realistic expectations. The research concludes that advertisers apply what is referred to as advertising puffery while attempting to persuade and appeal to the emotions of the customers. This article further recommends that advertising bodies develop guidelines to regulate advertising messages more vigorously to enable consumers to make better informed choices particularly in low income communities.

This paper discusses the role of postgraduate research in the construction of a renaissance Africa where African ways are represented in African research. The study contends that, through postgraduate research, African institutions can effectively impart significant intellectual development which will allow the continent to actively answer African questions through the development of indigenous knowledge. Through a desk research approach, this study finds that problems on the African continent could be better tackled using Afrocentric approaches. As such, constructing an African renaissance requires thinking African, imagining African, researching African, and in a way, learning African by slightly unlearning the European and American. While the study does not propose totally discarding Eurocentric approaches, we propose the idea of hybridity, where existing Eurocentrically minded research can be used to conceive of and implement indigenous frameworks and methodologies which could be employed in addressing problems in Africa. Importantly, research work in Africa should begin to mirror African societies, with the objective of constructing a reborn African continent.

The Coronavirus Disease 2019 has become a significant global threat which has continued to have wide-reaching impacts on the world, and on South Africa. Society in general, and the academic project in particular, have been similarly affected by this public health threat. Also, given the risks of human-to-human transmission, a range of social distancing measures became necessary, such as South Africa's national lockdown and the blanket closure of all institutions of higher learning. The global pandemic represents an unprecedented risk to everyday life and most notably, it has the potential to destabilise educational, research and innovation endeavours for South Africa as a whole. In spite of the possible damaging effects, Oparinde and Govender (2020) emphasise that it is feasible to have coping strategies in place to cushion the effect of the pandemic, and that researchers, as well as academics cannot be excused from such important responsibilities. Like many other world leaders, President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa also declared that the country is in a national state of emergency, considering that the virus brought the entire country to its knees. With the nationwide lockdown that started as a 3-week event and eventually got prolonged, it soon became clear that the Covid-19 pandemic has come to stay far beyond earlier imaginations. What further became obvious was that the more prolonged the pandemic, the more negative