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This article explores the psychosocial impact of online teaching and learning on students, following the decision by South African universities to move teaching and learning from physical contact platforms to cyberspace interactions. South Africa’s intervention, like many other countries, adopted the necessary measures that would prevent the spread of the virus among its population, particularly educational institutions. One such measure was the decision to shut down institutions in South Africa and the contingent measure to operationalise teaching and learning using cyberspace. The unprecedented move to online teaching engendered levels of anxiety and fear, and presented a highly disruptive and traumatic experience for many students, especially those from impoverished and rural backgrounds. While focusing on student psychosocial vulnerabilities during this pandemic, the article also presents background factors such as social and economic factors that constrain student success in South Africa’s higher education institutions (HEIs), and which became exacerbated during the pandemic. It further explores the behavioural significance of online teaching and learning’s impact on the physical and psychological energy that students devote to their academic work. The study is underpinned by psychosocial and student-integration theories, and it weaves the argument articulated by leaning heavily on the secondary data. Lastly, by way of recommendation, the study highlights the unique challenges that the COVID-19 disaster posed for South African students in HEIs and emphasises the need to give symbolic attention to these unique challenges. The study, therefore, is proposing improvement in preparedness and the mitigation of societal disruption in South African society and higher education during future pandemics.

Over the decades there have been continuous efforts to position African scholarship within the global knowledge economy. Against the backdrop of marginalisation and domination, the champions of African scholarship have been engaged with political, ideological, and philosophical agendas that attempt to legitimise the African knowledge enterprise. Using an anthropological lens, this paper presents the nuanced local/global dialectics related to the recognition of African scholarship. The paper is based on the reflections of a selected number of academics of African origin from the College of Humanities at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. It highlights their subjectivities towards the elusiveness of this concept and attempts to seek its relevance as a knowledge space within the global knowledge economy. Branded as the premier university of African scholarship, UKZN has embarked on vigorous curricular, pedagogical and research initiatives that seek to bring the meaningful transformation needed to position the institution as a truly African university. This meaningful transformation can only be achieved if knowledge production in on Africa is cognisant of an African worldview, encompassing African cosmological, ontological, and epistemological perspectives. Interviews with those who participated in this study revealed the need for African scholarship to go global. Although this was emphasised, the approach to it revealed three streams of scholars who are termed in this paper as the idealists, the moderates, and the extremists. Despite their varying subjectivities, the conclusion drawn from the interviews pays allegiance to Afrocentric paradigms as the only way African development can be achieved as it connects with other global knowledge systems.