Background: The coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic brought unprecedented changes leading to ‘business unusual’ in all facets of life and livelihood on a global scale. The restrictions on gathering, social distancing and lockdown measures necessitated by the need to curtail its spread, had, and still have an enormous impact on the educational sector as indeed all spheres of life. These measures implied a change in the traditional modus operandi of curriculum and delivery options for educational institutions in South Africa in the bid to continue academic sessions. Hence, a transition of educational institutions from physical interactions to virtual meetings and the need to evolve curriculum contents and delivery.Aim: With the peculiarity of the South African socioeconomic and political space, this article assessed the viability of curriculum change and delivery options (e-teaching and learning) for both students and instructors in the higher institution and the varied implications. It drew from discourses around the theory of localisation within educative context to create a more student-centred approach especially with the situation of less physical contact.Setting: The discourse is set within the South African educational space.Method: Considering the novelty of Covid-19 research and the challenge of contact, the study adopted a participatory action desktop research method to collect and analyse secondary data. The article vividly discussed how institutions transitioned to a localisation of frameworks and policies to ensure successful academic sessions.Results: The educational landscape in South Africa is still plagued with historical antecedents of social injustice, funding, and resource allocation as well as the ever-present pressure of making education affordable to majority of local students. Also, the weakness of the online teaching methods to the physical contact method for learners and practitioners could be summed up into the issues of connectivity, technical knowledge, and attention span.Conclusion: The conclusion enumerated the need for the implementation of policies and frameworks on proper utilisation of online systems to adjust to the demands of less contact-based approaches in favour of virtual approaches. The study called for adequate consideration to issues around the localisation of teaching and learning techniques considering the peculiarities of South Africa with focus on the opportunities, feasibility, and challenges of online measures especially for those in economically disadvantaged spaces.

The advent of the COVID-19 pandemic and its crippling effects exacerbate many people’s vulnerability to food security across the world, including Africa. This article offers an explorative discourse on the implication of COVID-19 pandemic for South Africa’s food and livelihood security in the face of climate change. Using a scoping desktop review method, the article aims to provoke research and policy action and discourse on the subject matter. The article explores pre-and post-COVID-19 vulnerabilities in South Africa. It acknowledges the impact of climate change on food security and the situation of food security in South Africa pre-and post-COVID-19 pandemic. It then provides policy recommendations and expected outcomes to reconfigure the agricultural sector in the new sociopolitical and economic order necessitated by the pandemic. The article argues that reducing the stress posed by COVID-19 will require collaborative efforts and systemic thinking by stakeholders across all quarters. This will proffer workable solutions to mitigate the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic on the food and livelihood options of rural dwellers in South Africa and their interconnectedness with the impact of climate change.

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Ṣaworoidẹ is a Nigerian film about the Yorùbá people in Nigeria. It accentuates the socio-cultural and political activities and nuances in Jogbo, representational of the “old Nigeria.” Ṣaworoidẹ itself is a “talking drum” laced with brass bells along its beatable surface. The “talking drum” is an indigenous musical instrument in West Africa, whose functionalities are those of communication and entertainment. But enshrined in this unique instrument are political and socio-cultural characteristics as represented in Ṣaworoidẹ. This chapter identifies those characteristics and their prominence in present-day Nigeria, particularly among the Yorùbá people. The authors unravel the notable and multifaceted use of the “talking drum” for political, religious, traditional, and mass mobilization activities. They suggest that cultural heritage policies of Nigeria, including curricula that facilitate indigenous knowledge, should provide support for this rich drumming tradition, especially in educational institutions.

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