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Now showing 1 - 5 of 11

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Policing the pandemic: migrants in South African cities during the COVID-19 lockdown
(Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd., 2025) Crush, Jonathan; Sithole, Sean
On March 5, 2020, South Africa recorded its first official case of COVID-19 when a South African returning from holiday tested positive. The number of excess deaths is over 300,000. The policy response to the pandemic is regarded as among the most draconian in Africa. In 2020, the government imposed a stay-at-home lockdown for 100 days, which was enforced by armed police and the army. Breaching the lockdown was a criminal offence and arrests were widespread. By April 2021, over 400,000 had been apprehended. In his 2021 book, One Virus, Two Countries, Steven Friedman suggests that government containment and punishment measures had a negative impact on the country's urban poor, a population that includes many internal migrants, several million international migrants, and refugees. This chapter discusses South Africa's militaristic policy and policing response to the advent of COVID-19, and how this impacted migrants in the urban formal and informal economy.
Preparation and anti-fatigue activity of polypeptides from sea cucumber viscera
(John Wiley and Sons Ltd, 2026) Zhao, Yuxuan; Zhang, Xiaotong; Wang, Ye; Zhang, Jun; Gong, Xiaojie; Ma, Xuesheng; Dou, Deqiang
BACKGROUND: In the industrial processing of sea cucumbers, the nutrient-rich viscera are often discarded as by-products, leading to resource waste and environmental pollution. To achieve high-value utilization of these resources, the present study aimed to optimize an enzymatic process to extract anti-fatigue bioactive peptides from sea cucumber viscera for use in functional foods. RESULTS: The hydrolysis conditions with neutral protease were optimized using response surface methodology and the optimal conditions were determined as follows: an enzyme addition of 3 μL g−1, a temperature of 65 °C, pH 7.0, a duration of 4 h and a material-to-liquid ratio of 1:4 (g mL−1). Under these conditions, a high polypeptide yield of 303.0 mg g−1 was obtained. The resulting enzymatic hydrolysate (EH) contained small peptides (< 1000 Da) at a concentration of 775.40 mg g−1, which was significantly higher than that in the non-enzymatic hydrolysate (491.21 mg g−1). Furthermore, the EH exhibited increased levels of branched-chain and functional amino acids along with improved nutritional indices. The anti-fatigue effects of EH were evaluated in a murine model using an exhaustive swimming test combined with biochemical analyses. The results demonstrated that EH treatment significantly prolonged thorough swimming time and elevated levels of liver glycogen, lactate dehydrogenase, tumor necrosis factor-α and interleukin-2, at the same time as reducing blood urea nitrogen levels. CONCLUSION: Bioactive peptides derived from sea cucumber viscera exhibit strong anti-fatigue activity, demonstrating great potential as functional food ingredients. This work provides a sustainable and efficient strategy for valorizing seafood processing by-products.
The Expulsion of Igbo People from Equatorial Guinea: 1950-1979
(University of the Western Cape, 2026) Owojuyigbe, Praise Funmilola
This study presents a historical exposition on the expulsion of the Igbo people from Equatorial Guinea between 1950 and 1979. The research begins in 1950 because by the mid-1950s, many labourers migrated from Nigeria to Fernando Po Island. Most of these Nigerian migrants were Igbo people. The study ends in 1979, the year that marked the end of the first native and tyrannic ruler, Francisco Macías Nguema. He maltreated many autochthonous groups and alien ethnic groups in Equatorial Guinea, the Igbo people included. The available literature on the history of Equatorial Guinea discloses the pre-colonial, colonial, and post-colonial governments, with an emphasis on the economic and socio-political history. Nonetheless, most literature has scant information about the main and minor ethnic groups in Equatorial Guinea, such as the Fang, Bubi, Ndowe, Bujeba, Benga, Kombe, Fernandino, and Creole. Still, little or nothing is specifically written about the Igbo of Equatorial Guinea. The study examines the rationale for the migration of Igbo to Fernando Po, Equatorial Guinea. This study examines Igbo activities and how Spanish colonial rulers mandated the Igbo to build the colonial economy. Also, the study focuses on the colonial legacies of brutality, extortion, and underdevelopment of both human and infrastructures that Macías inherited from his Spanish predecessors, and how these led to the expulsion of the Igbo from Equatorial Guinea. The study identifies the paradigm shifts in the policies of the first native president, Macías Nguema, whose leadership were synonymous with what he inherited from the Spaniard colonial administrator. The study examines the struggles between the Igbo and the host government; it understands the factors that led to the expulsion of the Igbo from Equatorial Guinea, cum outcome of the expulsion on the Igbo and Equatorial Guinea. This thesis relies more on archival records on the rationale for the migration of the Igbo to Equatorial Guinea, and the reasons for their expulsion from Equatorial Guinea cum the colonial relationships with the Igbo in this study.
Hornberger's continua of biliteracy model: perspectives from my neck of the woods in the global south
(John Wiley and Sons Inc, 2025) Antia, Bassey E.
Hornberger's Continuum of Biliteracy (CoBi) model is the precursor to approaches such as translanguaging and the New London Group's multiliteracies. CoBi enables us to analyse and address language and literacy practices in education in a structured way. In this paper, I reflect on the explanatory power of CoBi in education in the Global South, drawing on my own research and experiences, as well as those of others. CoBi challenges is shown to challenge many common but unhelpful ideas held by teachers; it informs the design of teaching arrangements attuned to students' contexts; and it explains the content of their annotations on reading material. Given the benefits reported in the literature, there is much to be gained from incorporating CoBi into teacher education and continuous professional development. Scholars of language and other disciplines interested in decolonising the education curriculum, and keen to replace the Global North's Eurocentrism and conversion approach with a North-South conversational approach to knowledge, should find CoBi of interest.
Juro: a retrieval-augmented generation AI chatbot for enhancing legal information access in resource-constrained settings
(Springer Science and Business Media Deutschland GmbH, 2025) Ngandu, Bernard; Mbale, Landry; Bagula, Antoine
Access to legal information remains a significant challenge in resource-constrained settings where the digitization of legal systems is still in its early stages. To address this issue, we developed Juro, an AI-based chatbot architecture utilizing a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) framework. Leveraging a curated dataset of over 8,400 legal documents, Juro provides a user-friendly platform that simplifies complex legal language and ensures information reliability through a robust source citation mechanism. This paper demonstrates the applicability of adaptable AI-driven solutions in low-resource environments, offering a flexible chatbot architecture that can be tailored to various contexts where information accessibility remains a critical challenge. The legal system in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) serves as a use case, illustrating the potential of Juro in addressing similar challenges across developing countries.