There is an urgent need to support socially engaged scholars, ethical leadership and activism. Edknowledge Mandikwaza’s remarkable educational journey gives us an insight into why.
Maya Angelou’s oft-touted idea that, “if you don’t know where you’ve come from, you don’t know where you’re going,” is about respecting the past.
The past however, for all its compelling power, cannot dictate or even conceive of the future possible. What our pasts can teach us however is that human potential is no respecter of privilege.
Take Edknowledge Mandikwaza for instance. From his primary school years and throughout his secondary schooling, Edknowledge was a child labourer in Zimbabwe on the Tea Estates’ Earn to Learn System.
He would spend many hours each day picking tea in exchange for some schooling in the afternoon.
When the Earn to Learn programme did not provide schooling for A Levels, he and some friends pooled their earnings to pay a teacher and study by correspondence.
Then, to access a university education, he panned gold to cover his tuition fees before a relative came to his rescue. Even for his Masters in Zimbabwe, Edknowledge had a work to earn scholarship.
Then, something truly wonderful happened, Edknowledge was given the freedom to learn.
First, the Beit Trust Scholarship offered him an opportunity to study an MSc in Development Policy at the University of Reading, and Canon Collins Trust supported his PhD in Public Administration and Peace Studies.
For someone who had to earn to learn from the age of 11, this was Edknowledge’s chance to be free to learn without distraction or worry.
And with that opportunity, Edknowledge learned to free. He became a Peacebuilder and has travelled the continent mediating conflict and supporting transitional justice processes from South Sudan to South Africa, where he is currently involved in an area of the Eastern Cape where protection rackets and gender-based violence are rife.
As part of his work as a postdoctoral research fellow at the Centre for Mediation in Africa at the University of Pretoria, he is training local individuals in mediation and conflict transformation.
Part of that work is to form early warning systems that can identify and defuse potential violence.
He is particularly passionate about peace in his home country Zimbabwe, and travels regularly to train aspiring conflict mediators – a non-profit project he initiated in his free time.
