imaginative collection of short stories featuring funerals and ancestors and satirical flair. While Mhlongo recently led a JIAS seminar about African myth and magic realism, the subject of African ontology was the concern of another Writing Fellow, Dr Elvis Imafidon who teaches in the Department of Philosophy of Ambrose Alli University in Nigeria. Ontology is the study of metaphysics and the nature of being, and he looks at how African concepts of reality affect the African idea of the good. In another field, that of urban planning, Writing Fellow Melissa Tandiwe Myambo, did a comparative project on spatial inequality in urban spaces in
main programmes is the Writing Fellowship. A dozen residence Writing Fellows come to stay at JIAS for four months to work on their chosen subject. The writers apply for the fellowship and a selection is then made. Last year there were over 300 applicants from South Africa, Asia, Uganda, Nigeria, Kenya, the USA and India. South African author, Niq Mhlongo, was one of the Writing Fellows who stayed at JIAS this year to work on his new novel. Born in Soweto , Mhlongo’s first highly acclaimed novel Dog Eat Dog was published in 2004 by Kwela Books and was translated into Spanish under the title Perro Come Perro . His most recent book Soweto under the Apricot Tree (Kwela 2018) is an
started an institute for advanced studies that aimed to be at the very top of research and higher education. One of the first fellows, would you believe, was Albert Einstein”. Today’s institutes of advanced studies locate themselves in different ways within the global academic world. JIAS is a university-based institute as opposed to free-standing institutes such as those in Princeton, Berlin, Radcliffe, and Stellenbosch. Although rooted within UJ and linked to NTU, JIAS collaborates with other institutions of higher learning throughout the country. Launched in May 2015, JIAS is in its fourth year now, and one of its
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ALUMNI IMPUMELELO
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