This “Southern African” region special issue is an attempt by guest editors to connect local-global perspectives in social work. The word “encouraging” is used strategically to connect two ideas: 1) nurture the voice of those who are writing Southern African and have been historically been marginalized 2) provide a forum for mutual exchange of ideas that connect local-global perspectives in social work as a quest to for global justice. The guest editors of this special issue on “Southern Africa” are Prof. Otrude N. Moyo (University of Michigan – Flint, USA) and Dr. Thanduxolo Nomngcoyiya (University of Fort Hare, South Africa). While the call was extended to the Southern African region, our presumed local context, manuscripts received came mainly from South Africa, due to the fact that the call for paper was widely shared with scholars and members from the Association of South African Social Work Education Institutions (ASASWEI). Further, this special issue is realized as part of the scholarly partnership between Prof. Moyo and Dr. Nomngcoyiya extended through the Carnegie African Diaspora Fellowship Program – IIE, whose partnership focus was South Africa. Therefore, as guest editors we are encouraged by the responses and desire of social work scholars to engage critical dialogs about global issues experienced within local contexts. We realize that the African continent is vast, our efforts are open to all but, given our own positionalities, this special issue represent a small part of the continent.
The African continent continues to be disproportionately impacted in global injustices, it is for this reason that the Journal of Progressive Human Services (JPHS) in the Special Issue on Southern Africa continues to provide a platform for scholars located in the global south to continue to contribute and share their visions on the theme “Encouraging Global Justice: Integrating Local and Global Perspectives in Social Work”. This is our second special issue and we are encouraged by JPHS’s scope of covering professional problems in human services from a progressive perspective and by stimulating ideas and debates about global social issues experienced locally, serves as a platform to develop analytical tools needed for building a caring and just society. The reader must know that our scholarship presented here is emerging, in attempts to situate the historical experiences of global political economic context for example, the article titled: Quzzing the “social” in social work by Mbazima S. Mathebane engages the “social” in social work in Africa as a system of colonial social control, highlighting the continued experience of coloniality today. Through the critical interrogation of the “social”, the article demonstrates how western social work as a colonial instrument in the form of a helping profession institutionalized the subjection of Africans through the systematic destruction of indigenous ways of solving problems and their replacement with alien and vaunted Euro-North American systems of psychosocial care.
Dr. Zibonele Zimba the cultural complexity thinking by social workers in their address of Sustainable Development Goals in a culturally diverse South Africa. The author believes that the global agenda of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) provides social workers an opportunity to redefine their contributions pertaining to socioeconomic development, human rights and the environment. This is specifically so for social workers in South Africa, whose contributions have been narrowed to focus only in child protective services. This paper, therefore, identifies potential contributions by social workers in relation to the SDGs using cultural complexity thinking in a diverse country. It also highlights some of the challenges encountered by social workers in their endeavor to contribute meaningfully toward SDGs in a culturally diverse South Africa.
Drs. Allucia Lulu Shokane, Mogomme Alpheus Masoga and Lisa V. Blitz in their article titled: Creating an Afro-sensed, Community -Engaged School: Views from Parents and School Personnel, the authors address how the implementation of African indigenous knowledge could enhance family engagement and inform social work assessment and interventions with African families as well as with other indigenous communities globally. The authors further explore how indigenous knowledge is tied to place-based knowledge and is therefore relevant to family engagement in school communities where the dominant community is not indigenous, such as non-indigenous people of color and white people in North America.
Drs. Linda Harms-Smith and Shahana Rasool in their article, Deep Transformation Toward Decoloniality in Social Work: Themes for Change in a Social Work Education Programme express the need for deep transformation toward decoloniality in social work and its education programme (curriculum). The authors describes outcomes of a process of engagement around deep transformation toward decoloniality in a social work programme. They believe South Africa’s political liberation from colonialism and its extension, apartheid, resulted in little more than hope compromised. This is because historical racist oppression and neo-liberal economic policies relying on the free-market as a template for solutions to social problems has led to the continuation of historic race-stratified inequality; extreme levels of poverty; ongoing class, race and gender oppressions; and ongoing coloniality of power, being and knowledge.
Dr. Robert Mutemi Kajiita and Prof. Simon Kang’ethe express the need to invest in people and communities for social change informed by the lessons from social enterprises in South Africa. The authors believe that there has been a mind boggling economic investments primarily premised on maximizing profit and accumulating wealth for oneself and less investment on people. Through this approaches, inequality has been glaring, with rich individuals becoming richer, while the majority continue to languish in poverty and their human dignity highly compromised. South Africa as a country battling with ugly legacies of apartheid present such a good example. The country experiences social injustices such as high level of gender inequality, poverty, a culture of violence, and unemployment for women and youth. This, therefore, presents a need to question the dominant exorbitant profit making investment approaches that undermine people’s dignity, freedom and self-value.
As guest editors we are excited about the platform created by the Journal of Progressive Human Services (JPHS) as we continue the collaborative effort for social work academics and scholars in the global south to share their knowledge and experiences in this theme of encouraging global justice through the local-global perspective. We believe that the articles shared in this special issue may be relevant not only in the global south but also in all parts of the world. As we continue to collaborate in our scholarship agenda to cultivate local-global framework in our approaches to improving quality of life, we expect stronger impactful scholarship.