Unchaining the human of the humanities

Abstract

In his article, ‘Still searching for “the human”’, Premesh Lalu (2012, p. 1) decries the National Research Foundation’s decision to fund 60 new chairs at universities in South Africa, to foster research in line with the government’s identified social development goals and priorities, leaving the humanities out in the cold. The article highlights the primacy of the idea of the human condition over developmentalism defined by policy experts which ‘threatens to obscure more than it reveals about the predicament of post-apartheid South Africa’ (p. 2).