Nurses are often said to be the backbone of health services, but in South Africa their profession itself is in need of care. This monograph considers the profile, image and status of nursing today and the nature and role of nursing education. A major concern is that, although nursing still attracts many more students than there are places available, the gap between the large numbers who complete their training and the relatively small growth in the professional registers, indicates high attrition rates. The decline in the role of the public sector in the training of nurses is another worrying trend. Through interviews and focus groups, the study explores issues that are contributing to the state of the nursing profession and airs the concerns of nursing students, academics and qualified nurses who are leaders in the field. These are concerns which managers and policy-makers in the health sector must address if the nursing profession is to regain the respect it once enjoyed, and if South Africa's public health sector is to address the serious challenges it faces. This study forms part of a broader project on professions and professional education within the HSRC Research Programme on Education, Science and Skills Development (ESSD). The research focus of ESSD is wide, spanning three major social domains: the education system, the national system of innovation and the world of work. The programme is distinctive in that it is able to harness research work at the interface of these three key social domains, to produce comprehensive, integrated and holistic analyses of the pathways of learners through schooling, further and higher education into the labour market and the national system of innovation.

Winner of the Sunday Times Literary Award for non-fiction.

‘A truly stunning book.’ - Jacob Dlamini
‘… meticulously researched and most unsettling yet compelling …’ - Francis B. Nyamnjoh

Sunday, 9 November 1952. It should be remembered as a day of infamy in South Africa’s history but few know of a brutal massacre when police opened fire on people at an ANC Youth League-organised event in Duncan Village in East London.

The official death toll was eight people killed by police gunfire and bayonet and two killed in retaliation, including an Irish nun and medical doctor, Sister Aidan Quinlan, who lived and worked in Duncan Village. Today it is believed that between 80 and 200 died that day, most buried quietly by their families, who feared arrest if they sought help at hospitals. In the cover-ups and long silences that followed, the real facts of this tragedy at the height of the ANC’s Defiance Campaign were almost lost to history.

Bloody Sunday follows the trail of the remarkable Sister Aidan into the heart of a missing chapter in our country’s past – and what was one of the most devastating massacres of the apartheid era.

The papers for this special issue were selected from a pool of nearly 700 presentations which were made at the 10th Congress of the World Council of Comparative Education Societies (WCCES), which was held in Cape Town, South Africa, from 12 to 17 July 1998. The congress was hosted by the Southern African Comparative and History of Education Society (SACHES) and held on the campuses of the University of the Western Cape and the University of Cape Town. The papers were selected by the convenors of the conference's standing commissions, which provided a significant focus for the conference proceedings. These commissions were on the following themes: Teachers and teacher education Curriculum - Higher education - Lifelong learning - Language, literacy and basic education - Gender and education Policy - Theory and theory shifts Basic education in Africa Peace and Justice Dependency European Education Policy Research in Africa Culture, Indigenous Knowledge and Learning The papers presented, as the discussion below makes clear, ranged widely in subject matter and theoretical perspective and addressed issues of concern both to individual countries and to regions of the world. While some of the papers use comparison as an approach, it remains a matter of concern that the comparative perspective is so little in evidence. It is hoped that the com parative research approach will be more in evidence in the future."