Wananchi

About the Book

In Kiswahili, the East African language spoken by black African people, wananchi means ‘the ordinary people’ or ‘the public.’ The origin in Kiswahili of wananchi, the plural of mwananchi is ‘inhabitant or citizen.’ Kiswahili is the African language spoken, used, and understood by majority of Africans in sub-Saharan Africa. In the view of Arthur Livington, who wrote the introduction section of Gaetano Mosca’s Elementi di Scienza Politica (1939), his “the plain man” fits Kiswahili’s mwananchi.

About the Author

Monde Ndandani was born and bred in Madokisini village of Upper Qhora District in a municipality of a small rural town called Dutywa, located in the Transkei region of the Eastern Cape Province – one of the nine provinces of the Republic of South Africa. After completing his junior degree at the University of Fort Hare in South Africa, he taught at Ohlange High School, Inanda, Durban, the school founded by Dr JL Dube, the first president of the African (Native) Congress in 1900. After ten years of teaching at Ohlange High, he crossed the Atlantic Ocean to attend to his postgraduate studies at the University of Texas-at-Tyler, United States of America, where he completed M.Ed. degree. Hereafter he came back to South Africa, joining the staff of the Faculty of Education at the then University of North-West – now North-West University, North-West Province, South Africa. While teaching at this university, he registered with University of KwaZulu-Natal for Ph.D. Currently he is attending to the final sections of his dissertation under the auspices of Tshwane University of Technology in Pretoria. He also had one-year contract employment with the National Department of Basic Education and Training in the Teacher Development Unit.