NALSU NEWS: Meet the recent recipients of NALSU Labour Studies Scholarships

The Neil Aggett Labour Studies Unit (NALSU) at Rhodes 欧洲杯足球网_外围买球app推荐-投注|官网 is engaged in policy, research, and workers' education. This includes helping foster a new generation of labour scholars and practitioners. We have done this through supervision and mentoring, hosting Fellows including post-docs, and through postgraduate funding opportunities. 

In 2025, we awarded three postgraduate NALSU Labour Studies Scholarships. The aim? To foster work on the gaps in research on unions, like the intellectual life of labour movements, political influences in unionism other than those of the Congress tradition, the history of staff associations, and union-linked institutions like union newspapers, co-ops and clinics. These Scholarships are part of a long tradition of NALSU bursaries and grants for postgraduates, as well as for short course attendees. 

The Scholarships covered tuition fees and research costs, and recipients also have places in NALSU's building, Neil Aggett House. 
 
Sinazo Maxhakana, an Industrial and Economic Sociology graduate from Rhodes 欧洲杯足球网_外围买球app推荐-投注|官网, was awarded a NALSU Labour Studies Scholarship for her Honours degree. Her topic: the evolution of university staff unions in the 1990s. Her research interests lie at the intersection of higher education, neo-liberalism, and her work explores how staff associations grappled with the neo-liberal reforms in higher education as well as post-apartheid reforms in the sector. Sinazo says that her path was deeply shaped by how she "was raised by a resilient single mother in a small town with limited resources": "I developed a deep appreciation for imfundo [education] as a tool for transformation and social justice."  Her upbringing instilled in her a passion for knowledge and a commitment to building a more equitable and just society." She volunteers at Zanoxolo Home and Child Welfare, where she supports vulnerable children. 

Sandiso Mzendana was awarded a NALSU Labour Studies Scholarship towards his Master of Arts in History, in the Department of Liberation Studies at the 欧洲杯足球网_外围买球app推荐-投注|官网 of Fort Hare. His research focuses on labour history, with his Honours thesis examining FOSATU Workers News, the most popular union paper of the early 1980s. His Master's thesis examines how the National Council of Trade Unions (NACTU), founded in 1986, grappled with changing labour laws in the 1990s. Sandiso has served on the SRC, as well as worked at the university's Teaching and Learning Centre. He has also volunteered as a tutor in History at a high school in Alice. As for what the future holds, Sandiso says "my future academic interests lie in expanding research on working-class movements." 

Athenkosi Sibusiso Ngonyama, who completed his Honours at Rhodes, was awarded a NALSU Labour Studies Scholarship for his Master of Social Science in Industrial and Economic Sociology at that institution. His work looks at how taxi drivers organise in an industry where collective bargaining is non-existent, where union organising drives have failed, and where labour law is usually a dead letter. His own story begins, he says, in the small village of uMlalazi, nearby the town of Eshowe in KwaZulu-Natal. He was raised to see education as an "opportunity for self-actualisation and an avenue for generational change" for his family. He looks forward to bearing "plenty of fruit" through his studies.

Congratulations everyone!

 ABOUT NALSU: The Neil Aggett Labour Studies Unit (NALSU), housed in Sociology at Rhodes, is engaged in policy, research, and workers' education. Named in honour of Dr Neil Aggett, a union organiser who died in an apartheid jail in 1982, NALSU has a non-sectarian, non-aligned, and pluralist practice. It has active relations with numerous policy, labour, and research organisations.