Prof Relebohile Moletsane (UKZN) presented on Wednesday 31 July 2019, at DUT University Ritson Campus, the annual SAERA Nelson Mandela Legacy Lecture, entitled “Rethinking Legacies in the Midst of the War on Women’s Bodies: A Feminist ‘Ghost Dance’ with Mandela”.

Relebohile (Lebo) Moletsane is a Full Professor and the JL Dube Chair in Rural Education in the School of Education at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. As part of her Chair in rural education, she has worked in South African rural schools and communities, focusing on teacher development around such issues as poverty alleviation, gender inequality, GBV and HIV prevention as barriers to education and development.

From 2009 – 2012, she was the South African PI of an HIV Prevention Leadership Fellowship led by Columbia University and UCLA and funded by the MACAIDS Foundation. Currently, her work focuses specifically on working with girls and young women to address sexual violence in rural communities. As part of this, she is co-PI with Claudia Mitchell, of an IPaSS grant: Networks for change and well-being: Girl-led ‘from the ground up’ approaches to addressing sexual violence in Canada and South Africa. As recognition for her work on addressing poverty in rural communities, Moletsane was the 2012 winner of the Distinguished Women in Science (Humanities)

Award presented by the National Department of Science and Technology. She was a 2014 Echidna Global Scholar at Brookings Institutions’ Centre for Universal Education, where she completed a research report.