The Sechaba Initiative
Foundations
The Initiative is named for Prof. Sechaba Mahlomaholo. His scholarship is not a dedication on this work — it is the reasoning underneath it.
How to read this page
Three things are kept separate here, and the separation matters more than anything else on the page.
First, Prof. Mahlomaholo's scholarly areas. These are the fields he worked in.
Second, our reading of them. That is interpretation, and it is ours.
Third, what we changed about how we work as a result. That is application, and it is ours too — and the responsibility for it is entirely ours.
We do not attribute our conclusions to him. No quotation appears here that he did not write. Where we cite a specific work, it is cited properly, and where we have not yet done that, we say so rather than gesturing at scholarship in general.
His scholarly areas
The fields Prof. Mahlomaholo worked in. Stated as areas of scholarship, not as claims about particular arguments.
- 01
Sustainable learning environments
Environments that sustain both themselves and the people in them.
- 02
Critical emancipatory research
Research that liberates rather than describes, with the people affected as co-creators.
- 03
Cognitive justice
Different knowledge systems holding equal standing.
- 04
Community cultural wealth
The assets communities hold that deficit models cannot see.
- 05
Decoloniality
Refusing the hierarchy that places the centre of knowledge elsewhere.
- 06
Participatory action research and bricolage
Working with what is available, combining methods as the problem demands.
- 07
Indigenous knowledge and curriculum inclusivity
Whose knowledge counts, and who decides.
- 08
Scholarship of engagement and social cohesion
The institution engaged with its community rather than extracting from it.
- 09
ICT in learning, and education for the Fourth Industrial Revolution
Technology in education, and what education owes a technological economy.
What we did with it
What follows is our application. It is offered as our reading and our responsibility, not as a summary of his position.
Some of it is genuine convergence rather than derivation. Several of these decisions were made before the connection was drawn, and we are claiming them as ours rather than his — but it does mean the integration is not decoration applied afterwards. The company already worked this way. Now it knows where the thinking comes from.
Our reading, and what it changed
Each of these altered something specific about how the company operates.
- 01
Co-creation over prescription
If the people affected are co-creators rather than subjects, the first question cannot be what would you like us to build. It is what are you trying to accomplish. In our conversation form, I am not sure yet carries identical weight to the seven specified options — the interface refuses to treat not-knowing as a lesser state.
Read more - 02
The anti-deficit rule
If communities hold assets that deficit models cannot see, then young South Africans are never framed as needing to catch up, and the country is never framed as behind. This is the hardest rule we hold, because the catching-up framing is everywhere and it is easy to write by accident.
- 03
Culture as substance, not ornament
If local knowledge has equal standing, then rendering culture as pattern and decoration demotes it. Our site has no section headed South African identity. Culture appears through language used correctly, named places, real people and perspective that could only be written here — and is labelled nowhere.
- 04
Environments that reproduce themselves
A sustainable learning environment sustains the people in it and itself. Sechaba Labs progresses from child to learner to builder to mentor to leader. It ends in mentoring, not employment, because an environment that depends permanently on the people who started it has not been built.
Read more - 05
Bricolage as engineering practice
Building well with what is actually available, combining methods pragmatically, is a description of good engineering under constraint. It is why we treat constraints as the material rather than the excuse, and why our performance budgets are tested on the conditions people actually have.
- 06
Engaged, not extractive
An institution engaged with its community rather than extracting from it is why Sechaba is not corporate social responsibility. It is also the argument for reasoning in public — publishing our decisions, including the ones that were wrong.
Read more
Sources
[CITATIONS PENDING — his publications and the institutions he published under are to be supplied before this page is published. Until then no specific work is referenced, because a half-remembered citation is worse than none.]
This page will name his publications and the institutions he published under. Until it does, everything above is described as an area of scholarship rather than attributed to a specific argument in a specific work, which is the honest way to hold the difference.