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According to the Independent Examinations Board (IEB, 2015), students who write the IEB National Senior Certificate school-leaving exam are at a distinct advantage and seem to be better prepared for the pressures and challenges faced during their university years than are those students who wrote the Department of Basic Education (DBE) exams. Although the underlying curriculum is no different, the IEB exam is thought to be more challenging and to encourage more critical thinking and deeper engagement with the material than the DBE exam. Thus, this research paper aims to provide a rigorous investigation of whether those students who write the IEB exam at the end of their matric year achieve higher university grades in their first year of study, as well as a decomposition of this effect into a teaching effect and a testing effect. This is done by exploiting within-school variation of examination boards. Given that studies investigating independent school impacts on university performance have predominantly been conducted internationally (McNabb et al., 2002; Ogg et al., 2009; Smith & Naylor, 2001; Smith & Naylor, 2005), this paper will add to the literature in the South African context. By using the techniques of OLS, quantile regression, binary choice probit models and ordered probit models, this paper attempts to provide a holistic view of the effect that the IEB school-leaving examination has on a student's academic performance at a tertiary level. The data used in this study is also unique, in that it is made up of an amalgamation of student record data obtained from the University of Cape Town (UCT), as well as governmental survey data. This paper finds that the IEB examination has a strong positive effect of between 1.6 and 6.5 percentage points on first-year GPA at UCT, particularly in the Medicine and Engineering faculties. Furthermore, this effect is present, but decreasing across the entirety of the performance distribution. Students with an IEB matric are significantly more likely to achieve a 2nd class pass or higher at the end of their first year of study than are comparable students from Former African schools. When decomposing the IEB effect into a teaching effect and a testing effect, it was found that the majority of the impact of the IEB comes simply from the different exam, and that teaching effects are minimal. A further finding of interest is that the IEB effect seems to be independent of resource availability, and that simply the exposure to the alternative testing method is sufficient for students to see significant improvements in their university performance. These results are robust to changes in functional form, and provide a strong and clear picture that perhaps South Africa should be adopting more of the IEB policies towards teaching and learning on a national scale.

Although little studied or understood, the black impostor occupies an important place in the history of the African diaspora. The present essay examines the imposture of Prince Thomas Mackarooroo, aka Prince Ludwig Menelek of Abyssinia, as an avatar of Emperor Menelik II of Ethiopia, whose military victory over Italian forces at the Battle of Adwa in 1896 made him the black culture hero par excellence at the height of the imperialist era. The black impostor, it is argued, represents a political actor of a certain type.

This essay examines the role played by George Beckford in grappling critically with the complicated legacy of the plantation system. It focuses on the transition from his role in the New World group to his participation in the Abeng newspaper group in Jamaica, in 1969. The essay argues that it was Beckford's participation in the Abeng group that helped to pave the way for his expanded concept of dispossession as well as his concept of the culture of dread. The essay examines how this twin set of concepts displaced the dominant New World theoretical model of dependency.

The most famous nineteenth-century British reformer of care for the mentally ill and disabled was undoubtedly John Conolly, whose 1856 Treatment of the Insane without Mechanical Restraints is also reissued in this series. However, Conolly's work at the Hanwell Asylum near London was based in part on the pioneering efforts of Edward Parker Charlesworth (1781–1853) and his younger colleague Robert Gardiner Hill (1811–78), who had already (and controversially) abolished physical restraint in the Lincoln Asylum by 1838. Conolly is known to have visited and been impressed by the Lincoln hospital, but his supporters, and his own book, suggested his primacy in the field, and Hill published this work in 1857 in order to refute Conolly's claims. The first part consists of Hill's account of his and Charlesworth's reforms at Lincoln, and the second reprints many of the letters and pamphlets which focused on the topic during this period