How UNC compares to African universities according to South African and Kenyan students

Students from South Africa and Kenya are visiting UNC this week as part of the African University Leadership Exchange Program.

The three students from Kenya and South Africa toured the UNC School of Media and Journalism, the Morehead Planetarium and Science Center and attended a football game during the 10-day long exchange. The program had originally been planned for April, but it was postponed due to difficulties with student visas. 

Touring UNC was fun, said Mila Tshaka from the University of Cape Town, but his favorite part of the program was something different.

“It’s been the interactions and the discussions that I’ve been having with the different participants, firstly with the participants from the African continent and other people from the University of North Carolina,” he said.

Founded in 2016 by then-Student Body President Bradley Opere, the program brings students participating in student leadership in African universities to UNC to interact and exchange ideas with student leaders at the University.

Now in its second year, the program is funded mainly by benefit nights, fundraising and donations.

One of the organizers, junior Kyende Kinoti, said the idea of the program is not only to have the Kenyan and South African students learn from students at UNC, but also to teach students at Carolina how they can improve as well.

"I feel like we often don’t think about the continent as having anything to teach, especially to Western nations,” she said. “I feel like this is an opportunity for people to expose themselves to people that are different from them, who have different experiences and different realities and different truths and learn from that, as well as sharing authentically what they have experienced in their own truths here at UNC.”

Ntebogang Segone from the University of Cape Town said he wants to replicate the emphasis the University places on networking at his university in South Africa.

“There’s this mentorship program (in the Media and Journalism School) where some students are given mentors who are alumni who are in the profession,” Segone said. “It teaches students about the importance of a network from a very young age.”

Although the students learned a lot from the students and faculty at UNC, based on what Tshaka saw in "The Hunting Ground," he said the protection given to sports and athletes is excessive, especially when it comes to sexual assault. 

"The Hunting Ground" is a 2015 documentary about sexual assault on university campuses and centers around two UNC students who filed Title IX complaints. 

“We went to the basketball game and the football game, and we were stunned by the magnitude; everything was huge and great,” he said. “We couldn’t have anticipated the downside to what we saw in 'The Hunting Ground.'”

Kinoti said differences definitely exist between student leadership and student culture at African universities, but overall, student life is a pretty universal experience.

“I think we often think of the African continent and UNC as two different worlds, but the problems in student life are very similar in the two places,” she said.

Jacinta Ng’ethe from the Kiriri Women’s University of Science and Technology said what surprised her the most was that unlike her university, UNC did not have a backup plan prepared for the water crisis situation.

“I was shocked when the water pipe breaks, there’s nothing you can do about it; you just have to wait,” she said. “I didn’t understand how that can happen because we’re in America, hello.”

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