–– Paul Schlehlein

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Recently the University of Fort Hare in South Africa has been ensnared in controversy. One of its professors has been charged with ignoring the plagiarism of nine postgraduate students under his supervision. This comes over two decades after another infamous plagiarism case in South Africa, where a doctoral thesis was submitted to the University of Witwatersrand, having been copied word-for-word from another student’s post-graduate thesis. Upon discovery, the professor was fired from the university and his PhD was invalidated, a reminder that plagiarism remains one of academia’s most serious offences. 

Plagiarism is the practice of taking someone else’s ideas or work and passing them off as one’s own. For centuries this has been a worldwide problem and today’s Africa is no exception.