From human to human(e) is an exploration of ways of coming to understand what it means to be(come) human and to belong (Vanier, 2003) while living and working as an educator in a disadvantaged community. In this sense, the purpose of this dissertation is the exploration of understanding what it might mean to be a ‘Foundation Phase’ (Primary/Elementary School) educator in a context of constructed poverty and disadvantage (Swanson 2004), thereby contributing to the field of education in this area, whilst embracing a practice of freedom and fostering apertures of hope and transcendence. This reflexive, rhizomatic narrative journeying (ibid) attempts to reach out to humanity via an interdisciplinary and arts-based approach that attempts to address concerns of inequity and pedagogical in-access and evokes the spiritual, emotive and philosophical in drawing attention to the ethical irresponsibility and socio-spiritual repercussions of ignoring social disadvantage in education. It includes inherences and impressions of humaneness in education. It seeks both introspection and insight into what ‘the human condition’ might mean to a just and robust education of children. In this sense, it is a personal inquiry as reflexive narrative journeying (ibid) based on twenty seven years of teaching in a primary school in a vulnerable and economically-impoverished community in the province of KwaZulu Natal in South Africa. As a writing-as-inquiry journeying, I engage with ‘critical rhizomatic narrative’ methodology (Swanson, 2004) as it resonates with the explorations of lived experiences that pertain to emotions, feelings, values and spirituality and because it enables a process of seeking what it might mean to be(come) human(e). This study is a philosophical rhizomatic narrative rendering which is an approach to(wards) understandings of personal growth and spirituality through understanding the various emergent journeys of life and the meanings that we can elicit from them to become more human and thus more humane.

The legal historical development of fairness in the South African common law of contract is investigated in the context of the political, social and economic developments of the last four centuries. It emerges that the common law of contract is still dominated by the ideologies of individualism and economic liberalism which were imported from English law during the nineteenth century. Together with the theories of legal positivism and formalism which are closely related to parliamentary sovereignty and the classical rule of law, these ideals were transposed into the common law of contract through the classical model of contract law which emphasises freedom and sanctity of contract and promotes legal certainty. This approach resulted in the negation of the court’s equitable discretion and the limitation of good faith which sustain the social and economic inequalities that were created under colonialism and exacerbated under apartheid rule. In stark contrast, the modern human rights culture grounded in human dignity and aimed at the promotion of substantive equality led to the introduction of modern contract theory in other parts of the world. The introduction of the Constitution as grounded in human dignity and aimed at the achievement of substantive equality has resulted in a sophisticated jurisprudence on human dignity that reflects a harmonisation between its Western conception as based on Kantian dignity and ubuntu which provides an African understanding thereof. In this respect, ubuntu plays an important role in infusing the common law of contract with African values and in promoting substantive equality between contracting parties in line with modern contract theory. It is submitted that this approach to human dignity should result in the development of good faith into a substantive rule of the common law of contract which can be used to set aside an unfair contract term or the unfair enforcement thereof. / Private Law / LL. D.