“They work incredibly well ’s no surprise that they won the World Championship.” “They complement each other as debate partners” Zoffer said. Zoffer, who won the 34th World Universities Debating Championship with teammate Sprung-Keyser and is a team coach, said Mashwama and Seo form a powerful debating duo. Seo and Mashwama are both international students, Seo from Australia and Mashwama from Swaziland. Seo also attributed his and Mashwama’s success to the pair’s diversity. “When it came to the end and one team had to shine before the judges, Bo and Fanele had a sense for what went wrong last year, and conversely, what to do this year,” Balakrishnan said.įellow debater and president of the Harvard College Debating Union Dhruva Bhat ’17 also competed in the tournament, and said that the debating union was “with them every step of the way, cheering them on.” Balakrishnan, a Harvard graduate student and one of the team’s coaches, said making it to the finals last year gave Mashwama and Seo an advantage over the other debaters. “But we certainly hadn’t prepped for the poor having a Marxist revolution as a topic.”Īs sophomores at the College last year, Mashwama and Seo were finalists in the same competition, an experience that Seo said helped them in this year’s debate. “I do political theory at school, Fanele is a philosopher, and so we at least knew what the big central ideas were,” Seo said. In the final round of this year’s championship, Seo and Mashwama argued that “the global poor would be justified in pursuing a Marxist revolution” Seo said. The tournament followed a British parliamentary style format and competitors received debate topics 15 minutes in advance of each round. “You’re asking your body to do a lot, like concentrat, think very fast, b anxious between decisions, so I think we just collapsed,” Mashwama said. Mashwama described the sensation of winning as “an odd mix of relief, exhaustion, and excitement.” Mashwama '17 and Bo Seo '17 were victorious in the 2016 World Universities Debating Championship, becoming the second Harvard team to earn the title in three years.
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