Professor Pumla Gqola revisits the impact that Miriam Tlali had on black writing.
Guests attending Professor Pumla Gqola’s inaugural lecture received a rare glimpse into her life outside of her remarkable profile as a gender activist, author and professor of African Literature.
Gqola began her lecture by paying tribute to her family, friends and supervisors who have shaped her journey.
A respected scholar, Gqola admitted that she always knew that she wanted to be a professor – something that she formulated at the age of five growing up at the University of Fort Hare.
“I imagined my discipline would be organic chemistry only so that I could have an office next to my father, whom I stalked regularly.”
It wasn’t long before she found her own interests which have brought her to the height of academia and the presentation of her inaugural lecture titled Writing Miriam Tlali: Authority, Voice and Black Feminist Imagination.
Literary scholarship records Tlali as the first black South African woman to publish a novel in English inside apartheid South Africa. Tlali was also a regular contributor to Staffrider magazine and her books published by the iconic press Ravan as part of the Staffrider series, placing her firmly within the "protest" canon.
Gqola revisited some taken for granted aspects of Tlali's writing and relationships to writing, representation of intersectionality in her work, and the specific way in which her work (the published novels Muriel at Metropolitan, Between Two Worlds, Amandla, her short stories Footprints in the Quag, her missing novel, and her columns in the first five years of Staffrider magazine) surface relationships between writing, gender and publicness.
The lecture interrogated the ways in which Tlali has been written into literary publicness, including her unhappiness with the publication of Muriel at Metropolitan. It also examined her explicitly gendered relationship to writing as presence and as linked to other women's writing practices, and third, the representational choices staged in her literary expression.
Tlali was born on 11 November in 1933 and studied at Wits University before moving to the National University of Lesotho. She, however, did not complete her education due to lack of funds, and became an office clerk. Her novels describe experiences of being black and female in apartheid South Africa.
The urgency of transformation in the Global South
- Refilwe Mabula
Professor Felix Maringe says there is an urgent need for transformation in the Global South academies.
The higher education (HE) sector in South Africa is facing interesting times, with transformation at the fore of its agenda. The call for transformation in South African universities is a continuous battle to undo the historical disparities and injustices of the past.
Professor Felix Maringe, Assistant Dean in the Faculty of Humanities, addressed the topic during his inaugural lecture on 01 June 2016. His lecture, Emerging narratives in the internationalisation of higher education focused on “an epistemological ecology for transforming Global South academies”.
He provided a synthesis of emerging narratives in the internationalisation of higher education, arguing that an ecological international epistemology could underpin the change needed in the quest for transformation within the HE systems, and could aid institutions to be globally competitive academies.
He argued that the Global South academies are characterised by a history of colonialism fractured cultural heritages, and experiences of economic exploitation, widening poverty and wealth gaps. They are perpetual recipients of donor funding and development aid. It is their post-colonial experience which has disabled their potential to become meaningfully competitive within a neo-liberal framework.
Maringe’s lecture was based on research and work he had done for more than a decade, including his doctoral research conducted at the University of Southampton in 2000 on the marketing of HE – fueled by the intensifying globalisation and the desire to create markets as a strategy for becoming competitive.
His research on marketing in HE, premised on the need to attract more international students to the universities – particularly in the Global North – stimulated his interest in the field of internationalisation in the Global South, as more international students were being absorbed by Global North academies. This subsequently led him to establish a research programme on the Internationalisation of HE at the University of Southampton. The programme included courses taught at Master’s level through the Centre for Higher Education Management, of which Maringe later became director as well as Chair of the research group on leadership and school improvement.
Towards curriculum transformation
While institutions in South Africa are moving towards transformation; employing and recruting more black academics and students, and reworking their language policies, the still-Westernised academic curriculum is not transformed.
Maringe says that the academic curriculum has not changed and what is taught in our universities has remained the same over the decades. Hence, “transformation is urgent in the Global South”.
“The fact that we now have black Vice-Chancellors instead of white ones in our universities does not in itself mean that the curriculum has also changed its colour,” says Maringe.
“The models and theories of leadership I learnt at university two or three decades ago, such as transformational leadership, distributed leadership, instructional leadership, ethical leadership, amongst others, continues to constitute the staple diet of the leadership programmes we teach our students today,” he said.
Bringing it home: an African perspective
Meanwhile, as the quest for academic transformation and decolonisation continues, Maringe says that the hegemony of Western knowledge systems – which, by default have become the stock-in-trade for what counts as acceptable scholarship in the global academies – needs to be constantly challenged.
He says that internationalising African academies should not simply mean being more like institutions such as Harvard, Oxford and Cambridge, but should rather be more about placing Africa at the heart of the internationalisation project.
“Europe grew because it looked into Europe and not outside Europe. Africa needs to do the same,” says Maringe, adding that academics need to start playing a role as transformation agents in the knowledge academy.
“We are in a moment which requires us to think outside the box. We have been caught napping as our students have grabbed the initiative for transformation right in front of our noses. If we wish to place our footprint on this inevitable transformation, there is only one place where we have an acknowledged legitimacy. It is on the knowledge production project.
We should not allow anyone to take that away from us, because if that happens, our institutions will become illegitimate and perhaps even ungovernable. We cannot continue educating our students on a purely western diet, designed for a small minority but fed to masses.”
What do you profess, Professor?
- Wits University
Professor Shirley Abelman of the School of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics speaks about her life in research.
Professor Shirley Abelman from the School of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics celebrated her Inaugural Lecture on 31 May.
Abelman said an inaugural lecture was the highlight of an academic’s career as it celebrates the academic’s scholarship achievements and allows the professor to showcase his or her research career to the community.
As an expert in the study of fluid dynamics and computational mathematics, Abelman has applied her studies to a number of multidisciplinary research projects, such as working on intervention strategies for diseases such as malaria and Tuberculosis, as well as applying mathematical principles on finance models.
In her lecture she gave special interest to fluid dynamics in nanofluids.
The study of fluid dynamics is fundamental to many scientific problems and engineering applications. It covers the range from very large scale phenomena, to very small scale.
Nanofluids are fluid suspensions of nanometre-sized particles and they have recently been demonstrated to have thermal conductivities that are far superior to that of the liquid alone.
The aim of the science is to enhance fluid microscopic and mega-scale properties such as thermal conductivity, through manipulating microscopic physics, structures properties, and activities.
BAM! And Bob's your uncle
- Wits University
A series of BANGs led Distinguished Professor Bob Scholes from wanting to be a game ranger, to being one of the top scientists in the world.
When Distinguished Professor Bob Scholes looks back on his career, the analogy that he sees is exactly how complex systems like ecosystems work. Complex systems, like ecosystems, don’t change smoothly along a pre-destined trajectory. They change dramatically.
“You’re coming along, minding your own business, then ‘BAM!’, something changes and you go in an all different direction. You never intended it. But it is a good direction. But then you’re just getting settled in that, and then ‘BAM!’, you’re hit by something else and you end of going somewhere else,” he says.
These changes are all very unpredictable and very contingent. So Bob’s advice to the younger generation of scientists would be to yes, by all means, have a plan, but be ready for whatever opportunities come to you, and follow your own instincts in making those choices.
“Start out by being born into the right family,” he says.
Bob’s mother, Mavis Scholes, was a schoolteacher and passionate about plants. His father was an engineer and an extremely rational man. He also was a mountaineer, so Bob grew up in the outdoors. His aunt was a science teacher and a botanist, so, from the start, it was almost obvious that Bob would end up as a biological scientist.
But that wasn’t a given at all. Bob had a very clear idea of what he wanted to do. He wanted to somehow be part of solving these massive environmental problems that were starting to pop up over the world in the late 60s and 70s.
However, he had something much more activist in mind. But when he tried to explain that to his school teachers, they thought his ideas were crazy but thought he was talking about “something like a game ranger”.
So in 1975, Bob came to varsity to study to be a game ranger.
However, early in his undergraduate, he worked for a very famous atmospheric physicist. And that was where his first “BAM!” moment came.
“She said to me, ‘Why don’t you become a scientist?’ and I just about fell about laughing,” said Scholes. “I said ‘I can’t possibly be a scientist. Those are clever people!” But she responded saying she thought Bob was “clever enough”.
It took another series of BANGs that took Bob through his career of being an ordinary scientist, through to being a systems ecologist and eventually ending up as an A-Rated scientist, being one of the leading one percent of scientists in his field in the world, and representing South Africa in a range of international environmental assessment bodies, including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
“(One of these assessment panels) The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment has changed the language that we speak about the conservation of nature from being something that is an ethical and aesthetic concern, to a realisation that if we don’t preserve nature, we’re toast! We depend on nature, we require things from nature,” he says.
Bob brought back his experience gained on major assessments to South Africa, and applied his knowledge on issues like the management of elephants and the Karoo fracking issue. But he believes this approach could work in a number of other areas, one of them being the HIV/Aids crisis.
“Instead of fighting over it for five years, while a million people die, if we had an assessment, early on in that process, we may have come to a sensible decision a lot earlier,” says Bob.
As a systems ecologist, Bob currently looks at the world on a global scale, trying to find answers for one of the world’s most pressing problems, which is climate change. He believes we are currently experiencing the “sixth extinction crisis”.
“The Earth has had five big events that led to the mass extinction of species. In the last time, it was an asteroid that killed all the dinosaurs. This time, it is not an asteroid (that is responsible for a mass extinction), it is us.”
Like the constantly changing complex systems that he is studying, Bob’s career has also changed from being a clear scientist, to moving into the world of making or influencing policy.
“It is not enough to simply have the data, and have the evidence,” he says. “We, as scientists often think that we can just hold up the data and the world will say ‘ja, of course, let’s go and do that’”.
But it doesn’t work that way. “You have to move that evidence into a decision-making process and that is a really, really hard thing to do effectively.”
Good students, bad students, and biocatalysis
- Wits University
Professor Roger Sheldon of the Wits School of Chemistry delivers his Inaugural Lecture.
You can immediately tell the difference between a “good student” and a “not so good student”, says Professor Roger Sheldon, one of the fathers of green chemistry and the 2010 winner of the Royal Society of Chemistry’s Green Chemistry Award.
When faced with a challenge, the “not so good” student will come up to you and say “Professor, it didn’t work, do you have any other ideas?” But the good student will say “it didn’t work, but I thought about it a bit, and …”
Sheldon, a Professor in the Wits School of Chemistry delivered his Inaugural Lecture at Wits on 26 July 2016. In his lecture, he gave an overview of Green Chemistry and sustainable development, before taking his audience on a journey of the use of enzymes as biocatalysts in organic chemistry.
Sheldon, who is globally recognised as an expert on catalysis and green chemistry and the (co)author of several books on the subject of catalysis as well as more than 400 professional papers and 50 granted patents, spoke of the need to improve the way we produce chemicals.
“Everything we use, we borrow from future generations. We have to put it back, as we have received it,” he says. “Natural resources should be used at rates that don’t unacceptably deplete supply over the long term.”
We are using fossil fuels much faster than the rate at which they are being generated and we are generating CO2 at a rate that can’t be assimilated by the environment, and that is leading to climate change.
“We need to close the carbon cycle and only then would we have a truly circular economy,” he says.
By using biocatalysts to improve the production of chemicals, Sheldon, and his colleagues have made several major breakthroughs in green chemistry, even developing magnetised enzymes, which could be recycled out of liquids (and re-used), by separating the magnetised enzymes from the liquids.
“Biocatalysis is green and sustainable, and it has made enormous progress in the last two to three decades, and the performance can be dramatically improved by biocatalysis engineering,” he says.
Thinking about free will
- Deborah Minors
Do prior events beyond our control cause us to act as we do, or are we free to decide? The nature of human free will is one of Philosophy's oldest problems.
Lucy Allais, Professor in the Philosophy Department and Director of the Centre for Ethics at Wits delivered her inaugural lecture, entitled:Laws of Nature, Human Freedom and Human Laws, on Tuesday 16 August 2016 in the Senate Room.
“The way we think about causation and laws of nature in the physical sciences is often taken to threaten the idea that human free choice is really possible: it seems to suggest that everything that happens is a determined function of the way things were in the past,” says Allais.
“On the other hand, the idea that we have the capacity to freely choose how we act – that our choices are not settled by the past and the laws of nature – is fundamental to the way we think about ourselves as human and moral beings, as well as to the way we hold each other responsible.”
For example, when you are angry with someone, or grateful to someone, you see them asresponsible; you see their action as having been up to them – not an inevitable outcome of theBigBang or of social conditions, explains Allais.
“We see people as having agency; as capable of making changes. This is central to human life. But is it consistent with taking causal explanation and causal law in science and social science seriously? Could our responsibility attributions be entirely based on an illusion?”
Allais’ lecture aimed to sketch a way these two different kinds of explanation can be reconciled, by drawing on her scholarship in the history of philosophy, metaphysics, and the work of Immanuel Kant (1724 – 1804).
“What we take from past philosophers is not so much answers to particular questions as careful ways of thinking about the reasons for the answers they give,” says Allais.
Kant was gripped by the free will problem, which he saw as a metaphysical problem. Metaphysics is concerned with the nature of being and the world that encompasses it. Although deeply engaged in science, Kant wanted to make room for genuine free will.A focus of Allais’ researchto date has been on Kant’s metaphysics; her current research explores his account of free will.
Assuming humans are purely physical beings – just stardust – then everything has been caused by a prior event. Further, if we are made up of matter, and matter is governed by physical laws, then it seems that everything that happens in our physical reality is a function of the laws governing particles, together with the initial positions of the particles. Allais challenges this assumption.
Allais argues that the assumption is a function of misunderstanding what we learn from science and (mis)taking a ‘model’ for a complete account of reality. She argues, firstly, thatnotevery event is caused by a prior event (sometimes agents have causal efficacy), and secondly, sometimes the agents who make decisions have not themselves been ‘caused’.
“We think there is a significant sense in which our actions are up to us, but it is hard to see how to fit this together with causal explanations in physics,” she says.
Kant theorizes that our natural thought pathway lead to contradictory conclusions. Understanding the relation between the mind and the world enables us to diagnose paradoxes to which our thinking naturally leads us: On the one hand, we think that we can’t really be more than matter and motion, and a profusion of chemical reactions. Yet on the other hand, we recognise that our capacity to make this observation suggests wehavefree will. Kant introduced the term ‘dialectic’ to refer to what he calls this logic of illusion. He argues that there is a natural dialectical tendency in human thought to alternate between these two illusory views.
“There are two sides to this dialectic: We find ourselves pulled – even if only implicitly – by the thought that to have some kind of autonomous mental life, our thoughts and emotions must be something that transcends electro-chemical reactions. On the other hand, we find ourselves pulled by the thought that there must be a scientific explanation at the level of electro-chemical reactions. And if this is so, then we have exhausted the causal-explanatory space; electro-chemical reactions are just what thoughts and emotions are. That’s all there is,” says Allais.
Kant’s aim it to avoid both sides of the metaphysical illusion while doing justice to the thoughts that seem to pull in both directions. This is the theoretical framework of Allais’ research, the aim of which is to show that the causality of freedom is not ruled out by the metaphysics of science. Allais also shows how this relates to an account of freedom in politics, and relatesit to the effects on human psychology of living in conditions of injustice.
Allais is the author of Manifest Reality: Kant's Idealism and his Realism (Oxford University Press, 2015). She has published twice in both Philosophy and Public Affairs and the Journal of the History of Philosophy. Both have acceptance rates of less than 5% and are the leading international journals in their fields. In 2014, the Journal of Moral Philosophy, a leading international publication, published Allais’ article: What properly belongs to me: Kant on giving to beggars.
The Origins of Livestock in South Africa
- Wits University
Twenty-five years ago the conventional view was that the first herders in South Africa were an immigrant Khoe-speaking, this view has been challenged.
Professor Karim Sadr based in the School of Geography, Archaeology and Environmental Studies, has been working on the question of the origin of livestock herding in South Africa ever since he arrived in Africa a quarter of a century ago. Worldwide, farming and herding are seen as the precursors of 'civilisation' or better said 'complex societies,' so studying how, when and why hunters, gatherers, foragers and fishers decided to grow their own food rather than extract it from nature is important.
In South Africa, the oldest evidence for food production, sheep bones to be precise, is only 2 000 to 3 000 years old; relatively recent compared to places like the Near East and China, or even South America.
Sadr, an archaeologist, delivered his inaugural address on 24 August titled: The Origins of Livestock in South Africa drawing on various fields such as archaeology, genetics, and linguistics among other disciplines of study.
Twenty-five years ago the conventional view was that the first herders in South Africa were an immigrant Khoe-speaking population from farther north who brought sheep and cattle with them. It seemed clear what route the foreign herders took and how they interacted (or did not) with the local indigenous people, the San hunter-gatherers. Today it is acknowledged that the matter was a bit more complex. In his inaugural lecture, Professor Sadr described some of this complexity.
Sadr was born in Tehran, Iran in 1959. He began his studies at the Southern Methodist University in Dallas, where he read for his doctorate in anthropology. His thesis was titled: The Development of Nomadism in Northeast Africa” under the supervision of Professor Anthony Marks.
He joined Wits in 2001 and served as head of school in 2008 – 2013. He has authored two books, more than 80 journal papers and book chapters.
Understanding complexity
- Wits University
Physicists like Professor Zeblon Vilakazi seek to answer ancient fundamental questions, such as: Where do you come from? What holds us together?
Delivering his inaugural lecture, titled: Understanding complexity: Study of nuclear mater under extreme conditions, Vilakazi highlighted his involvement at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, in the biggest scientific project the world has undertaken in the past 50 years.
Before taking up his appointment as Deputy Vice-Chancellor: Research and Postgraduate Affairs at Wits University in 2014, the highly respected nuclear physicist was instrumental in establishing South Africa's first experimental high-energy physics research group, focusing on the development of the High-level Trigger for the CERN-ALICE experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
“The LHC is an amazing piece of engineering. It is the most complex scientific project since the landing of humankind on the moon,” he said.
The US$9-billion collider smashes atoms together using colliders to simulate the early universe just after the Big Bang. “The LHC is a discovery machine and will determine the future of High Energy Physics. We are doing very ‘violent physics’ where particles are smashed into each other – they collide to give you species of particles that only existed at the beginning of time,” Vilakazi said.
It is from these collisions that scientists pick up data in the same way as astronomers pick data that comes from the early universe. “Our detectors become almost like our telescopes that pick up the early universe by smashing these particles together. Basically, we are launching two attacks: the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) will look out into large scale structure, and we, physicists, look at inner-space. So we are launching almost like a pincer attack on the early universe to understand the fundamental questions to define who we are as human beings.”
He has been involved with the ALICE detector (A Large Ion Collider Experiment) for some 20 years, and more particularly where the experiment focusses on muons. To process the vast amounts of data from the signals that ALICE can track, the team that Vilakazi was involved with developed what is called the High-level Trigger (HLT) that removes all the data without throwing the good physics away.
But finding that “needle in a haystack” in the data is “like downloading some 22 000 DVDs a day and looking for your favourite track,” Vilakazi said.
A first in the world
The HLT-team wrote highly sophisticated algorithms and built a computing grid. For the first time in the world, physicists were doing real-time computing.
This successful international collaboration meant that researchers sitting in different locations all over the world were able to do real-time tracking, calculating and comparing of data as well as mapping their results and feeding it back to CERN.
This development has played a significant role in developing end-user real-time scientific collaboration around the world.
The century of the photon
- Wits University
Welcome to the photonics age where we will be harnessing light for a myriad of applications, says Professor Andrew Forbes.
Delivering his inaugural lecture, titled: Photonics for a brighter future, Forbes outlined how research into structured light has defined new paradigms and how it may fuel exciting future developments, both fundamental and applied.
A Distinguished Professor in the School of Physics, Forbes joined Wits in 2015 and is Head of the Structured Light Laboratory.
The team has already had some notable achievements: the creation of a vector microchip laser; the first demonstration of quantum interference in high dimensions; a new approach to packing information into light, which the group sent over free space (air) and optical fibre (glass), as well as bringing this cutting edge science back into teaching through the use of digital holograms to demonstrate some very basic physics and mathematics in a laboratory.
As one of the fastest growing technology fields, photonics (the harnessing of light and light-based technologies) are enabling technology that permeates our everyday lives, Forbes explained.
Forbes and his team are exploring new techniques with optical communication that include researching how to pack information into light, transmit it over distance and then unpack the information on the other side. This year the team has shown that data can be transmitted with over 100 patterns of light, effectively increasing in the amount of information that can be 'packed into light'.
The application for this research directly relates to increasing current bandwidth by 100 times, a huge boost for developing sufficient bandwidth to meet the growing demand from the impact of big data and advances in information technology.
But it is not only about increasing bandwidth. Looking into the future, Forbes said his team will also explore how to make data more secure by using the laws of physics and the rules of nature.
The cost of free tertiary education might push South Africa over the edge
- Wits University
Professor Jannie Rossouw gives a stern warning to the country's leaders on the consequences of over expenditure of government revenue.
At a time when South Africa is facing huge financial pressures, and the possibility of a looming fiscal cliff, the costs of free tertiary education, among other things, might just push the country over the edge.
This is the view of Professor Jannie Rossouw, head of the School of Economics and Business Science at Wits University, who delivered his Inaugural Lecture on Tuesday, 22 November.
Rossouw, who has spent the major part of his career at the Reserve Bank and held the position of Deputy General Manager, said that for the Government to finance free tertiary education, it would cost an estimated R50 billion extra per year.
“There is no free lunch,” said Rossouw. “Somebody has to pay for it, and in the case of free tertiary education, it will be paid for by those I call ‘We, the South African tax payers’. This, ladies and gentlemen, is for our accounts.”
The additional R50 billion – or “R50 million with a lot of zeros” – said Rossouw is equal to a surcharge of nearly 12% on income tax, or an increase of 2.5 percentage points in VAT, or an increase of 7% in company tax.
“Increasing the marginal tax rate to 45% from 41% on taxable income above R1 million per annum, and to 50% on annual taxable income above R1.5 million will add only 30% of the required amount, or R15 billion,” said Rossouw. “We, the South African tax payers, should brace ourselves for substantial tax increases, going forward.”
In a research paper published in 2014, Rossouw warned that government was facing a looming fiscal cliff in 2026. A fiscal cliff, he said, was when all government revenue is expended on social grants and civil servant remuneration.
“By 2002, South Africa had 4.2 million people who received social grants. This number of recipients increased rapidly, as take-up increased, with 16 million people receiving social grants,” said Rossouw.
“Therefore, currently some 30% of South Africans are grant recipients, and these grants account for some 12% of the government’s revenue.”
At the same time, civil service remuneration amounts to about 44% of government revenue, and about 12% of South Africa’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
“This compares unfavourably with other emerging economies, like Chile, where civil service remuneration amounts to 6% of GDP, or Peru, where civil service remuneration is equal to some 5% of GDP.”
Rossouw warned that the rate of growth in government expenditure should be contained and that a fiscal cliff should be averted to avoid the South African credit risk downgrade. However, he warned, despite the looming fiscal cliff, further expenditure increases might be on their way.
Along with the pressures of free tertiary education, the government also faces the pressure on the implementation of National Health Insurance, and President Jacob Zuma is pushing for South African investment in nuclear power plants and. There are also plans to purchase a new presidential airplane.
“Purchasing a new plane can only be described as ‘fiscal lunacy’, given the many other fiscal demands in South Africa. It might have a negative demonstration effect that could see this country going up in flames. It is not clear that those in power understand how serious this matter is,” said Rossouw.
Professor Shirley Abelman from the School of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics celebrated her Inaugural Lecture on 31 May.
