April 2016 UCT News Issue 10

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Journeys through academia: In this latest edition of UCT News, we track the unexpected twists and turns taken by UCT staff and students on their journeys to and through higher education. For more stories like these, keep an eye on the UCT website.

How can we transform the professoriate?

Dean-designate Bongani Mayosi outlines what can be done to grow and fast-track a new cohort of black and women professors in the Faculty of Health Sciences, using his own career path as a case study.

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Activities News

Make a name for yourself: Activist-academic: Rashida “History is like a puzzle”: How a university buildings are under Manjoo's journey from clothing master’s student pieced together

review, and UCT wants your input factory clerk to UN investigator of the details of UCT's first black

violence against women medical doctor

How the Drama Department When an inspiring lecturer PhD student and indigenous interprets South Africa through changes your life’s course: language programmer Joan

local lenses, using works from Introducing Ingrid Woolard, Byamugisha’s story is a lesson in

SA playwrights UCT’s new dean of commerce persistence

What's on at UCT? Find out more How toolmaker-turned-teacher Postdoctoral fellow Tana Joseph’s about university concerts, Gideon Nomdo ended up journey to the stars began when

seminars, talks and public lectures recruiting young black students she was 11 with a scrapbook of

into academia Hubble images

Make it here

Applications for study at UCT in 2017 are now open.

If you know someone who wants to study at UCT, now’s the time to apply. Visit applyonline.uct.ac.za to submit an application online, or contact the Admissions Office on [email protected] for more info.

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Fast-tracking professors is key to transformation 19 April 2016

In 1986, halfway through his medical degree at the University of Natal, Bongani Mayosi took a year off to do pure research (BMedSci), returning later to finish his MBChB. It was one of the crucial factors that fast- tracked his journey to a full professorship only three years after getting his PhD at Oxford in 2003.

All talent on deck: Prof Bongani Mayosi, dean designate of the Faculty of Health Sciences and one of UCT’s newest National Research Foundation A-rated researchers.

Mayosi believes these factors can be replicated in the faculty to boost transformation.

“We can create professors in five to 10 years after completion of professional training, but the conditions have to be right,” says the dean-designate who will lead the faculty from 1 September this year.

The shortage of black, especially black women, professors has been a stubborn obstacle to transformation where the faculty’s current cohort is predominantly white, ageing and male.

But growing a new and diverse cohort of professors takes careful planning and commitment, both in the faculty and the university, says Mayosi.

“In academia, the path is well-trodden. There are formulae and the rules are clear. But we [the university] must provide the system.”

His own journey began in a church mission hall in the Eastern Cape where volunteer parents taught him. He matriculated at 15 and followed his father into medicine. Fortunately, he fell in love with research early and by the time he’d graduated as a new doctor in 1989, he’d published two papers, the first in the South African Journal of Science.

But even with “a bit of a head start”, Mayosi believes he took too long to become a professor.

“It was long only by neglect. These things must be planned. If I’d struck gold early – if I’d found a good supervisor and a good topic that could have lead to good papers and outputs early – I could have got there faster.”

Four success factors

Early exposure to research is the first of four factors he believes are vital to grooming a new cohort of professors. “We have a responsibility to instill a love of knowledge and research early in our undergraduates, but we must also expose them to an early stint of full-time research at a reputable institution. If you want to produce a Nobel prize-winner, they must be exposed to research when they’re young.”

The faculty already has in place an “interrupted” medical degree where medical students can take a one-year research degree at honours level before continuing their studies, as he did as an undergraduate. This programme has now been adopted and funded by the Medical Research Council as the National Medical Student Research Training Programme for South Africa.

The second critical factor is time – high quality training in research is best done full-time. This will give candidates the opportunity to do their PhDs within three to four years. Support is vital at this stage. And the process is easier for those who commit to full-time research under the guidance of a good, committed supervisor, says Mayosi.

He was fortunate to have Hugh Watkins as his supervisor at Oxford, “probably the most influential person in my early scientific career”.

Third, choose a good research question; not something that’s been discovered.

“A lot of research people do is wasteful because it seeks to discover what is already known. Does smoking cause lung cancer in the Venda? Of course it does. It doesn’t matter that a study has never been done in Thohoyandou. Identify problems that need a solution.”

This is not hard to do in Africa, says Mayosi. He chose poverty-related heart diseases, such as rheumatic heart disease – a neglected disease in Africa and other poor regions that is easily prevented with penicillin. Untreated, it can cause heart valve damage and heart rhythm problems. He now leads the Global Rheumatic Heart Disease Registry (the REMEDY study).

The fourth factor to forming a new cohort of professors is good funding. Scholarships are crucial since they allow candidates to put their heads down and not worry about “feeding the wife, two children and the dog”, as in Mayosi’s case.

And the system should work for women, particularly in their child-rearing years. With his wife, Nonhlanhla Khumalo, a full-time researcher and full professor at UCT, Mayosi knows this well.

Trailblazing new paths

Nurturing a new cohort of professors is a national imperative. The ambitious National Health Scholars Programme hopes to produce 1 000 medical doctors by 2022. The minister of health, Dr Aaron Motsoaledi, kicked off their programme in 2013.

“I don’t know if we’ll get there, but we’re pushing hard,” notes Mayosi. “The way we’re going to do it is by getting funding, ensuring people are trained by the best mentors in the world, working on the right topics and starting early.”

Conferring: Prof Bongani Mayosi with registrars and medical students on a ward round.

When he took over as head of the Department of Medicine at UCT and Groote Schuur Hospital in 2006, he was a trailblazer – the first black person to head the department. The department was also misaligned – it was geared to treat the diseases of some five million South Africans, not all 55 million.

“We had divisions for every part of the body: nephrology, cardiology, neurology … everything except infection. We needed a division for infectious diseases such as TB and malaria and HIV/AIDS – a flagship division for flagship problems [which was established as the Institute of Infectious Disease and Molecular Medicine]. As a department we had to become relevant to 55 million South Africans.”

Given South Africa’s health challenges, especially in rural areas, transformation requires “all talent on deck”, says Mayosi. Besides changing the demographics and size of the professoriate, it’s important that the faculty reorient the content of its work and the curriculum to address local need.

Transformation is also a requisite for the faculty to remain a world leader. In this context, world class no longer makes sense, Mayosi says. “World leader” is the new dean’s first choice for a slogan that will guide the faculty in the future.

A call to step up

Taking on the deanship was never part of Mayosi’s plan, but with the Rhodes Must Fall- and Fees Must Fall-driven events of 2015 and 2016, it was a “critical moment” in the country’s history. With “a little leaning at the right time”, he agreed to rejoin the struggle for a better South Africa.

“For me it was a call to serve. But we’ve got to be constitutional about it and set up processes that will really achieve social justice. All of us must come forward to make a contribution.”

He has no illusions about the complexity of the task ahead. “I told them [the faculty] that they were taking a risk because I had no experience of being a dean – but that I’d do it with them.”

The complexity extends to the faculty’s makeup: 2 000 staff and 4 000 students. The staff are employed by different entities: some by the province, others by the National Health Laboratory Service, while others are research-funded (this group of 600 is the largest) or funded by the university. “So we have many types of staff and we need to work hard to bring them all into the business of the faculty so that there’s no sense of alienation from the greater university project. We need to work as a team.”

Mayosi calls it “saamtrek”.

Where the students are concerned, there are basic issues linked to serving communities in need that must be addressed.

“It’s a problem if a student can’t take a patient’s history in isiXhosa. We need people who are competent to work with the majority of people. These are things we must work together to identify.

“We need to rupture from the past; we need a new future and direction relevant to the needs of 55 million South Africans and a billion Africans. That’s the key in the transformation project.”

But there is a new dilemma for the designate dean who is a committed researcher (Mayosi will keep the title of professor when he takes the mantle of dean). Just after his appointment as dean, Mayosi was awarded a National Research Foundation A-rating, putting him among the world’s top brass (a mere handful) in cardiology research.

He’s sanguine about the temporary trade-off. It will take a lifetime to solve some of the country’s and continent’s health problems. For this new era of his career, Mayosi is committed to driving the faculty’s mission and ensuring that it becomes a home for all South Africans.

“Talent, fortunately, is evenly distributed. But we must make sure that talent meets opportunity so that it can flourish.”

Story Helen Swingler. Photo Michael Hammond.

Make a name for yourself 13 April 2016

The names of five UCT buildings are under review, and the university wants your comments, suggestions and proposals.

The following buildings are up for renaming:

 Smuts Hall (upper campus)  Beattie Building (upper campus)  Otto Beit Students Union (upper campus)  Wernher Beit (medical campus)  Jameson Hall (upper campus). *

Send your comments and proposals for naming these buildings (with a motivation) to:

Marius Lund [email protected] Room 142, Bremner Building, Lover’s Walk, Rondebosch

The deadlines:

 * 15 April for Jameson Hall (the deadline has now passed)  30 May for Smuts, Beattie, Otto Beit and Wernher Beit

“The conventional politics of memorialisation is canonisation. Done in this way, though, you effectively tame [someone’s] ideas while elevating them in some fashion. Can we live up to their ideas? Can we critically engage with their ideas and see how they fit our changing situations? To what extent are we realising their vision? That to me is how you truly live up to somebody’s name. Do we simply want competing nationalisms, where you replace the previous nationalism with a new version, or do we want something more radical? Renaming ought not to be an event, but a process by which we commit to critically engage with their ideas rather than foreclose that process.”

Dr Maanda Mulaudzi A UCT historian who heads up the task team on the naming on buildings, reflects on the politics, opportunities and potential pitfalls of names in heritage.

Read more:

 For a history on each building, read the register of building names.  Read the statement from the team tasked with the renaming of buildings.  Read the announcement from the vice-chancellor.  Find out more about recent renamings at UCT. In the past year: o the Arts Block was renamed after AC Jordan, and o the Graduate School of Humanities was renamed after Neville Alexander.

Glasgow to honour UCT legal expert on women's rights 18 April 2016

Interviewed in the law common room at UCT, Professor Rashida Manjoo exudes calm and a natural authority.

UCT’s Prof Rashida Manjoo is to receive an honorary doctorate from the University of Glasgow.

No doubt, this demeanour has stood her in good stead in a career that has spanned human rights activism under apartheid to a more recent six-year stint as a special rapporteur on violence against women for the United Nations.

As the UN’s representative, she visited 19 countries, speaking to women in camps, prisons, refugee detention centres and elsewhere to gather information on the causes and consequences of violence against women.

The stamps in her passport include troubled countries like Honduras, Somalia and Afghanistan but also more ‘developed’ states like the United Kingdom and the United States. But more of this later.

Activist academic

Manjoo’s work as an “activist academic” dates back to the 1980s in apartheid South Africa and includes her work with the Street Law Programme and in the law clinic at the then University of Natal.

“My social justice and human rights work is framed by my own context and reality,” she explains. “My parents couldn’t afford education, so after matric my first job was as an accounts clerk in a clothing factory.” Juggling work and children, she obtained three degrees and immersed herself in activist work.

The law clinic work in the 1990s involved reaching out to communities to provide free legal services and also conduct educative activities. For example, using donated shipping containers which were set up at a taxi rank, students working with the law clinic would dispense legal advice closer to people’s homes. In the afternoons they conducted educational workshops in community halls. This bringing together of “town and gown” is something that lies close to Manjoo’s heart.

Her activism was initially part of the broader struggles against apartheid oppression and injustice, but as it became clear that a new era was dawning, she deepened her work on the human rights of women and was deeply involved in processes that embedded this in post-apartheid South Africa. “Towards the end of the 1980s, it became an imperative to start focusing on women’s human rights,” she recalls. “We had learned from many other liberation struggles that the gender struggle would not necessarily be high on the agenda and thus this needed to be made explicit.”

To this end, she was actively involved in processes around developing a women’s charter, consulting with women on the ground and feeding information into the constitution-making process. She was also involved in different capacities in law reform work during this period.

In 1998 she joined UCT’s Law, Race and Gender Research Unit (no longer in existence) where she was involved in developing materials and also providing social context training for judges and magistrates.

She was appointed as the parliamentary commissioner to the Commission for Gender Equality in 2001. Her task was to ensure that all draft legislation passing through the South African parliament was gender responsive and in line with constitutional imperatives.

When she left for the US in 2005 to work in the Human Rights Program at Harvard Law School, she had no idea that she would end up staying for two and a half years. On her return to UCT, she worked on a research project on women’s rights and traditional justice mechanisms with Professor Chuma Himonga.

In 2008 she was appointed as the Des Lee Distinguished Visiting Professor at Webster University in Missouri where she taught courses on transitional justice and women’s human rights.

All of this experience was excellent preparatory ground for her appointment by the UN Human Rights Council that kicked off in 2009 and ended only last year.

Treaty on women’s rights

Manjoo’s UN role included providing thematic reports to the Human Rights Council in Geneva and to the General Assembly in New York. To this end, she wrote 11 reports (over and above the 19 country reports) that pushed the conceptual understanding of member states on violence against women, its causes and consequences. A particular focus was identifying the “normative gaps” in international law between human rights standards and violence against women occurring on the ground.

Her last two reports identified that under international law there are no provisions that impose legally binding obligations on member states to eliminate violence against women. She believes that a specific international treaty is required to address the normative gap, but the UN does not appear to have much appetite for this.

In a recent interview with a legal journal, she says: “The concern for me remains that the rhetoric is that violence against women is a human rights violation, yet the reality is that it is not taken as seriously as other human rights violations.”

In her view, violence against women is not something limited to conflict zones. Instead, it is part of a continuum of the low-level warfare that women face on a daily basis in their families and communities, and is exacerbated in times of conflict.

Country missions

Serving in an individual capacity, her country missions as special rapporteur could only be carried out on invitation from a government.

She counts Algeria among her successes. After visiting the country, she met with the Algerian ambassador and her recommendations translated into the government passing a law on domestic violence, which was a unique achievement in the North African / Middle East region.

Her report on a more recent visit to Sudan is due to be released in May. She anticipates “fireworks” from a government that is reluctant to accept responsibility for human rights violations that are widespread, whether perpetrated by state or non-state actors. “The narrative in the capital, Khartoum, is that there is no violence against women except in the refugee camps in Darfur.”

While in Sudan, she was constantly watched by security officials or “well-meaning” government officials who sat in on every interview. After privately speaking to four students from Darfur in her hotel (they had requested a separate meeting), two were picked up by security police when they left. The other two managed to run back to the hotel and, for three hours, Manjoo physically shielded them against arrest. She did so on the grounds that their arrest would constitute reprisals against informants who were sharing information on human rights violations, which would violate the terms of reference governing a country mission. Government representatives from the diplomatic corps managed to resolve the issue, largely to avoid creating a diplomatic incident.

In Somalia she visited refugee camps outside Mogadishu. Wearing a bulletproof vest and helmet while travelling in a Casspir, she noted at the same time that “normal life” was continuing, even in the camps. Here she found that crisis management tended to cloud the very real issue of the daily violence that women experienced and the blame that was constantly cast elsewhere.

In Zambia she noted a high population of women with their children living in appalling prison conditions – many arrested for what she calls “crimes of poverty”.

Manjoo says when an invitation was not forthcoming from a country, she was never shy to request one. Zimbabwe and South Sudan are African countries that have failed to respond to requests for visits, while Israel prevented her scheduled mission to the Occupied Palestinian Territories by not granting her a visa.

Glasgow honour

She is not sure exactly what caught the eye of the University of Glasgow, which is to award her an honorary doctorate in November this year. Her investigation of the UK during her 16-day, fact-finding mission as the UN rapporteur included a public lecture at the university.

While in the UK, she delivered some home truths about the over-sexualisation of children and the damage caused to the service provision sector due to the devolution of functions and budgets to local authorities and the introduction of new commissioning policies. She also made headlines when she was refused entry into the Yarl’s Wood Immigration Removal Centre where female detainees had complained about their treatment at the hands of male guards.

This serves as proof that governments all over the world remain defensive about human rights issues.

Story Andrea Weiss. Photo Michael Hammond.

Scholar’s search uncovers UCT’s first black medical doctor 12 April 2016

Halim Gençoĝlu, a UCT doctoral student from Turkey, has discovered that Dr Muhammed Shukri Effendi was the first black medical student to graduate from UCT. Effendi, who studied at Trafalgar High School, went on to pursue his studies at UCT medical school and graduated as a medical doctor in 1942. Previously, it was thought that Maramoothoo Samy-Padiachy, Cassim Saib and Ralph Lawrence were the first black medical doctors to graduate from UCT – in 1945.

Gençoĝlu at the Western Cape Archives and Records Services, where he spent time doing research.

With a keen interest in colonial history, Gençoĝlu studied honours in the History Department in 2011.

“While doing my honours with Professor Worden, he suggested that I write something using Turkish sources. The late Professor Shell inspired me to research Ottoman presence in South Africa using Ottoman/Turkish archival materials. I thought that these sources could perhaps offer us new insights into historical events in South Africa and the continent,” explains Gençoĝlu.

Using South African and Turkish archival sources, Gençoĝlu uncovered evidence to suggest that Dr Muhammed Shukri Effendi was actually the first black doctor to graduate from UCT. These sources include UCT registration papers and documents from the Effendi family.

“A South African medical journal published on 27 July 1946 shows that Effendi was a qualified doctor already and moved his practice to a stone house in Mountain Road in Woodstock. The building was called ‘Erzeroum’, named after his grandfather’s birthplace,” says Gençoĝlu. This was after having worked briefly at Groote Schuur Hospital and in his own surgical clinic in the Bo-Kaap. Left: Effendi qualified as a medical doctor in 1941 and graduated in February 1942. Right: Effendi's registration papers at the UCT medical school. Read "A rare case of restorative justice" on the Faculty of Health Sciences website.

His research also shows that the first black female doctor in South Africa was Dr Effendi’s cousin, Dr Havva Khayrunnisa, who graduated in London in 1920. She moved to Istanbul where she worked as a gynaecologist to fulfil the conditions of the bursary awarded by the Ottoman government. She eventually practised in Cape Town after the death of her husband in Holland in 1929.

Gençoĝlu’s article, “Forgotten Medical Doctors, Dr Muhammed Shukri Effendi and Dr Havva Khayrunnisa”, was published in the Bulletin of the National Library of South Africa in June 2015. In the article he argues that although the fair-skinned doctors Effendi and Khayrunnisa were of Turkish descent, at that time in South African history they would have been classified as non-white due to their religious identity as Muslims.

“It is an interesting fact that Dr Shukri Effendi was admitted merely on the grounds of his physical appearance, rather than his non-white identity,” says Gençoĝlu.

Furthermore, Gençoĝlu explains that earlier researchers may have overlooked Dr Effendi because they were confused by his ethnic and national identity. Dr Effendi’s fair skin and his well-known Turkish family background (as the grandson of Professor Abu Bakr Effendi and nephew of Dr Abdullah Abdurahman) might have contributed to his acceptance at UCT at the time.

“This is relevant in the context of apartheid in South Africa when, prior to 1943, universities were subject to strict laws of racial segregation and did not allow non-whites to study at UCT,” observes Gençoĝlu.

The classification of the present generation of the Effendi family puts the historical matter into context. A copy of the ID of a living member of the Effendi family, Hesham Nimetullah Effendi, clearly shows he is regarded as a Cape Coloured despite his fair skin colour.

“Even when I looked at the death records, the Effendi’s were referred to as Asiatic or Malay; that’s what made them non- white,” notes Gençoĝlu.

The death record of Dr Muhammed Shukri Effendi, clearly showing his occupation as a medical doctor.

On the other hand, Effendi had a Turkish classmate, Dr Reginald Remzi Bey, who was the son of Mehmet Remzi Bey, the first Turkish ambassador in South Africa. He was classified as white because he was raised as a Christian and studied at SACS. He graduated in 1938, four years before Dr Effendi, who graduated in 1942.

Dr Effendi passed away at the age of 30 after contracting tuberculosis, which Gençoĝlu believes may have contributed to his obscurity in history.

Gençoĝlu is currently completing his PhD in Hebrew Studies at UCT and hopes that scholars will study further on the topic, as his research is only the tip of the iceberg.

“There is an old Turkish saying by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk which says, ‘Writing history is as important as making history. If the writer has no allegiance to the makers of history, the irrefutable facts become incomprehensible to human beings,’ ” explains Gençoĝlu. “So I think history should be a compulsory subject in schools as the youth need to read history in order to see the future. They need to access different sources, which are not influenced by politics, in order to expand their historical knowledge and critical thought.”

He plans to continue with his post-doctoral studies as he feels he can provide rare knowledge to UCT because of his diverse educational background.

“As you can see, history is like a puzzle for me. I find bits of information and piece them together to get the whole picture.”

Story Chido Mbambe. Photo Michael Hammond. UCT Drama Department presents new works from South African playwrights 22 April 2016

After the success of last year’s Barney Simon Season, the UCT Drama Department will once again curate a season of local plays. New Works provides everyone with an opportunity to experience new plays and allows young actors to take on the challenge of interpreting new writing for contemporary audiences. The initiative also aims to respond to an ongoing need for new plays that reflect the current state of South Africa and to use indigenous lenses to interpret and represent our world.

Audiences can look forward to seeing Langalibalele – the scorching sun by Neil McCarthy and Portret by Philip Rademeyer.

Phoebe Alice Ritchie and Zeno Jacobs practising a dance routine during Langalibalele rehearsals.

Langalibalele – the scorching sun

Written in English and Nguni by Neil McCarthy, Langalibalele – the scorching sun is directed by Clare Stopford. The multilingual play tells the story of the AmaHlubi king Langalibalele, who had powers over the weather and was renowned as a rainmaker. He commanded a large group from the AmaHlubi clan, kept sovereignty by avoiding domination by the colonial powers as well as the Zulu nation, and was finally imprisoned on Robben Island for defying British authorities in Natal.

Not many know that the Cape Town township KwaLanga was named after Langalibalele, who was put under house arrest in the Cape and finally died back in his homeland near Estcourt.

Stopford believes that working on the play has been a beneficial exercise for her students as many know very little about their own history. The play has forced students to research and dig deeper.

“The history is very raw, and it’s hard for the students to deal with. The question is, ‘Do we avoid these topics?’ We thought it was in the interest of decolonisation to do something that was absolutely 100% South African history in terms of [the fact that] all our ancestors can be traced back in one way or another,” explains Stopford. “The assumptions about colonisation are almost being demythologised, assumptions about how it worked.”

Langalibalele – the scorching sun runs from 17 to 21 May 2016 at 20:00 in the Old Workshop, Hiddingh Campus.

Bookings can be made via email or by calling Nabeelah Khan on 021 650 7129.

Gretchen Ramsden and Luke Buys from Portret.

Portret

Drama student Wynand Ferreira, who plays the character of AJ in Portret, says: “It’s a collaboration of industry experts, and for us as students it’s a great time to learn from them. It’s exciting to be able to breathe life in to this new play.”

Portret, an Afrikaans play directed by Amy Jephta, is based on Oscar Wilde’s The Portrait of Dorian Grey. Dorian sells his soul for eternal youth and beauty, but the cost of being immortal ripples far beyond himself. Rademeyer’s play studies a group of friends whose lives become increasingly detached and manipulated by an outside force.

Jephta says, “Phillip has sustained his relationship with the department even after he established a name for himself in the theatre world. When I approached him to write this play, he said yes immediately. It’s a great example of how the alumni of the department plough back into the department.”

Portret runs from 18 to 21 May 2016 at 19:30 in the Little Theatre, Hiddingh Campus.

Bookings can be made via email or by calling Nabeelah Khan on 021 650 7129.

Story Chido Mbambe. Photo Je’nine May.

Balance and blend – the new dean of commerce 23 March 2016

When Ingrid Woolard threw her hat into the ring for the position as dean of commerce towards the end of 2015, it was with some hesitancy. The selection process had already gone two rounds and there was her research to think about – a body of work that has earned her a formidable reputation in government policy circles, but also has a good measure of personal significance.

Society at heart: Prof Ingrid Woolard, new dean of commerce and the 2015 winner of the Alan Pifer Award, which will be presented on 23 March.

As pro vice-chancellor for poverty and inequality, Professor Murray Leibbrandt, says, she is “without a peer as a producer of survey data and a top-cited economic researcher.”

Woolard cut her teeth as a data manager on the country’s first national living standards measurement survey in 1994, which the Southern Africa Labour and Development Research Unit (SALDRU) produced with the World Bank at the request of the ANC.

“These data have been used by Ingrid and hundreds of other researchers to analyse South African well-being,” said Leibbrandt.

The information also underpinned Fighting Poverty, a book she co-wrote with colleagues Leibbrandt, Haroon Bhorat and others that analyses labour markets, poverty and inequality in South Africa. The book won a meritorious award and a Pifer award for Leibbrandt and Bhorat in 2003. Woolard was not working at UCT back then, says Leibbrandt, but had she been she would have shared the award since much of the book rested on her PhD work.

NIDS and KIDS

Woolard was also a key team member in the second and third waves of the KwaZulu-Natal Income Dynamics Study (KIDS). This used the KZN component of the 1993 Project for Statistics on Living Standards and Development and then re-interviewed this sample in 1998 and again in 2003.

KIDS was South Africa’s first socio-economic panel survey and it pioneered the analysis of poverty and inequality dynamics in South Africa. Based on this data, Woolard’s work showed how destitution has driven many urban-based unemployed people back into rural areas to survive off the pensions of parents and grandparents. “As these unemployed people are moving away from labour markets, this is clearly a sub- optimal outcome. Only panel data in expert hands could have revealed this unfolding poverty trap. This paper, and others too, have been influential in unpacking how South Africa’s unemployed actually survive,” says Leibbrandt.

Cape Town: The effects of poverty and unemployment are often all too visible on South African streets.

Given this experience, Woolard was the first choice as a principal investigator for SALDRU’s bid for the National Income Dynamics Study (NIDS), the country’s flagship national household panel survey, which was launched in 2008. Later, by making the survey data widely available, Woolard positioned it as South Africa’s highest-profile national survey with the unique potential to reflect the country’s evolving socio-economic dynamics.

Woolard’s contributions have been internationally recognised. She was the only South African labour economist invited to membership of the labour market team within the Harvard Group that National Treasury tasked with preparing a South African growth strategy.

In 2011 the minister of labour appointed her to chair the Employment Conditions Commission (she replaced UCT’s Professor Evance Kalula). The commission, which makes sectoral wage determinations for vulnerable workers who are not covered by formal wage bargaining procedures, was informed by her own work on labour markets and inequality. She gave up the position in 2014 after being appointed to the Davis Tax Committee.

New career

But after more than a decade in SALDRU and the School of Economics, Woolard was ripe for change.

“There’s a lot of really excellent socially driven research going on in the faculty and as dean I’m looking forward to shaping the direction that takes.”

She is also acutely aware of curriculum reform and how and what the faculty teaches students.

Her own life was deeply influenced at student level. But for one lecturer, Woolard might have missed her calling (she initially signed up at UCT to become an actuary). That lecturer was Francis Wilson, now emeritus professor of economics.

“Francis was this incredibly inspirational second-year lecturer,” she recalls. “He really influenced a lot of lives. One went from Ecos I, with all these boring models that didn’t seem particularly useful in explaining the real world and then, suddenly, you were in a class with Francis who was so engaged and immersed in the country’s pressing social issues and Ecos became exciting! Francis taught us for about two weeks only but completely changed how I felt about the subject.”

Working with Wilson at SALDRU later proved pivotal.

“I had a very different view of where my career was going to go. In 1994 I had just embarked on a career at the National Treasury running macro forecasts and then – more by accident than design – I found myself at SALDRU working on the living standards survey with Francis; collecting and processing incredibly exciting socio-economic data.”

This epiphany helped Woolard realise that working with microdata – the dots that could be connected to understand the grand narrative of complex data – lit her fire.

Managing a faculty

Woolard has been well served by the minutiae of managing the multiple arms and legs of big-bucks projects with clout (the last round of NIDS was a R70 million project). Her new role as dean of commerce will have her managing the university’s second-largest faculty using many of the same skills.

Fortunately, she’s a listener and gatherer. When Woolard was asked to produce a vision for the faculty, she was astounded by the idea that anyone could do so singlehandedly. The vision had to be produced with the input of the faculty community and a process built on listening, gathering, sifting and reflecting.

Though she recognises the significance of being the faculty’s first woman dean, Woolard is quick to point out that the idea of a “female leadership style” doesn’t resonate with her. The job needs hard and soft skills and everything in between to steer transformation in a faculty that is still too white.

“Transformation is going to be the biggest part of what I want to do in the next five years.”

“Transformation is going to be the biggest part of what I want to do in the next five years.” She came up against the hard edge of transformation in her first week as dean when UCT’s black alumni association issued a statement calling her appointment a “smokescreen for transformation”. It was uncomfortable but not unexpected, she says.

“We can’t pretend that it isn’t a problem that there are so many white deans. The faculty went into this appointment process with a very deliberate strategy of wanting to recruit a black dean. The fact that we didn’t succeed is an indictment of the slow pace of meaningful transformation of the higher education sector. We have to try harder. We can’t continue to say we can’t attract black academics because there are all these outside pressures [that make other options more attractive]. We have to have an aggressive recruitment and retention strategy.”

World at work

As dean, Woolard is also acutely aware of the faculty’s brand; she understands the need to attract the brightest and best and most diverse student corps − and to prepare them for the world of work.

“The whole way of working is changing; more and more people are working in atypical employment. We need to think of the softer skills like flexibility and resilience and teach our graduates how to be adaptable.

“It isn’t enough to say: this is what you’re going to study and this is what you’re going to do in your job for the next 40 years. I think we’re going to see increasing levels of ‘uberisation’ in the workplace. Businesses will buy services as and when they need them. Our students have to be able to market themselves and have to be able to self-manage.”

How do we teach those skills?

“Something we do very well at UCT is that we train up students to be critical and analytical. And if we’ve taught students how to engage critically, how to think and how to learn, then they’re much more adaptable in the workplace.”

Vice-Chancellor Dr Max Price, Prof Ingrid Woolard, Dr Chris Woolard and Prof Murray Leibbrandt on the evening of the presentation of the Alan Pifer Award.

Press pause

Though the deanship will absorb most of her time, Woolard will maintain a presence in the School of Economics and will continue to supervise PhD students. And she’ll keep her hand in research. “SALDRU will always be my research home,” she says.

Fortunately, there’s support on the home front – UCT is very much in the family. Her husband is Dr Chris Woolard, who teaches in the Centre for Materials Engineering. They met as res students at UCT in 1991. Their children, Andrew and Sarah, are in high school.

What else fills her life?

(Look of alarm) “Work! I don’t even cook,” she apologises. “And I read terribly low-brow stuff.”

Drill down a little and you learn that this “stuff” is mostly old-fashioned whodunits by PD James, Ngaio Marsh and Dorothy Sayers, which are filled with clues, red herrings and good detective work.

Some might say it’s simply data analysis in a different guise.

Story Helen Swingler. Photos Michael Hammond.

The Alan Pifer Award is the Vice-Chancellor’s annual prize for outstanding welfare-related research. The prize honours the late Alan Pifer, philanthropist and former president of long-term UCT benefactors, the Carnegie Corporation. His focus was on social justice and strengthening the rights of historically disadvantaged groups, including women. Pifer also established the UCT Fund, which raises funds in the US to support black students and to promote the advancement and welfare of disadvantaged groups. A lesson in persistence 29 March 2016

In 2003 Joan Byamugisha had just finished high school and was waiting to start her studies in medicine at the Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda, when life threw her the ultimate curveball.

Computer science PhD student Joan Byamugisha is focusing on natural language generation in her mother tongue of Runyankore.

At first she thought she was coming down with a bout of malaria, but a lab technician picked up that she had an extremely high white blood cell count. The diagnosis was leukemia and within weeks the disease had irreparably damaged her optic nerves, which robbed her not only of her sight but also her dream of becoming a doctor.

What followed was a period of rapid adjustment. Joan was still determined to pursue a university education, but although Makerere allowed her to enroll for some science courses, she was at sea.

“Obviously I couldn’t do it. I had never used a computer with screen-reading software. I didn’t know braille. There was no way of reading back what I needed to.”

So Joan spent four months learning braille and the necessary computer skills. When her brother, who had a background in IT, suggested she consider studying computer science, her academic career was born.

“You just come”

From the outset, Joan loved programming – “it’s completely text-based and I didn’t have to worry about images.”

With Makerere University unable to assist, she enrolled at the Uganda Martyrs University (UMU) in 2005, which welcomed her as their first visually impaired student.

“UMU were very, very good,” she says. “I remember the registrar saying, ‘You just come and we’ll see what we can do.’ ”

Three years later she emerged with a first-class bachelor’s degree in computer science and economics, but she soon found that nobody wanted to employ a blind person. Undeterred, she studied further, enrolling for a distance-learning master’s in software engineering at De Montfort University in Leicester. After completing her master’s in 2011, Joan landed a job at UMU lecturing in the IT department and heading their new special needs department. The academic bug had bitten, however, and by 2013 Joan realised that she needed to start working towards a PhD before she got “too comfortable”.

Programming for indigenous languages

At first, she considered focusing on speech recognition software in her local language of Runyankore, but soon realised that she would need to take a step back.

“If you want to teach a computer how to talk, it has to learn how to process the words. But if the language itself does not have computational resources, that has to be the starting point.”

Instead, she is now focusing on natural language generation (NLG) and is working on a grammar engine that will be able to recognise the grammar rules in Runyankore to output sentences for computer-generated prescriptions in the health- care sector.

While her research is specific to Runyankore and a particular application, the underlying principles can be generalised to languages such as isiZulu and isiXhosa. What they have in common is that the grammar is based on the noun-class system, which determines the rules for verb conjugation and noun categorisation.

Initially, she applied for and was accepted to do her PhD at the Queensland University of Technology in Australia but funding was not forthcoming.

“In a way, that helped”, says the ever-positive Joan, “because there is so much I did not know regarding natural language processing and computational linguistics.”

Instead, she took a year out to brush up her skills in both these areas, and to write papers which would help her applications for PhD studies elsewhere.

Settling in at UCT

Then the UCT opportunity came up in 2014 via the Hasso Plattner Institute. She found herself having to complete a flurry of forms and to pack up over a weekend to make it in time for registration.

To help Joan settle in, her mother travelled with her. She now lives at Obz Square, which she says is an easier environment to get around – “you can count doors”. Also, Pick n Pay is close by and UCT’s Disability Service provides transport to upper campus.

She is full of praise for the Disability Service, which has helped to settle her in and to jump a few additional hurdles.

One such hurdle was the fact that she arrived with only a paperback copy of the Runyankore dictionary that she needed for her studies. Denise Oldham arranged for student volunteers to transcribe the entire dictionary – a process that took around three months.

And then there was her recent trip to Pretoria to the Turkish embassy for a visa interview so that she could go to the conference she’d been invited to. It was her first solo trip since losing her sight and the Disability Service made all the transport arrangements.

She is hoping to travel to Turkey with Dr Langa Khumalo, who is one of the co-authors of the paper she is to present. But if that’s not possible, she says she’ll have to “bite the bullet again” and tackle the trip on her own.

With her funding set to carry through to 2018, she hopes to graduate in June of that year.

Is she proud of what she’s achieved thus far? She laughs: “Not yet, but I will be when I wear the cap and get the doctor title.”

And what happens after that?

“I want to work where I’ll be most productive. I don’t care where.”

Story Andrea Weiss. Photo Michael Hammond.

Mellon fellows grapple with blackness at UCT 13 April 2016

Dr Gideon Nomdo has been a Mellon co-ordinator since the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship (MMUF) Programme was formally established at UCT in 2002. Having being funded by the Mellon Foundation himself, Nomdo unpacks the idea behind the programme that aims to boost the numbers of black academics at UCT.

Nomdo argues that it’s essential to have students interrogate their identities as a core part of their academic experience.

“The competition this year was out of this world,” says Nomdo about the 2016 MMUF cohort. “It’s getting tougher every year. They’re well read, articulate and they’ve thought about what they want to do after the graduate degree.”

The Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship Programme aims to recruit young black students into academia. The American programme branched out to South Africa and has been running at UCT since 2002. Each year five students are selected as Mellon Undergraduate Fellows.

“Issues of race and identity are huge items on Mellon’s agenda,” explains Nomdo, who lectures in the Centre for Higher Education Development.

MMUF is open to students who are entering the final year of a three-year degree or the third year of a four-year degree. Students in a three-year degree are expected to apply for an appropriate honours programme. Southern African Development Community students are also welcome to apply.

Students interrogate their identity

The fellowship pushes its fellows to think out of the box and deal with identity issues both from a UCT and a South African context. “It’s quite interesting to see how they [the students] unpack issues of how they identify as black,” says Nomdo

In 2004 MMUF started admitting coloured and Indian students, which has added diversity to the cohort and has made the programme more dynamic.

“The success of the MMUF programme depends on the success of the cohort; it’s just five students and we’ve got them for two years,” Nomdo says. “In the first few years, it was very interesting to see how coloured students identify and how black African students identify as black in terms of the South African context,” says Nomdo.

He infuses identity politics into his teaching as a matter of course, be it a language course or gender studies module. “We get students to think very carefully about what it means to be a future black academic,” he says.

Belgravia to UCT via Simon’s Town

Nomdo is a teacher by training and trade, so it’s little surprise that he revels in nurturing young scholars.

But his was not a linear trail from Belgravia High School. After matriculating in 1984, Nomdo had ambitions to be a toolmaker.

“My friends were toolmakers and they were driving fancy cars, so I figured I wanted to be one too,” he grins. So off he went to the Simon’s Town naval dockyard to learn the trade.

“Lucky for me, the toolmakers’ shops were crowded!” he laughs. But it was after spending six months hammering out ship parts in a blacksmith’s workshop that he baulked at the idea of spending the rest of his life making tiny metal springs.

So Nomdo enrolled at Hewat, the teacher training college in Athlone, and completed a Higher Diploma in Education. Thereafter he spent “the best two years” of his life teaching at Turfhall Primary.

His UCT journey began with an undergraduate degree in 1992, and it continues.

He was funded from honours through to master’s level by the Mellon Foundation and, had he not landed a teaching post, they would have funded his doctoral studies too.

“The proposal was already accepted, and all I had to do was complete the writing,” he says. But the peace of mind of a steady job won the day, and Nomdo has been teaching and researching since then. He completed his PhD in December 2015.

“My case studies for my PhD were MMUF students, so this made my research really meaningful for me,” says Nomdo.

He has taught in the humanities faculty’s Academic Development Programme since 1999 and became a Mellon co- ordinator at UCT in 2002.

MMUF’s mission at UCT is to nurture Mellon fellows’ aspirations of embarking on a career in academia and to increase the number of black professors. It’s about correcting historical disadvantage, says Nomdo, and with South Africa’s legacy of apartheid, the five students selected each year are all from historically disadvantaged backgrounds.

“It’s all about how one navigates and negotiates their identity in the institution,” says Nomdo.

These students are each assigned a mentor of their choosing, and this established academic guides them through their final undergraduate year and first year of postgraduate work.

Having a mentor for two years helps to “demystify academia” for up-and-coming scholars, says Nomdo. As does being whisked off to regular workshops and conferences locally and internationally, and presenting research papers to critical peers.

“Very often when you enter academia you don’t really know what’s happening behind the scenes, what professors are actually doing. Once Mellon students reach the lecturer level, they’ve seen it all,” he says.

Over a ten-year period (2005–2015), 11 MMUF fellows have graduated with PhD degrees with another 11 currently registered for study at this level. Over this same period, 19 MMUF fellows have graduated with a master’s-level degree with another 12 currently registered for this level of study. As part of an ongoing tracking exercise, it has been established that 22 of the MMUF fellows are currently employed as lecturers, tutors, researchers, trainers or managers in higher education institutions.

Story Yusuf Omar and Chido Mbambe. Photo Yusuf Omar. Opening the doors of science 4 April 2016

Postdoctoral Square Kilometre Array (SKA) fellow Tana Joseph knows the value of firing a young imagination. That’s what happened to her at the age of 11 when the Cape Times published a series of long- anticipated pictures from the Hubble Space Telescope.

Dr Tana Joseph is the first woman of colour to have been awarded a postdoctoral SKA fellowship.

“I started cutting them out and keeping a scrapbook. That’s when I decided that this is the kind of science that I want to get into,” she recalls.

Her father was the person who bought the newspaper for her, but she credits both her parents – Lorraine and Quintin Joseph – for keeping her ambition alive.

“I was very lucky because they are both high school science teachers, so they encouraged that curiosity in me and my siblings.”

Parental support was crucial when it came to astronomy, says Tana. Back in the mid-1990s in South Africa, when she first saw those Hubble images, there was “no SALT (Southern African Large Telescope), no SKA; so the question was, ‘Do we even do that in South Africa?’ ”

By the time she had finished her undergraduate degree, SALT, near Sutherland, had been completed and her ambitions were beginning to look a lot more realistic as the South African government was showing clear intentions of investing in astronomy.

Outreach

Her next step was an honours in physics at UCT, and this is when she began to feel a certain kind of loneliness that many women scientists before her have felt.

“I was one of only two women in the class – and the other woman was the only other person of colour. We only had one female physics lecturer the whole time I was there. I think that is still the case.” Although she felt isolated, she didn’t dwell on it at the time. “You don’t realise it until afterwards; you are just trying to keep your head above water.” But she remembers what she calls the “micro aggressions”. Like the lecturer who said, “Oh, you’re still here,” when she reported for class at the start of the new academic year.

In light of her experiences, she says it’s no surprise that a recent survey found that the STEM disciplines (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) were the least transformed in South Africa. This is why she’s committed to ensuring that anyone who might wish to follow in her footsteps should be encouraged to do so.

She is active in outreach and a natural public speaker – a recent Summer School class was hanging on her every word. She has given talks from primary school through to church groups and amateur astronomy organisations, and she has also done radio and print media interviews.

She also runs the astronomy department’s job-shadow programme for high school learners, predominantly Grade 11s, and has kept track of whether it actually translates into future students. She’s happy to report that seven of the 27 who have shadowed or attended the open day are now doing either physics or astronomy at UCT.

“It looks like it’s working,” she says.

Ironically, Tana made a similar approach to the department when she was in Grade 11, but at the time she was told: “Sorry we don’t do that.”

“That might have been the final straw for me, but I was fortunate that I had my parents on my side.”

This is why, even if the department is too busy to accommodate a learner, she will look for alternatives at the SKA office in Pinelands (just up the road from where she matriculated at Pinelands High School), the SA Observatory or the University of the Western Cape.

“I never want a learner to walk away feeling like this isn’t a job for them.”

View from abroad

It was only when Tana started her MSc in astronomy that the doors really started to open for her, and she got the kind of international exposure that has shaped her thinking.

“I was finally doing exactly what I wanted to do and I started to travel for work. That was great.” She visited France and Germany and started to work with international collaborators.

In 2009 she enrolled for a PhD at the University of Southampton in the UK and lived abroad for close to five years. It was this experience that underscored what she believes is the essential problem of science in South Africa.

“I started to realise how isolated things are for a woman in science. It may seem a bit controversial to say this, but I feel like in South Africa we focus a lot on race and race relations, but ours is a more sexist society than it is racist. That’s not addressed very often.”

She does, however, concede that there has been massive change in her department. It is far more diverse than it was 10 or 15 years ago, having had, among others, a woman head of department, Professor Renée Kraan-Korteweg.

In her mind, however, there’s still much work to be done.

“I would say that the university should heed the call for change that is happening right now. We have the chance to get on the right side of history by taking on board what is happening. It’s not too late to engage and make things right.”

Family first

Tana is very aware that if the end of apartheid had come too late for her, she too might have ended up in a high school classroom as did her parents, uncles and aunts.

“If you were a coloured person, the best job you could have was a high school teacher. That was the pinnacle. And that is what I would have done. I would have been a physics and maths teacher in high school.”

Not that she undervalues her family’s teaching roots. Her mother still teaches in the Bonteheuwel school where she has been for 30 years and often helps Tana with advice around the job-shadowing programme or when it comes to career choices.

“She’s had a lot of experience in difficult conditions. It’s always good to have her feedback and input.” Through this parental support, her siblings too have found their niche. Her younger sister, Laurelle, is enrolled for a PhD in supramolecular chemistry drug development at UCT; another sister, Tatum, is doing a master’s in public policy; and her brother, Cole, has already developed a keen interest in palaeontology even though he’s only in Grade 9.

“That’s the problem with telling your kids you can be anything you want to be,” Tana jokes.

So, what is dinner around the Joseph family table like?

“Noisy,” says Tana. “We are a very opinionated, noisy family. People think I’m joking when I say I’m the quiet one, but my sisters out-talk me 10 to one!”

Story Andrea Weiss. Photo Michael Hammond.