23 Jan 2025

Long Covid remains mysterious. This is in part due to the difficulty in identifying an overt pathological cause, but also the complexity of understanding how organic changes result in psychological symptoms such as mental fatigue, memory problems, emotional issues, and difficulty in focusing. The first lecture will discuss Long Covid, its controversial history and prevailing ideas regarding the brain changes that result in its symptoms. The second lecture will focus on the results and implications of a recent neuropsychological study of Long Covid.

The musical was instrumental in changing the country’s political landscape. An all-encompassing presentation of original and indigenous South African musicals will be given to illustrate this point. These include King Kong, Wait a Minim, Ipi Tombi, District Six: The Musical, Sarafina!, Ons vir Jou, among others. In addition video clips, interviews and sound bites will enhance the historical background.

The constitutionalist parties got the most positive media coverage leading up to the election and received generous donations for their campaigns. When the results were in, the DA gained only one percent, Zibi’s Rise Mzansi and Mmusi Maimane’s BOSA got two seats each, and Zackie Achmat failed to win a seat. What are the lessons South Africa’s politicians need to learn so that they can prevent more growth in the populist when Cyril Ramaphosa will no longer head the ANC list on the ballot?

In this lecture we learn about bird evolution and diversity worldwide, the ever-present arms race between predator and prey, how they are superbly adapted for the demanding physiological requirements of flight and about their remarkable but restricted reproductive strategies. The lecture will answer questions such as how birds evolved from dinosaurs, why birds are the only animals with feathers and hollow bones, why there are no birds that bear live young, why birds don’t have teeth and why over 60 species of living birds have abandoned the advantages of flight.

Breast cancer is the most commonly occurring cancer in women and the most common cancer globally. This lecture will discuss the different ways that breast cancer can present, including early warning signs and the risk factors for developing this type of cancer. The lecture will also cover the tests and work-up done when there is a suspicion of breast cancer. Finally, the different therapeutic options will be discussed, including surgical procedures, chemotherapy, radiotherapy and hormonal therapy.

Mosses, along with their close relatives the liverworts and hornworts, are the closest living relatives of the earliest land plants that emerged nearly 500 million years ago. This lecture will introduce mosses and will outline their evolutionary origins, functional roles in terrestrial ecosystems in general and in the Cape in particular, diversity within South Africa particularly in relation to the main vegetation types, and unique adaptations to the strongly seasonal rainfall of the Cape region.

Booker Prize longlisted author Karen Jennings will be in conversation with Cape Talk presenter Pippa Hudson about her new novel, Crooked Seeds. This novel, in which a woman in post-apartheid South Africa confronts her family’s troubling past, is a daring work of fiction about national trauma, collective guilt, the ways we become trapped in prisons of our own making and how we can begin to break free. Join us in listening to this conversation about Karen Jennings’ compelling and engrossing 2024 novel.

A thirty-minute lecture will be followed by a ninety-minute tour of the original core Upper Campus buildings: the two Upper Campus residences, the Maths Block, the Arts Block (now the AC Jordan Building), the original Students’ Union Building, the Oppenheimer and Jagger Library complex, finishing in the Cissie Gool Plaza. As these buildings are close to one another this tour does not involve a strenuous walk, but do wear comfortable walking shoes and bring a hat and water.

The Union-Castle shipping line provided an essential service moving mail, cargo and passengers between Britain and South Africa. They also carried mail between Britain and the British East African colonies. In the 1950s air travel made inroads into ocean passenger markets, accelerated by the advent of jumbo jets in 1971, providing a shorter trip between Britain and Cape Town. The final blow was the containerisation of the South Africa-Europe. The last passenger mail ship left Cape Town in September 1977, followed two weeks later by the last mail ship.

Winnie and Nelson Mandela’s marriage is the most famous union between two people in our history. They self-consciously chose to make it a public institution. Their aim was for their relationship to embody their people’s struggle for freedom. Yet it ended up embodying one of the deepest conflicts in black South Africa: whether to negotiate a peaceful, but compromised, settlement with the apartheid government, or fight on for deeper and more radical change. This lecture looks at their legacies after the movement to which they dedicated their lives.

Bach’s Goldberg Variations, opens and closes with one of the most recognisable tunes in the keyboard repertory. This work, which was originally written for a two-manual harpsichord, poses a challenge for performance on the piano, despite the longstanding performing tradition on the instrument. Join pianist and musicologist Dominic Daula, who will share insights on these practical matters as well as the theoretical underpinnings of the Goldberg Variations. Following a short lecture, he will give a complete performance of the work.