25 Jan 2025

The 2021 fire on UCT campus brought planted trees into focus, especially the palms and pines, with fingers pointed to the role of exotic trees in fanning this catastrophic fire. On this excursion, participants will look at the diversity of trees on the campus, with a focus on the trees with flammability properties that played a key role in the 2021 fire. Please wear comfortable walking shoes and bring a hat and water.

Boulders Beach is one of the last remaining African penguin breeding colonies in South Africa. The colony faces many challenges, including land-based predators, human disturbance and road kill, as well as the lack of fish to eat and climate change. As management interventions such as fishing restrictions, habitat restoration and the rescue of eggs and chicks have proven to be successful for penguin conservation. As one of the main tourist attractions in South Africa, this colony also provides an important income for both the local community and the country.

In this interactive workshop participants will learn how to listen out for key elements in music that will increase their understanding of this mercurial art form, enhancing their pleasure. Aaron Copland believed that there are three levels of listening to music: the sensuous plane, the expressive plane and the musical plane. Added to this are the fascinating aspects relating to each composition: the composer’s era, geographical location and personal story, the structure of their musical composition and the reasons they wrote it.

This looks at Sudan’s history, present issues and future possibilities. It covers Sudan’s past, from pre-colonial times and the Mahdist Revolution to colonial rule, independence and the difficult decades that followed. Key topics include Sudanese society, government and economy as well as the effects of civil wars, conflicts, the split of the country and important moments like the Sudanese Revolution. The course also looks at Sudan’s current political, social and economic situation, focusing on important topics such as governance, human rights and economic changes.

The NHI must be implemented in two phases, phase 1 from 2023 to 2026 and phase 2 from 2026 to 2028.This lecture will explore the following:
Why massive systemic health sector reform is needed
What the NHI aims to achieve
What the Act provides for by way of a statutory mandate interventions and response plans to operationalize and implement the NHI
Budgeting and funding for the roll-out of the NHI.

The focus of this lecture will be on the GNU and multi-party coalition government, and prospects for shifting South Africa’s political lines for the better. It will discuss conditions for the success of the coalitions and the challenges they face. The lecture will also interrogate whether South Africa will genuinely shift towards multiparty cogovernance and embrace the idea of power sharing as a long-term arrangement, or whether this is a temporary arrangement that is expected to be replaced by realignment.

This lecture focuses on the way in which artists have utilized their skill to augment, enhance and enrich books in many cultures and over centuries. Starting with the glories of Medieval illumination, we will move through the beginnings of wood and metal engraving, lithography and the wholly new techniques of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. We will also look at Chinese, Japanese and Meso-American book illustration.

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.

The ANC decisively lost its majority in May. After a short period of negotiation, a centralist Government of National Unity (GNU) emerged. This lecture will pose and seek to answer the questions: Miracle or mirage? Will the centre continue to hold? Can a coalition government deliver the tangible change so urgently needed? What is the longer-term prognosis for democratic consolidation? Professor Calland will conclude by suggesting what is likely to be raised at SONA in February 2025, ten months after the national elections and the subsequent creation of the GNU.