By Heather Dugmore Africa’s unique megaherbivores - elephants, rhinos and hippos - could potentially play a major role in mitigating climate change, says Distinguished Professor Graham Kerley, Director of the Centre for African Conservation Ecology at Nelson Mandela University. He is one of six authors of a paper attracting global attention that was published on [...]
Justice Mandisa Maya is the first woman President of South Africa’s Supreme Court of Appeal, which dates back to 1910. “The most challenging aspect of being a judge is the enormous responsibility you carry in resolving society’s disputes and determining people’s lives, including whether a person must go to prison for life,” says Justice Maya. [...]
He was a gigantic, unsung character with unsurpassed knowledge and understanding of South African plant species, veld types and veld management. Landbou Weekblad salutes South African botanist and man of the veld, the late great John Acocks. By Heather Dugmore In the Footsteps of Acocks is the working title of a book about the contributions [...]
Nelson Mandela University, the only university in the world to carry Nelson Mandela’s name has its first woman Vice-Chancellor, Professor Sibongile Muthwa. She is joined by two other top-ranking women in leading the university: the new Chancellor, Dr Geraldine Fraser-Moleketi, and the new Chair of Council, Ambassador Nozipho January-Bardill. All three assumed their posts in [...]
“Let me sit closer to you,” says Wits Business School MBA alumna Gail Kelly as we position ourselves around the imposing table in the VIP dining room at Wits Business School. This is the woman Forbes listed in 2010 as the eighth most powerful woman in the world; the first female CEO of Westpac, one [...]
From the wildebeest migration to the ice floes of Alaska, we are so inundated with hype and overbaked replays that life’s miracles have become boring. “Oh whaaaw they’re approaching the Maaahwra – look at all those craaacs just waiting for them,” we’re told as the camera zooms in on yet another wildebeest migration crossing the [...]
It has been 46 years since the first Free Peoples Concert was held at Wits in 1971. Back then, as always, music was a way for everyone to imagine and be part of a different South Africa – starting on campus. It was South Africa’s Monterey, Haight-Ashbury, Woodstock; a platform for counterculture with music as [...]
Stocks of some of our iconic angling fish species – such as red and white steenbras, black musselcracker, dageraad, kabeljou (kob) and seventy-four – are now so overexploited that they fall within the red list of threatened species as tracked by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN). Professor Nadine Strydom a marine [...]
Algoa Bay in South Africa’s Eastern Cape has unusually large group sizes of common and bottlenose dolphins. The reason for this is being researched by dolphin and whale (cetacean) specialist, Dr Stephanie Plön, an ocean health researcher from the Earth Stewardship Science Research Institute at Nelson Mandela University in Port Elizabeth. “My research team and [...]
A plant with perfectly shaped silver-green baubles, called silver brunia, that is endemic to South Africa’s Cape Floral Kingdom has been dubbed ‘white gold’ because of its escalating market demand in the East. This plant is focusing attention on the more than 9 000 indigenous plant species in the Cape Floral Kingdom. Broadly known as fynbos, [...]
