“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, [...]
To succeed as a profitable commercial cattle farmer in this era, we need to stop breeding large, unsustainable cows and bulls, and we need to change our approach to grazing management, say leading cattlemen, Chip Hines (US) and Johann Zietsman (southern Africa) “Churchill once said: ‘You have enemies? Good. That means you’ve stood up for [...]
Doctor of chemistry and founder of sustainable development solutions company Tomorrow Matters Now, Dr Jaisheila Rajput, applied her mind to the pressing need for fresh water and fuel in South Africa. She took one year (February 2016 to February 2017) to research and write about a WWF Nedbank Green Trust-funded project that can unlock freshwater [...]
A portrait of the Western Cape 300 years ago would show rolling expanses of a vegetation type with an extraordinary diversity of bulb species called Renosterveld, being grazed by large numbers of big game, including the extinct bluebuck, quagga, as well as the eland and black rhino, hence its name. The large numbers of [...]
“Businesspeople talking to businesspeople is the best way to address the innovations required to address the challenges of our time,” says Zimbabwean-born telecoms mogul Strive Masiyiwa who is listed as one the World’s 50 Greatest Leaders by Fortune Magazine. Masiyiwa is the Founder and Executive Chair of Econet, a diversified pan-Africa telecommunications, media and technology [...]
