Curiosity CLXXV by Centre for Curating the Archive

OSITY C U R I O S I T Y

CURIO

C U R I O S I T Y CLXXV A Pa p e r Ca b i n e t

Pippa Skotnes Gwen van Embden Fritha Langerman

Curating collections at t he Univer s ity of C ape Town

Photography by Stephen Inggs

LLAREC: Series in Visual History LLAREC: The Museum Workshop at the University of Cape Town 31-37 Orange Street 8001 Cape Town South Africa

First edition Photographic donors: Orms Pro Photo Warehouse and PICTO, Cape Town Repro and Fine Art Printing: Scan Shop, Cape Town ISBN 0-620-33345-6

Dedicated to Lucy Lloyd, Stephen Jay Gould, Stephen Greenblatt and all other astonishing minds.

C O N T E N T S

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Astonishment Alterations Articulations Brilliance Beauty Censorship Consilience Concentrations Diversity Diary Document Expansiveness Effluvia Encapsulation Forensics Fugacity Foundations Generation Gathering Heritage Historicism (new) Incubation Isolation Judgement Kingdoms Knowledges Liberations Lustre Libraries

S T N E T N O C

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Memory Marking Mobility Notes Neotony Origination Openings Obfuscation Perspectives Positioning Particularisation Quadrivium Quarantine Resonances Replications Resurrections Similitude Shorthand Subjectifications Treasury Unmaking Vision Virtuosity Wonder Work |xam-ka-!au Yearning Zoomorphism

8 A Paper Cabinet: Curating The Left-overs In the 1990s three South African courts, the Magistrates’, the Supreme and the Appeal courts heard arguments for and against a book being a work of art. The defendant in the case argued that a book could simultaneously be an artwork and that if it were an artwork then its ‘artness’ was its primary identity, its ‘bookness’ secondary. The plaintiff argued that a book, however attractively compiled, was just a book and could, by no stretch of the imagination be considered art. In the end, the Appeal Court ruled it was less concerned with the definitions of what constituted book or artwork. If an object looked like a book, then it fell under the legal restraints pertaining to books, regardless of whether it was also an artwork. The identity or ontology of the object was determined by its appearance. For us as artists and curators, definitions and identities of objects are important, indeed, often central to how we understand our own practice. A collection of objects curated into a display may be equally convincingly argued to be a book as a sculpture. An installation of paper works and projections could be described as printmaking, a series of photographs as painting. For us, the definition of an artwork has less to do with its material presence than with the history of the discipline it brings with it into the zone of display in which it is encountered. All three of us graduated from Michaelis as ‘master’ printmakers. All three of us developed a sense of what constitutes the identity of printmaking from the way in which it was taught and practised within the department. Printmaking at Michaelis originated with Katrine Harries in the 1950s and she taught at the school for more than 20 years. She was trained as a lithographer and designer. Printmaking in her day was a discipline that developed through intense technical training and was nurtured by her great love of lithography and etching. She would sit on her high chair, in her red checked apron, puffing away on a Lucky Strike plain cigarette, drawing on one of the Solenhofen limestones (p71) she had arranged for the school to import from Germany while students ground the stone surfaces or polished copper plates to a mirror-like shine. We would make prints that perfected the technique of hardground or aquatint, or revealed a nuanced understanding of the relationship between water and grease, gum Arabic and chalk. Our concern then was to produce images that realized each discrete process in the making of prints. The taxonomy of processes was as important as the images we described through it. When Jules van de Vijver took over the teaching of printmaking at the School in the 1970s, emphasis was diverted away from the idea of the print as iconographic component of the illustrated book, and towards its realization as a series of individual images that make up the artwork as a whole. He insisted on the importance of the

tradition of printmaking and the origins of prints in serialised imagery, reminding us of the tradition of the portfolio or book of prints, exemplified by artists such as Goya or Picasso. Printmaking became less about technique than about a way of conceiving of an artwork – as an object or collection of objects where each component depended for its meaning and significance on all the others, and where understanding the work was about ‘reading the images’ in a circular, rather than a linear way. This sense of the past use of printmaking pervades its current use. Today at Michaelis, printmakers see themselves as curators of images and objects, producing books, portfolios, installations and video. As printmakers, their three-dimensional projects or curated displays depend as much on the history of their discipline as they do on a break with its traditions. We three curators of this Curiosity CLXXV exhibition, as teachers and graduates, see ourselves as both products of our history and as participants in shaping it. What we have produced here is as much about printmaking and an understanding of its taxonomy as it is about curatorship, museology, installation art and book-making; as much about our sense of what art is as about the diverse and curious nature of the scholarship in the university. It should come as no surprise, therefore, to discover that this publication, which has been produced to accompany the exhibition Curiosity CLXXV, is neither a book nor a catalogue. Rather, it is a paper cabinet – a curated collection of the images and texts that have been assembled in the preparation of this exhibition. As a paper cabinet, it depends less on the linear readability of its sequence of pages, and more on the visual delight of its layout and the play between the various taxonomies that both govern display and describe the disciplines and curiosities we have sought to represent. Inevitably there will be areas of over- and under-representation. What we have featured here has as much to do with what seemed to us important and fascinating as with the unexpected discoveries that both appealed to our individual visual sensitivities and teased and challenged our expectations and preconceptions. Representing 175 years of the history of a university is, of course, an impossible task, or at least impossible for us in the seven-month period we researched and assembled it (and produced this publication). We hope we will be forgiven for what will surely seem to some as inexcusable oversights. Yet while our attention may have focused more closely on some areas of scholarship or creativity, we hope that we have been able to use our own obsessions with objects, taxonomies and display to play with ideas and insights that bridge disciplines or dart through them and nurture curiosity. We began this project in May 2004. At the start we had the good fortune to make our first appointment with Professor Deon Knobel, head of Forensic Pathology. His was

an environment full of curiosity and curiosities and his willingness to share his considerable experience and understanding of his discipline seemed to be part of the quality of generosity that characterises his academic life. This first visit was thrilling – it convinced us at once that the process of gathering material would be full of surprises. Like Deon (although no one is quite like Deon) we found other remarkable thinkers and generous scholars who gave us access to their ideas and objects. We carried a great many things out of people’s offices. We scrounged through drawers, browsed bookshelves, waited while keys were found to open long-locked storerooms, and we recovered treasures which ranged from lead blocks in a physics storeroom (p22), to stuffed mice from an office desk (p121), a photograph of Richard Nixon with Elvis Presley (p124), and precious documents from the UCT libraries (p42, 176) and the Irma Stern Museum (p182). Many of these objects when displayed immediately become fascinating mnemonics able to refer to a range of ideas and stories. Others were, as we frequently found ourselves declaring, were ‘pressed into service’. There is nothing, for example, particularly curious or informative about old boxes of discarded battery glass casings. Yet when organized into a cabinet about ‘replication’ and reshaped by light, mirror and reflection, they become quite transformed and their original function is displaced in the interests of representing something entirely different (p141). Our original impetus for the mounting of this exhibition was to produce something to celebrate the university’s 175th anniversary. We wanted to draw together collections of objects that could represent the various activities that characterise a university. Right from the beginning it was clear that UCT does not have a ‘culture’ of collecting and curating. While there are some established collections like the Drennan Anatomy Museum, the Bolus Herbarium and, of course, the libraries that are cared for by dedicated curators and librarians, there are uncurated collections in almost all departments. Most of these do not have keepers and much has been lost or destroyed over the years for want of proper attention and adequate funding. There were a number of places we arrived at only to be told that the whole storeroom had been cleared out and all the ‘old stuff ’ thrown away. In some, old teaching collections or small museums were shut down and their contents decaying. In the end, it would be true to say that what we worked with in much of this exhibition is the ‘left-over’. Which brings us to the moment in this introduction where we must acknowledge our debts. We have, of course, been influenced by dozens of scholars, museologists and artists, but a few require special mention here. The idea of the left-over, borrowed from Stephen Greenblatt’s discussion of early modern debates about the fate of the Eucharist (the body of Christ) when swallowed and digested and eventually expelled,

has illuminated all our discussions about objects and what they come to mean long after they have served their purpose or been appropriated for another. His various discussions on representation have, equally, been foundational. Lucy Lloyd, whose manuscripts constitute one of the most important collections at UCT, has continued to inspire as both a scholar and a woman who prevailed against all odds. We thought of her many times and of the many months she spent sending her manuscript backwards and forwards from Cape Town to London by boat as we rushed this book from page lay-out to press in a mere three weeks. We have drawn on Stephen Jay Gould and his creative collaborations with Rosamond Purcell. We were inspired by the way in which he has drawn together subjects and ideas not usually discussed on the same page or even in the same book and made them communicate with each other in fascinating ways. There have also been many visual sources we have referenced. These include the work of Marcel Duchamp, Joseph Cornell, Peter Greenaway and Joseph Beuys, and collections of the Wellcome Trust in London and La Specola in Florence. Our great source of inspiration, and indeed the one thing we reference most, is the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford. Subjected to much criticism, debate and argument about the display of objects and the politics of representation, the Pitt Rivers Museum remains for us an extraordinary place. While we have engaged critically with its methods of display through our own display choices, we have also tried to pay tribute to the wonder of objects and the value of collecting them that it exemplifies. Finally, this exhibition includes three bodies of work made specially for it, a trinity which will be its own left-over and become part of the art collection of the university. The first is an assembly of cases created by artists who have, or have had a connection with the university. These are small gems, treasures placed in the centre of the exhibition, each representing the visual as a site of meaning, creativity and imagination. The second is a series of four works created by the three of us, ‘Filing the Archive’ (p153), ‘Place Holders’ (p28), ‘175 Chalkboard Dusters’ (p171) and ‘References’ (p188), which provide a structure for the exhibition and refer directly to the activities that are central to a university. These left-overs with the third body of work, this ‘Paper Cabinet’, will ensure that Curiosity CLXXV survives its end, enduring like the medieval relic described by Caroline Bynum as ‘a shimmering reflection of eternity’! Pippa Skotnes Gwen van Embden Fritha Langerman

A s t o n i s h m e n t

‘Let him who does not know how to astonish go work in the stables!’ Giambattista Marino (1569-1628) There are places and things in the world that truly astonish. The painted caverns of Lascaux, the shelters of the Drakensberg and the Duccio altarpiece at Sienna all astonish for they represent the full realization of the human imagination at a time before the written word, before architecture, before surgery. The bronze feet of the charioteer at Delphi astonish, as do the island of Torcello with its church and the small sheet-gold rhinoceros from the citadel of Mapungubwe. Each resonates with the extraordinary presence of human creativity. But it is not only these undoubted works of art that astonish. In a tiny cardboard box in an office on the third floor of the Beattie Building at the University of Cape Town nestle the bones of an infant Rock Dassie. Its ribs as slender as toothpicks, the dassie is the closest (if distant) living relative of the African elephant. But this is not its most remarkable feature. When John Parkington (Professor of Archaeology) proposed, in the 1970s, a novel theory of the seasonal mobility of late Stone-Age hunter-gatherers, dassies’ remains were able to confirm it. Born in late October and early November, and with teeth erupting in regular and predictable episodes, dassies are archaeological clocks – a comforting presence of certainty in the often disputed and contested calendar of human mobility.

A l t e r a t i o n s A r t i c u l a t i o n s 1960

2002

1848

UCT economics student Philip Kgosana leads 30 000 people from Langa to Cape Town to protest against the Sharpeville killings.

In an international survey of vice-chancellors published in the UK’s Financial Times, UCT is rated in the top 23 universities worldwide.

Langham Dale is brought out from Oxford to occupy the chair of English Classics.

Things of Enchantment In 1594 Francis Bacon listed among the requirements of an educated person – a library, a garden, provision for rare animals, birds and fish, and also a ‘huge cabinet wherein whatsoever the hand of man by exquisite art or engine has made rare in stuff, form or motion; whatsoever singularity, chance and the shuffle of things has produced … may be kept; shall be sorted and included’.1 The Renaissance cabinet with all its diversity could be interpreted as a microcosm of the known universe. The arrangement of objects within these cabinets, however, was not intended to simulate the order of nature but was governed mainly by outward appearances. Divination, signs and wonders prevailed over rational argument and deduction. During the eighteenth century the intellectual environment of the Enlightenment fundamentally changed the way knowledge was constructed. Systematic order, empirical methods of observation, classification and description, brought the miscellany of known things into an emerging framework of scientific discipline and discourse. Through the following centuries, the quest for knowledge continued to produce an extraordinary array of artefacts that constitute a tangible record of the ideas and practices that gave rise to them. The enchantment of the object, like the archaeological site, lies in its physical presence and its promise of revelation. But the unknown is revealed only through human engagement and interpretation – ideas and artefacts are inseparable. While the conceptual domain may still occupy the intellectual high-ground, the materiality of objects can claim aesthetic and sensory ascendancy. Curiosity CLXXV brings together objects of knowledge that have been kept in UCT departments over the decades, either by design or default. Re-positioned literally and conceptually by three artist-curators, these objects have been transformed within new taxonomies that simultaneously

1930

1995

Patricia Massey graduates from UCT as a doctor and goes on to become a leader in the obstetrics profession in Cape Town.

UCT’s first on-line course – on relativity—is launched on the worldwide web.

2002 Professor Igor Barashenkov receives a National Research Foundation ‘A’ rating for his mathematics of solitons, the moving wave phenomenon that underpins the field of fibre optics.

resonate with and undermine conventional classificatory schema. Having mined the university in pursuit of the memorable, the forgotten, the curious, and the souvenir, the curators have presented their finds in ways that elicit interest and provoke imagination. At first glance the exhibition suggests the quintessential Victorian museum. Antique cabinets – many of them – echo the spatial arrangement of the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, in which a vast collection of objects is arranged typologically to show the evolution of formal attributes from the rudimentary to the most sophisticated. The classification of objects in this way, in keeping with scientific ideas of the time, proclaimed that the evolution of culture could be inferred from the material development of artefacts. By arranging objects typologically, origins could be determined and theories of progressive evolution affirmed. Curiosity CLXXV affirms a curatorial vision of a different kind. Formal taxonomy has been subverted by the bricoleur-curators to be replaced by an eclectic juxtaposition of things that defies easy classification. In a neat inversion of the ethnographic gaze, the university has become an exotic field, and there is no longer a division between observer and observed but a reflexive awareness that the extraordinary is ever present in the familiar. Surrounded by artefacts that reflect the material history of UCT, the viewer is invited to look anew at the wondrous creativity of intellectual endeavour. Curiosity CLXXV reminds us that physical presence cannot be fully circumscribed by description or classification. Material things appeal to the senses and evoke many meanings – herein lies their enchantment. Patricia Davison Iziko Museums of Cape Town 1 Bacon cited in Impey, O. & MacGregor, A. 1985. The Origins of Museums. The cabinet of curiosities in sixteenth and seventeenthcentury Europe, p.1. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

1999

1914

Roger Lass, is awarded a Distinguished Professorship in Historical and Comparative Languages at UCT.

Percival Kirby, pioneer in the field of South African musicology, arrives in South Africa. His remarkable collection of musical

instruments, known as the Kirby Collection, is later given to the South African College of Music at UCT.

Above: Collection of rocks from the closed-down Geology ‘The earth is 4.5 billion years old, but heat generated from two major Museum, and bagged rocks from a study collection of Maarten sources – the decay of short-lived radioisotopes and bombardment by cosmic de Wit (Geological Sciences) debris that pervaded the inner solar system during its history – melted the earth’s surface some 4 billion years ago. All rocks must, therefore, postdate Skeleton of a youth, showing joint articulation (Anatomy Museum) this early liquefaction. The oldest known rocks on earth are a bit older than Section through femur of Massospondylus, a 190 million year 3.8 billion years, but they have been so altered by heat and pressure that no old dinosaur from South Africa (note the thickness of the bone fossils could have survived. The oldest rocks that could contain preserved organic remains are 3.5 to 3.6 billion years old from Australia and South wall and crystals inside the medullary cavity) (Anusuya Africa – both deposits do feature fossils of single-celled creatures similar to Chinsamy-Turan, Zoology) modern bacteria.’ Theodolite: an optical surveying instrument used to measure Stephen Jay Gould, Eight Little Piggies: Reflections in Natural History 1993: 328 horizontal and vertical angles (Heinz Ruther, Geomatics)

The ground reaction force vector plotted with respect to the hip, knee and ankle joint centres during five important phases of the gait cycle. These phases are heel strike, foot flat, mid stance, and toe off. The model for these drawings was 9 year old Gareth Vaughan, now a graduate in English and Classics at UCT. (Christoper L. Vaughan: Biomedical Engineering)

1829

1831 – 1834

1932

The first Senate meeting is held. A timetable is drawn up and money is demanded.

Student numbers plummet from 130 to 97.

Jameson Hall is completed, but without the dome.

1931 Sol Plaatjie, renowned journalist, writer and founding father of the ANC, becomes the first black person to give an address at UCT at the

1984 invitation of a student group. There are only five black students at the university at this date.

Raymond Suttner delivers this year’s TB Davie lecture titled ‘Freedom Charter-People’s Charter in the 1980s’.

These cases include items from Avian Demography, glass slides from the Michaelis School of Fine Art and a bottle-brush plant labelled by Jules Skotnes Brown. Dieter Oschadleus, Ringing Co-ordinator at SAFRING (Avian Demography) has asserted that no other technical advance in the field of ornithology has made as large a contribution to the scientific study of birds as has bird ringing. Ringing faciliates the tracking of individual birds, bird movements and flock survival. Such knowledge is central to the development of conservation plans.

Glass slides are found in many departments. Most are no longer used and many will soon be tossed away with other redundant teaching and study material. The slides in these drawers come from a collection at the Michaelis School of Fine Art of images of the Virgin and Child. In this curation, they recall the collections of saintsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; relics and religious items that were the early predecessors of our cabinets of display.

1985

1977

1983

Detained UCT students write examinations in jail this year.

UCT Sport Centre is opened. It cost about R3 million to build and fit out with equipment.

An honorary doctorate is awarded to Dr Beyers Naude who is serving his second term as a â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;bannedâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; person.

‘Figures in Dialogue (with burins)’ 2004 Cecil Skotnes (UCT honorary graduate)

2004 The South African College of Music receives news of an award of over 2 million rand from the lottery for the curation of the Kirby Collection.

1940 UCT’s first ‘African’ graduate – Gladstone Lelele – obtains his MA in Bantu language.

2004 Professor Geraldine van Bueren wins the Child Rights Lawyer Award organized jointly by UNICEF, the British Law Society and The Lawyer Magazine.

‘Ceci n’est pas une chaise’ Chair of Dave Dewar

Dave Dewar holds the BP Chair in City and Regional Planning in the Faculty of Engineering and the Built Environment. He consults widely in southern Africa and has been core consultant to the City of Cape Town in drawing up a Spatial Development Framework for the city.

2004

1965

1903

Dr Erik Chisholm becomes dean and director of the South African College of Music at UCT.

Erik Chisholm dies leaving all his music to the university.

The department of Zoology is established on the Hiddingh Campus.

b r i l l i a n c e

‘What is the felt experience of cognition at the moment one stands in the presence of a beautiful boy or flower or bird? It seems to incite, even to require, an act of replication. Wittgenstein says that when the eye sees someting beautiful, the hand wants to draw it.’ Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just 1999 Bones from seven blue cranes, recovered from their corpses after they were poisoned by a farmer in the northern part of the Western Cape (Pippa Skotnes, Michaelis School of Fine Art) Medical instruments, Collection of the MR Drennan Museum Collection of glass apparatus, and lead blocks (Department of Physics) Glass vessels and ground charcoal (Chemical Engineering Department) Flat-bottomed basket collected by Schapera from the Ngwato and various hand tools and weapons (UCT Ethnographic Collection housed at the South African Museum)

‘For many years shielded from Africa by colonialism and apartheid lead blocks used to shield out background radiation from detectors of low-level radiation in the new line in the study of polonium isotopes in fish UCT now hopes that its scholarship will resonate with a new African awakening Helmhotz resonators – the cylinders of different size were an early, pre-electronic way to analyse vibrations into their component frequencies.’ David Aschman (Professor of Physics)

B e a u t y 1902

1929

1883

The College sets up a development fund. At the same time it buys Bertram House for £30 000.

The university occupies its current location on the slopes of Table Mountain.

Alternative courses are given for the BA degree, prior to which all students had to take both literature and science.

Resurrection plant and double helix from the laboratory of Professor Jennifer Thompson (Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology)

In response to the challenge of improving maize varieties for small-scale farmers in Africa, Jennifer Thompson and the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology are working on developing a transgenic maize, tolerant of drought and other abiotic stresses. The source of the genes for abiotic stress resistance is the endemic South African resurrection plant, Xerophyta viscose, found in mountain top habitats such as Cathedral Peak in the Drakensberg.

All the bones of one November-new-born dassie arranged according to size and shape on blue felt in a case made by Gary Branquet. Original numbered storage cardboard box included on lower right. These dassie bones are part of a bigger collection, unique in the world, which is used for dating seasonal sites in the later Stone Age. This dassie is also featured unarranged on page 12. No. 73186. Collection: John Parkington (Archaeology Department)

1999 Professor of English Literature J.M. Coetzee makes literary history by becoming the first person to win the Booker Prize twice, the second time for his novel Disgrace.

1991

1918

Dr Mamphela Ramphele is appointed Deputy Viceâ&#x20AC;&#x201C;Chancellor.

A one-year BA course in Afrikaans is established.

1917 Edith Stephens is appointed acting head of the Botany Department and given a seat on Senate, raising fears on the part of the Science Committee of the South African College that the

1917 interests of the department might be ‘endangered’ if the period is ‘unduly prolonged’ in which it is ‘entirely staffed by women’.

J.C. Beattie is appointed Principal of the University of Cape Town.

‘Place holders’ 2004. Plaster books. Fritha Langerman, Gwen van Embden, Pippa Skotnes (Michaelis School of Fine Art)

1934

1931

1981

The student newspaper the UCTattle is established.

J.W. Jagger Library and the Otto Beit University Union building are completed.

Students protest against government’s celebrations to mark South Africa’s 20 years as a Republic.

C e n s o r s h i p

‘Large parts of the University of Cape Town campus were at times uninhabitable yesterday afternoon and some lectures were disrupted as a result of actions by certain people which may not be reported in terms of state-of-emergency press censorship’ (Cape Times 25 April 1987). Yesterday afternoon was 1987. Certain people, who could not be named, were police and security agents enforcing the instructions of the Minister of Education to suppress any dissent inside or outside the classroom on university campuses. The Minister of Education was F. W. de Klerk, who would one day become State President of a South Africa in transition. All of this – the dissent, the suppression, and the National Party presidency of F. W. de Klerk – now seems like ancient history. But it was only yesterday. As we recall the taste of tear-gas, we must also remember the lingering blindness of censorship that accompanied it. During the second half of the twentieth century, many actions went unreported, many people remained nameless, intellectual life was disrupted, and large parts of South Africa were made unsuitable for human communication and habitation. With brutal calculation, the tactical and ideological arsenals of state intervention, secrecy, and violence were deployed in the formation of a pervasive ‘culture of censorship’ in apartheid South Africa. The culture of censorship did not only produce silence. It also produced writing. The dominant literary genre of censorship was the list – the ‘consolidated list’ of banned publications, the roll of ‘listed’ persons who could not be quoted or photographed, and even the death squad’s ‘hit list’. The primary literary form of censorship, therefore, was not discursive; it was the linear, sequential, and, in principle, infinitely extendable list. Censorship also broadened the scope of what counted as a text. The

C o n s i l i e n c e C o n c e n t r a t i o n s 1977 Fairall-9, a galaxy in the Southern Hemisphere, is discovered spectroscopically as a Seyfert 1 galaxy by Tony Fairall of the Astronomy Department.

2004 This year’s 41st TB Davie lecture is delivered on 26 August by Jonathan D. Jansen and is entitled ‘Accounting for Autonomy: How Higher Education lost its Innocence’.

1868 At the prize-giving ceremony, Superintendent Langham Dale states, ‘We have plenty of room but we have no money and no spirit.’

broad, multifarious character of intellectual repression in South Africa cast a wide net, as the state intervened not only by suppressing printed material (books, newspapers, magazines, journals, articles, pamphlets, tracts, flyers, flags, banners, graffiti, and T-shirts), along with photographs, radio, and television, but also by suppressing people. Human lives became texts as state censorship included the prevention of public meetings; the persecution of trade union movements; the banning of organizations; the arrest, detention, or banning of writers; the harassment of editors and journalists; the expulsion of foreign correspondents; the dismissal of teachers and university lecturers; the intimidation and banning of religious organizations; and acts of brutality, assault, torture, and murder. In the midst of this repression of living texts, the chairperson of the state’s Publications Control Board urged writers to adopt an allegorical method. ‘If you are not allowed to criticise the government or its agencies, then describe the antics of pigs, as Orwell does in Animal Farm,’ he advised. ‘The writer who is totally destroyed by censorship law is not a writer, but a mediocrity.’ If writers had only followed this advice, then today we would have an extensive literature on pigs as part of the legacy of apartheid. But apartheid was not an allegory. It was the thing itself – life and death, speech and silence. David Chidester Chair of Religious Studies University of Cape Town

Flamingo wing, parrot skeleton and porcelain books made by Wendy Maclachlan 1895

1894

1940

The new physics laboratory is opened by the Governor, Sir Henry Loch.

The School of Mines is founded, and would be designed by Herbert Baker.

Frances Ames is elected head woman student of UCT.

2002

1892

1839 – 1841

UCT boasts the highest number of scholars rated ‘A’ by the National Research Foundation in South Africa.

Tennis is played and enjoyed at the College.

Smallpox ravages the city of Cape Town.

Censor marks on envelopes written during the Anglo Boer War (Special Collections)

Crystal structure of a protein: lysozyme. Collection of Luigi Nassimbeni, Professor in the Department of Chemistry

Consilience is commonly held to be the coinciding of one body of knowledge with another – the concurrence of various disciplines in the production of a commonality of thought. It acknowledges the fragmentation of disciplinary boundaries and, in doing so, embraces a sense of the ‘edge’ between disciplines, which has been instrumental in guiding the curatorial process of this exhibition. Consilience recognizes abstract patterns of order, which in some cases can be interpreted only by reference to intuition and imagination. 1831 – 1834

1866

Laws on slavery are passed in London and in South Africa as racial tensions rise.

Governor Grey gives the College the old Lion’s dens for necessary sanitary purposes.

Oral examinations are replaced by written examinations.

Gold-capped pen used by Queen Elizabeth (Doug Cornell Papers) to sign the visitorâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s book at Jagger Library in 1947, the worldâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s smallest printed book and some large wooded type blocks (Manuscripts and Archives), a drawing of the Lion House on the Groote Schuur Estate by Herbert Baker (Special Collections), embroideries, a stringless violin that belonged to Andrew Proctor who won the Victoria Cross in World War I and artworks by Outa Lappies.

1988

1925

Brian Warner, Professor in the Department of Astronomy, is awarded the John F.W. Herschel Medal, Royal Society of South Africa.

Notable community involvement at UCT starts in 1925 when Rag becomes a fund-raising event for community services.

2029 To celebrate the 200th anniversary of the founding of the university, an installation is curated at the new exhibition complex on the Hiddingh Campus.

D i v e r s i t y

The upper embroidery opposite is documented in the following way: â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;During the South African War, 1899-1902, Mrs J.W. Tainton entertained a party of wounded soldiers accompanied by their Ward Sister and Surgeon Captain from Fort Napier Hospital, Pietermartizburg, at her home. They all signed this cloth which lay unfinished for 50 years and was completed a few weeks ago by her daughter, Mrs A.D. Knott Craig (neĂŠ Thelma Tainton) who surmises that no more embroidery silk was available and that the stains, which have proven to be fast, were made by medical dressings.â&#x20AC;&#x2122; Dated 1956 (Manuscripts and Archives)

The lower embroidery is by Outa Lappies, an artist who, once assisted by the university in a legal matter, is now a donor to a bursary fund called the Outa Lappies Bursary for Fine Art. Despite the fact that he owns little himself, he has also made donations of his work to the university. These works are made of broken glass collected on freeways, nails, crushed tins, wood and other materials and he also quilts and embroiders cloths that record his thoughts and history.

D i a r y D o c u m e n t 1931

2003

1942

The old Chemistry laboratory is converted into an experimental theatre, known as the Little Theatre, by Professor Bell.

Dr Helen Barnes and Dr Heinrich Hoppe develop significant strategies in the fight against malaria in Africa.

A letter appears in the Cape Times (29 August) describing some of the difficulties experienced by coloured medical students registered at UCT.

Specimens from the Bolus Herbarium and arrows from UCT’s collection at the South African Museum.

1973 The committee of the debating union includes Hugh Amoore (consultant), Michael Harris (president), Sir Richard Luyt (patron), Dennis Davis (vice-president), Charles

McGregor (treasurer and secretary) and Deon Irish (ex-president). Mr Irish would later become a member of the Bar and represent Professor Pippa Skotnes in the

National Library’s court action against her in which they demanded free copies of her artist’s book Sound from the Thinking Strings.

These photographs, above and left, were taken by Professor Martin West in Soweto, Johannesburg over the period 1969-1971. Martin West was at the time a doctoral student in social anthropology. His research was the first full-length study of the importance of African independent churches in a modern urban environment. At the time of the study there were about 1 000 African independent churches in Soweto alone, and the study demonstrated how these churches helped the poor to deal with the harshness of their lives in a huge township under apartheid conditions. The study was published as Bishops & Prophets in a Black City (David Philip, 1975). Martin West is now Deputy-Vice Chancellor, a post he has held since 1991.

1952 Dr. Heinz Einhorn of the Engineering Department uses 51 military searchlights to illuminate Table Mountain.

2004 A scholarship is launched in conjunction with the Mandela Rhodes Foundation called the Thabo Mbeki Scholarship for leadership in Africa.

1951 Hon. Mr. Justice Albert van de Sandt Centlivres is installed as Chancellor on 6 April.

E.E. Esterhuizen. Notebook with lists of identified specimens, 25201 Lepidozia hyalina 28490 Staberoha remota, January 1956 - June 1960, Bolus Herbarium

Specimens and watercolours from the Bolus Herbarium, a tobacco pouch from the UCT Goodwin collection at the South African Museum, and a San waistband from the Ngami District, Botswana

Watercolour of Oxalis nidulans and Oxalis minuta. No. 1285 in the series. M.M. Page. Bolus Collection in Manuscripts and Archives.

Specimens and watercolours from the Bolus Herbarium

42 A letter from Caroline Molteno Murray to ‘Aunt Nancy’, 17 August 1869, which demonstrates ‘cross-hatching’ (Manuscripts and Archives)

Pauline Smith’s handwritten manuscript of the short story ‘Jan Boetjes’ (Manuscripts and Archives)

A piece of calico which covered the original manuscript of Olive Schreinerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Story of an African Farm at the time that it was sent to England for publishing (Manuscripts and Archives)

Herbert Baker and Kendall notebook no 5. 1910 (Manuscripts and Archives)

Alan Morris. Field notebook Rehoboth, Namibia â&#x20AC;&#x201C; excavation of old graves, 1989 (Anatomy Department)

2004

1975

1985

Jacque Derrida, French philosopher whose work influenced thought in a range of disciplines, dies.

Trevor Abrahams, captain of UCTâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s spearfishing team is prohibited from taking part in an event at the University of Port Elizabeth.

The government declares a State of Emergency.

Stephen Watson. Travel journal (English Department).

Geological survey of the Cape Colony, April 1905 (Wodehouse west and Queenstown north) Field notebook of Alexander du Toit (1878-1948), library of the Department of Geological Science Du Toit was a South African geologist who spent the period between 1903 and 1920 working for the Geological Commission of the Cape of Good Hope. His work was to contribute towards the theory of continental drift and plate tectonics that prompted the geological revolution of the 1960s.

2002 A UCT research team under the leadership of Associate Professor Carolyn Williamson of the Virology Department has helped design an

1900 HIV/AIDS vaccine, currently being produced in the USA, aimed at helping fight the disease in developing countries.

Dr W. Hiddingh leaves ÂŁ9 500 in his will for the erection of a building for the use of students. This is now known as Hiddingh Hall.

Diaries of Gwen van Embden and Fritha Langerman for Curiosity CLXXV (2004)

1899

1950

The South African War begins.

Maria Emmeline (Minnie) Buchanan (later Fuller) receives an honorary doctorate from the University. She campaigned for the

construction of a womenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s residence at UCT and Fuller Hall was named after her.

A sea journal belonging to Pauline Smithâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s father (Manuscripts and Archives) 1914

1936

1944

Lucy Catherine Lloyd dies in Mowbray and is buried at the Wynberg Anglican Cemetery.

J.C. Smuts becomes Chancellor of UCT.

The first non-white person, R.A. Lawrence, is elected to the SRC.

A shipwatching journal belonging to Martin Leendertz, kept between March 1926 and September 1928. vol 18. (Manuscripts and Archives) Walter Floyd’s diary of ‘big game shooting’, 1911-1912. Enclosed is a pencil list of animals he shot (Manuscripts and Archives)

2003 Professor Doug Pitt, Dean of Commerce, and Professor Xu Yan of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology publish an extensive study of telecommunications in China.

1926 Two UCT graduates become the first women to be admitted to the Bar in South Africa – Irene Antoinette Geffen (née Newmark) and Bertha Solomon (née Schwatz).

1960 Vice-Chancellor J.P. Duminy, reminds students that sports activities are not permissible on Sundays.

Boerneef André P. Brink Izak de Vries I. D. du Plessis Joan Hambidge M.E.R. Adam Small N.P. van Wyk Louw Jaco Botha Breyten Breytenbach Tom Dreyer Rachelle Greeff Sonja Loots D.J. Opperman Etienne van Heerden Carine Zaayman

‘Victimology’ 2004 Eustacia Riley (Michaelis School of Fine Art)

1999

1990

1930

Mrs Graça Machel is installed as UCT’s fifth Chancellor, the first black person and the first woman to fill the position.

Walter Sisulu delivers a paper entitled ‘The road to liberation’ in this year’s TB Davie lecture series on 2 October.

The Rationalist Society is established.

Sketchbooks of S. D. H. Schutte, the third member of the Thibault, Anreith triumvirate, 1894 1897 (Manuscripts and Archives)

1946

1881

1849 – 1852

World War II pilot R.G. Drummond launches UCT’s flying club.

The Chemistry laboratory is opened by P.D. Hahn.

Student numbers almost double within a year of Adamson’s departure.

F. K. Kendall. Notes on science as applied to architecture, 1893 (Manuscripts and Archives)

1853

1990

1916

The first discussion begins about a School for Fine Art. Thomas Bowler begins a class in drawing.

Nelson Mandela is released after 27 years in prison and addresses the crowds at the Parade in Cape Town.

The University Bill proposes the formation of the University of Cape Town, incorporating the South African College.

Left: First entry in the daily report of Mr Washkansky, first heart transplant patient, Groote Schuur Hospital. 3.12 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; 21.12.1967 (Transplant Museum) Below: Letter written to Chris Barnard by American school children after he performed the first heart transplant

1980 Dr Stuart Saunders, head of Medicine at UCT, resigns from the Medical Association in protest over medical complicity in the death of Steve Biko.

1983

1978

Antiâ&#x20AC;&#x201C;apartheid campaigner Helen Joseph receives a standing ovation as she delivers the T.B. Davie Lecture.

Wieland Gevers is appointed Professor of Medical Biochemistry at UCT.

Daily report book for Dorothy Fischer, heart transplant patient at Groote Schuur Hospital. Folder no 331-835. 11 June – 21 December 1971 (Transplant Museum, Groote Schuur)

1981 Dr Stuart J. Saunders gives his inaugural address at his installation as principal and ViceChancellor on 20 March.

2003

It is entitled ‘Towards sanity and goodwill … scholarship – not ethnicity’.

Professor Brenda Cooper, director of the Centre of African Studies at UCT, becomes one of the few women elected a fellow of the university.

Professor Thandabantu Nhlapo was appointed Deputy Vice-Chancellor at UCT in 2004. He occupied the Chair of Private Law in the Law Faculty from 1995 to 1998 before he was appointed to the South African Law Commission, where he served between 1996 and 2000. Here he was involved with issues surrounding indigenous law and common law, particularly customary marriages. Thereafter he worked as Deputy Chief of Mission in the South African Embassy in Washington.

1975

1888

1970

Professor Isaac Schapera receives the honorary degree of Doctor of Literature from UCT.

The coat of arms, unused since its design in 1860, is finally embraced.

Professor Christiaan Barnard receives the first UCT Gold Medal of Merit.

E x p a n s i v e n e s s

Largely obsolete as a term, effluvia concerns the flow of matter – the subtle or invisible emanation of material particles. It is the transitional state – between presence and extinction, lightness and weight, it is curative and destructive.

E f f l u v i a E n c a p s u l a t i o n 1845 Henry Murray, a wealthy merchant from the Colony, leaves £5 000 for scholarships at the College for needy students.

1828

1987

Population of the Cape Colony comprises 55 000 Europeans, 32 000 slaves, 32 000 free blacks.

Police disperse a party in Jameson Hall which was held to celebrate Nelson Mandela's birthday.

Videos is this cabinet were filmed and edited by Mark Antonello, a candidat

Helen Moffett (African Gender Insitute) discusses cricket with Tim Noakes (Sports Science Institute). She is interested in the value of the reverse swing both for the game and for postcolonial theory. He is interested in, among other things, the early apprehension of the cricket ball by the batsman.

Thandobantu Nhlapo talks about his early work in customary law, his subsequent relationship with UCT, and the events that led to his appointment as Deputy Vice-Chancellor.

didate for a masterâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s degree in new media at the Michaelis School of Fine Art.

John Parkington and Cedric Poggenpoel (Archaeology Department) discuss the dassie, the seal maxilla and the wrapped mussel shells found in the archaeological record and their importance in supporting their theory of seasonal migration.

Maarten de Wit (Geological Science) talks about his interest in the first million years of the earthâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s formation and the idea of the life of the earth as a book in which no pages remain for this particular period.

Chalkboard sketches and equations The information on the chalkboard attempts to summarise the key features in the mathematical modelling of the behaviour of deformable media. The specific example is of the Navier-Stokes equations, which serve as a good model for a wide range of fluid flows in nature and in engineering applications. The Clay Mathematical Institute in the United States has offered a $1m prize to the mathematician who is able to determine whether there exist smooth solutions for all time to the Navier-Stokes equations in three dimensions. This is one of seven major unsolved problems in mathematics, the solution to each of which carries a $1m prize. B Daya Reddy Dean of the Faculty of Science 1995

1857

1886

Dr Mamphela Ramphele is selected as Viceâ&#x20AC;&#x201C;Chancellor designate.

Numbers rise above one hundred for the first time in 25 years.

Dr Harry Bolus is made the president of the South African Philosophical Society.

Physics cabinet This interactive physics platform reflects the true spirit of curiosity and imaginative problem solving at UCT by inviting observers to engage hands-on with the 17.5 activities. The absence of instruction or explanation invites inquiry and experimentation. The collection of exhibits were designed to demonstrate key aspects of the fundamentals of classical physics: Newtonian mechanics, vibrations and waves, sound, electromagnetism and the properties of matter. Curated by Andy Buffler (Department of Physics) 1913 Lucy Catherine Lloyd is awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of the Cape of Good Hope for her work with Bushman folklore. Her manuscripts are later left to UCT.

1989

1957

P.W. Botha retires and F.W. de Klerk is appointed as President.

Dr Charles Kimberlin (Bob) Brain is awarded his PhD in Geology.

F o r e n s i c s

So much of our research involves dialogues with the dead. We ask questions: Who were you? How did you live? What were you thinking? Where did you think you were going when you ended up in our morgue of historical inquiry? We imagine that we hear answers from the dead in the material evidence of bones and texts, tools and images, and other artefacts left behind. We listen carefully to these human remains. We think we hear something. But what do the dead think about this dialogue? What is their interest in this exchange? If they are interested, the dead can only establish two kinds of connection with our inquiry, cognitive and forensic. These are the two ways the dead can determine that they are the same people after death that they were when they were alive. While cognitive continuity is based on memory, forensic continuity is based on a moral, ethical or legal responsibility for past actions, even if those acts are forgotten. In the cognitive connection, everything depends upon memory. We are the same people today that we were yesterday because we remember. In memory, we can construct a certain kind of narrative continuity – linking discrete episodes, reinforcing recurring schema – that transcends passing time. The dead are confronted with this challenge of memory. So are the living. For example, over the past fifty years, many people have been convinced that they have been abducted by aliens from outer space, even though they have no memory of the experience. Alien abduction has been defined as the ‘forced removal of a person from his or her physical location to another place. It may include an altered state of awareness for the purpose of physical, surgical, or psychological procedures performed by non-humans. After the abduction, the person is returned to his or her physical location and frequently has little or no recollection of the experience.’

F u g a c i t y F o u n d a t i o n s

Opposite: Cabinet filled with items from the collection of Professor Deon Knobel and the Department of Forensic Pathology

1998

1983

1994

Lafras Steyn is appointed head of the Division of Medical Microbiology.

The Institute of Marine Law is established with the primary focus of researching, teaching and monitoring developments in marine law.

The Law, Race and Gender Unit is established to focus on bias and discrimination in the administration of Justice.

Since most abductees have no memory of the experience, a website on the Internet, the Official Alien Abduction Test-Site, provides a helpful questionnaire with 52 indicators that will answer the question, ‘Are You an Alien Abductee?’ One of the indicators, of course, is that you do not remember. But those who pass the test are entitled to send in $4.95 for an ‘official alien abduction certificate’ that will prove to their families, friends, and co-workers that they have been moved by aliens. Memory, therefore, is unreliable evidence. So, we turn to forensics. In the forensic connection, everything depends upon responsibility. We are the same people today as we were yesterday because we are presently held responsible and accountable for the consequences of our past actions. In forensic terms, a living person is held accountable by law for being the same person from one moment to the next. According to religious traditions, the same principle of accountability applies after death. In Buddhism, the principle of karma – consequential action – establishes a forensic continuity from one moment to the next and from one lifetime to the next that persists after death. In Christianity, the principle of sin – misdirected action – establishes a forensic continuity that also persists after death to determine the status of the soul. In these terms, the dead certainly have an interest in forensics. So, if the dead could speak in our dialogues with the dead, we might imagine that they would be interested in both cognitive and forensic continuity, since these are the only ways in which they might be regarded as the same people now, after death, as they were when they were amongst the living. We are only dead, it has been said, when we are forgotten. So, memory is something. In many of our academic disciplines, we are engaged in memory work that is not only the struggle of memory against forgetting but also the struggle of life against death.

1986

1942

1995

Albertina Sisulu opens UCT’s year of celebration commemorating 100 years of women’s participation in the university.

Die Spantou and UCTattle merge and the bilingual newspaper Varsity is borne.

Harry Oppenheimer retires as Chancellor at the age of 88.

Forensics, as a science of evidence and an art of adjudication, is also a struggle on behalf of life. The dead, we might imagine, have an interest in these arts and sciences of establishing forensic continuity. Even if they do not remember, even if they lack all memory, consciousness, conscience, will, or desire, the dead nevertheless remain vital participants in the living web of moral significance that is constantly being woven and re-woven out of misdirected and consequential action. Vital signs, the cause of death, and the moral bond between the living and the dead â&#x20AC;&#x201C; these are forensic questions that many of our academic disciplines engage, in different ways, as life-support systems. David Chidester Chair of Religious Studies

1993

1887

1986

UCT launches its branch of the SA Students Sports Union (SASSU).

Women are permitted to attend all classes.

The State of Emergency is re-imposed.

1959

1985

1997

UCT students establish the T.B. Davie Memorial lecture.

UCT’s Institute of Criminology publishes a report on the widespread torture of detainees in South African prisons.

Dr Simon Onywere from the University of Nairobi becomes the first USHEPiA fellow to graduate with a PhD in Geology.

This cabinet and its companion cabinet on the following page refer to positioning and marking. They contain objects from various departments, including a silver ceremonial spade used to turn the first sod for the new Chemical Engineering Building, the embryonic remains of an 80-millionyear-old sauropod dinosaur and Tony Fairall’s finding charts for the extreme galaxy ‘Fairall-9’. The equations refer to time and space.

1987 Police invade the campus on numerous occasions. Vice-Cancellor Dr Saunders intervenes time and time again to prevent

1995 confrontations on campus between police and students from becoming violent.

Cheryl de la Rey joins the Department of Psychology at UCT. She is an authority on race and gender studies.

Above: Wax teaching model of a child’s face demonstrating the appearance of excema (Department of Human Biology) Below: Collection of stone flakes from the Archaeology Department surrounding a gold-leafed wax cast of the foot of Sandra Prosalendis, UCT alumnus and inaugural director of the District 6 Museum 1966 Senator Robert F. Kennedy visits South Africa. He is greeted at Cape Town airport at 4pm on June 7th by a crowd including UCT students and student representatives,

1992 chairman of the SRC Mr Charles Diamond and Mr John Daniel, vice-president of NUSAS, among others. The students sing ‘For he is a jolly good fellow’ to the senator.

A plaque is unveiled in Jagger Library recording that UCT’s battle to admit students and appoint staff irrespective of race has been won.

2002 Professor Raj Ramesar, head of UCTâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Division of Human Genetics, leads a team of researchers studying the genetic foundations of diseases such as retinitis pigmentosa and colorectal

1989 cancer. His work could lead to early detection of genetic indicators of disease and prevention of illness.

Dr Elaine Lynette Wilson is elected a fellow of the university.

Above: Clavicle, dissecting scalpel and anatomy notebook of Theodore (â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Toddyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;) Schrire, London 1931, as well as portrait and photograph of a Rag Procession. Theodore Schrire was the Surgical Registrar, surgeon, Head of Casualty and Honorary Consultant at Groote Schuur Hospital between 1938 and 1981. Left: Carmel Schrire (now Professor of Archaeology at Rutgers Unversity) repairs an ostrich egg during her student days at the Archaeology Department at UCT, and her class medal as best archaeology student.

1977

1992

1874

The Centre for African Studies is launched at the university.

Thulani Khanyile is elected as the first black African SRC president.

The South African College School is opened, and a headmaster appointed.

G e n e r a t i o n

Above left: Bird with a ring, sent in this matchbox to SAFRING, Avian Demography Unit in the Department of Statistics. This unit runs a number of projects that involve public participation, including CAR (Co-ordinated Avifaunal Roadcounts) which monitors over 20 species of large terrestrial birds. Above right: Shell excavated in Cradock by Ray Inskeep. Ray Inskeep had a profound effect on the discipline of archaeology in South Africa and was influential in the early development of the Archaeology Department at UCT.

G a t h e r i n g

1838 As one of his last official acts Cape Governor Dâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;Urban grants the College a small square portion of the abandoned Zoological Gardens. This area is later extended by his successor.

1954 J.G. Mutambikwa is the first black African to be elected to the Students Representative Council.

1829 The College's first three Professors are Rev. E. Judge (English classics), Rev. A. Faure (Dutch classics) and Rev. J. Adamson (mathematics).

Chemical engineering cabinet

Cyril O’Conner is Professor of Engineering and Dean of the Faculty of Engineering and the Built Envionment

Chemical engineering concerns itself with processes and devices which convert raw materials into products by chemical or physico-chemical means. In this apparatus no actual chemical process is taking place. Nonetheless, it demonstrates a range of principles and tools relevant in chemical engineering: solution flow, airlift, flotation, gravity separation, pipes, valves, threephase systems, sparging, froth formation, etc. While the inner workings of processes are mostly hidden to the observer, this apparatus demonstrates its principles visibly, allowing observation, contemplation and understanding – some of the core ingredients of scientific enterprise. Curated by Jochen Petersen, assisted by Emmanuel Ngoma and Kamunga Thierry

Far right: Solnhofen limestones used in the process of lithographic printing, the principal of which depends on the repulsion between oil and water. Collection: Michaelis School of Fine Art 1923

1994

1924

The South African College of Music becomes part of the university.

UCT re–lights the torch of academic freedom 34 years after it was extinguished.

Dr Enid Patterson becomes the first woman to graduate from UCT with a medical degree.

1994 The new South African flag is raised above Jameson Hall.

1925 HRH the Prince of Wales visits UCT for his formal installation as UCTâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Chancellor. The Prince is transported to the City Hall in an oxâ&#x20AC;&#x201C;wagon for the occasion.

1997 Pippa Skotnes, senior lecturer in the department of Fine Art, is elected a fellow of the University of Cape Town.

Engraving Jeremy King (Michaelis graduate) Collection: Katrine Harries Print Cabinet

‘Tromp l’oeil’ Collage Ada van de Vijver (former lecturer at Michaelis)

Katrine Harries Print Cabinet (KHPC) The KHPC was established in 1986 at the School by Stephen Inggs and Pippa Skotnes for the purpose of curating and cataloguing UCT’s collection of prints. Apart from being an accomplished teacher, artist lithographer and illustrator, Katrine Harries was also responsible for establishing the printmaking section at the Michaelis School of Fine Art and making it an important centre for print production in South Africa. The Print Cabinet, established in her honour, is one of the university’s significant collections of works of art, and is active in curating exhibitions, publishing artists’ books, portfolios and fine prints. In 1989, the Print Cabinet published the first of its hand-made limited edition books, Mordant Methods: Art and Technique of Intaglio Printmaking. The second book in the series, On the Surface: Art and Technique of Relief Printmaking was published in 1995 followed by What’s Bred in the Stone: Art and Technique of Lithography in 1998. In 2004 it published a portfolio of artist prints to co-incide with the international Impact 2004 conference. 2009

1972

Students are made responsible for the cleaning of lecture theatres, workshops and toilets.

UCT students gather on the steps of St George’s Cathedral to protest the government’s interference in university autonomy. The police

arrive and baton-charge the students, shooting tear gas into the crowd.

Top: Katrine Harries with student, photographed in the 1960s. Above: Bird takes advantage of exam period to gather together a nest from student project debris in the litho stone store.

1968

1976

1896

Sir Richard Luyt is installed as Principal and Vice-Chancellor.

Professor A.H. Halsey delivers a paper entitled â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Academic Freedom and the idea of a universityâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; in this yearâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s T.B. Davie lecture series.

Numbers reach the 200 mark and are never to drop below this figure.

‘88.5% of full Professors at UCT are men’, Svea Josephy (Michaelis School of Fine Art)

Hugh Corder is Professor of Public Law and Dean of the Faculty of Law. He specialises in Constitutional and Administrative Law and has been extensively involved in community work, concentrating on popular legal education, race relations, human rights and the abolition of the death penalty. He acted as a technical adviser in the drafting of the transitional Bill of Rights for South Africa. Hugh Corder’s Independent Electoral Commission armband from the 1994 elections

1905 The College library is catalogued and stored in one room. The collection is expanded with the addition of the Royal Society of South Africa’s books. An honorary librarian is appointed.

1910 Baker and Kendall commence building Hiddingh Hall.

1910 Harold Cressy graduates from UCT with a BA degree, the first black student to do so. His admission to the university caused great controversy and he endured racial prejudice.

‘Resonance and Wonder’, an essay by founder of ‘New Historicism’ Stephen Greenblatt, has been central to the teaching of curatorship at the Michaelis School of Fine Art. Each year students are obliged to contemplate his discussion of these two features of display, a discussion which has, indeed, been the inspiration for much of the way we three curators have approached this Curiosity CLXXV exhibition.

H e r i t a g e

Scales, belonging to Professor Lefras Steyn from Medical Microbiology, containing Hugh Corder’s voting memorabilia from the 1994 elections

H i s t o r i c i s m

( n e w )

1982

2002

1906

Dr Neil Aggett, a UCT graduate and trade union leader, dies in detention.

Hans Porer gives a large collection of contemporary South African art to UCT on permanent loan.

The first meeting of the SRC is held on 14 June and an executive is elected, with S.J. Billingham as President.

Black metal travelling medicine chest, containing bottles and packets of medications belonging to Walter Floyd, given to UCT by the Floyd family (Manuscripts and Archives)

2003 Professor Jack Fletcher of the Catalysis Research Unit in the Department of Chemical Engineering and his team are investigating

1990 ways of producing thymol (an ingredient in the manufacture of menthol) more efficiently and with fewer by-products.

The State of Emergency is lifted.

77 Charles Diamond was President of the SRC in 1965-66. He consequently had the privilege of chairing the Annual Day of Affirmation of Academic and Human Freedom meeting at Jameson Hall on 6 June 1966 where Robert Kennedy, Senator of the State of New York and former Attorney-General of the United States of America delivered the address. Diamond completed a master’s thesis on ‘African Labour Problems on the South African Gold Mines, with special reference to the Strike of 1946’. African labour conditions over a timespan of more than fifty years were found to be remarkable not for changes and improvements to be expected as a natural by-product of increasing mechanisation, industrialisation and sophistication, but for the rigidity and resemblance to conditions at the turn of the century.

1998 UCT astronomers receive government funding for a giant telescope at Sutherland which will ensure the continuation of UCT as a participant in international astrophysics.

1935

1937

The new School of African Studies revives African studies at UCT.

There are 40 black students registered at UCT.

The photograph is of me with Phyllis Jordan, taken at a lunch in the mid-nineties to celebrate the naming of the A.C. Jordan Chair in African Studies. I was so pleased to meet her. I had known of her under another name – Phyllis Ntantala – whose autobiography, A Life’s Mosaic, we teach in African Studies to enthralled students. While she was honoured to be witness to the naming of the Chair after her late husband, who was the first African to be appointed to a full-time post at UCT, Ntantala has battled to establish her own voice, independent of her famous scholar husband and her activist (now Minister of Culture) son Pallo Jordan. She was born in 1920 and the mosaic of her life is one of those wonderful South African autobiographies which depict the ability of certain individuals to rise above great impediments. My memory of the lunch was of her fierceness on all issues and the complexities of her love for SA and the life she has made in America, so typical of many of the migrants from apartheid. I am also reminded of our difficulties in filling this Chair, given our inability to compete with the USA for the top African scholars – the USA to which A.C. Jordan eventually felt compelled to flee. Ntantala writes in her autobiography that only after A.C. died were people able to see her in her own right and not as ‘the appendage of the great man’. She bemoans the fact that may women are forced ‘to live vicariously through their husbands’ (p.230). Although we were honouring her husband, I treasure the photograph as marking my encounter with a feisty, interesting woman whose work is studied and appreciated at UCT in its own right. Brenda Cooper (Centre for African Studies) 2002 UCT’s Boehringer Ingelheim Lung Institute proves to be a phenomenal success under the directorship of Professor Eric Bateman.

1866 The Institute is particularly well placed in a city where the prevalence of TB, allergies and asthma is very high.

Governor Grey opens the paddock on the opposite side of the avenue in the Company Gardens as a playing field.

Van Luchen’s skin colour chart (Drennan Anatomy Museum) and divining disks from the UCT collection at the South African Museum

1938

1995

1993

A.W. Falconer succeeds Beattie as Principal and Vice-Chancellor of UCT.

Following SA’s first democratic elections, universities worldwide seek to establish academic links with UCT.

The government proposes a non–racial education system.

‘Sensual, but not too sensual’ An Italian collector asked me to make a bronze figure for him. He wanted a woman, ‘sensual’ he said, ‘but not too sensual, provocative, but not too provocative’. Alas, I missed the boat. ‘She’s not sexy enough,’ he complained. ‘Her legs are too masculine!’ Anyway, I thought I would like her to steer a little boat on a stormy evening. So here she is in a little boat in this little box for the university’s 175th birthday. David Brown (UCT alumnus) 2003 Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town Njongonkulu Ndungane is awarded the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the humanities for his commitment to socio-political issues.

1977 The Baxter Theatre opens.

2003 Hamilton Naki is awarded an honorary Master of Science in Medicine for being an extraordinary teacher and surgical craftsman. He started work at UCT as a gardener.

Professor Njabulo Ndebele, Vice-Chancellor of UCT since July 2000, is an author and poet. He has a long history in governance, having acted as Dean of the Faculty of Humanities and Vice-Chancellor at the University of Lesotho, Chair and Head of the African Literature Department, University of the Witwatersrand, Vice-Rector of the University of the Western Cape and Vice-Chancellor and Principal of the University of the North. He has been awarded honorary doctorates in literature from the University of Natal (Durban), the Vrije Universiteit (the Netherlands), and Soka University (Japan), and in Humane Arts from the Chicago State University. Part of his collection of dolls and stamps as well as translations of some of his publications are represented in this cabinet.

Back of the photograph of baby Njabulo and his mother (above) taken in 1949

1999

1960

2003

Philippe Salazar, Professor of French, is offered a Distinguished Chair in Humane Letters. Salazar was made a fellow of UCT in 1995.

Dr William Duncan Baxter bequeaths UCT R527 000 to build a theatre for eveyone, regardless of race or culture.

Tim Noakes, Professor of Excercise and Sports Science, wins the UCT Book Award for â&#x20AC;&#x153;Lore of Runningâ&#x20AC;? (4th edition).

Springbok ear rattles made for Lucy Lloyd in the 1870s (Kirby Collection at the South African College of Music)

1855

1989

Roderick Noble takes the Chair of Physical Science, becoming an influence on a generation of leaders of South African public life.

The Medical Research Councils of both UCT and Stellenbosch make a break-through in the understanding and treatment of hereditary

heart disease by identifying three genetic defects which cause the majority of cases.

I n c u b a t i o n

Incubator Struggling to breathe With papyrus lungs, To swallow Down a narrow Oesophagus funnel, In the incubator, Place of learning, Quadrangle, cloister, Sarcophagus in-waiting Is the infant of our knowledge.

Ingrid de Kok

I s o l a t i o n 1907 December 19: the South African College council engages in debate around the suggested appointment of a â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;lady teacherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; to teach Dutch. Mr Buissinne and Mr Bolus support the suggestion

but Mr Baxter feels that work and discipline would suffer. Eventually Miss Krige is appointed and begins work in January 1908. It is noted in the minutes that Miss

Krige is to be told that her appointment is an experiment and as such could be terminated with three months notice on each side.

‘Think’ Johann van der Schijff (Michaelis School of Fine Art)

The Extension (sic) of Universities Education Act restricted entry to universities by South Africans, who were free only to attend universities established for their own population groups. They could attend another university only with permission from the relevant Minister. The document (opposite) is a copy of the permit obtained from the Minister of Indian Affairs, and which granted the applicant permission to register as an MSc (Eng) student at UCT. He had previously had to obtain permission also to register as a BSc (Eng) student; this document has been mislaid. In the event, the master’s degree was never completed as the applicant left later in 1974 to pursue doctoral study at Cambridge University. Professor B D Reddy, Dean of the Faculty of Science 2003 Basil February (1943-1968) is awarded the Mendi Decoration for Bravery in Gold by President Thabo Mbeki. February’s application to study law at UCT was turned down by

1973 Deputy Minister of Education B.J. Voster because he was not white, though he later registered for medicine. He eventually dropped out of UCT to join Umkhonto we Sizwe.

Professor Monica Wilson retires as Chair of Social Anthropology at UCT.

1994 The honorary degree of Doctor of Literature is conferred on Professor Shula Marks, a UCT graduate who pioneered African historiography and influenced scholarship in departments of

1990 history, sociology, politics, anthropology, archaeology and gender studies on five continents.

Nelson Mandela is awarded an honorary doctorate by UCT.

86 Top: Asbestos collection from the now closed Geology Museum

2010 The university recognizes the importance of visual literacy and art classes are made compulsory for all first year students.

2004 Dr Patricia Davison of Iziko: the South African Museum leads a workshop at UCT on developing policy for the management of human remains in Iziko collections.

1944 Selwyn Langerman joins the Maths Department after his service in the South African Airforce and teaches applied maths.

87 The Universal Receipt Book or Practical Library London: (1824?) ‘Receipts’ (here meaning received rules) of this kind were originally handed down by word of mouth, and recorded in hand-written collections like this one. It includes recipes covering the following topics: metallurgy, varnishes, oil and water-colours, enamelling, engraving, dyeing, brewing, wines, distillation, cookery, medicine, farriery, tanning, horticulture, husbandry, rural and domestic economy: all the skills and crafts necessary for a trouble-free, and comfortable life in 19th century England and its colonies. (UCT Libraries: Rare Books & Special Collections) ANC/SACP booklets in false covers, published during the apartheid years, Jack and Ray Simons Papers 018.9 BC 1081 (Manuscripts and Archives)

Silver Class Medal from 1831, collection Hugh Amoore (Registrar)

Bottom left: ‘Universal Reports’ Part IV, 1618 Giovanni Botero 1540-1617 Botero was considered a powerful thinker by his contemporaries. He was an opponent of Macchiavelli who energetically refuted the mercantilist theories of his time, and who enuciated the law of increase of population, later known as Malthus’s law. His so-called Universal Reports, the product of his many travels, were published for the first time in 1591. This was a treatise on political geography and the state of religion throughout the known world. Part four of the 1618 edition contains woodcuts by the 15th century artist Hans Burgkmair (1473-1531), a contemporary of Albrecht Dürer. The book includes an image of a Khoi family – in Allago, most likely being St. Francis Bay, adjacent to Cape St. Francis – taken from Balthasar Springer’s account of the Francisco d’Almeida expedition to the Indies of 1505-1506. Springer’s orginal text accompanied Burgkmair’s set of woodcuts, first published in 1508. This book was donated to UCT Libraries by Woolworths to commemorate the 50th anniversary of its existence. Tanya Barben (UCT Libraries: Rare Books & Special Collections)

1940

1948

1938

Just over 25% of all students are living in the Residences.

UCT has the highest population of Rhodesian students in South Africa

The Herbarium moves from Kirstenbosch Gardens to University Avenue where it remains until 1984.

This box honours the 9 August 1956 Women’s March to the Union Buildings in the then Pretoria. It bears a single ‘reference book’ (formerly known as a pass book) which was collected by the artist in 1999 when preparing for the installation of his work entitled Workmen’s Compensation on the Champs Elysées. A flyer issued by the Federation of South African Women and the ANC Women’s League (Cape Western) dated 13 June 1957 reads as follows: ‘Who knows better than any African woman what it means to have a husband who must carry a pass? The women know that: PASSES MEAN PRISON PASSES MEAN BROKEN HOMES PASSES MEAN SUFFERING AND MISERY FOR EVERY AFRICAN FAMILY IN OUR COUNTRY PASSES ARE JUST ANOTHER WAY IN WHICH THE GOVERNMENT MAKES SLAVES OF THE AFRICANS PASSES MEAN HUNGER AND UNEMPLOYMENT PASSES ARE AN INSULT. And the Government is trying to force our WOMEN to carry passes too. No woman is fooled by the ‘Reference Book.’ We know that this is the same as a pass. If a woman is found without this book or if all the papers inside are not in order, she will be pushed into the Kwela-Kwela and taken to gaol. Her children will be left motherless.’ Gavin Younge (Michaelis School of Fine Art) Source: Thomas Karis and Gwendolin Carter, (eds), 1977. From Protest to Challenge: A Documentary History of African Politics in South Africa 1882-1964, Vol.3, p.403, Hoover Institution Press, Stanford University.

1990

1991

1973

Pontso Monese and Mosedi Namane are the first two African women to graduate as doctors from UCT.

Dr Bob Brain is awarded the honorary degree Doctor of Science for his work on cave deposits, predation and the early use of fire.

David Levick, UCT graduate, wins the Comrades Marathon.

Working papers from the South African Labour and Development Research Unit in the Economics Department in the Faculty of Commerce

Site of the first SHAWCO Clinic at Windemere 1990

1976

1946

Exâ&#x20AC;&#x201C;UCT lecturer Professor Jack Simon and Ray Alexander return from exile. Both take up posts at UCTâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Centre for African Studies.

The Centre for Conflict Resolution mediates in the 1976 upheavals after the Soweto uprising.

UCT loses 30 members of staff who find better paid employment elsewhere.

‘Alien’, water-colour, 2004. Bridget Simons (Graduate of the Michaelis School of Fine Art)

1998 UCT alumnus Professor Ralph Hendrickse, head of the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, receives an honorary DSc in

1939 Medicine from UCT. Shortly after becoming the first doctor to complete a master’s degree in Paediatrics at UCT, he left the country.

The new medical residence is completed, offering medical students 112 rooms.

J u d g e m e n t

The force of poetry Om die weg te baan tussen oorsprong en uiting (Siamese tweeling onafskeibaar). Dié klein kringloop skep sy eie wette: die moordenaar keer na die toneel van misdaad terug; Einstein verhef tot die skilder van die Mona Lisa; lewe boots fiksie – geëlektrifiseerde draad – steelmatig na … Dié wetmatigheid verraai niks van die noodsaak – opvallende keerweer – om kortsluitings uit niks te trek. Joan Hambidge (Joan Hambidge is Professor in the School of Languages and Literatures)

1837

1929

2003

A new ordinance is passed by Governor D'Urban cutting professors’ fixed salaries from £200 to £100.

Fine Art achieves full faculty status.

Professor J.M. Coetzee becomes UCT's third Nobel laureate, winning the Nobel Prize for literature.

Orangutan and armadillos from the Zoology department displayed in their lab in the 1920s and in Hiddingh Hall in 2004.

2004 President Thabo Mbeki is hosted at the African leadership award by Vice-Chancellor Njabulo Ndebele at UCT. Chancellor Graça Machel awards UCT’s inaugural

1980

Chancellor’s Award for Outstanding Leadership in Africa to the president.

Roch-Kelly is named UCT Sportsperson of the Year. She is the first woman to win a silver medal at the Comrades marathon.

Above: wax models from the Drennan Museum of Anatomy and models of the voice box used in the study and teaching of linguistics. (Collection, Department of Linguistics in the School of Languages and Literature)

1948 Ralph Hendrickse is one of the first medical graduates ‘of colour’. He achieves his MBChB at the age of 22, the youngest in his class. He

1940 goes on to complete a master’s Degree in Pediatrics at UCT (the first doctor to do so), but apartheid forces him to leave the country.

Thirty staff members sign up to answer the country’s call to arms at the start of World War II.

‘Wax is the material of all resemblances. Its figurative virtues are so remarkable that it was often considered a prodigious, magical material, almost alive – and disquieting for that very reason. Even if we leave aside Pharaonic Egypt and its spellbinding texts, Pliny the Elder’s Natural History already catalogues, in the Roman period, the entire technicalmythical repertory of the medical, cosmetic, industrial, and religious properties of wax. Closer to our time, a Sicilian wax-

Wax teaching model of a man’s hand with Ekzema rhagadiforme (No. 443) and opposite male genitals exhibiting gonorrhea (Anatomy storeroom, Department of Human Biology)

1957 Chancellor A van de Sandt Centlivres, accompanied by Vice-Chancellor Professor R.W. James, leads a march through Adderley Street in

1984

Cape Town. The march is in protest against legislation introducing ‘apartheid universities’.

The UCT Fund Inc. (US) is launched in New York to raise money for UCT’s black student advancement programmes.

worker [Cedrini], a modest supplier of exvotos and crèche figurines, expressed some fifteen years ago his wonder at the strange powers of this material, nonetheless so familiar to him: “It is marvelous. You can do anything with it ... It moves.” This material has provided the privileged metaphor of the work of memory, and even of sensorial operations in general.’ Georges DidiHuberman Encyclopaedia Anatomica Musei La Specola Florence

1943 The war in Europe creates a paper shortage so, for this year, the university calendar contains no Law, Fine Art or Architecture prospectus.

1942 Hiddingh campus (except the Little Theatre) is taken over by the military as headquarters for the Coastal Area Command. Staircases are reinforced with wooden beams to facilitate

marching up and down the stairs. These are only partially removed in 2004 to facilitate the installation of the 175th anniversary exhibition Curiosity.

In 1933 Margaret Shaw, a graduate of the School of African Life and Languages at UCT, joined the staff of the South African Museum as the first Ethnologist. By this time the study of material culture at UCT had become largely confined to archaeology and the focus of anthropology had shifted to the study of social relations. Although UCT had a small ethnological museum, the collections were neglected and eventually placed in the care of the S A Museum. Margaret Shaw’s enduring work forms the basis of present curatorial practice. Patricia Davison (Director of Social History, Iziko: South African Museum, Research Associate of UCT)

1925

1886 – 1887

Governor-General the Earl of Athlone lays the foundation stone of the Wernher and Beit medical laboratories.

The SA College council agrees to Professor. P.D. Hahn’s request that women students be accepted into his chemistry classes for a one

year trial period. The first four women students register and two of them achieve first and second place in the final chemistry examination.

K i n g d o m s

The ordering of knowledge became extensively systematised during the European Age of Reason. This extended not only to systems of arranging libraries, encyclopaedias and cabinets of curiosity, but to the very field of learning and research itself. Sir Francis Bacon, the great systematiser of scientific reason, would frequently illustrate the title pages to his books with a visual representation of the journey to the kingdom of Knowledge, the thinker’s domain. Such an illustration would show a sailing ship moving on beyond the Pillars of Hercules, in search of new territories of the mundus intellectualis, the intellectual world. As Bacon noted in his Refutation of Philosophies, ‘It would disgrace us now that the wide spaces of the material globe, the lands and the seas, have been broached and explored, if the limits of the intellectual globe should be set by the narrow discoveries of the ancients.’ Andrew Lamprecht (Michaelis School of Fine Art) (Peter Burke, A Social History of Knowledge: From Gutenberg to Diderot. 2000: 113-14)

Stainless steel dilator with label (Drennan Anatomy Museum) Carded set of glass slides of Xenopus heart sections (Medical Microbiology Collection) Frogs and Toads, a game (Manuscripts and Archives) Wax model of embryo (Drennan Anatomy Museum)

K n o w l e d g e s 2002 UCT makes history by conferring an honorary degree abroad for the first time. The recipient is United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan.

1948 Dr T.B. Davie is installed as Vice-Chancellor. Davie affirms his and the university's commitment to the principles of academic freedom.

2004 George Ellis, Professor of Mathematics at UCT, wins the Templeton Prize for Progress Towards Research or Discoveries about Spiritual Realities.

1959

2002

Shula Eta Marks graduates from UCT with a bachelor’s degree in English and history, earning firsts in both.

Professor Johann Luteharms of UCT’s Oceanography Department shows that the Mozambique Current does not really exist. As

South Africa’s weather is largely determined by the oceans surrounding it, this knowledge may improve capacity to predict rainfall in advance.

Objects from the Kirby Collection at the South African College of Music, including a strung rattle with pellet balls of unknown provenance, dated to 1931, tortoise carapace folk lute (gunibri) dated to 1928, Venda feather stick zither, a model of a quill (1931) and clay 20th century globular Chinese flute

1855 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; 1875

1906

1918

Protracted war and cattleâ&#x20AC;&#x201C;killing episodes create chaos and starvation on the Eastern frontier.

The first Students Representative Council is elected.

The University of Cape Town is inaugurated.

100

Lipiko mask depicting Graça Machel Carved Ntene wood, paint, earth oxides. Circa 1990. Collection: Gavin & Glenda Younge This lipiko helmet mask (plural mapiko) was collected by Gavin Younge in 1994 whilst conducting research for the first Johannesburg Biennale. The artist/woodcarver is Jorrente Malaya from Mpeme on the Makonde Plateau in northern Mozambique. The masks are intended to be worn by male initiates (vaali) as part of an elaborate, and energetic, initiation dance. Consequently many of these masks are carved from the relatively light wood of the kapok tree (Ceiba pentandra). The Makonde plateau is geographically remote and until recently was further isolated by the ravages of the civil war in Mozambique. Perhaps these two factors have contributed to the continuance of the tradition. In respect of the dance, and according to Duarte (1992: 22)(see also Younge 1994-95): the institution of Mapico goes beyond the Likola, it is meant to have a broader function in the domain of social reproduction. The woman must defend herself against seduction and capture. The aggressiveness and terror provoked by the masquerader is thus aimed at keeping the women on guard against illegal and secret seducers. Jorge and Margot Dias produced a pioneering study of the Makonde people and set out the basic format for the dance of the ‘living dead’. Whilst attempts are made to make non-dancing participants think that the dancer is the ‘incarnated spirit of a dead person’ (Duarte 1992: 14), great merriment ensues when a credible resemblance to a well-known personality of the day is achieved. Duarte, R. T., 1992. Máscaras. Sevilha/Maputa: Museu Naçional d’ Arte. Younge, G., 1994/5. ‘An Explorer’s Hat, a Fireman’s Jacket, a Coconut Hat, the Cape of an English Sergeant, and a Haircomb’. In Artworks in Progress, Vol 4. 63 – 76.

2002 Professor Les Underhill, Director of UCT’s Avian Demography Unit, is made a fellow of the university. In the same year

1925 he develops a website for the world’s most famous and most watched penguins, Percy, Peter and Pamela.

Chancellor HRH Prince of Wales lays the foundation stone for the new Groote Schuur buildings in a ceremony on the 1st of May.

L i b e r a t i o n s

101

‘Umbrella’ Stuart Saunders (former Vice-Chancellor of UCT)

Emeritus Professor Stuart Saunders was the UCT Chief Physician and Head of Department at Groote Schuur Hospital in the 1970s, where he founded the Liver Clinic in the Department of Medicine. He was responsible for ending the segregated training of medical registrars and, in 1981, became the sixth Vice-Chancellor of UCT. During his 16-year term he guided the university through the difficult years of the transition to democracy and was outspoken on a range of civil justice issues.

L u s t r e 2003 Dr Helen Moffett of the African Gender Institute at UCT, a prolific writer in the field of gender, collaborates with Professor Tim Noakes

of the Sports Science Institute on a definitive manual for the coaching, playing and watching of cricket.

1969 Vice-Chancellor Richard Luyt delivers an address on 17 April reaffirming his and the university’s stand on academic freedom.

2003

1996

1837

UCT archaeologists excavate an unmarked burial ground in Green Point. The find may have profound implications for city planning.

Geoffry Hyland, lecturer in the Department of Drama, wins a Standard Bank Young Artist award .

Students numbers are down to 70. The English Classics professor tenders his resignation.

103

‘Les Trés Riches heures’ 2004 Vivien Cohen Vivien Cohen founded the Vivien Cohen Bursary Fund at the Michaelis School of Fine Art which assists students in need with the costs of art materials.

Left: Items from collections in Mathematics (a Martello Calculator donated by J.W. Jagger), three examples of the last hand-written doctoral theses in the Department of Chemical Engineering, crystal collection from the Geology Museum, dusters and boxes of chalk as well as other paraphenalia relating to library stacks

2004

1980

2003

Kenneth Abrahams, who first joined UCT and the Bindery division in 1958, retires.

J.M. Coetzee of UCT’s English Department publishes Waiting for the Barbarians.

Dr Sean Field of the Centre for Popular Memory launches a programme to archive records of the 1994 Rwandan genocide.

104

‘You and UCT’ Photographed above is the steering committee of the exhibition held at the Drill Hall in 1963 as well as images from the displays of ornithology and research methods. The exhibition was a great success and paying crowds visited in droves. The architect in charge, J.M. Miszewski is pictured at the top left. The evidence of this exhibition as well as others held in the 1960s initially escaped our notice and we thank Noeleen Murray for drawing this to our attention.

John Goodwin’s 3 stage Stone Age sequence – Early Stone Age 1.5 million – 300 000 years; 300 000 to 30 000 Middle Stone Age and 30 000- 300 yrs Later Stone Age. The thin red line represents the formal institutionalisation of knowledge. At the far right is a surveyor’s chain. The stones were selected by Royden Yates, UCT alumnus and archaeologist at the South African Museum. Opposite: J.H. Goodwin’s drawing of Aboriginal rock paintings in Australia 2002

1925

1859

Council approves plans for a new chemical engineering facility. It is completied in 2004 after 475 000 hours of labour.

The first Rag procession is held in the streets of Cape Town. Proceeds are donated to Groote Schuur Hospital.

The Faculty of Law is established.

M e m o r y

105

Memory, Marking and Mobility The calico wrapping in which Olive Schreiner covered the manuscript of her masterpiece, The Story of an African Farm, when she posted it off to Chapman and Hall – her publishers – is preserved in Manuscripts and Archives, UCT Libraries. Since the original manuscript has been lost, this is a charged artefact, physically the closest thing we have to the precious object that it once held which is now but a memory. Textual critics would find no value in this ephemeral piece of memorabilia and yet this object, which speaks so eloquently of lost things, is a powerful container of meaning. We can see by its markings that the author was proud of her work. The hand-stitched calico covering reminds us that needlework, like the novel that the covering once protected on its journey to England, is the product of women’s work. The precious casement moved from author to publisher by means of a reliable and systematised postal system. Upon publication the book travelled the world over, translated, republished and transmitted by numerous media, most of which would have been beyond the dreams of its dream-conscious author. That tale of an African farm is now found in moving image, play, radio drama, comic book adaptation,

M a r k i n g M o b i l i t y 2000 John Higgins is awarded the UCT Book Award for Raymond Williams: Literature, Marxism and Cultural Materialism.

2003 Professor John de Gruchy, director of the Graduate School in the Humanities is awarded an A rating from the National Research Foundation.

2003 Pieter-Dirk Uys is awarded a DLitt at the June graduation for his distinguished, socially responsive work.

106

â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Sexism, a Lesson at School?â&#x20AC;&#x2122; an essay written for her school magazine by Cheryl de la Rey, demonstrates an early preoccupation with a subject in which she would later become an expert. Cheryl de lay Rey initially joined the Psychology Department in 1995 before taking up a post at the National Research Foundation. She returned to UCT and is now Deputy ViceChancellor in charge of research and an authority on race and gender studies.

1996

2003

Mark Fleishman, lecturer in the Department of Drama, wins an AA Vita Award for his adaption of Medea.

Tim Noakes, Professor of Sports Science, continues to influence global thinking in the field of competitive sports by showing how

hyponatraemia (a lower than normal concentration of sodium in the blood) can follow the intake of too much liquid.

107

digital audio file (‘read’ by a text-to-speech software engine) and e-book. The mobility (and mutability) of texts is now a commonplace and heavy reliance on alphabetic marks for conveying our thoughts beyond the limited realms of ordinary memory is a thing of the past. We may gaze on that fragile calico and wonder at its power to entrance the imagination. Why do we cherish such a wretched thing, so seemingly devoid of any academic value? That it has been preserved and protected in our university’s archive is a testament to the human ability to see beyond the obvious, to be nostalgic for that which has slipped through our grasp. It speaks to us of the protective covering of a memory: the transmitter of our country’s great literary masterpiece. It also tells us that the great novel that is now scattered in multifarious forms throughout the globe, in innumerable copies, was once a singular artefact, hand-written by a thendiffident very young woman who would be forced to publish under a male pseudonym. Perhaps the masculine name, ‘Ralph Irons’, on the title page of the first edition, is a marking that we would do well not to forget. Andrew Lamprecht (Michaelis School of Fine Art)

1959

1992

1996

Breyten Breytenbach completes his BA at the Michaelis School of Fine Art

Andre Brink, professor in the English Department wins the Mosimanien Prize for Human Rights from the University of Uppsala.

Dulcie Howes, doyenne of ballet in South Africa for 40 years, receives an honorary doctorate in music from UCT.

1964 Deon Knobel joins the pathology laboratory on Hiddingh Campus. On his retirement in 2004, as head of Forensic Medicine at UCT, he will have worked on over 15 000 cases.

1953

1993

It is decided that all Rag proceeds will be donated to Shawco. The Windemere clinic moves to new premises on 12th Ave.

Ivan Toms is appointed director of Shawco and the organisation shifts from a welfare to a developmental approach.

N o t e s

109

There is hardly a species of scholarship that is not fuelled by a rich reservoir of notes. Note taking is the foundational act of creating any new knowledge and is a visual reminder of what the scholar and researcher finds to be of interest or value to the project at hand (or projected in the future). In predicating our research on that of the past we build upon a vast edifice. We may be reminded of Bernard of Chartre’s famous statement that we are like dwarves on the shoulders of giants which, incidentally, comes down to us thanks to the note-taking of John of Salisbury and is here printed in the book you now hold as a result of reference to my notes. This activity can, of course, lead to an entropic situation where, in the clutter of knowledge, old data – unchecked – are allowed to replicate and multiply and good thought is built upon fallacy and as a result is fallacious too. (A good example of such a piece of old clutter is the chestnut that it was Newton who first coined the observation of Bernard’s mentioned above.) Sometimes for real intellectual breakthroughs to take place it is necessary to demolish the top few floors of an unsound structure, or take the path less travelled (boarded up and labelled ‘dangerous road’). Our insights, now dislocated from years of more recent thinking, thus take on a new freshness and vibrancy. Neoteny rules. Andrew Lamprecht, Michaelis School of Fine Art Burke, Peter. 2000. A Social History of Knowledge: From Gutenberg to Diderot. London: Polity.

Left: A print-out of a small fraction of chromosome 17 on which is located the genes that influence the development of retinitis pigmentosa. A team led by Professor Raj Ramesar of the Human Genetics Research Unit and Professor Jacquie Greenberg has been responsible for the identification of the genes. To date 150 genes have been linked to inherited retinal disease. ‘A googly delivery’ from page 56

N e o t e n y 1979 Actor Richard E Grant graduates from the UCT Drama School together with Sean Taylor, Fiona Ramsay, Neil McCarthy and Ian Roberts.

1973 UCT mathematician George Ellis co-authors The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time with Stephen Hawking.

1920-23 Under the leadership of Hugh Reyburn, psychology laboratories are established and the course becomes one of the most popular at UCT.

Left: ‘Extremely Improbable Musical Moment’ dated 1986, by Peter Klatzow, previously reproduced in a booklet produced for the Centenary of Women on Campus by UCT Below: A detail extracted from a publication of ‘The Xhosa Dances’ by Jasmine Honoré, assisted by Tsolwana Mpayipeli and Nicolette St John Reid (Manuscripts and Archive)

2003

1989

2004

J.M. Coetzee publishes Elizabeth Costello: Eight Lessons.

Time magazine names Athol Fugard the greatest active playwright in the English language.

Angelo Gobbato, head of UCT’s opera school has transformed opera in South Africa.

111

1852 Francis Guthrie formulates the four colour problem, asking whether it is possible to colour any map with four or fewer colors so that adjacent regions (those that share a

1829 common boundary) are all coloured differently. He becomes a mathematics professor at SACS in 1861.

October 1st: Classes begin in the Long Street WeĂŤhuis with 115 students, many of them children scarcely able to read.

112

1949

1962

1937

Board of Extraâ&#x20AC;&#x201C;Mural Studies comes into being.

Cissie Gool is awarded an LLB degree from UCT. She is admitted as an advocate to the Supreme Court.

Jack Simons applies for the position of lecturer in Native Administration. His application is successful.

O r i g i n a t i o n

113

‘There’s a door in my apartment which I never noticed until now. It’s in a wall in the bedroom, which adjoins the neighbouring house. I never gave it a thought, let alone knew it was there.’ Franz Kafka ‘Fragments from Notebooks and Loose Sheets’

O p e n i n g s O b f u s c a t i o n 2003 Dr George Vicatos of the Department of Mechanical Engineering with Dr Keith Hosking of the Vincent Pallotti Hospital, develops a titanium,

1993 hydroxyapatite-coated prosthesis, giving patients with Gorham's disease (bonedisappearing disease) a chance at a normal life.

Miriam Makeba receives an honorary doctorate for her role in promoting African music and musicians internationally.

114

Two cabinets variously containing title deeds on parchment with wax seals from the tenth year of the reign of James I (Alton Mills Stationary Box), labels from old exhibits at the South African Museum, string of metal beads and a leather pouch from the UCT Collection at the South African Museum, South African College silver-plated case for calling cards, medal from the James Moir Collection, South African College badges and a teaspoon featuring the Egyptian Building at Hiddingh Campus (Forest-Thompson Collection)

2002 Dr Kelly Chibale of UCT’s Department of Chemistry studies enzymes crucial to the survival of disease-causing organisms. Such

1934 research could result in the development of drugs to treat cancer, tuberculosis, malaria and sleeping sickness.

An irate member of the public writes to UCT complaining about the tasteless and offensive ‘Hospital Rag’ float in this year’s Rag parade.

115

Hugh Amoore’s medals and pens with a page from his book of stamps and cards relating to UCT (Collection Hugh Amoore) Hugh Amoore was appointed Registrar in 1987 at the age of 36. He is responsible for the academic administration and legal issues across the university and his calligraphic script has become synonymous with governance. In 1979, when it was decided to award permanent numbers to all runners who had achieved three wins, or five gold medals, or 10 finishes in the Two Oceans Marathon, he was awarded the permanent Number One.

1914 Frances Lyndall Schreiner, daughter of former Prime Minister of the Cape Colony W.P. Schreiner, and niece of well–known writer and

1938 feminist Olive Schreiner, qualifies as UCT’s first female Bachelor of Law graduate.

Groote Schuur Hospital is opened on 31 January.

116

Left: Folder from the Transplant Museum containing the records of baboon number 341 sacrificed in the interests of medical research Above: Brian Sassman, with catheters he designed to maintain circulation and allow for measurements on pigs, and various laryngascopic blades adapted by him to fit down the throats of rats, ducks and pigs. The old photographs shows him (second from right) with his mother and siblings Brian Sassman is a laboratory technician in the Department of Anaesthesia.

1996 Dr Helen Annan Brown, who graduated from UCT as a doctor in 1935, is awarded the honorary degree of Doctor of Medicine.

1943 A reading room is named in her honour at Medical School library.

The music library with a record-listening room is opened.

117

Images of Groote Schuur and stamps featuring Professor Chris Barnard from Hugh Amoore’s collection. Photograph of the team of doctors and nurses who performed the first heart transplant in 1967 Surgical instruments from the Drennan Museum The ‘bionic bone’ developed by Dr George Vicatos (Mechanical Engineering) and Dr Keith Hosking, a coated titanium prosthesis which enables bone growth

Correctional orthopaedic paediatric boots from a collection at Groote Schuur Hospital

1935 Margaret Cairns graduates with an LlB from UCT, one of the first two women law graduates.

1959 Raymond ‘Bill’ Hoffenberg becomes senior lecturer in the Department of Medicine at UCT. His contribution to endocrinology, clinical teaching and to the fight against apartheid

would eventually result in the award of an honorary Doctor of Science in Medicine Degree being conferred on him by UCT.

118

Set of three engraved tsama melon knives, on a necklace UCT38/37 From the condition report prepared by June Hosford:

‘All 3 bone knives are dry and worn and the incised decoration has faded. The many small lower leg, animal bones are dry and brittle, as is the thong that they and the knives are strung on. The twisted sinew thread that the necklace is threaded on has broken at one point but the beads have been secured. Display flat and support when moving the knives on necklace during exhibition preparation’. Measurements: average L. knives: 123 mm L. necklace: 719 mm

1995 USHEPiA (University Science, Humanities and Engineering Partnerships in Africa) is launched. Its vision is of an African Renaissance powered by intellectuals across the continent.

1951

2004

The first Summer School is approved.

Professor Deon Knobel retires as head of UCT’s Division of Forensic Medicine.

119

Tamme, a !kun boy who came from an area north of Damaraland, told Lucy Lloyd in 1880 of a practice of beating the ground with a stone, possibly a rain-making ritual. ‘The !kun beat a stone upon the ground. My father’s mother beat a stone upon the ground. She said: “Fall into the water! Fall into the water!” And the thing, the lightening, fell into the water. A man does not beat a stone upon the ground. A woman beats a stone upon the ground.’ (Lucy Lloyd’s notebooks, page 9298)

1965

2003

The Department of Urban and Regional Planning is formed.

Cissie Gool is awarded the Order of Luthuli in Silver (posthumously) for outstanding contribution to the struggle for

liberation and for the ideals of a just, non-racial and democratic South Africa.

120

1997

1910

2003

Cecil Michaelis dies at the age of 93.

The South African College of Music opens in Strand Steet, Cape Town, with six students.

The Institute for Film and New Media (IFNM) opens on the Hiddingh Campus.

121

Below: Mouse taxidermy performed by Meg Ledeboer (Department Administrator, Zoology) Left: Whale ear bone fossil from the desk of Charlie Griffiths, (Associate Professor, Department of Zoology). Owing to its extreme density, the ear bone is the part of the whale that endures the longest

2003 Nine years after the first democratic elections Professor Crain Soudien of the Department of Education, with Dr Yusuf

2002 Sayed at the University of Sussex, spearheads a study which seeks to understand racial affairs and integration in South African schools.

Professor Jan Glazewski of the Law Faculty wins the UCT Book Award for his work on environmental law in South Africa.

The Department of Anatomy (now the Department of Human Biology) has been home to several distinguished researchers in physical anthropology including R.Thomson (1911 to 1919), J.A. Keen (1942 to 1959), R. Singer (1945 to 1960), L.H. Wells (1955 to 1974), and E.N. Keen (1974 to 1986). Research in the subject of human origins and human variation has continued from the start of the department in 1911 until the present, but the focus and conceptualisation of the research has shifted significantly since the formative work done during the long tenure of Mathew Drennan (1916 to 1955). . Both Drennan and the current physical anthropologist Alan Morris have been interested in the origin of South African peoples from the Late Pleistocene to modern times. The main differences between them are in their attitudes to ‘race’. Drennan was strictly typological and was really part of the ‘Old Physical Anthropology’. His use of types, including the ‘Boskop’ type, showed an interpretation of human variation which clustered humanity into precise types, each with a separate origin and ancient history. Morris, on the other hand, has tended to view humans as groups rather than types. Categories are temporary and reflect ongoing change rather than ancient roots. Morris has examined the relationships between populations in terms of both gene flow and adaptation. Both Drennan and Morris have explorered ancestry through ‘old bones’, but what the bones told them has been viewed differently.

1926 Courses in sociology are taught at UCT for the first time.

1995 The Centre for Rhetoric Studies is established at UCT following the first Symposium of Rhetoric in Africa. It is directed by Professor Philippe Salazar.

1859 A lectureship in law is established at the South African College (making UCT’s Law Faculty the oldest in the country).

p e r s p e c t i v e S

123

The Cape Town Stereotactic Pointer This is based on the principles of 3D vector algebra. Five slices of the patient’s brain are made with the computerised tomographic (CT) scanner: the target lesion, the positions of the three legs of the tripod, and the entry point in the skull. The three-dimensional coordinates (XYZ) of these five points can be measured with the CT scanner and this information can then be used with the Cape Town Stereotatic Pointer to enable the surgeon to locate the lesion. Original development team: Profesor Laurie Adams, Barbara van Geems, Michael Price, Ann Stekhoven, Professor Gyuri Jaros Orientation of the Skull ‘In order to place the skull as nearly as possible in the position which it occupies in the living body, and in order to make the results – drawings and measurements – of different workers comparable, certain arbitrary methods of orienting the skull have been made use of. Whilst there is no unanimity amongst anthropologists with regard to this question, there is no doubt that the method recommended by the Frankfort conference of anatomists has had most universal acceptance. It has the advantage that it can be applied to the head of the living. In this method the lowest point of each orbital rim or margin and the highest point on the rim of the external acoustic opening are made to lie on the same horizontal plane, called the Frankfort plane.’ M.R. Drennan (Professor of Anatomy) from A Short Course on Physical Anthropology (undated, p. 7) Cranium with funnel filled with linseeds used to measure cranial capacity (Anatomy Museum) Skeleton of a youth mounted to show articulation of joints (Anatomy Museum) Photograph and field notebook of Alan Morris, Professor in the Division of Anatomy and Cell Biology and expert in the field of human evolution and the skeletal biology of earlier peoples in southern Africa Glass slides are found in many departments. Most are no longer used and many will soon be tossed away with other redundant teaching and study material. These slides are part of the collection of material left to UCT by M.R. Drennan Skull used for teaching purposes in the study of forensic pathology (Professor Deon Knobel)

P o s i t i o n i n g P a r t i c u l a r i s a t i o n 1994

1947

1960

South Africa holds its first democratic elections. Nelson Mandela is elected president.

On a visit to South Africa, the Queen Mother becomes the third woman to have an honorary degree bestowed on her by UCT.

Wieland Gevers is awarded both the University Gold Medal for the most distinguished graduate in medicine and a Rhodes Scholarship.

124

â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Digging the pastâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; In this model of the excavation at De Kelders in the 1970s, the archaeologists are Frank Schweitzer, Graham Avery and Kate Scott, all UCT graduates, assisted by Neville Eden and Imogen Chesselet, who made the model for the Archaeology Gallery at the SA Museum. The model was intended to show archaeological method but inadvertently also made the point that knowledge of the past is shaped by people in the present. Patricia Davison (South African Museum) Photograph of Richard Nixon with Elvis Presley, on loan from Annette Seegers who is Professor in the Department of Political Studies. Seegers has been, among other things, advisor to the head of the research division of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and contributed to the writing of part of the new South African constitution.

1957

1995

1988

Neville Alexander is awarded a Master of Arts degree from UCT. He is later imprisoned on Robben Island.

Jeffrey Dumo Baqwa is appointed as the first Professor of Primary Health at UCT.

Vusi Khanyile, special assistant to the ViceChancellor, escapes from detention.

125

‘Round Houses’ Noeleen Murray (Centre for African Studies) Including a musical bow from the Kirby Collection at the South African College of Music and a letter from A.M. Anderson about round houses at the Veryan Village. (Papers of Vivien and Derek Japha, Manuscripts and Archives) 1999 Judith Sephuma, graduate of UCT’s College of Music, wins the first prize for Best Jazz Vocalist at the Old Mutual Jazz Into the Future competition.

1829 Dr James Adamson, founder of the Presbyterian Church in South Africa, becomes the principal of the school senate formed to run the South African College.

1926 UCT graduate Mary Hall becomes the first woman admitted as an attorney in South Africa.

126

â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Urban Sublimeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; Thomas Cartwright Oil on gesso

1912

1929

1921

W.H. Bell is appointed Principal of the S.A. College of Music.

The holdings of the library reach 45 000 volumes.

The Faculty of Commerce is established.

127

Capacitance Galvanometers, measuring electric currents; Wheatstone Bridges, measuring electric resistance; variable capacitors, measuring electrical charge; potentiometer, used for comparing voltage; crystal goniometer, measuring crystal face angles (all from the Physics department); crystal 175 from the crystal collection in the Geology Museum; a tutu from the School of Ballet; M. R. Drennan’s models of the human embryo; a wax model of flesh from the Anatomy Museum As a physics term, capacitance refers to the ratio of charge to electric potential on an electrically charged, isolated conductor. More broadly, capacity can be seen as the measure of the ability to receive, hold or absorb – aptitude or facility. Whereas, inductance, while being the property of an electric circuit that enables an electromagnetic force to be generated as a result of a change of current in the same circuit or in a nearby circuit that is magnetically linked, also refers to induction. In this sense it evokes notions of logical reasoning and the initiation into systems of knowledge.

1967 3 December: Professor Chris Barnard performs the first human heart transplant, an event that attracts international attention and awareness of Groote Schuur Hospital.

1925 Isaac Schapera graduates from UCT and travels overseas on the HB Webb Gift Research Scholarship. He later becomes known as ‘the’

authority on the ethnology of southern Africa, in particular, the Tswana people, and leaves a collection of artefacts to UCT.

Architectural model, notes and drawings from the Faculty of Engineering and the Built Environment, including the urban design scheme for the Cape Town Foreshore by members of staff in the School of Architecture and Planning, including Roelof Uytenbogaardt. Assembled by Noeleen Murray (Centre for African Studies)

1923

2002

1996

The Department of Classics is formed.

THE UCT Opera School receives a R5-million Mellon Foundation donation.

Akin Omotso, a UCT trained actor and graduate, wins the Fleur Du Cap award.

129

‘One Step Forward; Two Steps Back’ Geoff Grundlingh (Michaelis School of Fine Art)

1929 Monsignor Frederic Charles Kolbe receives the honorary degree of Doctor of Literature. He was influential in the establishment of the Michaelis School of Fine Art. He had presented an art

1996 collection to the university and was appointed its first curator. The university, however, did not maintain the collection after his death.

Dr Saunders retires and Dr Mamphela Ramphele becomes UCT’s seventh Vice– Chancellor.

130

‘Stick Figure Universe’ (2004) Virginia MacKenny Blood charcoal, vegetable charcoal, ultramarine pigment, glass ‘The stick figure universe is a computer-generated image derived from redshift surveys. It represents one of the most sophisticated pictorial visualizations of the known universe. The researchers who found it joined the dots and, perhaps predictably, saw an image of a human figure, albeit in rudimentary form akin to a child’s early drawing. Within the box, glimpsed through the stars, is one of the primary elements or components of life: carbon/charcoal dust. The charcoal is derived from vegetables and blood. From charcoal we make images. From its blackness we draw our world.’

1977 The Von Beckerath Organ, a magnificent example of its kind, is given its inaugural concert by a group of prominent Cape Town

1841 – 1845 organists, including Professor Michael Brimer, Dean and Director of the South African College of Music.

Student numbers rise from 16 to 45, including free scholars.

131 Godfrey Koff (Michaelis School of Fine Art) First appointed in 1983 as a Certified Sailor on the T.B. Davie research ship, serving until 1989 Seaman’s identification issued in 1982. ‘If you lose your passport you are in big trouble, so you are given one of these to use when you are on the boat.’ Seaman’s book, isued in 1967 with a record of all the vessles served on and for how long. The last record was for the T.B. Davie Letter of appointment to UCT and photographs taken on board the T. B. Davie Below left: The T.B. Davie Below right: Todorokite-rich manganese nodules from the Southeast Cape Basin, station 6854 at a depth of 4517m. The spheroidal, botryoidal nodules are on average 6cm in diameter and these two nodules, 6854G 2 & 4, have several nuclei of largely devitrified basaltic glass. The growth rate of the nodules is 3.6mm every million years and they are thus time capsules of oceanographic history. These nodules have a two-layer internal structure, which reflects growth in the early to middle Pleistocene phase, followed by the middle Pleistocene to Holocene phase, where ice rafted quartz grains were included in the outer layer. John Rogers (Department of Geology

2000 John de Gruchy, Professor of Christian Studies and fellow at UCT, is made the first director of the Graduate School in the Humanities.

2003 Professor Lynette Denny of UCT’s Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology wins the Shoprite/Checkers/SABC2 Woman of the Year Award in the category of Science and Technology.

2002 Brian Watermeyer becomes the first blind student to graduate as a clinical psychologist.

132

1927

1929

First annual Michaelis School of Fine Art public exhibition is inaugurated by John Wheatley.

Twenty-six different degrees are offered by the university.

A.J.H. Godwin is promoted to the position of senior lecturer and introduces Ethnography and Archaeology courses.

Q u a d r i v i u m

133

University curricula are measures of the intellectual, philosophical and economic sentiments of the period in which they are constructed, and what is seen as the natural confluence between disciplines shifts over time. The medieval curriculum was divided into the trivium of grammar, rhetoric and logic, and the quadrivium of arithmetic, music, geometr, and astronomy, and concerned itself largely with the philosophical and theological agency of these subjects. The quadrivium is a meeting point of four roads and was primarily concerned with the significance of numbers and measurement. The curriculum for arithmetic incorporated Aristotelian philosophy regarding the relationships and ratios of numbers, while astronomy was based primarily on Platoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s model of the universe as ten spheres which rotated one inside the other. Geometry was construed as the science of measurements and the relational values between objects, whereas music was seen to conform to these numerical principles using sound.

Q u a r a n t i n e 1979

2000

Allan Cormack, a former UCT professor, is awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine.

Professor Jonathan Peter and Dr Graham Fieggan perform a world first in surgery by separating the fused lower spines of

conjoined twins Esther and Stella. Both the twins retained the use of their lower limbs.

134 Lab notebooks of R.W. James, photograph of James and Bragg and galvonometer (Physics Department); Crystal Collection, Geology Museum; Jamesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; crystal goniometer from the 1950s (Chemistry Department)

R.W. James was Professor of Physics between 1937 and 1956 and his work in X-ray crystallography has had widespread influence throughout the university. He was the physicist on the Shackleton expedition in 1914, where he made magnetic observations and researched the movement and physics of pack-ice. He taught two Nobel laureatesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; Professor Allan Cormack (awarded a Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1979 for his work in X-ray tomography) and Sir Aaron Klug, who was awarded a Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1982 for his development of crystallographic electron microscopy.

2003 Mary Burton, deputy chairperson of the Council of UCT, is awarded the Order of Luthuli in Silver for raising the conscience of

1934 South Africans against the evils of apartheid and for outstanding contribution to national reconciliation, nation building and peace.

The UCT Ballet School, established by Dr Dulcie Howes, became the first ballet school in the world to be attached to a university.

135

Musical instruments from the Kirby Collection at the South African College of Music; publications of Brian Warner, Professor of Astronomy; several abaci and polyhedron models belonging to John Webb (Mathematics); mobiles demonstrating Platonic solids made by students (Mechanical Engineering); a sign pointing to ward D10 from the old section of Groote Schuur Hospital, bought by one of the curators in a Long Street second-hand shop; and a reflection of the photographer of the images in this book, Stephen Inggs (Associate Professor at Michaelis School of Fine Art)

2003 Cecil Skotnes (honorary fine art graduate of UCT) is awarded the Order of Ikhamanga by President Thabo Mbeki for exceptional

1875 achievement in and the deracialisation of the arts and for outstanding contribution to the development of black artists.

Wilhelm Bleek, founder of research into |xam language and culture, dies. He is buried in Wynberg cemetery.

â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Mr Eurekaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;, the first person in the world to have a full body digital X-ray, taken in July 1999 at Groot Schuur Hospital following a motor vehicle accident. His treatment was a success and he walked out of hospital a few weeks later. (Source: Medical Imaging Research Unit, directed by Kit Vaughan)

R e s o n a n c e s

137

R e p l i c a t i o n s r e s u r r e c t i o n s 1830

1853

1996

Two new professors are appointed, James Rose-Innes from Uitenhage and Antoine Changuion from Leyden.

New shares are offered to the public making provision for a professor of physical science and also the teaching of French and German.

A new mission statement is adopted at a university assembly. It is the first in 78 years.

Looted books ‘... today the esoteric contents of these books are only of interest to Hebrew scholars and to bibliophiles, they testify to a cataclysmic historical event which destroyed a culture which can never be reconstituted in the same way. The unclaimed books, books that on the whole did not belong to institutions but to individuals, testify to the most common books found in Jewish homes in the period before the Holocaust. They memorialize both the culture and the individuals who participated in it. In the words on the bookplate of the South African Jewish Board of Deputies’: ‘May their memory inspire us to keep alight the flame of Jewish learning and Jewish life’. Veronica Belling, Jewish Studies Librarian (Philobiblon, March 2004:18)

1929 Douglas Beech records the phonetics of the Nama language on a kymograph in the new phonetics laboratory.

1997 A new student governance system is established consisting of a Students’ Union Parliament, representative of all student sectors, with the SRC serving as an executive.

1945 A.J. Lawrence, M. Samy-Padiachy, A.J. Raar and C.H. Sail are the first black students to graduate from UCT Medical Faculty.

‘Replication’

‘Mafikeng Head’ Malcolm Payne (Michaelis School of Fine Art)

1945 A.J.H. Goodwin founds the South African Archaeological Society as well as the South African Archaeological Bulletin. He is a senior lecturer in archaeology and ethnology.

1960 26 July: After the T.B. Davie Memorial lecture a torch symbolising academic freedom is extinguished. A plaque is unveiled in the

Jagger Library which records the destruction of academic freedom by the apartheid regime.

Cape fur seal (arctocephalus pusillus) skulls and mandibles, part of an â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;archaeological clockâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; used to date seasonally occupied sites Collection John Parkington (Archaeology Department)

1950

2003

1925

The Students Health Scheme is approved.

Associate Professor Anton Fagan of the Law Faculty wins the Humboldt Research Fellowship to conduct research in Germany.

The College of Music takes up residence at Strubenholm in Rosebank.

144

‘What is the exact distance that permits us to see things as they are? To understand our world it is necessary to find a balance between being so close to the object that our vision is warped by familiarity or so far from it that the distance becomes distorting.’ Carlo Ginzburg Wooden Eyes: Nine Reflections on Distance. 1991.

1980

2004

1981

The first UCT Mathematics Competition for schools is held on campus. Today it includes 6 000 competitors.

Yi-Ju Wang, an information systems master’s student, becomes one of the youngest members of parliament and first member of Chinese birth.

John Reid, a Professor in Physiology at Natal University, joins UCT as Deputy Principal.

144

1980

2004

1981

The first UCT Mathematics Competition for schools is held on campus. Today it includes 6 000 competitors.

Yi-Ju Wang, an information systems master’s student, becomes one of the youngest members of parliament and first member of Chinese birth.

John Reid, a Professor in Physiology at Natal University, joins UCT as Deputy Principal.

145

Post mortem Die lykbesorger lyk besorg oor die warm lyk kyk uit sien sy fiets langs die lykhuis wens hy kon weghardloop sien dis sy eerste dag ‘Pas dood’ sê die briefie om die toon wit asof blakend gesond dog bleek van die té vroeg ingetrede dood op sewentien ’n swanger stilte voor die storm iewers klap ’n deur ’n staatspatoloog moet rede verstrek aan geregsdienaars die selfmoordnota glo ten spyt die ouers wou nie glo húl kind was tog lewensfiks dit moes háár skuld wees kap kap kap breek oop die ribbekas sny sny sny saag saag saag deur longe bloedig skoon geen swart streep hier die strotteklep ook reg gesond kon seker lekker sluk aan kos net nie aan nuus soos dié dan af af af breek verder oop koelbloedig diep die hand in die lewer galblaas in ook niks hier alles alles reg verby die opstandige geslag tot by die hakskeen voet en toon hoe lank die koeëlgat gapend nog? Joan Hambidge (School of Languages and Literatures)

1968 In response to the government’s ban on the appointment of Mr Archie Mafeje as a senior lecturer in anthropology, a plaque recording the further infringement of university liberty

1987 to exercise the right to determine ‘who shall teach’ is unveiled on 13 December by Chancellor Harry Oppenheimer.

The Baxter Theatre celebrates 10 years of achievement and acclaim.

S i m i l i t u d e

147

The Reappearance of the Authentic Is the world a simulation? Are material objects – ‘things’, ‘artefacts’ – still essential to grounding our sense of identity? How can the claims for hyperreality be reconciled with the urgency with which many people grasp the material culture of their identity, or the ferocity with which they attack the cultural property of others? Nondescript buildings, not worth a second glance in the normal flow of urban regeneration, are taken apart brick by brick, cleaned up and reassembled. Ordinary objects, the stuff of flea markets and dusty attics, are acquired, accessioned, conserved and displayed. In this process, material objects are relocated from the profane world to the sacred site of the museum. This is the paradox of the authority of the object in a time of digital simulation. Walter Benjamin (The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, 1936) was fascinated by the consequences of reproduction and, particularly, by the implications of photography. He saw the years around 1900 as millennial in their consequences for art – as a time when advances in technology allowed all forms of art to be reproduced, and therefore made widely available. As a consequence, art was increasingly available to all, rather than being restricted to a small group of connoisseurs who had access to private collections, galleries and select performances. This phenomenon directed Benjamin’s attention to the status of the original, to its particular qualities. Benjamin was acutely conscious of the gathering momentum of mass, popular culture and the contradiction between the desirability of democratic access to artistic production on the one hand, and the consequences of commodification for works of art, on the other. Now, at the beginning of

S h o r t h a n d S u b j e c t i f i c a t i o n s 1903

1945

2003

Professor Henry Harold Welch becomes the first Harry Bolus Professor of Botany at the South African College.

76 Coloureds, 26 Indians and 5 Africans are attending UCT.

Associate Professor Pumela Gobodo-Madikizela publishes her book, A Human Being Died that Night: a South African Story of Forgiveness.

148

the next millennium, the easy availability of near-perfect copies of art works is taken for granted, and major genres of artistic production are enabled and inspired by this mass market. The question now is – why the stubborn saliency of original objects at a time when the mass reproduction of copies seems unexceptionable? Benjamin’s argument hinged on the proposition that an original work of art has an ‘aura’. This is founded in its uniqueness, ‘its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be’, and is reinforced by the trace of its history, by ‘the changes which it may have suffered in physical condition over the years’, and changes in ownership that constitute its history. Together, position in time and space and the patina of ‘trace’ constitute authenticity, and authenticity is beyond reproducibility: ‘the authenticity of a thing is the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history which it has experienced’. How can the aura of an object be established? Arjun Appadurai shows how objects have social lives – life histories . In some situations, objects can be ‘enclaved’, or removed from circulation as commodities. In other situations, objects may be ‘diverted’, often in the service of entrepreneurial interests. Here, the best examples are in the domain of fashion, domestic display and collecting. In these cases, ‘value … is accelerated or enhanced by placing objects and things in unlikely contexts’. Practices such as enclaving and diversion interrupt the circulation of an object as a commodity, either raising its value because of its scarcity, or else removing it from circulation completely, making it – literally – invaluable. We can now understand why the impresarios of simulation are drawn to

1966

1933

1999

Luigi Nassimbeni is appointed as lecturer in chemistry. He later becomes Professor of Physical Chemistry and Chrystallography.

Samuel Skewes, Professor in the Department of Mathematics, proves the first Skewes number.

Anne Peacock, UCT law graduate wins an Emmy Award for her screenplay adaption of Gaines’ novel A Lesson Before Dying.

149

the authentic, whether period artefact, a work of art, a rare ethno-graphic specimen or a building, restored or transported to a destination museum. The authentic object, diverted from circulation as a commodity, enclaved, serves to anchor the simulacrum, arresting the endless process of production and consumption that drives down the value of experiences. This resolves the paradox. Simulation depends on the close connection between hyperreality and commodity production and marketing. The ‘museum effect’ is achieved by withdrawing selected artefacts from circulation as commodities, creating a destination with added value. Similarly, in a world in which identities are claimed and disputed by communities who may be far removed from the homelands with which they identify, cultural property may be endlessly reproduced through digital and other media. To retain value, the simulacra of identity need to be anchored by cultural treasures. There is a return of the aura of the work of art in an age of digital simulation. Martin Hall Adapted from ‘The Authority of the Object in the Age of Digital Simulation’. In Museum Frictions: Public Cultures/Global Transformations, edited by Ivan Karp, Corinne A. Kratz, Lynn Szwaja, and Tomas Ybarra-Frausto, with Gustavo Buntinx, Barbara KirshenblattGimblett and Ciraj Rassool. In press, Routledge.

Martin Hall is an archaeologist, Deputy Vice-Chancellor and fellow of UCT. He was formerly the Dean of the Centre for Higher Education and he holds a personal chair in the Graduate School of the Humanities. He is pictured here doing field-work in the Drakensberg in the 1980s.

1966

1967

1970

Senator Robert F. Kennedy delivers a speech at UCT at the invitation of NUSAS.

Mr. Harry Oppenheimer is installed as UCT’s fourth Chancellor.

Initiation ceremonies are declared undesirable at the University.

1866

1834 – 1838

1866

Free scholars appointed by government are selected by examination. They are known as Queen’s scholars.

D’Urban, the new Governor, gives the College an annual state grant of £200, in addition to another grant of £180.

Jan Brand is called upon to lecture in Colonial Law at the College.

Assembly of objects from chemical engineering, the Kirby Collection and forensic pathology A taxonomic system based on resemblance or shared characteristics is perhaps the most elementary in the construction of order and corresponds to early Linnaean classification. Yet, it is in the language of the visual analogy that the unexpected is allowed to emerge. This is the space for the dialogue of objects and the bringing together of the disparate in a conversation in which new significance may be fashioned.

1984 The Queen of England knights Bill Hoffenberg who was banned and forced into exile in 1967.

1985 Dr Saunders releases UCT’s mission statement, publicly committing the university to non–racialism non–sexism and freedom of speech.

1982 Dr Aaron Klug, a UCT graduate working in Cambridge, is awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry.

A fire dance at the Clanwilliam Spring Parade, an annual art and performance workshop run by Mark Fleishman (Drama) and Pippa Skotnes (Fine Art) with the participation of students from both departments and Jazz Art. Funded by the Fairheads International Trust Company, the workshops seeks to re-animate |xam stories through art and performance. George Ellis is Professor of Applied Mathematics and Distinguished Professor of Complex Systems in the Mathematics Department. The Large Scale Structure of SpaceTime is one of his earliest publications, co-authored with Cambridge physicist Stephen Hawking in 1973. Since then he has published extensively and is considered one of the world’s leading theorists in cosmology, particularly general relativity theory and its application to the study of the large-scale structure of the universe. He has received many awards, including the Star of South Africa medal and the Templeton Prize in 2004. 1840s

1855 – 75

1945

The Freemasons withdraw their annual grant of £50.

The new library buildings are constructed.

A standing Research Committee is set up to oversee all research matters.

Charms, beads, divining bones (from various southern African sources), ironwood baboon (Barotse tradeware collected by I. Shapera), cloth and scrotum bags from the UCT Collection housed at the South African Museum; expanding photograph album belonging to Professor J.H. Goodwin containing South African sites of rock art (Goodwin Papers, Manuscripts and Archives)

Tobacco hunger is killing me Tobacco hunger is killing me Can’t find that dog Stole my tobacco skin Can’t find that dog to give it back to me

Can’t find that dog Stole my tobacco skin Can’t find that dog to give it back to me

Last night I had a dream Oh last night I had a dream And I saw what was behind me I saw the rain washed my footsteps clean Tobacco hunger is killing me Tobacco hunger is killing me

Wind is blowing from behind me Wind is blowing from behind me Blown away my footprints She’s calling me Lyrics of a song composed by Steve Louw based on an 1870s |xam lament in which the author, ||kabbo, living in Mowbray with Lucy Lloyd, searches for his tobacco pouch after it was stolen in the night by a dog called Blom.

1977

2004

Professor William Hutt is awarded the honorary degree of Doctor of Laws. He established UCT’s Graduate School of Business Administration.

UCT rugby team beats a touring Cambridge XV by 24-11. Vice-Chancellor Njabulo Ndebele and Spencer King, director of rugby, unveil a

plaque commemorating the FNB UCT First XV’s match against Cambridge as part of UCT’s 175 celebrations.

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154

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a kip p ingâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; a Vend

1943

1986

Sarah Dollie helps to open the clinical years of the M.B. Ch.B course to coloured students.

Staff at the Michaelis School of Fine Art produce a portfolio to celebrate the centenary of women on campus.

1898 The SACS fountain is installed in the school quad in Orange Street. In 2004 the fountain is removed and reinstalled at SACS High School in Newlands.

e of lleg o C

) Music

T r e a s u r y

155

Treasury

When we label and display we entrust our traces to the past, award them the prize of the present or bequeath them to a yet-to-be-discovered place. In the cabinet of juxtaposed matter each name, date and time claims the space around itself, reshapes it as a stage for pageants or soliloquies. Each object of discovery, sits like a mannequin, a favoured child beside competing siblings, composed, mannerly, elbows in: sarcoptes scabiei, lead bars, ballet shoes, platana frog, waterproof field guide, titanium implant, anteater.

1954

1887

The Rag Fund Allocation Committee decides to support to the Windermere Centre, the community clinic started by Andrew Kinnear.

In honour of Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee, the SAC council announces that their ‘experiment’ with allowing four women

to attend certain classes has been a success and that ‘the gates of the college be thrown wide to women’.

156

Collection, exhibit, parade, explication of signs. These are our cables to a signal box of meanings underground or in the air. Even if we believe in other magic: divine purpose and the syntax of the spirit (some realm where that-which-is mimics that-which-will-be), we are obliged to chronicle in custodian grammar the processes and particles of the earth, to measure shape and weight, retrieve history, reach into the future. Talisman, relic, fetish, portent: we rub up against them like cats.

The resurrection plant, its drought resistant gene. A bird's blood temperature, demography, flight politics. Seasonal calendar revealed by dassies' tiny teeth. The heart in foreign lodging. Lost language, fugitive tracks, their tracings on paper or in paint.

1922

1910

1918

Sir Max Michaelis gives the University ÂŁ20 000 to fund a Chair of Fine Art.

ÂŁ500 000 is secured from the Alfred Beit Trust, Otto Beit and Sir Julius Wernher for a residential university at Groote Schuur.

The Van Riebeek Society is founded to make primary souces available to anyone interested in South African history.

157

In graph, key, index we profess that what we make and remake in our laboratories of meaning compasses the sphere of nature and generation. But the world holds up its torn arm, torn wing, an angel or horseman reining us in, as we enter the archive of half known things, with our quiver of blunt arrows.

Ingrid de Kok

Lyndi Sales 2004 (graduate of UCT)

2003

2001

1938

Dr Ed Sturrock and his team and collaborators identify the first 3-D crystal structure of the human angiotensin-converting enzyme.

Dr Jonathan Kaplan, who graduated from UCT in 1977, wins the Alan Paton award for The Dressing Station: a Surgeonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Odyssey.

UCT graduate Dr Theodore Schrire becomes Surgical Registrar at Groote Schuur Hospital.

158

‘Replication’ Stephen Inggs (Michaelis School of Fine Art)

1966

1910

NUSAS president Ian Robertson is banned on 11 May.

Numbers rise to above 300 for the first time.

1933 The first issue of Sax appeal goes out in May of this year. Some of the illustrations and advertisements are considered risqué and one features a naked woman.

159

Hiddingh Hall prior to the installation of Curiosity CLXXV (below) and during the construction of the exhibition (above)

1890s A lecturer in law is appointed. It is not J.C. Smuts who the College chose not to appoint despite his recent

1903 – 1905 graduation from Cambridge. Instead Smuts went north to the Transvaal as Kruger’s state attorney.

Council obtains £64 000 from government to build engineering and natural science blocks. These were completed by the end of 1905.

U n m a k i n g

161

In my domain there are no artefacts or measuring instruments and few consoling discoveries. It is a space between science and art, at the shifting edge of what is known or understood. Pain and madness are enduring afflictions, and my work seems to involve finding some sort of balance between trying to control the symptoms of illness and trying to help patients otherwise cope with the intractable. In dismembering and naming the eczematous hand there is a tenuous belief that we may begin to understand the pathological process and thus provide a cure. The person in the glass jar contains a mystery and is rendered a curiosity. Confronted by the limits of what I am able to achieve, I feel at times a disenchantment or disillusion with the notion of a scientific progress towards enlightenment: there is a tension between the aspiration of gaining mastery over disease (and, at least temporarily, death) through the acquisition of knowledge, and (more modestly) of finding tolerable ways of living in the world. These artefacts at times seem to represent a striving to shore up our world against the dread of disorder and the unknown, and, in another light, a heroic curiosity. My patients live with pain and inhabit fearful menacing spaces, at the edges of medicine. When the limit is reached, I am at times inspired by the creative strategies they adopt to survive, and sometimes flourish, in a state of solitary wonder. My few artefacts then are the stories my patients tell me of how they make sense of their predicament, and of the world we share, however mad or painful. A patient said to me: ‘Sometimes I am so persistently aware of the curiosity with which I must criticise every moment that I criticise myself out of my presence of mind … I lose focus in this crisis … a vague epileptic panic rises, on realizing one’s own forgetfulness at trying to be lucid … so I need to keep moving, as I walk though the silhouetted environment, causing a feeling of calm because of the changing frontiers at the periphery of my vision.’

1911

2001

Dr. Harry Bolus bequeaths to the College his herbarium and botanical library as well as £27 000 for its upkeep and expansion.

Kirstenbosch Gardens are founded.

UCT achieves a 50:50 black/white student ratio, comprising students from 70 countries.

162

â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Industrial strength gloves with cuffsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; 2004 Jane Alexander (Michaelis School of Fine Art) 2002

1988

1986

The African Gender Institute at UCT launches the new on-line journal Feminist Africa.

The Centre for Applied Language Studies and Services in Africa is founded.

The Philosophy Department founds the UCT Philosophy Society to promote philosophical thought within the city of Cape Town.

163

Another said: “Elements of precognitive thoughts overpower me … I want to use this to grow but it’s vexating, being bombarded by too many psychic forces … they have this surveillance, this inner knowledge of me … eventually I align myself … balance out, get my privacy … people affect me … sometimes they don’t do it intentionally, it just comes out of them … it’s just got to do with humans, it’s just the pain of life … I’ve come to accept it. The funny thing about this is that I take it terribly seriously.’ Sean Baumann (Department of Psychiatry and Mental Health)

‘Husse met Lang Ore’ 2004 Wendy McLachlan

1911

2004

Hiddingh Hall is opened. It was built with a bequest of £10 000 from Dr Willem Hiddingh, a jurist, born in Cape Town in 1808.

‘Curiosity CLXXV’ curated by Pippa Skotnes, Gwen van Embden and Fritha Langerman opens in Hiddingh Hall.

1929 Dr Jane Elizabeth Waterston, who qualified as a medical doctor in Ireland in 1879, becomes the first woman to receive an honorary degree (Doctor of Law) from UCT.

Unnamed surgical instrument with curved business end (ANAT066 Anatomy Museum)

Forcep-like instrument with curved business end (ANAT078 Anatomy Museum)

Xenopus laevis was the frog used by Zwarenstein of the Physiology Department to develop the first pregnancy test.

2002 Fairheads InternationalTrust Company sponsors another art and performance event in Clanwilliam. Fine Art and Drama staff and students are involved.

1956 RW James, member of the Shackleton expedition to the South Pole, retires as head of the Department of Physics.

1968 The School of Social Work becomes a department in its own right, later (in 2000) changing its name to the Department of Social Development.

165

V i s i o n

Body maps Take the body trace its outline map its armature tendons viscera scar tissue fractures swellings promises and wishes. Map age genes place of origin and love’s lineaments. For mapped onto each body is love. Cartography of one’s own country or the contours of a foreign land. A journey through forests over cataracts turbulent rivers peaks ravines rift valleys grasslands wetlands oceans sand. Down mine shafts. Through truck stops. In towns and cities. On tarred roads dirt tracks. At the shoreline is a flare where pain’s fire consumes itself with its earth-hunger unquenched thirst burning wings. It lights the way back to touch soft or violent

V i r t u o s i t y 1828 A meeting in the Groote Kerk in Cape Town chaired by Sir John Truter, Chief Justice, elects an organising committee to arrange the founding of the South African College.

1873

1900

The University of the Cape of Good Hope is established.

The hall in the Egyptian building becomes a students’ common room.

166

Computer tomographic images taken with a CAT scanner, the device for which Allan Cormack, UCT graduate and lecturer, won the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1979. These images form part of the teaching collection of the Medical Imaging Research Unit directed by Professor Kit Vaughan

Images displaying a technique, developed by Dr Tania Douglas and Dr Ernesta Meintjes with Professor Kit Vaughan of the Medical Imaging Research Unit, to identify children born with Foetal Alcohol Syndrome

1935 The Cape Town Child Guidance Clinic is established with Hugh Reyburn (inaugural director of the Department of Philosophy) as director.

1983 The Centre for Conflict Resolution at UCT establishes its Peace Library. The intention is to provide a national resource for those working in the field of conflict management and mediation.

1991 The Institute for Comparative Religion in Southern Africa is launched with Professor David Chidester as director.

167 stretched or shortened above below where there are sounds soft calls moans fright resistance silence movements towards or away where there is rupture or seeping where openings are buds that shrink or blossom where the spine buckles or uncurls where nails draw blood or declawed fingers touch tip to tip and palms dance. Mapped onto each body is that first launch into love: parachute drop of our begetters and then each body’s own open or closed arms and legs. And onto the bodies of those who die of love’s lesions we map our love too guilty shadow tracings lucky escape routes provisional survival. Take your own body or the leached body of your mother your father your brother your sister. Transparent body of glass of leaves of encoded messages to the past and the future unique thumbprint maze ubiquitous death mask.

‘Body map’, by Nondumiso Hlwele who is one of the original participants (now a facilitator) in the ‘psychsocial support intervention’ project called Mapping Our Livesfor people living with HIV. She is also a member of the Bambanani Women’s Group.

Take it trace it map it remember. Ingrid de Kok

The original project was facilitated by artist Jane Solomon and the intervention was co-ordinated by Colin Almeleh, researcher and Outreach Manager at the AIDS and Society Research Unit.

1925

1940

1959

The School of Art becomes part of the university. Later it is merged with the School of Architecture.

Dr Edward Bernard Fuller, principal founder of the Medical School at UCT, is awarded an honorary LL.D degree.

The Law Faculty celebrates its centenary.

1996 The Centre for Contemporary Islam (CCI) is established in the Department of Religious Studies. Its convenors are Professors Ebrahim Moosa, Abdulkader Tayob and Shamil Jeppie.

1937

1920

R.W. James becomes Head of the Department of Physics and gives fifteen lectures a week.

The Department of Psychology is formed as the Department of Logic and Psychology.

W o n d e r

169

‘When the first encounter with some object surprises us ... this makes us wonder and be astonished ... And since this can happen before we know in the least whether this object is suitable to us or not, it seems to me that Wonder is the first of all the passions. It has no opposite, because if the object presented has nothing in it that surprises us, we are not in the least moved by it and regard it without passion.’ René Descartes ‘But surely our job as teachers is to puzzle, confuse, and amaze. We must rear a new generation of students who will gaze in wonder at texts and artefacts, quick to puzzle over a translation, slow to project or to appropriate, quick to assume there is a significance, slow to generalise about it. Not only as scholars, then, but also as teachers, we must astonish and be astonished. For the flat, generalising, presentist view of the past encapsulates it and makes it boring, whereas amazement yearns toward an understanding, a significance, that is always just a little beyond both our theories and our fears. Every view of things that is not wonderful is false.’ Caroline Walker Bynum, ‘Wonder’ Presidential address to the American Historical Association 1997

Immunoflourescence images of frog body parts as well as a froglet in the lab from Dirk Lang (Human Biology)

W o r k 1923 Margaret Rutherford Bryan Michell (later Levyns) becomes the first woman to receive the degree of Doctor of Science from UCT.

1969 SRC president Philip van der Merwe writes to members of staff on 14 April asking them to sign a petition re-issuing the call for freedom to be sent to the Minister of National education.

2003 One thousand magistrates have been trained since 1995 by the UCT Law, Race and Gender Unit, directed by Professor Christina Murray.

Above: Glass slides and label from the Drennan Collection (Human Biology), divining bones and objects and a skin bag belonging to the wife of Setsjona (Ngwato) from the UCT Schapera Collection at the South African Museum, a nanga wa mathangwa Venda reed and skin flute (Kirby Collection), a round-bottomed vessel (Chemical Engineering) and a stiletto heel shoe which was used as a murder weapon, along with the piece of skull in which it was embedded (collection of Forensic Pathology). Left: fossilised dinosaur bone (collection Anusya Chinsamy-Turan, paleobiologist in the Department of Zoology)

1996

2004

1829

African Gender Institute is established.

Cultural critic and feminist activist Susan Sontag gives the Nadine Gordimer Lecture in Jameson Hall.

October 1st: Classes begin in the Long Street Weehuis with 115 students, many of them children scarcely able to read.

171 ‘The rest of human life can only gaze longingly at the condition of the art object, which is the manifestation of unalienated labor, the perfect articulation and realization of human energy. The art object, ideally self-enclosed, is freed not only from the necessities of the surrounding world (necessities that it transforms miraculously into play) but also from the intention of the maker.’ Stephen Greenblatt and Catherine Gallagher Practicing New Historicism 2000:11

The cabinet for these dusters (left) is a product of the exquisite workmanship of Gary Branquet who also made the majority of the other cases and cabinets for this exhibition. ‘175 Chalk-board Dusters’ Gwen van Embden, Pippa Skotnes, Fritha Langerman

age im

3.6 million y ear o of the ld fo otpr ints

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umentation of Heritag e site etric doc m m a g s in Laeto oto n the department o i h r Af p o s li record s s ’ e f r o f e r G p h t s ed as part of Heinz Rü eoma rica. her i t ü t R ics z Hein

1962

2006

Head woman student Elizabeth Thaele leads the academic procession at the annual T.B. Davie memorial lector at Jameson Hall.

New degree courses are offered in ‘curiosity and the imagination’

1977 Professor Gaiasford Harrison is awarded the Doctor of Science Degree in medicine for his research into the safety of anaesthetics, and is made a life fellow of UCT.

172

I took this photograph in 1974. At the time I was a student at Michaelis. I had read a report that people were living on the Guguletu rubbish dump, one of Cape Townâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s land-fill sites and that a child had been killed while scrabbling for food. I decided to do a photo essay on the site. It was a little piece of hell. As I wandered through the dunes of rubbish a figure appeared on a mound above me. I raised my camera and he responded by stretching his arms out in this scarecrow-like, Christlike pose. Today row upon row of shacks stand where this figure stood thirty years ago. David Brown, Cape Town

1859 J.H. Brand is appointed as Professor of Law at a salary of ÂŁ300 per year. He later leaves to become president of the Orange Free State.

1999 The Centre for Higher Education Development (CHED) is established at UCT. Its aim is to foster academic development across faculty boundaries.

1988 Nikolaas van der Merwe is appointed Landon T. Clay Professor of Scientific Archaeology at Harvard University. He holds a joint appointment at UCT.

| x a m - k a - ! a u

|xam-ka-!au is the |xam word meaning ‘the people’s ground’ or more specifically translated by Wilhelm Bleek in the 1870s as the ‘|xam’s land’ (or ‘Bushman’s land’). |xam-ka-!au then is the first term we know of that was used to describe much of what we now call South Africa.

The university’s research station in Clanwilliam, from which is run both John Parkington’s Living Landscape Project and the Art and Performance workshops run by Michaelis and the drama department. On the verandah walls hang the clocks, made by Pippa Skotnes and Gwen van Embden, pictured in the top right corner of this page.

1985

1872

Beyers Naude gives an address in Jameson Hall on his 70th birthday.

Sophia Barbara Elizabeth Jameson donates £5 000 to the South African College for the purpose of establishing a scholarship.

1976 Dr Frances Ames becomes the Head of the Department of Neurology at UCT. She is later to be awarded the Star of South Africa by President Nelson Mandela.

174

This is a titre de voyage, the ‘passport’ of the stateless person, which I was obliged to use for about 15 years while in exile from South Africa. In spite of its name, it was not meant to facilitate travel, but regulate containment – I needed permission to be in the country where I was granted residence, permission to leave it and enter another, and permission to return after travelling. In 1991 I received a South African passport for the first time and was able to cross borders in a relatively normal way. Why should this ‘passport’ be interesting in a display of intellectual artefacts such as those exhibited here? Because it stands antithetically to the focus of much of my intellectual work, which is interested precisely in borders, in knowledge boundaries, especially in the context of a continuing struggle for social justice within and through education in South Africa. The titre de voyage made me constantly aware of boundaries, and how difficult it was to cross them. In this sense borders were prisons. In my intellectual work, though, I have come to appreciate the stance of a friend and mentor, sociologist of education Basil Bernstein, who saw individual growth and enhancement as … a condition of experiencing boundaries, be they social, intellectual or personal, not as prisons, or stereotypes, but as tension points condensing the past and opening possible futures. Enhancement entails a discipline. It is the right to the means of critical understanding and to new possibilities. Empowerment within education is, in these terms, an apprenticeship into classificatory systems, into knowledge of boundaries and what they contain and separate. This runs against contemporary educational discourse which, in the name of empowerment, seeks to overcome distinctions between disciplines, between academic and everyday knowledge, between education and training, and so on. My academic work is concerned to uncover the implications of this discourse for educational practices and outcomes, especially those involving the poorest of the poor. Paula Ensor Dean of the Faculty of Humanities

1977 UCT graduate Marius Diemont leads a team of judges to Robben Island in an attempt to settle problems between warders and Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu and other political prisoners.

2004

1887

The artist Outa Lappies donates money to UCT for the Outa Lappies Bursary for Fine Art to be awarded to needy students.

The minute book of the South African College records discussion around the provision of a room for ladies in the Physics Department.

At the top is a map from the Avian Demography Unit showing the distribution of the raptor Bateleur Terathopius ecaudatus along political borders. The Bateleur is more frequently found where there is no formal farming. The Ngwato childâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s oxhide sandals were collected by Schapera and are in the UCT collection housed at the South African Museum. Beneath them is a page from The Afrikaans Atlas, showing language distribution provided by Rajend Mesthrie of the Department of Linguistics and Southern African Languages.

1983 Ministers Piet Koornhof and Pik Botha are invited to speak on campus by Professor Robert Schrire, Head of Political Science. Students protest and prevent them from speaking.

1989 Five new minerals are discovered by researchers at UCTâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Geochemistry and Geology departments.

2001 The Institute of Infectious Disease and Molecular Medicine (IIDMM) is set up to consolidate and expand research into HIV/AIDS.

Dutch Bible (1535) Den Bibel met grooter neersticheyt gecorrigeert. Antwerpen: Jacob van Liesvelt, 1535.

Encyclopaedia Britannica or a Dictionary of Arts Sciences and Miscellaneous Literature 3rd ed. Edinburgh: Bell and Macfaquhar, 1797 v.20.

This early Dutch protestant Bible was made in part from Luther’s German translation. It was printed in Antwerp in the Catholic Netherlands by Jacob van Liesvelt, a supporter of the new Reformation, who inserted an annotation directing readers to it if they wished to communicate with God. Subsequently he was executed, and his estate confiscated. It is an extremely rare copy as this edition was strictly suppressed and burnt. This copy was acquired for the Library in the 1950s for £25 by the University Librarian, René Immelman (Rare Books & Special Collections)

The last two volumes of the 3rd edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica consist of its accompanying illustrations, and a wonderful resource for the 18th century illustrative material consulted by ladies and gentlemen of the time who wished to add to their knowledge of the world in which they lived.(Rare Books & Special Collections) Modern and Authentic Systems, Cooke,(Rare Books & Special Collections) District Map of Matatiele (Mugsy Speigel, Social Anthropology) Islamic Bible (Rare Books & Special Collections)

2004 Thandabantu Nhlapo, former Professor of Law at UCT, is appointed Deputy-Vice Chancellor, returning from a post at the South African embassy in Washington.

1933 Margaret Shaw, graduate of the Department of African Life and Languages at UCT, joins the South African Museum as its first ethnologist.

Although UCT has a small ethnological musem its collections are neglected and it falls to Ms Shaw to curate them.

L.F. Casson, De Beers Professor of English Language Extract from: ‘The Dialect of Jeremiah Goldswain Albany Settler’, inaugural lecture delivered before the University of Cape Town, May 1955. ‘To assert that some aspects of Goldswain’s English have seventeenthcentury affiliations is thus merely another way of saying that his speech reflects the characteristics of his social betters of nearly two centuries before, and that it had been virtually unaffected by the new ideals ... In South Africa, the scene changes, both literally and linguistically. Goldswain now finds himself rubbing shoulders not only with his own countrymen but with a Dutch-speaking people who had been settled for generations. To them he pays the compliment of picking up useful words rather more than occasionally, and thus provides one more illustration of how the English language throughout its history has shown itself ready not merely to tolerate innovation, but to assimilate it and yet preserve itself ... Even the language of an illiterate can provide an abundant harvest to the philologer.’ (page 42)

Rudyard Kipling (Special Collections)

Waterproof notebook called a Rite-in-the-rain field notebook belonging to Maarten de Wit (Geological Science) Green sticker asserting that women’s demands are people’s demands (Special Collections) Personal scrapbook displaying a newspaper article about Archibald Mafeje who, although appointed to a post in Social Anthropology in 1968, was prevented by the UCT Council from taking up this post, for fear of the apartheid government. The affair became the subject of student protest and although the University recently attempted to confer an honorary doctorate on Mafeje, he did not respond to the invitation (Mugsy Spiegal, head of Social Anthropology) CSSR Working Paper No. 75: ‘Income inequality after apartheid’ (Jeremy Seekings, Professor of Political Studies and Sociology, Murray Liebrandt, Professor in the School of Economics and Nicoli Nattrass, Professor in the School of Economics) Model penguin used in wind tunnel experiments by the Mechanical engineering department to test the potential drag effect of the tracking device on Peter, Pamela and Percy.

KK59 San: !goin !goin, whirling type (Kirby Collection) c 1878-1880

2002 Professor Brian Warner and Dr Patrick Woudt of the UCT Department of Astronomy discover a cataclysmic variable star (CVS) with an

1990 unusually short orbital period of 10 minutes. They are given time on the world’s biggest telescope to confirm their findings.

President F.W. de Klerk lifts the ban on the ANC, the PAC and the SA Communist Party.

178

Above: Ballet shoe belonging to Elizabeth Triegaardt, Associate Professor at the School of Dance. Book bound in the skin of a dog by his grieving owner, the Rev. BowleEvans (Manuscripts and Archives) Key to the cupboard once belonging to Lucy Lloyd and now belonging to Pippa Skotnes Right: Detail reproduced from a booklet produced for the Centenary of Women on Campus by UCT in 1986. Opposite: Poem pasted on the inside of the dog-skin-bound book. 2004 Nelson Mandela delivers the Steve Biko Memorial lecture to a packed Jameson Hall. The event is funded by the Health Science

Facultyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Steve Biko Fund with money raised by doctors in the 1980s to aid the case against the South African Medical and Dental Council.

1978 Financier Duncan Saville graduates with a BCom (Hons) CTA. He becomes a major funder of the Commerce Academic Development Programme in 2004.

Y e a r n i n g

179

My dog, the trustiest of his kind, with gratitude inflames my mind. Gay ~~~~~~~~~ Let this perpetuate the Memory Of an Animal, when living, defervedly efteemed For his uncommon Sagacity, and Honefty. Tho’ of American Original He was no Rebel; But Faithful, conftant, and invariable In his Attachments. His Anger fometimes got the better of that Difcretion, With which he was endow’d by Nature: But it was then only, when he found Unjuftifiable Oppofition To his delegated, legal Authority. Poffeffed of every amiable Quality, His Refentment for any Affront, or rough Treatment, Soon fubfided, And he became at once Placable, loving, and fincere. Such was PERRO GRANDE: Whofe Misfortune it was to die by Poifon. Seduced by a falfe Brother, of an oppofite currifh Spirit, After a day’s confinement to avoid the danger, He took, alas! the fatal Dofe That put a Period to his Exiftence, To the general Regret of all who knew him, March 6th. 1780 ~~~~~~~~~~ To effect the Memorial, His skin, being tann’d for the Purpofe, Made the Covers of this, and another Book. ~~~~~~~~ Feb.14.1782

2002

1891

The UCT Institute of Infectious Diseases and Molecular Medicine, directed by Professor Ahmed Azad, is set to lead African research.

Governor’s Prize winner and literature gold medallist Isabel Stephens takes first place in this year’s BA examinations but the Ebden

Scholarship is awarded to J.C. Smuts who comes second. The scholarship enables Smuts to attend Cambridge.

181 Lucy Lloyd was born on the 7th November 170 years ago. She came to Cape Town in the 1860s and sometime after that she bought this cupboard. During her time in the city, with her brother-in-law Wilhelm Bleek, she assembled an extraordinary archive of |xam and !kun narratives which is now recognized by the United Nations as a Site of the Memory of the World. The major part of this archive now belongs to UCT. After her death in 1914 the cupboard stayed in her sister Jemima’s family. Two years ago it came up for auction in East London. I put in a phone bid for it and, with the help of family and friends, I bought it. For this exhibition I have been able to place in the cupboard some of Lloyd’s notebooks, musical instruments made for her by the |xam and !kun who lived with her, and photographs of those involved in her remarkable project. Pippa Skotnes Michaelis School of Fine Art Drawings by Tamme, !nanni, Dia!kwain and Han≠kass’o made for and annotated by Lucy Lloyd in the 1870s and 1880s (Collection: UCT Manuscripts and Archives)

1986 Elizabeth Triegaardt becomes director of the School of Dance. In the following year contemporary dance is introduced and in 1997 African dance becomes part of the programme.

1924

2003

NUSAS is founded by Leo Marquard.

The Graduate School of Business MBA class wins the 9th International Dragon Boat Race at the Waterfront.

Lucy Lloyd was born on the 7th November 170 years ago. She came to Cape Town in the 1860s and sometime after that she bought this cupboard. During her time in the city, with her brother-in-law Wilhelm Bleek, she assembled an extraordinary archive of |xam and !kun narratives which is now recognized by the United Nations as a Site of the Memory of the World. The major part of this archive now belongs to UCT. After her death in 1914 the cupboard stayed in her sister Jemima’s family. Two years ago it came up for auction in East London. I put in a phone bid for it and, with the help of family and friends, I bought it. For this exhibition I have been able to place in the cupboard some of Lloyd’s notebooks, musical instruments made for her by the |xam and !kun who lived with her, and photographs of those involved in her remarkable project. Pippa Skotnes Michaelis School of Fine Art Drawings by Tamme, !nanni, Dia!kwain and Han≠kass’o made for and annotated by Lucy Lloyd in the 1870s and 1880s (Collection: UCT Manuscripts and Archives)

1986 Elizabeth Triegaardt becomes director of the School of Dance. In the following year contemporary dance is introduced and in 1997 African dance becomes part of the programme.

1924

2003

NUSAS is founded by Leo Marquard.

The Graduate School of Business MBA class wins the 9th International Dragon Boat Race at the Waterfront.

Irma Stern, ‘Ballet Dancers’ 1943, gouache on paper (63x51cm) (Collection: Irma Stern Museum) Photograph: Kathy Grundlingh

The brilliant colour and the bold composition of the gouache are keynotes of Irma Stern’s gestural, immediate and expressionist style. Slim, classical proportions associated with ballerinas are sacrificed to the fabulous form of the tutu and the romantic atmosphere of ballet. This work is part of a unique collection of ballet works produced in 1943. The acquisition of an important oil painting in this genre in 2004 brought to light this collection within a collection. The Trustees of the Irma Stern estate with the generous assistance of the Roland and Geta (Jill) Trust made the acquisition possible. The regular hosting of temporary exhibitions in the upstairs galleries has assured the Irma Stern Museum of the regular patronage of local art lovers. The downstairs galleries host a permanent exhibition devoted to the work and collections of Irma Stern. Changes take place here too, in celebration of the artist’s rich legacy. The unique atmosphere of the house in enhanced by wall colours and flower arrangements – usually created by the director. The Museum is open Tuesday to Saturday between 10 and 5, and is administered by UCT on behalf of the trustees. Christopher Peter, Director: Irma Stern Museum

1993

1942

1975

Associate Professor Howard Phillips publishes a history of the University of Cape Town (1818-1948).

Professor Faulkner, Principal of UCT, sets up a formal court of discipline to deal with student misconduct.

The South African Labour and Development Research Unit (SALDRU) is established as part of the School of Economics at UCT.

184

Left: A case demonstrating tooth decay (Anatomy) and a seed-pod rattle (UCT collection at the South African Museum) Below: A Buddist holy book written on palm fronds (Special Collections), a rhinoceros’ tooth shaped like a pi, a cast of Fritha Langerman’s juvenile upper jaw and a tobacco pouch with horn attached (UCT collection at the South African Museum)

C.P. Owen’s Fundamentals of Removable Partial Dentures (2000) is a best seller for UCT Press.

1969 Neil Armstrong becomes the first person to walk on the moon.

2003 The Mellon Foundation, De Beers and Scan Shop provide funding for the digitising of the Bleek and Lloyd archive, one of the most significant collections of folklore in the world.

1985 The Baxter Theatre becomes the first South African Company to be invited to the Edinburgh Festival. Its production of Miss Julie plays to seven capacity houses.

Z o o m o r p h i s m

185

‘Primates are visual animals. No other group of mammals relies so strongly on sight. Our attraction to images as a source of understanding is both primal and pervasive. Writing, with its linear sequencing of ideas, is a historical afterthought in the history of human cognition. Yet traditional scholarship has lost this root to our past. Most reserach is reported by text alone, particularly in the humanities and social sciences ... Pictures are not peripheral or decorative; iconography offers precious insights into modes of thinking that words often mask or ignore ...’ Stephen Jay Gould Eight Little Piggies 1993:427

Skeletal remains with skull cast. Pangolin bones cleaned by Samuel van Embden. Mussel-cracker fish skeleton from the collection of Cedric Poggenpoel (Archaeology Department).

1995 Mark Shuttleworth graduates with a Business Science degree in finance and information systems. In 2002 he becomes the first African in space.

2004 The Avian Demography Unit receives a President’s Special Award from the Wildlife and Environment Society of South Africa in recognition of its contribution to ornithology.

2004 Lindy Mudenda, office manager at the Centre for Conflict Resolution, wins the National Office Professional of the Year title.

‘Human Behaviour’. A porcelain pig and ape stare at miniature video screens. The ape observes a portrait of itself emerging on the screen while the pig observes its upper body being sculpted by a pair of human hands. Interspersed between pig, ape and screens are optical grippers that hold the screens and magnify the subjects of the work. First shown at the South African Museum in the Human Genome Conference exhibition curated by Fritha Langerman, it is here presented in an incubator from the Mowbray Maternity Hospital. Malcolm Payne (Michaelis School of Fine Art)

‘Cephalothorax’ Bruce Arnott (Michaelis School of Fine Art)

Above: This mussel shell was found wrapped in the bulbar leaves of a coastal plant and tied up in fibrous string. It had been carried around, for some reason, 500 years ago. We found it 70 kilometers inland in a rock shelter where it may have been taken to exchange for some other valuable commodity. Somebody lost it and we found it. John Parkington (Archaeology Department) 1941

2002

2003

Sax Appeal is labelled ‘pornographic’ and banned by university authorities.

UCT research associate Helen Moffett and Mark Kaplan release Reverse Swing, a documentary series on cricket and trans-formation

UCT hosts a panel in memory of Edward Said, leading post-colonial scholar.

Cape Fur Seal skull (Arctocephalus pusillus) and mandible, collected from an archaeological site and used to judge its seasonal human occupation. Because seals give birth seasonally their teeth and bones can be used to tell the month of the year during which these sites were visited. John Parkington (Archaeology Department).

1999 Professor Njabulo Ndebele is inaugurated as UCTâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s eighth Viceâ&#x20AC;&#x201C;Chancellor.

1996 Professor Jennifer Thompson, head of Microbiology at UCT and outspoken advocate for genetically modified foods in Africa, is awarded a Distinguished Teacher Award.

1986 The government drops the permit system for students in all disciplines.

188

Herero headdress UCT collection at the South African Museum

â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Index IIIâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; Pippa Skotnes, Fritha Langerman and Gwen van Embden Individual entries in the annual university publication research report, stitched onto an academic gown, according to faculty.

1918

1961

The Werhner Beit Chair in Medical Microbiology is established.

The UCT Foundation is established to receive and administer about R8 million the university hopes to raise for new buildings, renovations,

the provision of modern equipment and library resources, and funding new chairs and teaching facilities.

189

â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;No1733 P. Royston Lake-Chrissie 1913â&#x20AC;&#x2122; bored stone (Goodwin Collection at the South African Museum) Left flipper bones of a platypus (Collection: Zoology)

1930

1983

The South African College council writes a draft policy on religious instruction in the school which provokes lively debate.

Dr Wendy Orr graduates from UCT with a MBChB. She later serves on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

1995 Professor Syd Cywes, Head of the Department of Paediatric Surgery, is made President of the World Federation of Associations of Paediatric Surgeons.

190 In the Kingdom of Objects A blue crane, its white clavicle, a black cake of tobacco; a set of wood divining discs placed in a glass case; the ear-bone of a whale, head-gear of the Herero; this section of the universe, mounted in a light-box â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Ten thousand things, the ancients used to say, compose the universe. And here, arranged and re-arranged, are all the odds and ends, shreds of the world in which the world, immeasurable, is writ both large and small. Stained by their origins, stained by time no less than the clock in which time has long since died, here are the stones, used stamps, old shoes that augment the world, the buttons, boxes, casings, that multiply reality. Hostage to their use no longer, no longer captive to us, they unmake the world that they once made. They orbit now within mute space, each in its own shape, innominate, in that strangeness, now grown doubly strange, of all materiality. They wait, reclaimed by that first, last of all enigmas: that they should be at all, exist. See the skull of this rock-rabbit or the glass vessel that, long empty, obsolete, here becomes a cadence only in the daily flow of light, of dark â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Each has been arranged, placed with such patience and such love, that in their midst we might enter once again the great kingdom of things, principality of objects; that we might bow our heads once more, our eyes prepared, Sight de-scaled, for never-ending wonder and delight. Stephen Watson Stephen Watson is Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature

192

We thank the many people who assisted us during the preparation of this exhibition including: Brenda Cooper, Noeleen Murray, Helen Moffett, Caroline Powrie, Alan Morris, John Parkington, Cedric Poggenpoel, Nic van der Merwe, Dave Dewar, Lionel Smidt, Tony Fairall, Brian Warner, Cynthia Best, Dieter Oschadleus, Les Underhill, Jeremy Midgley, Willam Bond, Terry Trinder-Smith, Maxine Arvan, Meg Winter, Alison Emslie Lewis, Steve Driver, Fran Pocock, Joachim Petersen, Emmanuel Ngoma, Kamunga Thierry, Luigi Nassimbeni, Allen Rodgers, Andre de Jager, Cyril O’Connor, Tony Morphet, Douglas Pitt, Gary Marsden, Elizabeth Triegaardt, Sharon Friedman, Gary Rosen, Dianne Cheesman, Mark Fleishman, Lynne Lomofsky, Liz Mills, Chris Weare, Stephen Watson, Ian Glenn, Paula Ensor, Ingrid Fiske, Murray Liebrandt, Anthony Black, Martin Hall, Raj Mesthrie, Mike Picker, Deon Knobel, Raj Ramesar, John Rogers, David Reid, Anton le Roex, Terry Davies, Maarten de Wit, Heinz Reuther, Rae Nash, Nikki Padayachee, Vivian BickfordSmith, Nigel Penn, Nan Yeld, Dirk Lang, Kit Vaughn, Christopher Peter, Mary von Bloemmenstein, Milton Shain, Veronica Belling, Faye Frizlar, Joan Hambidge, Hugh Corder, Pauline Alexander, Kirsten Morreira, Christopher Gilmour, John Webb, George Vicatos, Andy Sass, Jennifer Thompson, Sr. Waldon, Michael Nixon, Franklin Larey, David Benatar, Annette Seegers, Sean Baumann, Sandra Prosalendis, Thelma Skotnes, Steve Louw, Andy Buffler, David Aschman, Tanya Barben, Annette Roup, David Chidester, Philippe Salazar, Zafira Gitay, Sampie, Mugsy Spiegel, Lesley Fordred, Martin Hall, Owen Sichone, Daya Reddy, Jeremy Seekings, Nicoli Nattrass, Lafras Steyn, Royden Yates, Lindsay Hooper, June Hosford, Patricia Davison, Lesley Hart, Tim Noakes, Beth Adams, Pat Heydenrich, Christine Heydenrich, Meg Ledeboer, Charlie Griffith, Anusya Chinsamy–Turan, Julia Teale, Brian Sassman, Johann Maree, Makhosazana Ngaba, Jermaine Charles, Monica Mosarwa, Emma Beech, Martin West, Bianca Alexander, Sara-Jane Johnson, Ali Aschman, Natasha Norman, Michele Horwitz, Andrezej Nowicki, Lesca Steyn, Marco van Embden, Loyiso Qanya, Danielle de Kock, Madelyn Johnstone-Robertson, Stuart Bird, Eustasia Riley, Thomas Cartwright, Rayda Becker, Zubaida Shaik, Charma Nathoo, Ernestine White, Cheryl de la Rey, Charlie van Rooyen, Godfrey Koff, Freddie Scotchman, Martin Adams, Outa Lappies, Vida e café, Marius Diemont, Stephen Herandien, Gaby Richie, Mark Antonello, Russell Jones, Chris Mitchell, Skye Grove, Andrea Weiss, Mary Hilton, Marilet Sienaert, Andrea Steer, Vivien Cohen, Moeneeb Dalwai, Lyn Aschman, Sean Bowerman, Megan Higham, Howard Phillips, Eric Tucker, Janine Dunlop, Yasmin Mohamed, Ivan Toms, Karina Turok, Cecil Skotnes, Jacques van Embden, Samuel van Embden, Jules Skotnes Brown, Casey van Embden, Karl Markwald, David Brown, Malcolm Payne, Jane Alexander, Bruce Arnott, Geoff Grundlingh, Stephen Inggs, Svea Josephy, staff at the Scan Shop, Andrew Lamprecht, Virginia Mackenny, Johann van der Schijff, Gavin Younge, Carine Zaayman, Ada van de Vijver, Carmel Schrire, Bridget Simons, Lyndi Sales, Delise Reich, Nigel Penn, Shula Marks, Njabulo Ndebele, Hugh Amoore, Works of Arts Committee, Charles Diamond, Wendy McLachlan, Louise Linder, Gary Branquet, Anna du Bois, Dudley Horner, Lisa Essex, Ingrid Willis, Roland Willis, Shauna Westcott, Ferdi Nel, Mike Tuohy, Mike Ormrod and Orms, Picto, Supercare, Ida Fisher, Debbie Victor.