In a major move to reverse the brain drain, Wits will launch on Friday 21 July the Friedland Fellowship to encourage top young scientists to come to South Africa to do socially relevant research.

"We are very concerned about the brain drain so this fellowship is trying to reverse this trend,” said Professor Barry Mendelow, Executive Director of Research at Wits University.

He said the fund will enable scientists to come to Wits at a salary that would match what they would earn in England or the United States.

"We believe there are a fair number of young bright PhD graduates all around the world who are poised to start their scientific careers and contribute to the world of science.”

"If we can address the financial issue, South Africa is attractive particularly in the health sciences field because there are such big problems that need creative scientific research. Any benefits from this research will be applicable to millions of people,” Mendelow said, adding that researchers coming here would encourage our young people to stay and

The fund was made possible by a donation from money be used for a prestigious post doctoral fellowship that would be globally competitive.

Vice-Chancellor Professor Colin Bundy will launch the fund at 10:30am Friday 21 July at 11th Floor Senate House, Jorissen Street, East Campus Wits launch, phone Martha Molete at (011) 717-1019 or 083-327-0103 or email:086martha@atlas.wits.ac.za

Over the past 14 months the University of the Witwatersrand has been engaged in a highly consultative and comprehensive restructuring exercise involving both academic and support service functions.

As a result of restructuring for operational requirements, institutional improvements and financial sustainability some 624 employees are to be retrenched.

During all processes leading up to this outcome the university has meticulously and consistently complied with both the letter and the spirit of the Labour Relations Act.

Moreover the university is implementing generous severance packages and a comprehensive social plan to mitigate the impact on affected staff. The package includes three months notice and three weeks salary for every year of service. Further enhancements for length of service are also provided for. Bursaries of dependents of retrenched staff studying at Wits University or currently in their matriculation year will be continued.

The social plan covers such matters as retraining and reskilling, assistance towards the establishment of small business and a social fund for those employees whose personal circumstances are such as to render them “most vulnerable” to poverty.

The University’s offer not only far exceeds the requirements of the LRA and normal industry standards, but constitutes a model settlement.

The University emphasizes that the retrenchment of employees is a labour relations issue. The actions of NEHAWU in appealing to the Human Rights Commission and the Office of the Public Protector, as well as attempting to use the Employment Equity Act to prevent retrenchments, are entirely inappropriate. We urge NEHAWU to follow the remedies available to them in the Labour Relations Act, as opposed to attempting the circumvention of normal labour relations.

Issued by Professor Colin Bundy, Vice-Chancellor, Wits University For Information: Contact Martha Molete Cellphone: 083 327 0103 or (011) 717-1019

The University of the Witwatersrand strongly refutes NEHAWU claims that current restructuring constitutes privatization of a public asset, or that access to the university’s academic courses will become more difficult for less well off students.

In a statement issued by Vice-Chancellor Professor Colin Bundy on Tuesday 30 May, he said that current restructuring simply involves outsourcing contracts for certain non-core functions, rather than any shift in ownership relations or governance. The changes being made are in fact improving the financial sustainability of Wits, taking pressure off management and students, and allowing for better academic and support facilities and services.

The University also refutes allegations that work done on our behalf by consultants is in any way below par or prejudiced. On the contrary Wits has received excellent service and good value for money during the long and highly consultative review process undertaken. The University entirely rejects all suggestions and allegations that the change management process has been either unilateral or predetermined.

The comprehensive changes and improvements unfolding at Wits are in fact leading to new and exciting academic programmes, more productive use of infrastructure and resources, as well as enhancing the Wits contribution to South Africa’s human resource and development needs, Bundy said.

For more information: Contact Martha Molete, Media Relations Officer, Cellphone: 083 327 0103; (011) 717-1019 email: 086martha@atlas.wits.ac.za

The process of transforming South Africa will get a boost with a new institute that will conduct cutting edge research on pressing social and economic issues, the University of the Witwatersrand announced on 29 May.

Distinguished Wits academic Professor Deborah Posel has been appointed as director of the new institute called the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WISER). Posel will take up the post on 1 July 2000.

“The University of the Witwatersrand wishes to see this new institute become a leading centre of research locally, regionally and internationally,” said Vice-Chancellor Professor Colin Bundy.

“The institute will also contribute to the research training of postgraduate students, the facilitation of inter-disciplinary research, intellectual exchange and the development of research partnerships with a range of stakeholders – government, the private sector, research agencies and non-governmental organisations,” he said.

He added that the University’s location within the economic and industrial heartland of South Africa, its strategic location in the Southern African region together with its tradition of research excellence, gives it a head start in this objective.

Top academic Posel obtained her BA and BA Honours both with distinctions from the University of the Witwatersrand, and her Doctorate in Philosophy from the University of Oxford in 1987. She has served as an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology since 1995. She is the author of the acclaimed book, The Making of Apartheid, 1948 - 1961 published in 1991, and edited Apartheid’s Genesis (with Bonner and Delius) in 1994. She has authored many articles and chapters published internationally and locally.

Posel is a scholar of international standing, and has been a visiting fellow at the Universities of Oxford and Harvard.

“I feel privileged to have been appointed founding director of WISER,” she said. “I see WISER as bringing together top scholars from a range of disciplines, to shed new light on the complexitites of South Africa’s transition. I also want WISER to play a leading role in social and economic research beyond our borders, drawing on networks of scholars in the rest of Africa and beyond.”

Chief Justice Margaret Marshall, former South African student leader in the 1960s and now American judge, will receive an honorary degree from the University of the Witwatersrand at a graduation ceremony on Tuesday 23 May.

Marshall, who graduated from Wits in 1966 with a Bachelor of Arts degree, was active in student politics and went on to be elected president of the National Union of South African Students (NUSAS) in 1966.

In 1968 she went to the United States and in the following year was awarded a master’s degree in education by Harvard University. She then studied law at Harvard and Yale Law Schools, receiving her Juris Doctor degree from Yale in 1976. She became an American citizen in 1978, by which time she was practising law in Boston.

Marshall enjoyed a brilliant legal career which was crowned by her appointment as an associate justice of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts in 1996 and, three years later, at the age of 54, as the first woman to be sworn in as the Chief Justice of that court. Prior to those appointments she held high office in one of the world’s great universities; and for the past three decades she has remained active in causes and organisations dedicated to a just and democratic order in her native South Africa.

For photo opportunities, interviews or a seat at the graduation, contact Martha Molete at (011) 717-1019 or cell: 083-327-0103, email: 086martha@atlas.wits.ac.za The graduation begins at 6pm Tuesday 23 May but photos can be taken at 5:30pm in Room CB8 near the front doors of the Great Hall, Wits University.

Wits University has come to the rescue of valuable rock art engravings – not by recording them in photographic books but by trucking them across Johannesburg out of the highveld wind and acid rain.

Dr Ben Smith, director of the Rock Art Research Institute at Wits University, says the 33 large rocks with priceless San engravings have been at the Johannesburg Zoo getting covered with moss and lichen for the last 30 years. Wits has been granted permission to move the rocks to a safe storage place on campus while it constructs the first national museum of rock art. The collection will form the centrepiece of this new museum.

“It is fantastic that Wits has saved this collection for the nation. No one else can take them. It is our duty to come to the rescue of Southern African rock art wherever it is threatened,” Smith said, adding that Wits has a 911 rock art team that goes to rock art where it is threatened.

Rock engravings are carved into the rock so are different from rock paintings. Smith says these engravings are estimated to be thousands of years old.

In the 1950s Mr Paul Friede was concerned that dam projects, graffiti and the environment were damaging the numerous rock art engravings in the North West Province and in the Magaliesburg area of Gauteng. They got permission from landowners to take care of these precious engravings but had to remove the entire pieces of rock.

Friede and a team that included Wits Professor Clarence van Riet Lowe transported almost 100 engraved rocks to a site near the War Memorial at the Johannesburg Zoo. They wanted to build a museum in Johannesburg to bring rock engravings to a wider audience. However, the damper and more polluted Johannesburg air caused lichen and moss to grow on the rocks, Smith said. “The engravings became less clear and acid rain began slowly eating away at the rock surfaces.”

In the early 1990s, Museum Africa moved 60 of the small boulders to their Newtown building. However, the floors were not strong enough to hold the bigger stones. The largest one is 4x2 metres and weighs seven tonnes.

Wits has set aside a building – the Rembrandt Gallery – for the safe storage of the rocks while another building is prepared as the Wits national museum of rock art. The museum will house the largest original rock art collection in the world. “A lot of the engravings are engravings of eland, a key symbolic animal for the San people. For the San, the eland was God’s favourite animal and he blessed it with special spiritual power,” Smith said. “The San heritage is a truly national heritage as San rock art is found throughout every province. It is therefore a heritage that unites us all, as so beautifully exemplified in the new national coat of arms.”

Trucks and cranes will be moving the huge rocks from Wednesday 17 May to Friday 19 May. The route is from the War Memorial to Wits West Campus. For more information, or to take photos, contact Dr Ben Smith at (011) 717-6044 or cell: 083 770 1086 or Martha Molete at (011) 717-1019.

Invitation to the opening of Kwere Kwere / Journeys into Strangeness A multimedia exhibition on migration and identity in South Africa, curated by Rory Bester.

Tuesday 16 May at 17:30 for 18:00 Jenny Parsley of the Roll Back Xenophobia campaign will open the exhibition at Gertrude Posel Gallery, Ground Floor, Senate House, Jorissen Street, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.

Secure parking available on request

Kwere Kwere / Journeys into Strangeness
Open 17 May – 21 June 2000
Gertrude Posel Gallery,
Ground Floor Senate House,
Wits University
Tuesday to Friday 10:00 - 16:00 Tel. (011) 717-1363

Taking as its starting point the increasingly xenophobic reaction of South Africans to ‘foreigners’, whether migrants, refugees or asylum seekers, Kwere Kwere / Journeys into Strangeness is an exploration of the history of migration and identity in South Africa.

‘Amakwerekwere’, a word that originally referred to people who spoke a strange language that couldn’t be understood, has increasingly been used as a derogatory reference to unwanted ‘foreigners’. “The Kwere Kwere exhibition explores the impact of patterns of migration on perceptions about the identity of people and communities,” says curator Rory Bester, who teaches in the Department of the History of Art at the University of the Witwatersrand.

“In examining the relationship between migration and identity, the Kwere Kwere exhibition looks at four thematic areas: the making and maintenance of borders, the undertaking of cross- border journeys, the experience of displacement migrants feel in strange place, and the sense of home and belonging migrants forge in a strange land,” Bester says.

The Kwere Kwere exhibition includes 24 projects by photographers, filmmakers and artists including Ernest Cole, David Goldblatt, Themba Hadebe, Henion Han, Randolph Hartzenberg, Jacqueline Maingard, Zola Maseko, Gideon Mendel, Santu Mofokeng, Malcolm Payne, Jo Ractliffe, Berni Searle, Penny Siopis, and Paul Weinberg. There is also a range of historical and contemporary media footage presented in the form of 3 large-screen video projections, 6 television monitors and 5 slide projections.

Projects cover subjects as divers as the Great Trek, Angolan War, AWB invasion of Bophuthatswana, Sharpville massacre, mine hostels and migrant labour, homelands, land restitution, colonial ethnography, cross-border surveillance footage, pass laws, house arrest, Lindela Repatriation Centre, ‘illegal immigrants’, and xenophobia.

The exhibition focuses on the impact that colonial and apartheid era attitudes to race have had on recent xenophobic reactions to ‘foreigners ’, including systems and practices such as forced removals, pass books, migrant labour, and house arrest. The exhibition thus explores the criminalisation of migrants’ status and lifestyle as an attitude inherited and repeated from the past.

The exhibition also explores the role of culture in forming attitudes to ‘strangers’ and attempts to debunk some of the social myths about 'foreigners' that are, ironically enough, often generated within the cultural domain.

Kwere Kwere, in bringing together cultural experiences of alienation, loss, migration, displacement, defiance, home, isolation and return, is an attempt to create awareness and debate around the history of social discrimination against the victims and survivors of forced migration in the southern African region.

The Kwere Kwere exhibition opened at the Castle of Good Hope in Cape Town in March 2000. After its run at the Gertrude Posel Gallery in Johannesburg, the exhibition will travel to the NSA Gallery in Durban (October 2000). The Kwere Kwere exhibition is made possible in part by the Arts and Culture Trust of the President, City of Cape Town Arts and Culture Services, Ford Foundation, Hedwig Barry Productions, Hivos, National Arts Council of South Africa, Red Pepper Pictures, The Refinery, and Western Cape Cultural Services.

For more information, interviews or slides for publication, please contact Rory Bester at fotowork@iafrica.com or 083 458 6150. You can also contact Julia Charlton at (011) 717-1363.

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Two fossil hominids - a female, whose skull is the most complete ever found of her species, with a male lower jaw found a few centimetres away - were introduced to the modern world today (Wednesday, April 26, 2000) at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. They were discovered by Wits scientist Dr Andre Keyser at a new site in the Cradle of Humankind north-west of Johannesburg. The one-and-a-half to two-million-year-old pair, christened by their discoverer Orpheus and Eurydice (after the ancient Greek mythological lovers), was unearthed from a new research excavation called Drimolen in October 1994, only a year after it had been opened in the World Heritage Site area. They have been identified as Paranthropus robustus, a type of Australopithecine (ape-man) known for its huge teeth. This constitutes a double first for the Palaeoanthropological Unit for Research and Exploration (PURE) of the Bernard Price Institute for Palaeontological Research (BPI) at Wits. As Dr Lee Berger, Director of PURE, described it: "The female skull represents certainly the most complete skull of a robust Australopithecine ever found in Africa, and may in fact represent the most complete skull of an early hominid ever found. "There has never been a better discovery in this little-known branch of the human family tree. For the first time, we can directly compare unequivocally associated male and female robust Australopithecines. For the first time, we can see the complete morphology [scientific form] of a female robust Australopithecine; their form and shape has always been in question until now." Dr Berger said the discovery "further demonstrates that the newly-proclaimed World Heritage Site of Sterkfontein, Kromdraai, Swartkrans and environs is worthy of its name as the Cradle of Humankind." Dr Keyser said the first piece of fossil that had been noticed was the female's teeth, which were spotted by Ms Rosalind Smith, a volunteer assistant at the site. The skull and the second mandible were exposed by Dr Keyser and Ms Smith over the following three days. Said Dr Keyser: "I knew immediately what I was dealing with, and was extremely excited and absolutely delighted to have found it. It was certainly the highlight of my career as a palaeontologist." Said Ms Smith: "We all just sank down on our knees, we were so overwhelmed." The fossil pieces were so fragile that they had to be treated with a special glue as they were being exposed. The first steps in rebuilding the skull were made by Dr Ron Clarke, who works at the nearby Sterkfontein cave. Dr Keyser, Dr Jacopo Moggi-Cecchi (Research Officer with PURE) and Mr Colin Menter, graduate student and PURE'S Deputy Diretor of Excavations at Drimolen, completed the reassembly of the two specimens. Dr Keyser described his Orpheus and Eurydice: "She is beautifully preserved, and has a lower jaw with all its teeth. Next to her skull was another very much larger lower jaw, obviously that of a male. "When I recognised them as belonging to Paranthropus robustus, which has been known since 1938 from Kromdraai and 1948 from Swartkrans [two of the older sites within the Cradle of Humankind], I was incredibly excited. Nobody knew what a female Paranthropus looked like or what the differences were between the male and female skulls. These two now gave us those answers." And what are those differences? The males have a crest along the top of their skull, called a sagittal crest, to which the muscles of the lower jaw were anchored. The female, apart from being smaller than the male, has no such crest - a distinction echoed among male and female gorillas today. In life, Orpheus and Eurydice were largely vegetarian but may have included some meat in their diet from scavenged kills. They may even have used tools. The Drimolen site is now officially the second richest Australopithecus robustus site in the world after Swartkrans, having yielded around 74 specimens in the past eight years. Said Ms Mary Metcalf, Gauteng MEC for Agriculture, Conservation and the Environment: "The provincial government would like to congratulate Wits and its hard-working scientists. This magnificent discovery underscores yet again the importance of the South Africa community of palaeontologists to the international community, and the need for conservation of the area through its declaration as a World Heritage Site."

Photos available from Colin Emslie: 505colin@atlas.wits.ac.za Dr Andre Keyser of Wits University holding the skull Eurydice (skull) Paranthopus robustus Simon Mokobane, foreman of the Drimolen Site Project preparing one of the fossils from the site Orpheus (jaw), Eurydice (skull), Paranthopus robustus Pic:Colin Menter Dr Andre Keyser of Wits University at the Drimolen site where he found the fossils

• All about hominids and scientific names
• Fossil hominids and their classification
• Biography of Dr. Andre Keyser: the modest scientist
• Main Funders

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Wits Council reiterates support for restructuring plans

The University of the Witwatersrand’s Council fully reconfirmed its decision of 25 February to implement plans for restructuring the University. The council meeting on Friday 2 June also decided that management will continue to seek agreement with the National, Education, Health and Allied Workers Union on outstanding issues.

“We reviewed and debated views from various perspectives as part of an extremely consultative process, and approved management’s implementation of the plans,” said Mr Justice Edwin Cameron, Chairman of Council. “Wits must become a better managed, more cost-effective and service-oriented institution able to respond flexibly to society’s needs,” Cameron said. “Wits will continue with its comprehensive plan that involves new academic structures and new arrangements for the provision of support services,” he said.

Nine faculties are being transformed into five faculties that will be run by executive deans to be employed by the end of the year. The application process has begun and shortlists have been drawn up. Faculty boards are preparing implementation plans for the new structures and Senate and Council will review these plans in June.

In regard to the 624 support service workers who will be retrenched, unions, staff associations and management agreed on 1 June to a far reaching social plan. This plan includes arrangements for: retraining and reskilling, assistance towards establishing small businesses and a social fund for those employees whose personal circumstances are such as to render them “most vulnerable” to poverty. The package includes three months notice and three weeks salary for every year of service. Further enhancements for length of service have been provided for. Bursaries for children of retrenched Wits staff will be continued for the length of their degree. This includes children who are currently in matric and who will enrol at Wits in 2001.

For more information, contact Martha Molete, Wits Media Relations Officer:
(011) 7171-1019 or cell: 083-327-0103,
email: 086martha@atlas.wits.ac.za

This page first placed March 1999 and maintained by Wits Communications Service

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Director of Wits Communications Service Wendy McAllister