27 Jan 2025

D-Day liberated Europe from Nazi German occupation. It was the greatest amphibian operation ever planned. 2024 marked its 80th anniversary. A handful of the original participants were still alive to celebrate. Among them were several South African divisions. It was one of the most minutely planned operations in history. So many things could have gone wrong. In the event, although it was far from plain sailing, and hugely costly in terms of human lives, almost nothing went wrong. It remains a feat of astonishing military, organisational and human achievement.

Drawings, prints and sculpture by indigenous artists from the Circumpolar North have captured international attention at contemporary art events. This course offers a cultural perspective on the resurgence of contemporary art from the Far North. It explores its rich history and disentangles some of the complicated encounters between circumpolar communities and settlers that gave rise to beautiful visual and material expression of indigenous identity. The Inuit of the northern regions of Canada will be at the centre of this course, but examples from other Arctic communities will also be discussed.

Forgiveness is often described as a panacea for all wrongdoing, with immense benefits for everyone involved. What does recent science tell us about the evolution and biology of forgiveness, and what does it actually mean and require of us to forgive? This lecture delves into what is currently understood about the neuroscience of forgiveness. This analysis strives to bring the science of forgiveness into conversation with the complexities of our local context, also examining some of the processes that may derail or facilitate forgiveness and repair.

In this course the lecture will work individually with participants and assist them to translate from a medium into paint.During the working sessions we will be looking at how work is translated from one medium to another: such as photography to paintings, painting to tapestry, drawings to sculptures, collage to paintings, poems to paintings. We will then work from specific images of your choice and translate the selected image into painting.

This course looks at at how to use life as a canvas for our creative discovery. We will create structured flash-sized essays about our lives, which we can use towards a larger life-story or memoir. We will study examples of life stories and memoirs in different genres, discuss how to find creative inspiration from daily life and how to shape a narrative around life events using structure, voice, style and theme. We will also look at how to extend a short piece into a longer collection of work.

This course discusses the work of figures such as Mistral, Pagnol, Cézanne and Milhaud, all born in Provence, as well as significant visitors to the area. The south of France had a profound impact on artistic sentiments, resulting in beautiful works of art; the invention of paints in tubes enabled painters to work en plein air, fuelled by fine fare from the local markets. The impact of light, temperature, cuisine and landscape clearly played a significant role in original creativity – artistic, musical and literary.

For millennia homo sapiens had only the Sun for illumination. Then we discovered how to make fire, creating light after dark. In the first quarter of the nineteenth century, the generation of electric current became possible and the world changed. The creation of the electric light bulb was not simple, and the various models we use today took over 50 years to create This course will discuss how the discovery and use of electricity has made one of the greatest changes in the way in which we live today.

We are currently living in an ice age, with a major ice sheet situated over Antarctica. This course will explore the rock record of past ice ages, our understanding of how our current ice age came about and the future possible fate of ice on Earth, given global warming. The rock record of southern Africa includes evidence of Snowball Earth, of the end-Ordovician ice age in the Pakhuis Formation that sits atop Table Mountain, of the end-Devonian ice age from deposits in the Cape Fold Belt and of the Carboniferous-Permian Gondwanan ice age in the Dwyka tillites of the Karoo Basin.

State Owned Enterprises (SOEs) were the focus of the Zuma-centred power elite that coordinated the state capture strategies from 2009 to 2018. Since Cyril Ramaphosa became President, the focus has been on fixing the SOEs.The next step is the setting up of a holding company that will become the shareholder of SOEs, creating an arms-length relationship between SOEs and politicians. This lecture will ask: Why has the post-1994 South African government lacked a developmental vision for the role of SOEs? And therefore, what is the future of the SOEs?

The discovery of a living coelacanth off East London in 1938 was one of the most dramatic scientific finds of the twentieth century. The subsequent discovery of populations of this iconic fish off South Africa, Mozambique, Tanzania, Kenya, Comoros and Madagascar, and of another living coelacanth species off Indonesia, has renewed worldwide interest in this ancient fish. The sequencing of the coelacanth’s genome, the identification of their prime habitats and studies of their behaviour in the natural environment have added intriguing new insights to this famous scientific quest.

In a ground-breaking procedure at a government hospital, Tanya became the first person in
Africa to receive a double lung transplant. This life-saving surgery was made possible by the unwavering support of her family, the expertise of dedicated medical professionals and her unyielding faith in the Lord. Tanya’s experience underscores the incredible advancements in organ transplantation and the selfless gifts of organ donors. Her lecture will not only recount the medical miracles she experienced, but also highlight the emotional and spiritual journey she undertook.

Manet’s work represents a crucial turning point between the realism of Gustave Courbet and the ‘new painters’. His extremely expressive and accurate painting technique influenced the young Impressionists. Two works led to him to become the undisputed leader of the avant-garde, and a pariah at the École des Beaux Arts. Both works, ‘Déjeuner sur l’herbe’ and ‘Olympia’, reference the great Renaissance works of Giorgione and Titian. A deeper side of him is revealed in his moving works of 1864 and 1865 on the theme of death.

Alongside written scripture, there is a long tradition of depictions of Christ in painting. This course, jointly presented by a cleric and a historian, considers the varying purposes of Christian art: devotional, didactic and doctrinal. It examines how the human and divine natures of Christ are depicted in widely differing styles and schools of art. How did these images change over time, and why?

Everyone is taught that the Sun is 150 million kilometers away from the Earth. How do we know that? Is it obvious to you how far away it is? We cannot determine the distance to the Sun from just looking at it. This lecture will tell a story involving a stone tower, a dungeon, a great Dane, a hypochondriac, Shakespeare, a child prodigy, a genius, sea battles and voyages of discovery, royal observatories, a clockmaker, a gentleman returned from the dead, and even Dixieland jazz.

This lecture will provide an in-depth look at how investigative journalism in South Africa played a role in the eventual exposure of state capture and the toppling of the Zuma regime. It will also include a discussion on the constitution and why it is being contested.

This illustrated course is an introduction to both the history of landscape design and gardens, focusing on the practicalities of working with nature to create places of harmony, recreation and sustainable development. It will explore and uncover the influences and inspirations for garden design throughout the centuries, from ancient Persia to modern Prairie gardens. It will include some examples of maps, plans, plants and details, but the focus will be the overall impression that is created by designers when working with nature in an environmentally sustainable way.

This course will explore the most famous of poetic forms, the sonnet, from its earliest days to the present, with a close critical reading of selected sonnets. The course will discuss the form and development of the sonnet and its strange capacity for resolving itself and life’s questions, the mystery of fourteen lines, the power of metre and rhyme and the famous ‘volta’. Texts will be provided in class.

Few topics in philosophy have more immediacy than existentialism. Its many proponents and eminent thinkers address the most fundamental questions asked by all thinking humans and religions. Questions addressed include: What are we, how did we become us, where are we, are there other sentient beings in the Universe? What does it mean to be human, what may become of us? Are there alterable determinants of our destiny that may affect – individually – each of our ultimate destinies? Will it ever end, and if so, when and how?