Wits walkabout: A look inside the university’s treasures, spaces and places

A walkabout at the University of the Witwatersrand is an important reminder that a university can do two things: hold the past and realise the future. On the one hand, Wits curates an astonishment of treasures in its libraries, museums, collections and art galleries. Treasures spanning epochs and disciplines.

But it is also at the cutting edge of STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths). Half the students here are registered in STEM courses, and nearly 80% of all research is in STEM fields.

It is also a reminder about just how big Wits really is in terms of people and property. With a R10-billion annual turnover, the university has 400 hectares, 400 buildings, seven campuses in Parktown and Braamfontein and a rural facility in Mpumalanga.

Wits is the only African university to own a private hospital – the Wits Donald Gordon School of Medicine – and is about to complete the largest school of public health on the continent on the Wits Education Campus in Parktown, with an ultra-modern sports and exercise science institute, while the new Bio-Hub in Houghton is set to be a spacious campus housing a range of Wits Health Sciences research institutes.

Wits has 41,702 students, 2,500 staff, 12 libraries, 42 sports clubs and seven museums, and about 200,000 alumni around the world, including 15 dollar billionaires. Wits is consistently ranked in the top 1% of universities globally.

It has been a scientific, cultural and historic landmark in the heart of Jozi for more than 100 years. But the world-renowned Origins Museum, one of the places visited, takes one back much further. This modern space has one of the world’s largest rock art collections and details the compelling story of the evolution of life in modern humans over the past 250,000 years.

Across the road, the Evolutionary Studies Institute houses the largest collection of fossil hominid remains in the world, and the most prized fossils in global palaeoanthropology, including the Taung Child Skull, Little Foot, Naledi and Sediba. Wits also played a key role in having the Cradle of Humankind declared a World Heritage Site.

A few hundred metres down Yale Road is the new Anglo American Digital Dome which came into being when Jozi’s beloved planetarium got a R55-million hi-tech upgrade. It’s now a state-of-the-art data science exploration and discovery facility and remains a favourite place for the public to explore the wonders of the cosmos and experience 360-degree storytelling at its best.

Perhaps the most interesting symbol of Wits’ future face is the School of Physics with its Structured Light Laboratory and the world of photonics – the science of manipulating and generating light. Here the Wits team has developed novel methods to tailor light, fashioning customised light fields for applications in imaging, communication, health, metrology and teleportation.

From light to culture, the grand William Cullen Library, close to the famous steps of the Great Hall, is the repository of irreplaceable historical documents, including Nelson Mandela’s famous handwritten speech from the Rivonia Treason Trial, Sol Plaatje’s Diary from the Siege of Mafeking and David Livingstone’s diaries of his travels in southern Africa.

The Wits Art Museum (WAM), which houses one of the largest African collections worldwide, is also home to the Jack Ginsberg Centre for Book Arts, a delightful 3,000-plus-piece donation by art collector and philanthropist Ginsberg of his “artists’ books” (artwork in the form of books) that he’d been collecting since the early 1970s.

Wits is also planning a new cultural precinct that will link WAM, the new Digital Arts building, the Wits School of the Arts, the Wits Theatre and the iconic Chris Seabrooke Music Hall, a state-of-the-art performance venue. At the same time, Wits continues to be sub-Saharan Africa’s leading innovation hub, creating solutions for 21st-century challenges. DM