In Memoriam

1932-2021

James Mzilikazi Khumalo

[PhD 1989, honoris causa 2015]

Professor James Stephen Mzilikazi Khumalo — a colossal figure in South Africa’s academic, cultural and public landscape — passed away two days after his 89th birthday. Throughout his life he remained intellectually curious and moved effortlessly across disciplines as linguist, educator, composer and humanist.

He was born on a farm owned by the Salvation Army to a deeply religious family in the Vryheid district of KwaZulu-Natal on 20 June 1932. His parents nurtured his spirituality and love for western vocal music as well as traditional African music. He was the eldest in the family of seven children, surrounded by siblings who all learned to play musical instruments. He studied music through the Royal School graded lessons and examinations.

Professor Khumalo was schooled in Durban and Soweto and in 1950, matriculated from the Salvation Army High School in Nancefield. His journalist sister Nomavenda Mathiane said: “Cramped in this tiny two-bedroomed township house life seemed a perpetual struggle. We watched our parents battle to make ends meet on a meagre church salary. However, in hindsight, those were the best times of our lives as a family. We enjoyed many evenings of song, laughter and breaking bread.”

Given the realities of apartheid South Africa, Professor Khumalo directed his ambitions towards becoming a teacher. In 1956 he graduated with a BA degree majoring in English and Zulu, and in 1972 with a BA Hons from the University of South Africa. In 1987 he attained his PhD from Wits, with his postgraduate research and writing concerned with tonology, an aspect of linguistics that focuses on the interplay between intonation and meaning in spoken language. He joined the Department of African Languages at Wits as a tutor in 1969, serving a long stint as professor and head of the department. In these positions he made major contributions to the development and academic standing of the study of African languages. He retired from the University in 1998 but remained Emeritus Professor as an acknowledged authority in African Languages literature.

Professor Khumalo was particularly revered for his achievements in South African music as an awardwinning composer, conductor and mentor of generations of singers and musicians in the field of choral music. 1958 marked the completion of his first composition, "Ma Ngificwa Ukufa", followed by the composition of more than 50 epic choral works including the internationally acclaimed "uShaka kaSenzangakhona", an epic in music and poetry on Shaka, son of Senzangakhona. Other works for voice and choir such as "Five African Songs" included a setting of the traditional melody, "Bawo Thixo Somandla", arranged for orchestra by Peter Louis van Dijk. In 2002 he wrote "Princess Magogo kaDinuzulu", a work about the Zulu princess, musician and poet Princess Constance Magogo kaDinuzulu. It was the first Zulu-language opera.

The national respect that Professor Khumalo commanded is attested to in the numerous national positions and honours that he held (including a “Lifetime Achievement Award” bestowed at the 2007 M-Net Literary Awards), the countless competitions and awards that he and his choirs won, the many times he was commissioned to compose music for major occasions, being asked to join the Anthem Committee that developed the new national anthem of South Africa, and having a piano concerto composed in his honour, "Mzilikazi Emhlabeni", composed by Bongani Ndodana-Green. He received honorary doctorates from the University of South Africa, University of Zululand, University of Fort Hare and Stellenbosch University.

His wife of 63 years, Rose, died two days after him. They are survived by their four children and grandchildren.

Sources: Daily Maverick, Wits University archives, The Conversation

1957-2021

Robert Scholes

[BSc 1978, BSc Hons 1979, PhD 1988]

World renowned systems ecologist, Professor Robert Scholes, who was distinguished professor of systems ecology and director of the Global Change and Sustainability Research Institute at Wits, died in Namibia while hiking with friends on 28 April 2021.

Professor Scholes was named one of the most highly cited scientists in 2020 – he was among the top 1% of environmental scientists in the world based on citation frequency, having published widely in the fields of savannah ecology, global change, and earth observation.

He specialised in botany, zoology and ecology at Wits and completed a diploma in datametrics at the University of South Africa. After four years at Ntoma Wildlife as a research ecologist, Professor Scholes spent a year as a post-doctoral fellow at North Carolina State University before taking up the post of research officer at Wits. He held an A-rating from the National Research Foundation and served on the Technical Steering Committee of the South African Environmental Observatory Network.

As a systems ecologist, he adopted a holistic approach to the study of ecological systems, which he loved for their complexity. “Don’t throw out complexity because it reveals things about how the system has to put all the pieces together to allow it to function,” he would say.

Professor Scholes’s research provided a new measure called the Biodiversity Intactness Index. This has been adopted as one of the metrics used globally. Sorting out the complex energy and water balances that sustain one of the world’s biggest and most important ecosystems, the savannahs that dominate Africa, engaged him for 30 years.

He was a lead author on numerous assessments by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which provided a clear scientific view about climate change, as well as the likely environmental and socioeconomic impacts to policymakers. His work on the IPCC assessment processes led to his appointment in 2004 as co-chair of a working group which produced the ground-breaking Millennium Ecosystem Assessment.

Professor Scholes’s work provided the evidence which underpinned the new global concept of natural, as opposed to financial, capital. He said natural capital showed that the economic benefits which people derived from ecosystems amounted to trillions of dollars worldwide, arguably equal to or greater than the financial capital usually considered as a metric of wellbeing.

His work in the field of ecology, particularly in the areas of climate change, global biodiversity loss and land degradation, garnered considerable international recognition including the NASA Group Achievement Award. Over the course of his career, he authored and co-authored numerous books and book chapters and his articles appeared in various prestigious journals including "Nature" and "Bioscience". He was also a Fellow of the Royal Society of South Africa, a Fellow of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research and, in 2014, was elected an International Member of the US National Academy of Science.

He was interested in and very well-informed on a wide variety of topics. He was handy with tools and installed solar panels on his Johannesburg home and took it off the power grid. He was an excellent cook and for 22 years between Christmas and New Year he was chef at the Olive Branch restaurant in Prince Albert.

His wife, Professor Mary Scholes (BSc 1978, BSc Hons 1980, PhD 1988), whom he met at Wits in a botany class, said: “Our life was full of fun and glory”, adding that her husband died as he would have wished “with his boots on, peacefully under the shade of a Mopani tree”.

He is survived by his wife and son Stirling (BSc 2018, BSc Hons 2019, MSc 2020), who is doing a PhD in physics at a university in Edinburgh.

Sources: Wits University, Sunday Times and IPCC

1939-2021

Michael Kew

[MBBCh 1961, DMed 1968, PhD 1974, DSc Med 1982]

On the retirement of Professor Michael Kew from Wits in 2016, Emeritus Professor of Medicine and former dean at the Faculty of Medicine, Professor Thomas Bothwell, wrote: “When Mike was an intern, the senior ward sister, Stella Welsh, a great admirer of his, called him Peter Pan, and over forty years later, the title remains appropriate. Watching him hurry down a corridor, all energy and youthful drive.”

Over the years, many esteemed colleagues paid tribute to Professor Kew’s rigorous work ethic (up at 3.30am and retiring to bed at 7.00pm), which produced a formidable body of world-class research, and he became an international leader in the field of hepatology and viral hepatitis research. He belonged to a rare breed of physician-scientists who had a lasting impact on clinical practice, medical education, academic discourse, the lives of students and patients and medical leadership. He died of a perforated ulcer during the last week of May 2021.

Professor Kew was born in 1939 in Johannesburg, to Max and Dorothy Kew. At an early age, he was recognised as a brilliant student. He graduated with first class honours from Jeppe High School at the age of 15 in 1955. He enrolled at Wits in 1956 and began a more-than-50-year career at the university.

Over time he obtained all the degrees available in his branch of the medical field. His studies at undergraduate level were distinguished by many awards, culminating in winning the Bronze Medal of the Southern Transvaal Branch of the Medical Association of South Africa for the most distinguished graduate in Medicine. After obtaining the FCP(SA) from the College of Medicine of South Africa in 1965 he was appointed to the staff of Wits’ Department of Medicine and the Johannesburg teaching hospitals. He began work as a physician, later becoming a principal physician and senior lecturer (1971), a consultant hepatologist (1972), professor of medicine (1978) and senior physician and physician in charge of the Liver Unit (1972), as well as a member of the SA Medical Research Council (1997). He was inducted as a member of the Royal College of Physicians of London (MRCP) in 1971, followed by his election as a fellow of the Royal College (FRCP) in 1979.

Professor Kew’s initial academic and research studies were on a broad spectrum of liver diseases including viral hepatitis, drug-induced liver disease, portal hypertension, haemosiderosis, heatstroke and hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). In a series of studies, Professor Kew mapped out the close association of HCC with chronic hepatitis B virus (HBV) infection, the integration of HBV DNA into the tumour cells, the contributing factors ofage, sex, iron status and environmental factors in the progression of HCC, thereby establishing himself as the foremost authority on this significant tumour. Colleagues attest that he was an outstanding epidemiologist, pathologist, cell biologist and clinician on HCC. “He brought a freshness and excitement to the topic.”

He participated in a WHO expert committee and was given the task of recommending the final steps needed for the total eradication of the smallpox virus. Among the group of physicians who took care of former president Nelson Mandela, he was the first clinical scientist in South Africa to achieve a National Research Foundation A1 rating.

Outside of medicine, he had a black belt in karate and taught at Joe Robinson’s studio to pay for his undergraduate training. He was an accomplished cyclist and played squash at provincial level. He was an avid reader with a special interest in grammar and also single-handedly constructed an extra bathroom in his home.

After retiring from Wits, Professor Kew took up a research post at the University of Cape Town. Both the "South African Medical Journal" and the Gasteroenerology Foundation published festschrifts in his honour in 2018 as “physician-scientist, teacher and role model extraordinaire”.

Sources: SAMJ and Wits University archive

1959-2021

Christof Heyns

[PhD 1992]

On 28 March 2021 respected director of the Institute for International and Comparative Law in Africa, at the University of Pretoria, Professor Christof Heyns died of a heart attack while walking in the mountains near Stellenbosch. Professor Heyns also previously directed the Centre for Human Rights and was the dean of the Faculty of Law for a four-year period. He engaged in wide-reaching initiatives on human rights in Africa and internationally. In a tribute to him, the centre said his “enthusiasm for life, his dedication as a University of Pretoria Law academic, his national and international contributions, influence and work are unequalled”.

As an expert in human rights law, Professor Heyns was the rapporteur (main drafter) of the General Comment 37 (2020) of the United Nations Human Rights Committee, which offers global guidance on peaceful assembly. He worked with colleagues and students involved in the Freedom from Violence project. Professor Heyns made a presentation alongside Secretary-General of the UN, António Guterres, at the UN General Assembly event about peaceful assembly. He also drafted another document with the Office of the High Commission on Human Rights, called the UN Human Rights Guidance on Less Lethal Weapons, which was released in July 2020. These two documents restated the international law standards and UN standards on peaceful and not-so-peaceful assembly.

Professor Heyns advised a number of international, regional and national entities on human rights issues. In August 2010 he was appointed as UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, and in 2017 he was the South African candidate for election to the UN Human Rights Committee, the treaty monitoring body of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

Professor Heyns was also one of three experts appointed to conduct the UN Independent Investigation on Burundi and served as its chair. He held a Humboldt Fellowship at the Max Planck Institute in Heidelberg, Germany, and a Fulbright Fellowship at the Human Rights Programme at Harvard Law School. He served on the editorial boards of academic journals in South Africa, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Brazil, Uganda, Turkey and Costa Rica.

Professor Heyns held the degrees BLC, LLB, BA (Hons) and MA (Philosophy) cum laude from the University of Pretoria, a master’s of Law from Yale Law School (where he was a Fulbright Scholar); and a PhD degree on the history and legal aspects of the non-violent part of the struggle against racial domination in South Africa from Wits.

He is survived by his wife Fearika, son Adam, two daughters Willemien and Renée, mother Renée and grandson Isak Rust.

Sources: University of Pretoria and Daily Maverick

1943-2021

Anthony Keith Hedley

[MBBCh 1968]

Dr Anthony Keith Hedley was born on 2 October 1943 in Durban, South Africa and passed away peacefully at home surrounded by his wife and children on 19 April 2021.

Dr Hedley was an orthopaedic surgeon, author, researcher, and educator specialising in joint reconstruction and replacement. He received his medical degree from Wits in 1968. In 1977 he received his registration as specialist orthopedic surgeon from the South African Medical and Dental Council.

He was a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons in Edinburgh. He completed his fellowship in orthopaedic surgery at St Thomas Hospital, London, and his postdoctoral studies in Orthopedic Surgery and Bio-Engineering

1943-2021 at the University of California in Los Angeles. In 1982 he moved to Phoenix, Arizona and joined the Institute for Bone and Joint Disorders, later developing the Hedley Orthopaedic Institute. He performed thousands of hip and knee replacements until his retirement in 2020. He was known as the “doctor’s doctor” and listed among the “Best Doctors in America” since its inception in 1992. He was a master technician and loved by his patients for his kindness and compassion.

Dr Hedley was an avid fisherman, hunter, and bird watcher. He held three world record fish catches. He read widely and loved his daily crossword puzzles. He loved spending time with his family in Cabo San Lucas in Mexico and Soldotna in Alaska, where they fished together on the Kenai.

He is survived by two adult children from a prior marriage, Damian and Lisa, his three grandchildren, his wife of 20 years, Jennifer, and their three children.

Source: Journal of Orthopaedic Experience & Innovation

1948-2021

Chris Mann

[BA 1971]

Distinguished poet, playwright and musician Professor Chris “Zithulele” Mann died peacefully at his home in Makhanda in the Eastern Cape on 10 March 2021. He was diagnosed with cancer a year before.

“Poetry has been my vocation since my teenage years; an inconsolable yearning, a craft, a moment of vision, a protest, a solace, a prayer and respite throughout the turbulence of our times,” he wrote. His poems were prayerful and joyous. They reflected deeply about apartheid, nature, God and death.

The son of Norman “Tufty” Mann, the Springbok and Eastern Province cricketer, and Daphne Greenwood, an actress educated at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, Professor Mann was born in Port Elizabeth (now Gqeberha) on 6 April 1948. He matriculated from Diocesan College (Bishops) in Cape Town and he obtained a BA degree at Wits, an MA in English language and literature at the University of Oxford, and an MA in African oral literature at the School for Oriental and African Studies in London. Following the publication of his debut poetry collection, First Poems (1979), he won several awards, including the Newdigate Prize for Poetry from Oxford, the Olive Schreiner Prize and the Thomas Pringle Award. His poems appeared in a wide range of journals, textbooks and anthologies in South Africa and abroad.

After a few years as a teacher in Swaziland, he taughtat Rhodes University in the late 1970s. From 1980 to 1992 he worked in KwaZulu-Natal at The Valley Trust medical and agricultural project. It was at this time that he married his wife Julia Skeen. In 1999, he was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Durban- Westville in recognition of his literary accomplishments and many years of community-based work in the Valley of a Thousand Hills. Owing to his quiet personality, workers at The Valley Trust nicknamed him Zithulele, the quiet one.

In 2007, he was appointed Honorary Professor of Poetry at Rhodes University, primarily in recognition of his poetry but also for his founding, inspirational work in Wordfest, a national multilingual festival of South African languages and literatures.

Based at the Institute for the Study of English in Africa at Rhodes University, Professor Mann was able to converse in Afrikaans, Zulu and Xhosa fluently. In his poem Epiphanies from his latest publication (Palimpsests, Dryad Press, 2021) he writes: “Whoever grew wise without sorrow? Whoever loved until they’d trusted enough to bleed? And who understood until they’d shivered in terror at their ignorance?”

He leaves his wife and two children, Luke and Amy.

Sources: City Press, Wikipedia and Rhodes University

1947-2021

Michael Lewis

[MBBCh 1968, DOH 1983, DPH 1980, DHSM 1986]

Michael Lewis missed his first Wits graduation because he was backpacking in Madagascar. For him the journey was always more important than the destination.

He chose to practise medicine in the public health sector in South Africa and Dr Lewis’s journey led him to work at hospitals such as Themba near White River, Letaba near Tzaneen, Western Deep Levels near Carletonville, and Tonga near Malelane. From clinician to researcher, administrator to programme manager, he fulfilled many roles aimed at improving health services for the most disadvantaged people in South Africa.

Friend and human rights lawyer, Richard Spoor, describes his contribution in these words:

“Mike was an exceptional public health doctor. The work he did for former mineworkers is legend. He kept the system of medical benefit examinations for former mineworkers going in the Lowveld for many, many yearsin the face of managerial indifference. Securing benefits for disabled mine workers and their widows that materially improved their and their families’ lives.”

At Wits he met his wife and soulmate who matched and supported his ideals. Marieta Stumke (BSc 1967) and Mike got married in 1969 and raised three children: Sharon (BSc 1994), Christopher (MBBCh 1997) and Trevor (BSc Eng 1997).

Dr Lewis’s life was one of enquiry and learning. He loved intellectual debate, reading and challenging recreational pursuits like bridge, Scrabble and solving crosswords.

After returning to White River in 1997 — to settle ahead of retirement - he had a series of health setbacks. He died peacefully at home with Marieta by his side on 7 July 2021.

He will be missed for his warmth, wry sense of humour, curiosity and caring nature.

Source: Lewis family