In Memoriam

1962-2021

Rob Legh

[BCom 1982, LLB 1984, MBA 1994]

Robert Legh, who died in Johannesburg at the age of 59 of COVID-19 complications on 1 July 2021, was the chair and senior partner of Bowmans, one of the country’s largest corporate law firms.

Legh was born in Johannesburg and matriculated from St Stithians College in 1978. He enrolled at Wits on a De Beers scholarship and he was the manager of a punk rock band called Snappy Canaries.

He joined Bowmans in 1986 and became a partner in 1992. He was a multi-faceted lawyer having initially practised in various fields: commercial property, labour, general litigation, and eventually competition and mining.

He was considered one of the founding fathers of competition law in South Africa and the founding partner of Bowmans’ Competition Practice in 1999, the year the Competition Act was enacted, and headed it for many years before his appointment as chair in 2014. It is internationally recognised as one of the leading competition practices on the African continent. He worked on a number of high-profile cases over the years in relation to hostile mergers, abuse of dominance and cartel cases. He contributed to the first South African book on competition law.

Legh received the Lifetime Achievement Award for Excellence in Competition Law at the South African Professional Services Awards. Most recently he will be remembered as having worked during the pandemic to ensure workers without wages received help during the lockdown.

After 35 years at Bowmans his colleague Jonathan Schlosberg (BCom 1975, LLB 1976) paid tribute to him as “a fantastic and fun travelling companion and a wonderful colleague to have with you in important meetings with clients and with partners of major international law firms with whom we have very important relationships”. He writes Legh possessed “all the qualities of a leader - decency, integrity, loyalty, dedication, trustworthiness, reliability, intelligence (both intellectual and ‘street smarts’), toughness when required and thoughtfulness”.

He is survived by his wife Kathryn and children Tom and India.

Sources: Sunday Times and Bowmans

1944-2021

Ebrahim Kharsany

[MBA 1971, MCom 1971]

Chief executive and founder of the Islamic Bank Limited Ebrahim Kharsany died on 6 March 2021. He was one of 14 to receive the first Master of Business Administration degrees awarded by the university in 1971.

He was the only student of colour, and only Muslim, on the course. His classmates called him “Mickey,” and on occasional site visits to companies, he was asked to dine separately from other students, whereupon the entire class declined lunch in support of him. Known as an activist and astute businessman, he described how difficult it was finding any meaningful employment as the predominantly white corporate business sector would not employ people of colour in senior positions.

After spending a few years in the life assurance industry he established his own company which over several years lobbied the South African Reserve Bank (SARB) for a banking licence. His application was approved in September 1988 and he established South Africa’s first Islamic Bank. Kharsany was appointed head of the Small Business Initiative, which advocated support for small business and the abolition of restrictive trade legislation as part of the Old Mutual/Nedbank scenarios between 1992 and 1993.

In 1997 he made a submission to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, about the role the white business sector played in supporting apartheid and its being involved in sanctions-busting and arms procurement. He also criticised the SARB for advancing a controversial soft loan to Absa Bank Limited.

In 1981 he was an executive committee member of the Stop the Highway Committee which successfully stopped the Johannesburg City Council from constructing a section of highway from Auckland Park through De La Rey Street in Pageview and Princess Street in Mayfair. The highway would have caused the demolition of mosques, churches, temples, schools and houses in Pageview and Mayfair.

He was secretary of the Save Pageview Association and the organisation successfully prevented the forceful eviction of the Pageview families. Pageview was the only suburb in South Africa which, although declared a White Group Area in 1963, remained as South Africa’s first mixed-race suburb. He received a personal visit from then President Nelson Mandela in 1993.

Sources: SA History, WBS archives

1937-2021

Keith Beavon

[BSc 1959, MSc 1967, PhD 1975]

Professor Emeritus Keith Beavon died on 16 April 2021 after a long battle with Parkinson’s Disease. His contribution to South African geography was especially significant in urban geography: on record, he produced numerous journal papers, conference papers and urban reports. His work is referenced in at least 15 books. Beyond these formal academic achievements, he generously responded to public requests for extra-mural lectures and public lectures.

His teaching career included lectureships at the University of Swansea, Rhodes University, and the Universities of Cape Town, Witwatersrand and Pretoria. For six years after his retirement, he agreed to offer courses at all of the South African universities mentioned.

Professor Beavon was elected Fellow of the Society of South African Geographers. His awards included a Wits overseas fellowship (University of Sheffield), a British Council study award, a British Academy visiting professorship (University of Keele), and a New York University visiting scholarship. Between 1977 and 1998 he was the professor of Human Geography at Wits. When he retired from that post he became professor and head of geography at the University of Pretoria (UP) between 1999 and 2005. At the end of his teaching career, the titles of Professor Emeritus were conferred upon him by both Wits and UP.

He demanded high standards, but he made provision for his students to have fun, too. One past student (of the 1970s), on hearing of Professor Beavon’s death, wrote of the department under his leadership as “the wonderful years spent watching and learning from you at Wits, and benefiting from your intellectual and social generosity. I know others who reflect on that golden period in our lives with such pleasure and gratitude”.

Source: John Earle

1940-2021

Morris James Viljoen

[BSc 1961, BSc Hons 1962, MSc 1964, PhD 1970]

Celebrated Wits geoscientist Professor Morris Viljoen died of COVID-19 complications on 19 August 2021. Along with his twin brother Richard (BSc 1961, BSc Hons 1962, Msc 1964, PhD 1970) he famously mapped large parts of the Barberton Greenstone Belt, which lies within the Barberton Makhonjwa Mountains, a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

The mapping in the southern part of the Barberton Mountains revealed a remarkably well preserved succession of rocks which were unlike any other volcanic rock that had been described at that time.

The rocks’ very high magnesium content and distinctive texture put them in a new class of their own, and they are now recognised as an important part of the story of the early earth. They are found in the oldest segments of all the continents. Known as komatiites, they were formed when lava crystallised at a much higher temperature than other lavas, and they are associated with nickel and gold deposits. The Viljoens jointly received the Lindgren Award of the Society of Economic Geologists in the US in 1979 for the discovery of komatiite.

In 1970 Viljoen joined JCI and established the geological research unit with a mandate to find new mines for the company, which involved extensive travel. He made similar contributions as a consultant for Rustenburg Platinum, the forerunner of Anglo American Platinum.

In 1990, he was appointed professor in the School of Geosciences and introduced a course in mining and environment as well as the Centre for Applied Mining and Exploration Geology (CAMEG). Through CAMEG, he played an instrumental role in the generation of many exploration targets, several of which have developed into advanced prospects and operating mines.

In 2010, Viljoen was one of the co-founders of VM Investment Company. It laid the foundation for the establishment of Bushveld Minerals and AfriTin as fully operational London Aim-listed mining companies.

Viljoen was highly respected by his peers and was a fellow of the Geological Society of South Africa (GSSA) where he served as president in 1988, the Southern African Institute of Mining and Metallurgy and the Royal Society of South Africa.

He was also the recipient of a number of awards, including the Captain Scott Medal for the best MSc thesis, and the Draper Memorial Medal – the highest award of the GSSA.

His passion for geoheritage and geotourism helped many to understand the influence of geology on nature and on human activity. He and his brother led walks in the Kruger Park, produced explanatory material about the Vredefort Dome for visitors to Parys and published a guidebook to the Barberton region.

Sources: Wits University archive and Mining Weekly

1955-2021

Ivor Powell

[BA Hons 1980]

Ivor Powell was a Kimberley-born art history and philosophy graduate who defied the restrictions of a single profession. Mercurial and described by journalist Jonathan Ancer “as one of journalism’s most charming, complicated, complex and colourful characters: dapper and dazzling Dadaist, brilliant art critic, super sleuth, sensitive Scorpion”, he died five days before his 66th birthday from emphysema on 18 August 2021.

Powell’s father was an Anglican priest and his mother an assistant to Bishop Njongonkulu Ndungane in Kimberley. After completing matric in 1972, Powell moved to Cape Town and pursued a BA in English at the University of Cape Town. In 1980 he completed his BA honours and while tutoring at the university, he met artist and former lecturer in the Wits fine art department Robert Hodgins, who had a great influence on him. Between 1982 and 1987 he lectured at Unisa but also became involved in the underground art scene as a member of the neo-Dadaist collective, Possession Arts, an affiliation of artists and writers that included former arts editor of the Mail & Guardian Matthew Krouse (BA DA 1988), Joachim Schonfeldt (BA FA 1981) and Professor Mark Solms (BA Hons 1985, MA 1987, PhD 1992) who is now an accomplished neuropsychoanalyst. Their output was experimental anti-theatre. “Where it worked, it worked at the interface between meaning and anarchy, at a sometimes dangerous and visceral edge of control and loss of control, of making sense and not making sense,” Powell wrote. “At its best, you might think of Possession as a joyride in a stolen semantic vehicle.”

In 1985, he started contributing art reviews for the newly launched Weekly Mail and over the next two decades established a reputation as “one of the finest art critics in South Africa”. In 2004 he won a prestigious national journalism award for a piece of criticism published in Art South Africa. Increasingly he became more interested in political stories and morphed into a general investigative journalist. He helped the paper break important stories on the notorious Vlakplaas death squads. He moved to other publications such as The Star and the Vrye Weekblad.

In 2001 when Thabo Mbeki launched the Directorate of Special Operations (the Scorpions), Powell joined as senior investigator. In 2005 he authored the now-infamous classified internal Browse-Mole memo report, which investigated possible sources of Jacob Zuma’s legal and political campaigns. A version of this was leaked and it made him a target of various forces in intelligence circles. In January 2008, he was arrested on charges of driving under the influence, but the charges were struck from the register of Cape Town Magistrate’s Court six months later, with the local directorate for public prosecutions undecided on whether to prosecute him. The experience changed him.

He took up a post at Independent Newspapers, running the company’s cadet school until 2013, and lost his appetite for political investigations. In his remaining years he preferred the company of his family, cooking, and watching cricket and soccer.

Former editor of the Mail & Guardian Nic Dawes said he was “perhaps the most brilliant critic of his generation, an investigative journalist of penetrating acumen, and a spook. Some people see a contradiction in those three careers. I think on the contrary that they were deeply linked.”

He is survived by his six children and partner Chiara Carter.

Sources: Daily Maverick, Mail & Guardian

1957-2021

Thobile Patience Manana

[BA Hons 1992, Cert Ed 2010]

Thobile Patience Manana, affectionately known as “Manox” or “Oprah”, died on 28 June 2021 at the Netcare Hospital in Krugersdorp. She grew up in Ekuvukeni in Wasbank, KwaZulu-Natal. She graduated from Sigweje Junior Secondary School and then did her PTC qualification at eMadadeni Training College.

After high school she specialised in sociolinguistics, semantics, modern and traditional languages. In 2011, Manana was selected to take part in the “Leadership for Learning” at Harvard University in Massachusetts in the US. She spent the majority of her teaching time in Johannesburg at Jabulani Technical High School where she was the principal, and in 2012 implemented a turnaround strategy to move the school from 16% achievement to 66% and 88.8% the next year. Manana married Bhekisizwe Daniel Manana in 1984.

An avid Christian, she enjoyed travelling and public speaking. She is survived by her husband, her two sons Sicelo Nkosinathi and Sakhile Mthokozisi, and granddaughter Thandolwethu Heather Zamacusi Manana. She will be remembered for her verve for life, saying “I don’t need a billion rand to live my best life, I’m my own Oprah!”

Source: Sowetan