I settled in smoothly in Cape Town. I am staying at an Airbnb in Pinelands, which is proving to be a very positive experience. My hosts are a friendly couple who have provided me with ample information on things to do in Cape Town. And contrary to some of the alarming stories on crime in South Africa floating around on the internet, Pinelands is a quiet residential neighborhood and crime doesn’t seem to be a problem. (Although I do not doubt that this is differently in other parts of the city; I daily pass some more sketchy spots during my commute.) A small complaint might be the inferior reliability and speed of the internet connection, which is an important aspect in both my personal life and work.
Wherever you go in Cape Town Table Mountain is a useful orientation point.
At work I got off to a good start as well. There, the first item on my agenda was to finalize my registration as a student at Stellenbosch University, which was dealt with smoothly. After making sure the administrative affairs were taken care of I met up with prof. David Tabb, under whose supervision I will work these few months. Because prof. Tabb had to leave for Beijing on a research visit the weekend after I arrived I could only catch up with him to a limited extent. We quickly laid down some ground rules and he informed me about his busy schedule attending the various universities and research institutes in and around Cape Town. Work on our collaborative efforts will only start when he returns, but in the mean time I still have several projects I need to wrap up so I can include their results in my PhD thesis, which I will have to submit sooner rather than later.
After meeting up with prof. Tabb I was introduced to my colleagues at the Division of Molecular Biology and Human Genetics of Stellenbosch University, where I received a desk in an office along with the other bioinformaticians (which are all female by the way, quite a change from my usual situation at the ADReM and BioData Mining research groups in Antwerp!). The people of the Division of Molecular Biology and Human Genetics are a mixed bunch of local and international students and researchers, and they have welcomed me with open arms into their research group. I am fortunate to join a group with such great colleagues, and this has definitely helped me to make the initial transition from Belgium to Cape Town.
Most of my colleagues are doing genomics work on tuberculosis, two subjects I don’t know all that much, if not to say next to nothing, about. Nevertheless I am trying to participate as much as I can in the various lab meetings and keeping my ears open, and I am learning a lot simply by osmosis. So far I have been able to provide my first contribution by solving a minimal malfunctioning of a shell script, which saved on some invaluable research time as it would otherwise have taken about two minutes of googling to find a solution. Real research is done in the trenches, Mark!
In this office I finally feel like a
So far I have gotten acquainted with 2.5 universities in the Cape Town area. I am based at Stellenbosch University (SU) in the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences. Unlike the other SU faculties which are located in Stellenbosch itself, a town about an hour’s drive inland from Cape Town, this faculty is based in Cape Town at the Tygerberg campus. Additionally I have already spent a day at the University of the Western Cape (UWC), and paid a short visit to the University of Cape Town (UCT).
These three universities in Cape Town have diverse origins. Historically SU was established as a university for Afrikaans speaking whites, UCT as a university for English speaking whites, and UWC as a university for colored people. Fortunately the Apartheid has been abolished over two decades ago and this segregation is a thing of the past. However, these historical distinctions continue to be apparent into the present, as there is for example still a notably larger number of black students at UWC than at SU.
Note that I said I have gotten acquainted with 2.5 universities, as I only shortly visited UCT. This is because the past few days there have been heated student protests against a planned increase of the tuition fees. I was partially aware about the intentions to protest as I heard it on the radio in the car during my commute, when I listen to an Afrikaans radio station to learn a little bit of the language. However, I did not anticipate the students shutting down almost all universities nation-wide this past Tuesday. As I had scheduled a meeting at UCT I arrived there unawares in the morning only to find a group of students blocking the entrance to the campus. While I had a respectful conversation with one of the students to find out some further information on their point of view and why they felt the need to protest, some of the other students spontaneously broke out in dance and song. The protest took place in a friendly atmosphere, and after having waited for half an hour I managed to sneak into the university. Unfortunately, my contacts at UCT seemed better informed than I was and decided to work from home that day, so after a brief walk across the UCT campus to find no-one present, I returned home as well.
However, in other places the protests degenerated into riots and violence as students vandalized university properties and clashed with the police. So far, the Tygerberg campus has been spared of most of the unrests, however, it remains an unpredictable situation which may turn at any moment. For example, yesterday morning as I was about to leave from home I got a notification from a colleague that the entrance to the campus was blocked by some protesters and that everyone was advised to stay at home. After the campus was released 1.5 hours later and I arrived at work, I could still see the glas fragments in the road where some car windows got smashed, and most offices remained empty for the day. While the students’ grievances remain unadressed the situation will probably stay tense the next few days.
Luckily, my colleagues warned me in due time yesterday morning about the unrest so I could act accordingly. Getting the latest information is not always trivial as I do not have an official SU email address and I am not included in the default communication channels. But I have managed to subscribe to the university emergency SMS warning system, so I should be notified in case further problems arise.
The debate on tuition fees will certainly remain a hot topic in South African education in the days and weeks to come as the students stand by their demands of free education. Like many others I am curious to see how it will play out, but my colleagues and I hope further protests will remain peaceful so we will be able to do our jobs.