The University of Virginia opened an office in Cape Town, South Africa, last week to serve as a platform for teaching, research, student engagement and partnership with academic institutions in the southern part of the continent.
A delegation of 20 UVA faculty and staff members joined 75 attendees from South Africa and the region for a multi-day event featuring site visits and a symposium focused on higher education and cross-continent collaboration, culminating in the grand opening of the UVA Southern Africa Office. The gathering focused on topics important to both UVA leaders and Southern Africa participants, including public health, artificial intelligence, democracy and the role of universities in these areas.
“We recognize that UVA is entering a landscape already rich with extraordinary universities, scholars, artists, health professionals, innovators, community leaders and public institutions,” UVA Vice Provost for Global Affairs Steve Mull said. “We are not coming here to create something where nothing existed before. We are coming to join, learn from and contribute to networks of knowledge and relationships that have developed here over generations.”
UVA’s Southern Africa Office is based at the University of the Western Cape, a historically Black institution. UWC played a leading role in the struggle against apartheid and in South Africa’s transition to democracy. It has been home to many prominent figures, including Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who served as chancellor for more than 25 years.
While UWC is both host and foundational partner, the UVA office has a regional mandate, supporting collaborations across Southern Africa. It builds on existing relationships with the University of the Free State, University of Venda, Stellenbosch University and University of Cape Town, as well as with community organizations working across fields including medicine and public health, the arts and social justice.
Led by Valmont Layne, former director of Cape Town’s renowned District Six Museum, the office will also serve as a hub for expanding study-abroad and other experiential learning opportunities for UVA students.
“We want UVA students and faculty to come to Southern Africa not simply to do something, but to learn something – to encounter perspectives, knowledge and experience that can change the questions we ask and perhaps even the way we see the world,” Mull said. “Ultimately, that is how I hope we will judge the success of this office – not by the number of visitors who pass through its doors, but by whether it makes new things possible.”
Sarojini Nadar, the deputy vice chancellor for research and innovation at the University of the Western Cape, gave welcoming remarks to the group on the topic of interdependence, a thread that ran through the symposium.
Interdependence, she said, “grows out of relationships between people who discover that there are questions they want to think about together, sometimes because they share an intellectual concern and sometimes because they approach that concern so differently that something becomes possible in the encounter that neither could have produced alone,” Nadar said. “It grows through sustained conversations, through disagreement as much as agreement, and through the recognition that there are things none of us can adequately understand from where we stand on our own.”
