In a case of David against Goliath, Ameenah Gurib-Fakim beat her male opponent by a landslide to become the first female president of Mauritius, a small island off the coast of Africa that has a population of just over 1.2 million. No one expected her to win.
Gurib-Fakim, who joined the presidential office on June 5, relishes shuttering glass ceilings. In Africa, there aren’t many women at the helm of countries.
“When the people voted, they voted for a package, they knew that they would have a lady president and yet they voted massively for a party that has not made any provision for constitutional change,” says Gurib-Fakim.
Born into a Muslim Indian family, Gurib-Fakim, 56, is also a former bio-scientist and the Vice Chairman of the Planet Earth Institute, an international NGO and charity that builds a path for the scientific independence of Africa.
Gurib-Fakim published more than 28 scientific books that have been devoured around the world by students and researchers. She graduated with a bachelor of science in chemistry from the University of Surrey in 1983. She then obtained her PhD in organic chemistry at Exeter University in Britain.
“I became interested in sciences at a very young age because I had good motivated teachers who infected me with the virus of science. I went into sciences following my heart because passion was there.”
Back at home, she worked at the University of Mauritius before becoming the Managing Director at CEPHYR, a centre for phytotherapy research that focuses on using plants in cosmetics, nutrition and therapy.
“When I went back to Mauritius, I realized that the work I was doing in synthetic chemistry, the infrastructure wasn’t there and yet in the academic world you either publish or perish. I chose to publish. To publish novel things you have to have novel avenues,” she says.
This is when she started to probe into the biodiversity of Mauritius. The Indian Ocean island nation is known as a global biodiversity hotspot – it is home to about 300 plant species that can only be found on the island, which are under threat as a result of human activity and climate change.
Gurib-Fakim says she wants to drive science and technology in Africa.
“We believe a scientifically independent Africa is one with science, technology and innovation fully embedded in governmental policies and priorities, delivered by properly resourced and empowered educational institutions. A scientifically independent Africa will have both the ability to train and keep brilliant scientists on the continent, and create an inspiring new generation of academic leaders. Ultimately, we believe scientific independence means that African problems can be solved by African-led solutions,” it says on the Planet Earth Institute website.
Gurib-Fakim is also an entrepreneur.
“I didn’t stay in the academic world because my second life was that of an entrepreneur. I translated that research work on herbal medicine into a business so I can safely say I am now living my third life.”
In Mauritius many girls couldn’t go to school. After 1976, this changed and yet transformation is still the biggest problem.
“Coming back to tertiary education this is again an area where we find many women coming to do studies at tertiary level but still find the gap and where we find the downside of this, is for them to get jobs, for them to be leaders in their respective fields because society in Mauritius remains fairly conservative,” she says.
According to Gurib-Fakim, science is still dominated by males in many parts of the world.
As African countries aspire for economic growth and socio-economic transformation, Gurib-Fakim says: “It is becoming clear that any innovation or ambition to become a knowledge economy has to be driven by talented African scientists and with the knowledge that innovation is not instructed!”
She has a strong passion for protecting nature, fostering research and creating a better environment for women scientists.
This year Gurib-Fakim is nominated for FORBES AFRICA’s Person of The Year in recognition of her drive to protect her nation’s environment. She was listed by FORBES in June as being the 96th most powerful woman in 2016.
Her motto is: “Follow your heart, do what you enjoy best and you won’t have to work a day in your life.”

Step Forward The President With A Purpose

Today’s anti-doping mantra is less about fighting the war on doping than it is about protecting those that matter in the world of sport from doping behavior: the clean athletes.
Eighteen months ago, the world’s anti-doping community met in Johannesburg to agree a new way forward for clean sport; an improved set of rules that would aid world sport in its bid to be clean. The rules, which came into effect at the start of this year, had the full backing of the people they are specifically designed to serve: the world’s athletes. After all, it is the clean athletes that are directly affected when another athlete chooses to dope; and, furthermore, it is the public who are robbed of true, fair sport when an athlete chooses to dope. Doping is not something any of us want to see.
Too often, when a doping scandal rears its head, people turn to sport for an immediate solution. Ever since we have had a collaborative global response to doping – through the World Anti-Doping Agency (Wada) – it has been the responsibility of both sport and governments to take action. As an athlete and someone that is widely involved in anti-doping through the Wada Athlete Committee, I can see only too clearly the areas where governments and sport should act.
Sport is a hugely lucrative business. The win-at-all-costs mentality that pervades all areas of society is particularly evident in sport, and it is through this prism that we often forget just how far some athletes will go to win. Often these athletes have huge influences around them; doctors, coaches or other members of their personal entourage influencing them in the wrong way. With sport as profitable as it is in this day in age, these entourage members have large financial incentives linked to an athlete’s success.
Wada, and the sporting and anti-doping organizations practicing its global anti-doping rules, can do a great deal to help maintain a level playing field. We run education and awareness programs; provide tools and courses on why doping is not the right course of action; and conduct innovative science and social science research that keep the clean sport movement one step ahead of the cheats. These are but a few ways that Wada and its signatories do their part, but they cannot do it all. It is the governments of the world – through the UNESCO international convention against doping of which they are parties – that have the power to touch areas that sport cannot reach. Sport needs the active participation of governments in order to push anti-doping higher up the agenda.
Doping and its impact on public health is one area of increasing concern. Drugs are being illegally produced, trafficked and distributed across the world and, ultimately, getting into the hands of athletes and members of the public, too. If governments could introduce laws and penalties to stop this, there would be less risk of these dangerous substances reaching those playing elite and, increasingly, non-elite level sport.
There is also the matter of dietary supplements. We are hearing more and more about youngsters, and those working out in gyms and practicing sport at an amateur level, using supplements. We are seeing this problem become more normal in society, which is a huge worry. The supplement industry is a global industry and not something that Wada, nor sport, can tackle alone. If governments took appropriate action to regulate the supplement industry, it would be a huge stride in the right direction.
Above all, what is needed is better education. The tools are there to help educate athletes – and aspiring athletes – about the dangers of doping. Education is an area that is well emphasized for sport and anti-doping organizations to practice in the revised World Anti-Doping Code. Education needs to cover all matters, from the dangers associated with doping, to athlete rights and responsibilities when it comes to anti-doping, and preventative educational measures that explain to future generations why doping is the wrong option.
In Africa, we know that there are big challenges and opportunities for governments to deal with – health systems, housing crisis, poverty, inequality, unemployment, education, (socio-political realities), war and famine – but we shouldn’t forget what a powerful magnet sport is for society. Sport, and its fair play values, binds us together like nothing else. It is only with the support of governments that we can maintain the sporting values we all hold so dear.

Don’t Be A Dope

She has been listed as one of the ‘12 Names to Change the World’ by the Spanish National Centre for Research on Human Evolution as well as one of the top 10 most influential women in science and technology on the African continent by technology news website IT News Africa.
That’s 62-year-old professor Tebello Nyokong from Rhodes University in South Africa’s Eastern Cape, who is breaking the boundaries of science in cancer research.
Meeting her in her office at the university, one is immediately drawn to her warm personality and the twinkle in her eye. By her own admission, she likes to laugh a lot, and loudly.
Yet, the work she does is no laughing matter.
As Professor of Medicinal Chemistry and Nanotechnology at the university, as well as Director of the DST Mintek Nanotechnology Innovation Centre, Nyokong has attracted millions of rands in funding towards her research based on photodynamic therapy (PDT) of cancer.
PDT, which uses dyes and light, is already available for some cancers in the United States (US), Europe and Russia, but currently has strong side effects as the drugs hone in on healthy as well as cancerous tissues.
“Our whole aim is to make molecules that are cancer-specific so that healthy tissue will not be affected,” says Nyokong, going on to detailing the specifics, which any lay person would find hard to understand.
“In our research, PDT is combined with nanoparticles that absorb and re-emit light, thus enabling for visualization in addition to cancer treatment. In cancer therapy, nanoparticles act as delivery agents of the drugs selectively to the cancer tissue. This is due to the fact that cancer has leaky vasculature which allows nanoparticles to enter.”
Simply put, this means the drugs will specifically target cancer cells, which will see cumbersome treatments such as chemotherapy move into the dark ages.
Having overseen several formal collaborations with counterparts across the globe, Nyokong has also been awarded a prestigious Adjunct Professorship by the University of Tromsø in Norway and numerous international scientists have visited her laboratory. She has also hosted many postdoctoral candidates from around the world.
But she is quick to point out that her research is still in the pre-clinical trial phase and many years away from reaching the market.
Considered an icon in the world of science, Nyokong’s state-of-the-art laboratory is a far cry from her primary school days in Lesotho where as a child, she spent alternate days tending sheep and on the weekends, assisted her father who was a construction laborer. These tasks led her to conclude she could do anything a boy could do.
“At the start my father influenced my path. He believed that the apartheid system could only be defeated through education and I was encouraged to excel at a very young age,” she says.
And excel she did, having chosen art subjects for her matric, she changed to science two years before sitting her matric exams.
“The teachers accepted me after this mad move from arts to science and when I entered the University of Lesotho, I was greatly influenced by my lecturer, Dr Gray. After that I was driven by my desire to beat the odds,” she says.
Nyokong went on to obtain her PhD from the University of Western Ontario in 1987 and a Fulbright Fellowship for postdoctoral study at the University of Notre Dame in the US.
“I had academic loneliness, since there were very few women when I started. Now my past students have become professors and are my academic colleagues,” she says.
And she is excited and outspoken about Africa’s potential to excel in science.
On being awarded the National Research Foundation Lifetime Achiever Award last October, she says, “I am driven by being an African, completely, I’m passionate to see us succeed.”
And she is equally passionate when it comes to her students.
“I urge all young people in the country to study to the highest possible level [PhD]. The development of South Africa will depend on highly skilled labor. No country can have lasting economic growth or development without a solid science base. Science is thought to be hard, no, it’s not difficult,” she says. She wishes schools were not judged on their pass rate, but rather on their pupils’ abilities in maths and science.
Her work ethic is phenomenal and her research output has been described as simply extraordinary. In 2012, she published 51 articles, all of them internationally peer-reviewed; in 2013, she released 52 publications and 17 so far this year.
Nyokong admits she has a hectic schedule, between supervising students and attending scientific conferences around the world, which includes going to Oman this year for the World Academy of Sciences conference, where she will be the global representative in chemistry.
And when she’s not in the lab or traveling, Nyokong loves walking, as well as gardening, which she describes as “physical activity with a purpose”. She confesses a great weakness when it comes to beautiful bags and shoes and her ‘must reads’ are Malcolm Gladwell’s  David and Goliath
and Outliers.
A grandmother of two, her favorite holiday destination is Mauritius. As we end the interview,
3I ask her what it’s like to have come from a shepherd girl to a leading woman of science.
“Sometimes I think gosh, that is not me. I’m just doing my work, that’s all it is. I love my students and I embarrass them a lot sometimes.”
When she laughs, it’s from the core of her being. And with the list of honors and accomplishments she has garnered, no wonder she smiles – and the world of science with her.

From Shepherd  To scientist

Traditionally, women have not been associated with science, mathematics and engineering. Kirsty Chadwick is the antithesis of stereotypes that dictate who techies should be and what they should look like. The 39-year-old New Zealander is the founder and chairperson of The Training Room Online.
The company designs bespoke e-learning platforms for some of South Africa’s biggest private and public sector institutions, such as: FNB, Investec, ABSA, Standard Bank, Nedbank Discovery, PwC, Woolworths and the department of basic education.
Chadwick has a varied career. She was a teacher for three years, after studying towards a bachelor of music at the University of Auckland and receiving a teaching diploma. Relocating to the United Kingdom allowed her to take her first step into the corporate world, where she eventually became a director at mortgage broker Ashley Moore Financial and remained for six years.
In 2004, she moved to Cape Town where she began a call center, which she ran until 2008. The move to the ‘Mother City’ was largely a lifestyle choice that made sense due to the fact that Cape Town is in the same time zone as London, which worked well for her business.
Motivated by the desire to get back into the education space, especially after spotting a gap in the market for training solutions, she founded The Training Room Online in 2008, with seven employees. While Chadwick is passionate about incorporating technology into training, the primary focus of the company is the content that is delivered through an online platform. The technology facilitates learning. It presents an exciting opportunity to bring creativity and human interaction through the use of gamification and animation.
People are central to the creation and development of the technology. Over the last five years, the company has grown tenfold to employ 70 people. Given the shortage of skills required for the technology, content development and instructional design, Chadwick says it cannot grow quickly enough. In the short term, she outsources a number of processes to India. It is merely a stop-gap measure because the quality of the output often leaves much to be desired. To remedy this, her medium- to long-term goal is to develop the Creative Technology Hub that will develop the talent and skills required for this industry. This will contribute to job creation on the continent and will keep content creation on local shores.
Despite the challenges, the company is doing well; it has offices in Cape Town, Johannesburg, London and the Seychelles. Chadwick recently sold 49% of the company to Open Learning Holdings. Despite the strong strategic fit, the move has been one of the most difficult, as she had to deal with bringing new people onboard.
Globally, online training is a multi-billion dollar industry. According to Chadwick, South Africa is well positioned to be a leader in this space, for her it is a destination of choice by virtue of its time zone and the quality of the instructional design. The local market has become increasingly receptive, as they have realized that e-learning goes beyond Powerpoint slides. The industry has grown and she has five other similarly-sized competitors. While many tech companies are moving into the mobile market, she works primarily in the computer and tablet space. But learning via cellphones still has limitations.
Expansion into the rest of the continent is on the cards, with Botswana first in line. In each new market she will employ locals and retain each country’s content production.
For Chadwick, technology is part of the solution to South Africa’s challenges and she is keen to get involved with the education department. She sees an opportunity for a mass-scale e-learning revolution in South Africa. Low-cost, high-quality, centralized learning management systems are key to this revolution that can enhance the performance of pupils and teachers. Across the world, through examples such as the Khan Academy, e-learning has helped students realize their potential and master learning material by allowing them to learn at their own pace. The success of this rollout will be dependent on collaborations and partnerships, to ensure that obstacles such as connectivity and device design are overcome.
If Chadwick’s track record is anything to go by, the future of learning on the continent is optimistic and set to be filled with graduation caps.

The Go-Getter

Clues buried in the writings of William Shakespeare suggest that he may have partaken in the perceived ‘wisdom of the weed’. At least one Johannesburg-based scientist is convinced of it. And the proof may lie in The Bard’s Stratford grave in England.
It was while reading Sonnet 76 that Professor Francis Thackeray had a Eureka moment. The palaeo-anthropologist and director of the Institute for Human Evolution at Wits University recalls the moment during an ambitious project to read all 154 of Shakespeare’s 14-line poems in one sitting: “Shakespeare writes about ‘… invention in a noted weed’. And invention refers to creative writing, and we know that creative writers are known to enjoy the stimulation of cannabis.”
From behind his busy desk in a large office populated with casts of famous hominid skulls—among them the Taung Child and ‘Mrs Ples’—the tall, bespectacled academic proffers more clues garnered from the sonnet to support his hypothesis: “In the same sonnet, there’s reference to ‘…compounds strange’, which means strange drugs. And so, in my Eureka moment, I thought, ‘My goodness, is he making hidden reference to cannabis?’”
To further bolster his argument, Thackeray points out cannabis references in other Shakespeare works: “In other writings—for example, in Macbeth meeting the witches before he assassinates King Duncan, Shakespeare invents the word ‘assassination’. It’s derived from the (Arabic) word ‘hashashin’ – and ‘hashish’ is, of course, cannabis. It’s known that assassinations took place by assassins (sic) who got themselves high on cannabis before they executed their deadly deed.”
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The learned professor’s curiosity about The Bard’s smoking habits were first awakened after stumbling upon a book lying on a dusty shelf in the Shakespeare section of a second-hand bookshop in Hampstead, London. The book, Shakespeare’s Garden, referred to a 1920s excavation of the Stratford property, which threw up pipe bowl and stem fragments from a rubbish heap discovered there. Not one to pass up a good dig, Thackeray headed for Stratford to see the pipes for himself: “When I looked inside the pipe bowls from Shakespeare’s garden, and from other parts of Stratford, I could see that there was black residue.”
The palaeo-anthropologist, also a qualified chemist and mathematician, then got special permission to take 24 pipe fragments from Stratford to Pretoria, where he ran a chemical analysis at the narcotics laboratory in the police’s forensic lab. The gas chromatography technique used there revealed a plethora of compounds including vanilla, cinnamon and camphor, as well as cannabis. Until then, it was assumed that such pipes contained only the residues of tobacco from Virginia, which Sir Walter Raleigh had brought back to England. “They were experimenting!” exclaims the scientist excitedly. The findings led to his 2001 publication of a paper in the South African Journal of Science, which made a global impact.
Since then, Thackeray has hoped to prove his theory by examining The Bard’s remains, buried in a Stratford church next to his wife, Anne Hathaway, and their daughter. But his attempts have been thwarted curiously by Shakespeare himself—an epitaph written in the form of a curse has protected the grave for almost 400 years: “Cursed be he who moves my bones, and blessed be he who spares these stones.”
So Thackeray has proposed to carefully expose the skull and skeleton by excavating away the sediments without moving any bones. His team would then perform a laser surface scan, similar to those which have already been achieved by his institute on hominid fossils from the Cradle of Humankind. At best, he would hope to extract keratin from the hair and nails, which upon forensic analysis, would almost certainly provide conclusive proof of cannabis use.
DNA could also be extracted from a tooth, though that would be a more invasive procedure. A simple examination of The Bard’s exposed teeth would, however, reveal whether or not he was a regular pipe smoker. After deliberating over Thackeray’s proposal, the Holy Trinity Church Parochial Committee turned it down.
But for the Wits scientist, all is not lost. The church has more recently agreed to a proposal from archaeologists at the University of Birmingham to undertake an analysis which should determine simply whether there is indeed a body under the ground, without excavating. Technology such as ground penetrating radar could be employed to achieve this. Thackeray is delighted that the church has granted permission for such a preliminary exploratory study. He will be following these events closely and is optimistic that possibilities for him to do the kind of work he has been proposing may emerge.
The scientist first visited the church as a seven-year-old boy with his parents. Standing in the chancel by the grave, he recalls: “The thought did pass my mind. Wouldn’t it be interesting to look at the skeleton of Shakespeare?” It’s been a long wait for Thackeray and his collaborators, though he brushes it off: “We’re patient. I’m a palaeontologist. We can wait.”

Tag: Science

FORBES AFRICA SOCIAL MEDIA

Step Forward The President With A Purpose

Don’t Be A Dope

From Shepherd To scientist

The Go-Getter

Dig up Shakespeare In The Name Of Science?