"‘Africa forms the key’: Alex du Toit and the history of continental drift." Transactions of the Royal Society of South Africa, 76(2), pp. 217–218

This first issue of the South African Journal of Science in 2021 contains a wealth of multidisciplinary articles that are interesting to read while also broadening and deepening topics that are significant to the South African research agenda.While special issues highlight particular topics that consolidate research in a particular field, the Journal's strength lies in its multidisciplinary breadth.We also value the fact that our authors are varied -some are well established in their fields, while others are new to academic publishing and give us the privilege of publishing their first article.This issue contains a rich variety of Commentaries, which provide perspectives on the link between research and policy, on artificial intelligence and bioinformatics, ecological and social research in the Karoo and other regions, and the impact of COVID-19 on child development.We are also delighted to publish a profile of Professor David Mason of the University of the Witwatersrand, one of South Africa's leading computer scientists and mathematicians.

The front section of this issue of SAJS foregrounds a number of items relating to the science of environmental and biological conservation.We feature an important overview of South Africa's UNESCO Biosphere Reserves by Ruida Pool-Stanvliet and Kaera Coetzer.Many readers may not be familiar with the concept of Biosphere Reserves, nor be aware that they can make an almost unparalleled contribution to sustainability science in South Africa.Although the Man and the Biosphere Programme was launched in 1971, South Africa's first biosphere reserve was declared only in 1998 after the country had been readmitted to UNESCO, consequent upon our becoming a democracy.Biosphere reserves, of which South Africa currently has 10 -located in six provinces and collectively covering almost one-tenth of the total land area -are eminently appropriate landscape management areas for our age of the Anthropocene.Their purpose is to facilitate, in the most flexible and inclusive manner of governance, many of the global Sustainable Development Goals.In doing so, they ensure long-term conservation and appropriate land use in designated socio-ecological systems that encompass and include many forms of landholding and livelihoods.

In 2018, Koedoe celebrated an unbroken publication record of 60 years. From uncertain beginnings in 1958, it is now a mature and important internationally recognised scientific journal focussing on conservation and science in national parks in South Africa and beyond into the African continent. After an overview of the emergence of national parks in the 20th century, this retrospective essay reflects on Koedoe’s long and significant contribution to the field of national parks research and management. We identify and make easily available some of the seminal and influential articles that have appeared in the journal over this long time span. Principally relating to matters in national parks in South Africa, these articles (some coming from special issues of Koedoe) have been chosen for their variety as well as for the broader perspectives they open into the longer trajectory of national park conservation and management. Articles illustrate the evolution of paradigms from protectionist and species centric, to ecosystem focus, to complex socio-ecological systems and adaptive management. Conservationists, scientists and managers alike will benefit from an understanding of the transformations in their field over six decades together with appreciating the importance and usefulness of unpacking the intellectual journey of national park science in order to contextualise and enrich – even encourage and direct – present and future research. Conservation implications: The articles included in this essay produced important information that informed and guided later research. Introducing these contributions to a fresh audience we hope will also tempt readers to consult other back issues of this journal, which will benefit conservation by providing an understanding of the long-term transformations in the field.

"Dress as Social Relations: An Interpretation of Bushman Dress." Transactions of the Royal Society of South Africa, 74(2), pp. 204–205

In 1873, John Thomas Baines joined the retinue of Theophilus Shepstone, then Secretary for Native Affairs in the colony of Natal, travelling into Zululand to 'crown' Cetshwayo as Zulu king We argue that this was Baines's 'Last Hurrah': it was his last adventure and he died two years later. The life and work of Baines-artist, explorer, and diarist-have been well recorded by scholars, but here we highlight two aspects of his final expedition that have not previously been given detailed attention. As assigned Special Correspondent to the Natal Mercury, Baines wrote comprehensive descriptions of the events in which he took part, and here we subject these to close literary critique and scrutiny. Moreover, Baines's participation in the 'coronation' encouraged him to produce a detailed map of Zululand, now housed in the Royal Geographical Society in London. This too has not been published or closely examined, and our analysis sheds light on the geopolitical state of the subcontinent, as well as on the biography of Baines.

After at least two millennia of human-wildlife conflict over the predation of livestock in South Africa 1 , the recently completed scientific assessment on livestock predation 2 (PredSA) brings the power of a formal scientific assessment to focus on the topic.PredSA represents a global first in terms of applying this increasingly recognised approach to informing policy to the issue of livestock predation at a national level.Here we explore the process behind the assessment, its structure and policy relevance, and some lessons learnt and suggest some avenues for the way forward.

"The Haarlem Shipwreck (1647): The Origins of Cape Town." Transactions of the Royal Society of South Africa, 74(2), pp. 206–207

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South African Journal of Science http://www.sajs.co.za Volume 113 | Number 3/4 March/April 2017 © 2017. The Author(s). Published under a Creative Commons Attribution Licence. Livestock predation in South Africa: The need for and value of a scientific assessment AUTHORS: Graham I.H. Kerley1 Kevin G. Behrens2 Jane Carruthers3 Marius Diemont4 Jurie du Plessis5 Liaan Minnie1 Philip R.K. Richardson6 Michael J. Somers7 Craig J. Tambling8 Jane Turpie9 Hermias N. van Niekerk10 Dave Balfour11

AFRICAN LANDSCAPES - Cultural Landscape Heritage in Sub-Saharan Africa. Edited by John Beardsley . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016. Pp. vi + 478. $60.00, hardback (ISBN 9780884024101). - Volume 58 Issue 3

This book is a welcome addition to South Africa's rural and regional historiography. author, however, is not an historian, but an anthropologist with wide interests and an active engagement with the issues she writes about in Conserved Spaces. Teresa Connor is senior researcher at the Fort Hare Institute for Social and Economic Research and she holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from Rhodes. While she lists some of her publications in the source references, she does not list her doctoral thesis and it is not clear whether the contents of Conserved Spaces is based on her research for that degree, or whether it is the consequence, and perhaps amalgamation, of the three items she has authored about the Sundays River In 2001 as a consultant she wrote the Social and Environmental Impact Assessment for the Greater Addo Elephant National Park; in 2007/2008 (with D. Zimmerman) she was involved in the Socio-Economic Survey of the Addo Elephant National Park and Surrounds for SANParks; and in 2011 she published an article on The Frontier Revisited: Displacement, Land and Identity among Farm Labourers in the Sundays River Valley. On page 28 of Conserved Spaces, Connor outlines the numerous research initiatives in the area in which she has played an active role. Her long familiarity with, and expertise in, the locality is thus evident, but she has also investigated other contested rural areas in South Africa. Her M.A. dissertation (Rand Afrikaans University) in 1998 dealt with a settlement in Sekhukhuneland and she is also familiar with a border zone in Pafuri, in the Gaza Province of Mozambique.

Graeme Wynn is an outstanding academic and productive writer, but he is a modest person and it is therefore both appropriate and a pleasure to review and parade some of his ideas and writings. We need to do so not only to laud a researcher and teacher with a long and outstanding career, but also—and perhaps more importantly—to remind ourselves of the positive difference that a single scholar can make. In Graeme’s case, this has been not only to his discipline, but also to other related fields of study, in addition to his impact on his university and as a public intellectual. Graeme’s CV attests to the many prizes he has received, distinguished visitor invitations, election to prestigious academies and positions within them, and to his remarkable contribution to the teaching and administration of geography as a discipline of study. In his CV, Graeme Wynn has described his academic career in the following way: “For more than forty years, I have sought to understand human transformations of the earth.” These two words—“human” and “transformations”—are portmanteaus freighted with contradictions, complexities, histories, and, of course, geographies. To an understanding of many of these elements, Graeme has done justice. Unlike many academics who explain their work as being in the widest of fields but yet focus only on minutiae, Graeme’s achievement has been to keep the larger perspective in mind while always interrogating its rich contextual detail. In the layers of both scope and locality, he has made an immense contribution in a voluminous publication record. In reflecting on Graeme’s thinking and writing about environment and empire, we are left in no doubt of his conviction that of those human transformations he seeks to understand, the imperial period of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has been the most pivotal. The impact of British imperialism captured his imagination in the 1970s when he first set out to examine New Zealand and Australia and, since the 1980s, Canada. 1 These early studies of segments of the British world were seminal in first drawing his attention to how imperialism had transformed all geographies, be they political, social, cultural, economic, and environmental. Graeme’s personal biography itself straddles the British world of settler societies and he has written of these from the inside out rather than of the British Empire per se from the outside in. Born in South Africa, educated in England, a teacher in New Zealand, a researcher in Australia, and a resident, teacher, and visiting professor in many places in Canada, the University of British Columbia primarily, there is probably no single geographer with better personal experience of many elements of the emerging modern British Commonwealth and its significant settler societies. Geography is essentially a child, handmaid and catalyst of empire. In the nineteenth century it transformed itself into a professional discipline with intellectual authority over economic, environmental, social, political, and cultural evidence. By the end of that century, it was “the queen of all imperial sciences . . . inseparable from state knowledge.” 2 It was geopolitically powerful, but inseparable also from knowledge of natural resources and their exploitation. 3 Geography facilitated the exercise of political power, giving conceptual hegemony even where

In this article we reflect on how freshwater research has evolved in South Africa from its beginnings in the early 20 th century and how it has altered over time to align with the post-1994 socio-political environment. We situate aquatic science within a research question to explore why aquatic science has developed in the manner it has done, providing some of the broader environment of political change, access to funding, the relevance of particular research themes at different times, and the research agenda of some prominent individual scientists. We do not, therefore, intend merely to itemise what has been achieved over the years. Our intention is to develop an historical context that may help frame research in ways that bridge the cultural divides that persist between the humanities and the sciences. Moreover, although water is crucial to life and livelihoods in a country of scarce water resources, the fields of aquatic study are not generally familiar to the South African public and do not have the high profile they merit. In order to chart important current developments in freshwater research, this article highlights significant aspects of this scientific arena during the earlier part of the 20 th century that are pertinent to explaining how and why the current situation, by way of research fields, policy and legislation came into being. The history has been necessitated by, and driven by, regional socio-economic and geopolitical factors as well as developments in the relevant scientific disciplines. After examining how this state of affairs came to be, an overview of the present state of the field is provided. Keywords: research milieu; key developments; drivers of change; institutional change; policy