28 January 2026

This lecture addresses what pain is, how it emerges, what can alter it, and how pain shapes behaviour to protect us from harm. Participants will be introduced to a perceptual inference framework for pain, which considers the challenge of integrating diverse information to work out whether we are under threat and if pain is the best way to protect us. By considering how the human system receives and integrates information, and thinking about pain as the result of this process of integration, we can identify opportunities to reduce pain itself.

Wednesday 28–Friday 30 January 11.15 am

The term Baroque came to designate the period in the arts from roughly 1600 to 1750 and encompasses the careers of some of the greatest painters, sculptors, architects and composers the Western world has ever produced. Originally carrying negative connotations, Baroque art is now regarded as robust and decorative, massive and grandiose, complex and full of motion. This course explores the way in which the Baroque masters followed on from the great artists of the High Renaissance but infused their work with a vigorous new spirit.

Celebrated writers Antjie Krog and Ingrid de Kok have written extensively about family and the influence of family. In Krog’s autobiographical novel, Blood’s Inner Rhyme, she explores with rigour and humour her complex relationship with her mother, the Afrikaner writer Dot Serfontein. De Kok’s new collection of poems, Unleaving, is partly an elegiac tribute to her late partner, Tony Morphet, and to her late brother, Kenneth de Kok. In this talk, the writers will engage with each other about the pleasures, difficulties and taboos involved in writing about family.

This lecture will focus on the personal, political and commercial life of Cecil Rhodes, touching on his place in Britain’s imperial project, his homosexuality and his relationships with the men close to him. It will also focus on how he acquired wealth, and his legacy.

We all belong to one species but Homo sapiens shows a greater range of cultural differences than any other animal. We are special due to our large, complex brains, our language, and our capacity for abstract reasoning and symbolic thought. These traits have allowed us to thrive, adapt to a wide range of environments, create complex societies, and become the most numerous large animals ever. Yet, despite our intelligence and advanced technologies, we find ourselves at a crossroad. We must save the planet, when we need to be ‘saved’.

During this session, the mysteries and misunderstandings about these two crafts – aimed as they are at improving writers’ words and even saving their reputations – will certainly be dispelled. The way in which this will be done is to share a number of documents with the audience: raw, unedited texts; their copy-edited product, and the final proofread versions of the typeset or laid-out text as pages of the book or the article.

Wednesday 28–Friday 30 January 3.00 pm
This course explores the intersection of music and health. Beginning with the common ground of rhythms in the body and in music, the conceptual basis of the healing power of music will be explored. It delves into the lives of health professionals who were artists. Alongside the artistic fulfilment, musicians face a range of health issues, including pain and injuries, hearing and vocal health problems, and mental health challenges. The possibility of consilience between artistic and scientific modalities, two different languages for understanding the world, will be presented and discussed.

In this performance-lecture we explore how the themes of post-colonial writing, such as identity, heritage and power, are refracted through the figure of the child in post-colonial writing by authors from countries that gained independence from Britain in the twentieth century. Chinua Achebe, Salman Rushdie, Olive Senior, Imtiaz Dharker, Wole Soyinka, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Bernadine Evaristo and Trevor Noah are among the many writers whose child characters voice the dramatic, sad and funny stories of our brave new world.

Wednesday 28–Friday 30 January 5.00 pm

This course will discuss Chinese and Japanese gardens, their traditions and divergence in construction, location, plants and philosophy. The nobility created Kaiyushiki or ‘strolling’ gardens to impress, explore, to entertain guests and to provide diversions. The scholar gardens of Suzhou created intimate spaces with complex walkways and stone constructions, with rocks and pools emulating mountainous scenery to inspire painting and poetry among the literati. The tea garden was the journey towards the tea house, in preparation for the shared ritual to come.

The discussion addresses the covert intelligence operation against the vigilante-cum-terrorist organisation, Pagad, and deals with the lessons from that experience. How can this experience, and the lessons thereof, lay the basis for a new and context-relevant intelligence praxis? As South Africa confronts a complex and interrelated set of security crises (a polycrisis?), the country requires new approaches to policing and intelligence. The operation detailed in the book Lives on the Line posits such an approach.

David Africa will be in conversation with Hermione Cronjé.

Grant McLachlan will present an evening of music showing the seductiveness of harmony over the centuries. A small vocal ensemble of Cape Town’s finest singers will perform music from the Middles Ages to the Baroque period, and in the twentieth century from jazz to Debussy, Ravel and Poulenc. We discover how the adventurous harmonic experiments in the twentieth century were a pleasure to be savoured, and how harmony can evoke emotions and stimulate the senses more than any other human activity.