Limpopo Leader - Spring 2005 - University of Limpopo

SETTING THE AFRICAN SCENE
AT LIMPOPO UNIVERSITY
P A G E 6
bBOTH CAMPUSES OF LIMPOPO UNIVERSITY LOOK
UNMISTAKABLY AFRICAN.
The Medunsa campus sits in the middle of the
teeming peri-urban sprawl of what used to be a piece
of the old Bophuthatswana Bantustan. Turfloop is built
around rock protrusions as big as hills and covered
with lavish Southern African vegetation. It too is
surrounded by the noise and flamboyance of old
homelands. There’s dust and blue skies on these
campuses – and you could hardly be further, visually
at any rate, from Oxbridge or the American Ivy League.
What about the students and staff?
The students on both campuses are largely but not
exclusively black, and some of them are from other
African countries. Around 350 of them are, in fact,
out of a total student body exceeding 13 000. This is
a lot less than the 5% provided for in the SADC
protocol, but the numbers are growing. Many of them
represent neighbouring countries like Zimbabwe,
Botswana, Swaziland, Lesotho and Namibia. Then
there are others from Mozambique and Angola.
Some have come from even further afield, from
countries such as Zambia, Malawi, Kenya, Uganda,
Nigeria, Ghana, Ethiopia, Eritrea, and the island of
Mauritius.
When Medunsa was established in 1976, it was
named the Medical University of Southern (not South)
Africa. Part of this was a reflection of the official
apartheid desire for the emerging homelands to be
taken seriously as independent countries. But even
from those early days, foreign African medical
students were present on campus, as foreign students
found their way onto Turfloop.
On the Turfloop campus there’s a University of
Limpopo International Students Association. The
chairperson of UNILISA (as it’s called) is a third-year
BSc computer science student from Zimbabwe, Tapiwa
Zvenyika. His deputy is Mozambican Sky Mkuti who’s