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14 February 2018 Photo Bonolo Nkoane
First Sesotho soundtrack for fulldome film launched at Naval Hill Planetarium
Tshireletso Nkoane, best known for her television roles in the drama series, Tshisa, the comedy series, Moferefere Lenyalong, as well as the miniseries, Naledi.
In December, the Naval Hill Planetarium used the voice of a well-known South African actress for yet another trailblazer: the first Sesotho soundtrack for a full-dome film.

“It is important for our children to become interested in science and astronomy through exposure to good language use in their mother tongue from an early age, so that we can still make a sound contribution to these fields in the future,” said Prof Matie Hoffman from the Department of Physics at the University of the Free State.

Space Shapes, a child-friendly fulldome film by the Ott Planetarium at the Weber State University in Utah in the US, was translated into Sesotho as Dibopeho tsa Sepakapakeng by Khantlapane Selina Ketla and Dr Andries Hoffman, following last year’s release of the short film by the Naval Hill Planetarium as Ruimtevorms in Afrikaans. The film, created by participants of the 2010 Blender Production Workshop in Utah, takes young audiences on a journey to explore the different shapes found in space.

The voice artist, Tshireletso Nkoane, a star in her own right, is best-known for her television roles in the drama series, Tshisa, the comedy series, Moferefere Lenyalong, as well as the miniseries, Naledi. She has several theatre and radio credits to her name, and also boasts a diploma in Electrical Engineering.

The premiere of this Sesotho trailblazer, as well as the CosmoQuest and Ward Beecher Planetarium’s English fulldome film, Cosmic Castaways, will take place at the Naval Hill Planetarium on Saturday 17 February 2018 at 17:30. Cosmic Castaways is an exciting work that reaches out to places where there are no constellations; where there are still isolated stars to be found in the voids between the galaxies.

Tickets for this double premiere, as well as for the weekly Saturday 17:30 shows, are available from Computicket – just search under ‘planetarium’ on the Computicket website or visit Checkers.

News Archive

Moeletsi Mbeki discusses South Africa’s political economy
2012-08-17

At the guest lecture was, from the left: Johann Rossouw, lecturer in the Department of Philosophy, Mr. Moeletsi Mbeki, and Prof. Pieter Duvenage, Head of the Department of Philosophy.
Photo: Johan Roux
17 August 2012

South Africa’s ongoing problems do not have their origin in the apartheid dispensation but in the British colonial period. This is according to the well known businessman and political analyst, Mr Moeletsi Mbeki, who was speaking during a guest lecture at the University of the Free State.

Mr Mbeki said the high unemployment rate among Blacks arose from the destruction of the Black small farming class in the last third of the 19th century to provide cheap labour to the developing mining sector. He said the notorious Land Act of 1913 was not the root of Black people’s loss of land but merely the legal formalisation thereof. Mr Mbeki emphasised that as long as it was argued that South Africa’s problems arose during the apartheid dispensation, problems would remain unsolved.

Regarding South Africa’s future, Mr Mbeki argued that three issues in particular were important – South Africa’s industrialisation, which ground to a halt in the 1970s, should be revived; the large scale training of industrialists with special emphasis on mathematics, science and the broader education system; and post-nationalist politics, of which parties such as Zimbabwe’s MDC, Zambia’s MMF and Mauritius’s MMM were outstanding examples.

The guest lecture was presented by the Department of Philosophy. More than 200 people attended the lecture and participated enthusiastically in the question and answer session. Afterwards, Mr Mbeki said he was impressed with the high level of the questions asked by students, which he said gave him hope for South Africa’s future.

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