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20 March 2019 | Story Xolisa Mnuwka | Photo Charl Devenish
Stagedoor Finals
Houses Vergeet-My-Nie and NJ van der Merwe won over the judges at the 2019 Stagedoor finals.

‘Vergeet van der Merwe’, a hybrid of female residences Vergeet-my-Nie and NJ van der Merwe, are the 2019 Stagedoor competition’s overall winners. The dynamic girl duo showed up and showed off during the 2019 Stagedoor finals in the Kopanong Auditorium on the UFS Bloemfontein Campus over the weekend.

The girls enthused the audience with a soul-filled sing-off and a relatable theatrical performance, which earned them both the audience’s and the judge’s best votes. Teams Welwitschia and Imperium (Welperium), and Outeniqua and Soetdoring (Outdoring), walked away with the second and third positions respectively, as each of the residences were recognised for team excellence and spirit when it came to creativity and overall acting in each of their performances.

The UFS Stagedoor competition is an annual event that employs first-years to take cognisance of the day-to-day societal issues and pressures that university students are faced with. In 2019, the event was for the first time entirely organised and ran by students for students.

The competition has over the years become a major highlight on UFS students’ arts and culture calendar and continues to be a platform of expression for residence and off-campus first-year students. Stagedoor performances are traditionally themed to tackle modern-day issues such as infrastructure and economic inequality, land reform, and education. However, this year’s competition engaged students in telling their stories without any restrictions, and still being able to effectively examine the pressures that come with varsity life, and many other issues that face South Africa, but more specifically the youth. The 2019 Stagedoor event was successfully coordinated and structured by UFS Bloemfontein Campus SRC: Arts and Culture, Patrick Chirilele, with help from Residence Committee (RC) Culture members.

News Archive

Oxford professor unlocks secrets of DNA
2017-03-31

Description: Oxford professor unlocks secrets of DNA Tags: Oxford professor unlocks secrets of DNA

From left are: Dr Cristian Capelli, Associate Professor
of Human Evolution at Oxford University;
Dr Karen Ehlers, Senior Lecturer and Prof Paul Grobler,
both from the Department of Genetics at the UFS.
Photo: Siobhan Canavan

Many people are interested to know more about their history and origins, and with the help of genetics, it is possible to provide more information about one’s roots.

During a lecture at the Department of Genetics at the University of the Free State (UFS), Dr Cristian Capelli, Associate Professor of Human Evolution at Oxford University in the UK, addressed staff members and students on the history of our species.

Reconstructing the history of human population
With his research, titled: People on the move: population structure and gene-flow in Southern Africa, Dr Capelli looks at reconstructing the history of human populations, focusing mainly on how the different human populations are related, as well as how they exchange genes.

He said this research could be of great significance to the medical field too. “Knowing what the genetic make-up of individuals is, can give us some information about their susceptibility to diseases, or how they would react to a given medicine. Therefore, this knowledge can be used to inform health-related policies.”

Combining individual histories of multiple people
To understand this research more clearly, Dr Capelli explained it in terms of DNA and how every individual receives half of their DNA from their mother and half from their father just as their parents had received theirs from their parents. And so it goes from generation after generation. Each individual stores a part of their ancestors’ DNA which makes up the individual genetic history of each person.

“If we combine these individual histories by looking at the DNA of multiple people, we can identify the occurrences that are shared across individuals and therefore reconstruct the history of a population, and in the same way on a larger scale, the history of our own species, homo sapiens.

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