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Health Sciences awards first Bongani Mayosi Medical Students Academic Prize

12 December 2020 | Story André Damons

Bongani Mayosi Prize Latest News — Drs Kaamilah Joosub (in front) and Lynette Upman, medical students in the Faculty of Health Sciences at the UFS, are the winners of the first Bongani Mayosi Medical Students Academic Prize for final-year medical students.

Two final-year medical students from the University of the Free State (UFS) became the first recipients of the prestigious Bongani Mayosi Medical Students Academic Prize which was bestowed on them 10 days before their graduation.

Drs Kaamilah Joosub and Lynette Upman, two final-year medical students in the Faculty of Health Sciences at the UFS are the first medical students from the university to be awarded the prize.This is the first year it has been awarded.

Drs Joosub and Upman received their awards at a function on Friday (4 December 2020) from Prof Hanneke Brits, Phase III chair and specialist in the Department of Family Medicine, on behalf of Prof Gert van Zyl, Dean of the Faculty of Health Sciences.

The Faculty of Health Sciences will host a virtual graduation on 14 December 2020.

Prestigious national award

The Bongani Mayosi Medical Students Academic Prize is a prestigious national award which aims to recognise final-year medical students who epitomise the academic, legendary, and altruistic life of Mayosi. The awards are presented to final-year MB ChB students from all South African medical faculties. Each student is allowed one vote for one classmate who, in their private opinion, best balances:

Academic achievement
Emotional intelligence ‑ good interpersonal skills
Social accountability ‑ the ability to respond helpfully to the needs of others

Winners are determined by the highest number of digital votes, with the first-prize winner receiving R6 000 and second prize coming in at R4 000.

Dr Lynette van der Merwe, undergraduate medical programme director in the School of Clinical Medicine at UFS, commented that Drs Joosub and Upman are worthy winners, as they have continuously exemplified the ideals recognised by this award during their undergraduate training.

The School of Clinical Medicine is very proud of its newest Kovsie doctors who successfully completed the academic year despite the immense challenges associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. This is thanks to the commitment and hard work of students and staff at the UFS.

Name behind the prize

The late Prof Bongani Mayosi was an outstanding doctor who rose rapidly through the ranks to become a top cardiologist, internationally recognised as a leading clinician scientist. He completed his undergraduate studies at the age of 22, having graduated cum laude in both the Bachelor of Medicine and Surgery (MB ChB) and Bachelor of Medical Sciences (BMedSci) degrees.

He trained as a physician and cardiologist at Groote Schuur Hospital and completed his doctorate at the University of Oxford in the UK. At the age of 38‚ he became the first black to be appointed professor and Head of the Department of Medicine at the University of Cape Town (UCT). In 2016, he was appointed Dean of the Faculty of Health Sciences at UCT. Before taking up his deanship, he completed the Advanced Management Programme at Harvard University in the US.

As a medical student Prof Mayosi excelled academically, was supportive of his classmates and enthusiastically involved in student residence committees and politics as well as community outreach programmes. As a researcher, he initiated an international programme of research focusing on solutions for poverty-related heart diseases and trained local clinician scientists and research leaders.

Prof Mayosi had an exceptional mixture of academic brilliance and vision; ambition and humility; kindness and generosity; passion and compassion; drive and empathy that complemented his ability to persuade and inspire others, which no doubt contributed to his 400 publications.

News Archive

Code-switching, tokenism and consumerism in print advertising

2014-10-27

Code-switching, linguistic tokenism and modern consumerism in contemporary South African print advertising. This is the current research focus of two lecturers from the Faculty of the Humanities at the UFS, Prof Angelique van Niekerk and Dr Thinus Conradie.

The act of switching between two or more languages is replete with socio-cultural meaning, and can be deployed to advance numerous communicative strategies, including attempts at signalling cultural familiarity and group affiliation (Chung 2006).

For advertising purposes, Fairclough’s (1989) seminal work on the ideological functions of language remark on the usefulness of code-switching as a means of fostering an advertiser-audience relationship that is conducive to persuasion. In advertising, code-switching is a valuable means with which a brand may be invested with a range of positive associations. In English-dominated media, these associations derive from pre-existing connotations that target audiences already hold for a particular (non-English) language. Where exclusivity and taste, for example, are associated with a particular European language (such as French), advertising may use this languages to invest the advertised brand with a sense of exclusivity and taste.

In addition, empirical experiments with sample audiences (in the field of consumer research) suggest that switching from English to the first language of the target audience, is liable to yield positive results in terms of purchase intentions (Bishop and Peterson 2011). This effect is enhanced under the influence of modern consumerism, in which consumption is linked to the performance of identity and ‘[b]rands are more than just products; they are statements of affiliation and belonging’ (Ngwenya 2011, 2; cf. Nuttall 2004; Jones 2013).

In South African print magazines, where the hegemony of English remains largely uncontested, incorporating components of indigenous languages and Afrikaans may similarly be exploited for commercial ends. Our analysis suggests that the most prevalent form of code-switching from English to indigenous South African languages represents what we have coded as linguistic tokenism. That is, in comparison with the more expansive use of both Afrikaans and foreign languages (such as French), code-switching is used in a more limited manner, and mainly to presuppose community and solidarity with first-language speakers of indigenous languages. In cases of English-to-Afrikaans code-switching, our findings echo the trends observed for languages such as French and German. That is, the language is exploited for pre-existing associations. However, in contrast with French (often associated with prestige) and German (often associated with technical precision), Afrikaans is used to invoke cultural stereotypes, notably a self-satirical celebration of Afrikaner backwardness and/or lack of refinement that is often interpolated with hyper-masculinity.

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