Heritage research programme on the horizon

The NHC has adopted knowledge production as one of its key pillars of its strategy. While this was part of the outcomes of the projects and programmes in the past years, it will now receive more emphasis. It came about when the Council and staff on the NHC resolved at one of the strategy planning sessions that more research about heritage, especially living heritage, should be conducted and made public. It is intended to gradually move the NHC as the leading knowledge hub on heritage in the country.

The University of South Africa (UNISA) through its College of Human Sciences, will be collaborating on a Studentship programme that was launched on 4 June 2022 at Freedom Park in Pretoria. This signing ceremony of a Memorandum of Agreement (MoA) sealed the long negotiations between NHC and UNISA. These talks were facilitated by the NHC Human Resources Manager, Neliswa Bam, who sees this as partly an intervention of mediating the resource shortage in the research function of the organisation.

The Chairperson of the NHC, Mr Edgar Neluvhalani, remarked at the signing ceremony that the Studentship programme will make a significant contribution to the research and education content as part of the mandate of the NHC.

The five students will be joining the NHC in August 2022 to commence with their 24 months’ contract of their post graduate studies and research theses on various heritage subjects. This programme is targeted at students in Heritage, Archives and Records Management, Archaeology, Anthropology, and History to enrol for Doctoral studies in their fields of interest. It is the first to be implemented by the NHC.