The University of Cape Town (UCT) demonstrates a sustained institutional commitment to preserving and promoting cultural heritage in alignment with Sustainable Development Goal 11: Sustainable Cities and Communities. Rooted in UCT’s Vision 2030 and its core values of excellence, integrity, and social responsiveness, the university undertakes a wide range of initiatives to safeguard both tangible and intangible heritage. These include the digitisation of archives and collections, oral-history and community memory projects, and partnerships that record indigenous knowledge, languages, and local traditions. Through these activities, UCT contributes to resilient, inclusive, and culturally rich communities—reflecting its strategic goal to translate research and engagement into meaningful societal impact at local, national, and global levels. Below are some examples of this work in 2024.
1. Global Digital Heritage Afrika (GDHA)
GDHA was launched at UCT on 1 March 2024 as an affiliate of Global Digital Heritage. In a move to preserve and democratise architectural heritage, the University of Cape Town’s (UCT) Faculty of Engineering & the Built Environment (EBE) partnered with Global Digital Heritage Afrika (GDHA), a research grouping dedicated to the digital documentation of heritage.
GDHA is an affiliate of Global Digital Heritage, an international non-profit organisation based in the United States and Europe, which works collaboratively with the faculty on projects in Africa and around the world. GDHA is dedicated to the digital documentation of heritage landscapes, sites, monuments, and museum collections for research, conservation, and interpretation.
The group’s aim is to advance digital documentation (3D/photogrammetry, GIS, imaging) of heritage landscapes, monuments, museum collections and community knowledge across Africa - explicitly to address under-representation of African heritage in global digital collections. This is a direct institutional project for recording and preserving both tangible and intangible cultural heritage (through rich digital records, contextual metadata and outreach). Digital capture and community-engaged documentation preserve oral histories, performance practices, place-based practices and linguistics metadata that otherwise risk loss; GDHA’s remit includes outreach and research methods that foreground community narratives.
2. Centre for Popular Memory (CPM)
CPM (active 2024) is hosted at UCT and is an oral-history research, advocacy and archival centre. The CPM believes that people’s stories have the power to contribute to social and developmental change. As we hear, see, imagine and empathize with others, we can contribute to altering attitudes, perceptions and policy. Given that memories are particularly shaped and conserved by relationships, we focus on facilitating dialogues across generations and through sites of memory.
Our research prioritizes multi-lingual and multi-disciplinary approaches to memory, narrative, gender, identity formation, and the impact of violence and traumatic legacies in Africa. We specialize in dissemination of these narratives through books, radio, exhibitions, film and web. Future plans include the development of content into more portable media platforms.
The publicly accessible multilingual archive holds thousands of hours of audio/video and CPM runs training for students and organisations in oral/visual history research and public representation. CPM collects, curates and makes available first-hand accounts, testimonies, songs, storytelling and other non-material cultural expressions — core elements of intangible cultural heritage — and trains others to do the same (multiplying preservation capacity).
3. Hugh Brody / ǂKhomani (Brody San) Archive
UCT Libraries Special Collections hosts the Hugh Brody digital community archive (ǂKhomani material) on the Ibali digital portal. The ǂKhomani are among the first known people to live in the southern region of the Kalahari Desert. They have lived as hunters and gatherers in this immense sandy savannah for generations. The Kalahari landscape in the northwest corner of South Africa, is a land rich in wildlife, plants, rolling sand dunes, dry riverbeds and clear night skies. The ǂKhomani were dispossessed and dispersed; their language and oral history are endangered. Digitised recordings and transcripts in local languages directly protect linguistic and oral heritage and enable community access and reuse.
The archive includes >130 hours of film, >1,300 photographs, GIS mapping, family trees and multilingual transcripts (Nǀuu, Nama, Kora, Afrikaans). The Ibali/ǂKhomani pages note the archive’s content and availability (the Ibali portal materials and the UCT event listing show ongoing access and engagement in 2024).
4. Heritage Month programming and public storytelling
In celebration of Heritage Month (September 2024), the University of Cape Town (UCT) engaged with students from diverse cultural backgrounds to explore their rich heritage stories. From Malawi to Kenya, the United States, and Zimbabwe, students shared their unique narratives, highlighting the beautiful blend of ethnicities and cultures that shape their identities. UCT published video footage of this event on its news pages. Public recording, broadcasting and institutional recognition of living practices strengthens their visibility and creates accessible documentary material for future use.
5. “Behind the Scenes of Ibali: Digital Collections UCT”
“Behind the Scenes of Ibali: Digital Collections UCT" (Ibali Indaba Event 1, 27 March 2024), was a UCT Libraries event showing digital collections work. Ibali is the home of a number of UCT's digital collection showcase sites. In this indaba the focus was on all the behind the scenes work required to keep Ibali: Digital Collections UCT running smoothly. The indaba took a look at some of the technical needs of maintaining the software as well as some of the curation activities that take place to keep all the showcase sites not only fresh, but also FAIR.
6. UCT’s maiden Language Indaba
UCT hosted its first “Language Indaba” (12 September 2024) under the theme “Promoting understanding on the proposed UCT language policy”. The indaba discussed multilingualism, official languages (English, Afrikaans, isiXhosa at least), and prioritized other indigenous languages like South African Sign Language (SASL), Kaaps (Afrikaaps), and Khoekhoegowab. This event helped engage community / internal stakeholders about preserving and promoting heritage languages. It also created awareness and dialogue around language policy and valuation of indigenous languages.
7. New/approved UCT Language Policy
The UCT Language Policy was approved by Council in December 2024 and launched early 2025. That policy explicitly includes plans for promoting marginalised indigenous languages in teaching, research, communication; supports usage of languages like Afrikaaps (Kaaps), SASL, Khoekhoegowab and N|uu. Although formally launched in 2025, much of the groundwork and policy drafting and stakeholder engagement happened in 2024 (indabas, language elective offerings etc.). This is important, because policy-level change is key to heritage preservation.