SA’s Indiana Jones of fossil hunting
THE late Professor Phillip Tobias wanted to be a writer or a journalist when he was younger, but his family told him there was no money in that.
Nonetheless, the worldrenowned palaeoanthropologist — who died last year aged 86 — managed to “make a pig of myself” by writing more than 1 200 articles and coauthoring 33 books.
Tobias, who was nominated for a Nobel prize three times, taught and mentored more than 10 000 students in a career spanning more than 50 years at the University of the Witwatersrand.
He chose a career in science after his sister fell victim to diabetes at the age of 21 and no one in South Africa could explain why the disease had skipped a generation. While he was in his teens and still grieving, Tobias set out to be the first geneticist in the country, “which in fact I did”.
In a short film of the shooting of his portrait by 21 Icons mastermind Adrian Steirn, Tobias spoke about his involvement in the antiapartheid struggle.
Tobias, a former president and chair of the National Union of South African Students, described the apartheid era as “a 40year Dark Ages”.
Tobias said that, for him, Nelson Mandela’s release from jail had meant there was now much to live for, whereas previously there had not been. “It was a remarkable revolution in the country’s evolution. It was a turning point.”
Tobias was instrumental in the process to have the remains of Saartjie Baartman, who was exhibited in Paris as an ethnological and sexual curiosity in the 19th century, returned to South Africa in 2002.
Tobias negotiated with France on behalf of the South African government.
For the Tobias portrait, which is published in the R17 edition of the Sunday Times, Steirn wanted to show the palaeoanthropologist holding an old-fashioned hurricane lamp and walking stick. Steirn said the props evoked his days of doing fieldwork and uncovering the mysteries of human evolution — “a real-life Indiana Jones”.
A short film about the shooting of the portrait was made at Tobias’s office at the University of the Witwatersrand, where he was professor emeritus of anatomy and human biology. It will be shown on SABC3 tonight at 6.57pm.