When pro-Palestine encampments followed violent and disruptive protests over student debt and housing costs earlier this year, Mosa Moshabela, the fledgling leader of Africa’s highest-ranked university, could have been forgiven if he had looked forward to the numerous commitments that regularly took him far from campus.
Throughout the past decade, the University of Cape Town has been a troubled place. The Rhodes Must Fall protests, sparked by students’ objections to the presence on campus of a large statue of the British imperialist Cecil Rhodes, morphed into a wider movement to decolonise South African higher education – and then inspired the Fees Must Fall movement, which sparked violent demonstrations across the country in response to the government’s plan to raise tuition costs.
That unrest has not gone away. Just last month, for instance, both the University of Fort Hare and the University of the Free State were closed amid and . Campus relations at UCT itself have also been fraught, with 80 students occupying offices over tuition fee debts and accommodation grievances in February. Lectures, seminars and sports fixtures have been also disrupted.
But it is disruptions much further from home that have been occupying the majority of Moshabela’s attentions since his appointment in August 2024. Since Donald Trump returned to office in January, American culture wars have inflicted casualties around the world, including Africa, threatening billions of dollars in research funding spend in the continent. USAID grants were killed stone dead as the by South African native Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), and other agencies, including the National Institutes of Health, have been instructed to restrict overseas funding, obliging the South African medical researcher to spend lots of time on the road in 2025 in an effort to minimise the damage.
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At the turn of the year, UCT’s 140 research projects, including world-leading studies into tuberculosis, malaria and HIV, had a total value of 2.5 billion rand (£100 million), making it the NIH’s best funded university outside the US. However, an agency memo, leaked in March, revealed plans to cut off all funds to South Africa – apparently in reaction to an executive order from Trump claiming that the country was discriminating against Afrikaners: white South Africans of Dutch descent. Then, in May, the NIH announced the : funding passed on by principal grant holders to partners of collaborating institutions, often in other countries.
“Fewer people were coming from the US to South Africa because there was a freeze on [NIH-funded] travel there, limitations on funding and limitations on project activities,” Moshabela told ̽Ƶ. “There were projects that were naturally coming to an end, but also projects that needed renewal that were not being renewed. We were waiting for approvals and they were not being approved.”
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That sense of stasis understandably alarmed UCT’s research community. Without US funding, hundreds of NIH-funded research posts and PhD positions could have been lost, Moshabela said. In the event, a partial U-turn in July saw the NIH stating it was willing to from the new restrictions for human-subject research by temporarily converting sub-awards into special “supplements” to main grants, paid directly to the overseas collaborator.
However it has not been as easy to negotiate the imposed on several elite universities with which the Trump administration has been in dispute, including Harvard, Columbia and Northwestern, over allegations of antisemitism and “wokeness”.
Columbia University was affected, then they could not commit to continuing their commitment that they had with us,” Moshabela explained. But rather than withdraw from US partnerships, he chose instead to “double down” and “strengthen” them: “There were partnerships that I wanted to protect even if there was no funding, or even if funding was stopped. We could see how devastating the situation was for our American research partners, so I went to the US and visited a number of them – and, in fact, signed new agreements with other institutions,” he said.
“Every time, I explained to them that, as universities, we are not asking for this situation but we can [use it as a stimulus to] express more support for each other, in whatever way we can. We wanted to make clear that we are not going to pull back on that at all – there’s a slowdown for now but we are in this for the long term.”
Those visits have taken place during a choppy period in South Africa’s relations with the US, with its ambassador expelled from Washington in March over criticisms of Trump, and its president, Cyril Ramaphosa, publicly harangued in the Oval Office in May over widely discredited claims that .
“It’s been a very turbulent period geopolitically but I am hopeful things will stabilise,” said Moshabela. Now is the time to “elevate science diplomacy and academic diplomacy much more than we did in the past. We need figure out how to overcome this situation together, even if it means being more creative to ensure those partnerships continue to work, particularly when there is disruption to projects…As university leaders, we have to insist that the world can be at war, but science is not at war.”
As for the unrest at UCT, Moshabela’s administration has forcefully pushed back on students’ claims that thousands have been unfairly denied financial aid, issuing detailed rebuttals. He has also made it clear that further disruption will not be tolerated. In a issued in February, he said that campus security would shift its approach from “tolerance to intervention”, with guards authorised to “intervene whenever the protest action is considered disruptive or violent”.
He rejected calls for ongoing “blanket concessions” for the non-payment of fees, since this has been found to “cultivate a culture of non-payment among certain fee-paying or self-funded students at UCT, who seem to take advantage of measures put in place for financially disadvantaged students”. This had resulted in the doubling of outstanding student fee debt between 2021 and 2024, he revealed.
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Despite these robust exchanges, protests within days, following the agreement of alternative measures to tackle unaffordable fee debt. And Moshabela sees open dialogue as key to his ongoing success in keeping the peace.
“I’ve tried to create spaces for these conversations with students and staff,” he reflected. Those conversations with the vice-chancellor are important – I’ve tried to make them more structured by creating forums for the whole university community to come together. The issues don’t go away but you can manage them better – they’re still simmering but hopefully they won’t boil over in the way that they have [previously].”
Moreover, the dialogue has also improved strategic planning, he believes. “Talking about our university strategy with students and staff has been helpful,” he said. you can think ahead and think big about the future, you spend less time putting out fires in the immediate moment.”
Although, mercifully, the fires have only been metaphorical in Cape Town’s case, when Moshabela took office the institution was still smouldering from the acrimonious departure of its previous permanent vice-chancellor, Mamokgethi Phakeng. The replacement in 2018 of Cape Town’s white, male vice-chancellor, Max Price, by a black woman was initially seen as a significant step towards the racial transformation that the Rhodes Must Fall protests had been calling for. However, things did not go well and Phakeng was forced out in 2023 after a tenure characterised – according to a subsequent judge-led commission, whose conclusions she disputes – by the use of “threats, intimidation, ethnic slurs and personal insults” intended to “belittle and humiliate”.
Moreover, Moshabela soon had his own racial issues to deal with when he took over from interim v-c , in the form of pro-Gaza protests that critics labelled antisemitic. That perception “created problems because we have a large donor community, many of whom are of Jewish descent”, he said, reflecting on the need to address concerns over student safety while upholding free speech.
As the leader of Africa’s only world top 200 university (despite its recent challenges, it rose several places, to joint 164th, in ̽Ƶ’s latest World University Rankings), Moshabela is frequently asked to apply his leadership skills to helping other institutions in South Africa and elsewhere in the continent.
“There is definitely a call for UCT and for me to be more visible and present – to lead for the sector as well as for UCT,” he said. “People will say, ‘UCT is a prestigious institution, we know what you’re capable of but, really, what we need you to do is to support other institutions on the continent a lot more’.”
That has led to diary clashes and, at times, a gruelling travel schedule, Moshabela reflected. For instance, “Last month, the African Research Universities Alliance conference was taking place but it conflicted with another commitment. I was [going to send] a delegation but I had a specific call to attend so I had to prioritise that and be present myself,” he said.
“There is definitely more of a moral obligation for me to step forward – given the US funding cuts – to leverage the influence of UCT to intervene where possible,” he said, noting that THE’s flagship World Academic Summit will be held in Cape Town in September 2026, the first time the event has been held in Africa.
“We have the advantages of a global presence,” Moshabela said. “I’m doing my best to use that to make sure that we can make voices heard from the country and from across Africa as a whole.”
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