South African President Cyril Ramaphosa bestows the Order of Baobab in Silver to William Smith.Credit: GCIS
Little about William Smith’s debut on the Learning Channel, a programme he launched through South Africa’s national television broadcaster in 1990, hinted at how seminal his maths and science lessons would become.
The Learning Channel set was unpretentious. There were few showy graphics. His calculations were methodically handwritten onto transparent plastic film on an overhead projector. Smith didn’t need pageantry.
Smith studied science and chemistry at Rhodes University before going on to the University of Natal where he was awarded his master’s in chemistry after only seven months. Smith’s parents were role models for his love of science. His father, J. L. B. Smith, was a renowned chemist and ichthyologist who in 1938, working off a sketch sent to him by a museum curator, identified a mysterious fish that had been caught off South Africa’s east coast as a coelacanth. At the time, the fish had been thought to have been extinct for 65 million years. His mother, Margaret Smith was an ichthyologist, renowned for her illustrations in the seminal Sea Fishes of Southern Africa.
Until 1994, black South Africans were denied the right to learn anything more than numerical literacy, setting back generations and bedevilling maths and science education in the country still. In the 1970s, he defied the apartheid government’s laws against non-racial schools and started a programme of supplementary classes in maths and science, open to students of all races. He was supported by Hylton Appelbaum, CEO of the Liberty Life insurance company and The Star newspaper in Johannesburg, which published supplementary material. These classes would become Star Schools, still running today, offering support to students having to resit their final school exams.
The Learning Channel allowed him to expand his reach to millions. Patiently, joyfully, and wittily he set out to improve school-level mathematics and science. Millions of school children would watch his show over the next 16 years, along with many adults, simply to see if they could keep up.
The concept of the Learning Channel “may not strike one as remarkable in an era where many talented a tons of talented postgraduates post teaching videos on YouTube,” says Hartmut Winkler of the Department of Physics at the University of Johannesburg, “but 30 years ago this was relatively novel, and not something that would have worked without a captivating performance.”
Other teachers must have envied the consummate ease with which he would demystify the most incomprehensible of problems. “He always found a smarter and more interesting way to explain even the most complex of concepts,” said Nithaya Chetty, dean of science at the University of the Witwatersrand.
The honours that would later roll in, including being listed among the 100 Great South Africans and in 2019 receiving the country’s national Order of the Baobab attest to his impact.
And when he died of cancer in Australia on 21 August 2024, South Africans of all creeds and identifies mourned his passing.
“This is a sad day for science education in South Africa; he stimulated a love for mathematics in many of us as young children,” notes Burtram Fielding, dean of science at Stellenbosch University.
