INLSA

Bernie Fanaroff, project director for SKA South Africa, discusses the capabilities of the SKA mega-telescope. Photo: Cindy Waxa

Avery Carpenter

BERNIE Fanaroff, the man behind SA’s bid to build the world’s most powerful radio telescope, is no stranger to power – he once served as deputy director-general for star of the Struggle, Nelson Mandela.

Now he works for the stars of the universe.

Fanaroff is committed to building the SKA (Square Kilometre Array) telescope in SA.

“We have an outstanding site for the SKA, as well as the people and expertise to build and operate this mega-instrument,” he said.

The self-effacing Fanaroff, who has driven SA’s astonishing bid, is something of a renaissance man.

He has a PhD in radio astronomy and was a formidable union leader in the 1980s.

He was asked to run the SA SKA Project in 2003 by Rob Adam, then director-general of Science and Technology.

“I studied radio astronomy and I had also worked in government, so it was a good fit for the project,” Fanaroff said.

After receiving a PhD at Cambridge University, he worked as an astronomer in SA for two years and went on to serve as a trade union organiser during the critical apartheid years.

For 19 years Fanaroff worked as a organiser, negotiator and national secretary for the National Union of Metalworkers SA.

“My training in physics and astronomy made it relatively easy to understand the industry and its processes,” Fanaroff said in an interview published on the National Astrophysics and Space Science Programme website.

“I was also able to approach the difficult and intractable problems of organising workers in the face of strong state repression and intimidation with objectivity, systematically and logically (most of the time).”

And this seems modest when faced with his full résumé.

He went on to serve as a government official, beginning in 1994.

In addition to being the deputy director-general in the office of president Mandela, he was the Department of Safety and Security’s deputy director-general and chairman of the Integrated Justice System Board and Steering Committee for Border Control.

Faranoff remains confident in SA’s viability as a site for the SKA telescope.

“Physically and scientifically, the Karoo is really a great site,” he said.

avery.carpenter@inl.co.za