Reading the earth from the inside out

Prof Musa Manzi has transformed South African geophysics – one innovation, one student and one community at a time

Tracy Lee Stark

When Prof Musa Manzi was a third-year student at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits), his mother and sister died within a day of each other. In the weeks that followed, he attempted several times to end his own life. He brought his two young nieces – aged seven and five – to Johannesburg because there was no one to look after them. For months, he attended university lectures with them and slept at Park Station and in university libraries until a place in residence became available. Fellow students and church members brought food parcels. A classmate, Celeste Johnson, took him home for a meal; her parents, Ed and Rose Thomas, eventually opened their home to all three of them and helped fund his education.

Today, Manzi is the Founding Director of the Wits Seismic Research Centre – widely regarded as the best geophysical research and training hub in Africa – and the only academic leading expert on the continent in the field of reflection seismology. He tells that story not for sympathy, but because he believes it explains everything about how he runs his research centre: as a place of trust, creativity and deliberate investment in people who need someone to open a door for them.

There is gold beneath the Karoo. There is platinum beneath the Bushveld. There are fault lines beneath Johannesburg. And beneath all of it, there is a story that the earth tells in seismic waves – if only you have the tools to listen. Manzi’s career has been dedicated to building those tools and teaching South Africa (SA) how to use them.

His research develops novel, cost-effective and environmentally friendly seismic techniques that allow scientists and engineers to scan the earth’s subsurface without drilling a single hole. Working with fibre-optic telecommunications cables, wireless seismic sensors and purpose-built land streamers, his team has advanced Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS) technology for use on the surface, inside boreholes and in mine tunnels – transforming how SA explores for gold, platinum, manganese and rare earth elements, while also helping detect sinkholes, monitor methane explosions in mines and understand earthquake risk beneath cities. In 2013, he became the first Black South African to earn a PhD in Geophysics. His work received the 2012 Best Paper Award from the Society of Exploration Geophysicists and, in 2016, he became the first recipient of the International Award for Research Excellence in Earth and Ocean Sciences from the American Geophysical Union.

The flagship of his current work is the Karoo GeoScan Project – a R200-million government initiative awarded in 2024 by the Petroleum Agency of SA, in which his Centre is conducting the largest seismic surveys ever undertaken in Africa across the Western Cape, Northern Cape and Eastern Cape. The project maps the subsurface geology of the Karoo Basin for natural resource exploration, geohazard analysis and geo-environmental investigation, while also generating important data on groundwater. More than 50 community members were employed and trained as part of the project, with postgraduate students and early-career researchers gaining hands-on experience in large-scale data acquisition alongside them.

The transformation within the Wits Seismic Research Centre since its establishment in 2015 is perhaps the most remarkable number of all. It started with two MSc students. Today it hosts approximately 40 researchers – 8 postdoctoral fellows (six of them Black South Africans) and 15 PhD and 18 MSc postgraduate students, virtually all Black South Africans. Manzi has supervised more than 15 Black South African PhDs in geophysics – more than anyone else in the country’s history. Three of his former doctoral students, Drs Ngcobo, Rapetsoa and Mutshafa, have been appointed as academics at the Wits School of Geosciences. The Centre’s commercial research activities have generated more than R300 million in the past five years, sustaining instruments, postdoctoral salaries and the research pipeline.

Beyond the university, Manzi co-founded the Wits Mathematics Competition in 2018, runs Saturday mathematics classes through the Dr Musa Manzi Foundation across more than 20 centres in Southern Africa, and founded the Gentle Giants Orphanage in KwaZulu-Natal – home to approximately 120 children – which he uses to encourage young people to pursue science careers. His Foundation collaborates with the Wits Seismic Research Centre to use geophysics to locate groundwater boreholes for rural communities in KwaZulu-Natal.

He explains his philosophy plainly: the things you do for yourself are gone when you are gone. The things you do for others remain as your legacy. It is a philosophy forged in the hardest possible circumstances – and it has produced, in less than fifteen years, a research centre, a generation of scientists and a community foundation that will outlast any single discovery.

Prof Manzi received the TW Kambule-NSTF Emerging Researcher Award in 2018, and his unit, the School of Geosciences at Wits, walked away with the trophy for the Data for Research Award in 2021.

Read the special Mail & Guardian supplement about all the NSTF-South32 Award winners.