Section / About
Harding → Cape Town
Who is Waheed, beyond a list of roles
I am interested in the distance between what is possible and what is accessible.
In twenty seconds
Waheed Amanjee is a Mandela Rhodes Scholar and final-year medical student at the University of Cape Town, running his clinical years alongside an MSc in neurogenomics. He co-founded WiZmed — now Africa's largest stethoscope distributor — and the African Research Society, and works across medicine, long-read genomics and entrepreneurship on one question: how can scientific possibility become more accessible across Africa?
A mind, mapped
Six ways of working, one interdependent whole
The whole
Tap a node — or hover, or use the Tab key — to read the question that keeps that part of the work honest.
The longer story
My path has never felt like a choice between medicine, science and entrepreneurship. I have come to understand them as different instruments for the same work: seeing people clearly, asking better questions, and building systems that leave more possibility behind.
I grew up in Harding, a small farming town on the south coast of KwaZulu-Natal, before moving to Port Shepstone and then Cape Town for medical school. Much of what I do now traces back to a science fair — a Grade 7 project for a solar-powered laptop — that first turned curiosity into something public.
I matriculated as Dux of Creston College, then completed a BMedSci (Hons) in Bioinformatics at UCT with First Class Distinction as top academic achiever. I'm now in my final year of medicine, running clinical training in parallel with an MSc in neurogenomics as a Mandela Rhodes Scholar.
Alongside training I co-founded WiZmed — now the continent's largest stethoscope distributor — and the African Research Society, a youth-led non-profit opening research to more students across Africa. Field Notes is where I think in public, before the ideas harden into certainty.
My journey is rooted in the legacy of my forebears — the resilience of my mother, Rabia Bux, whose academic ambitions were curtailed by circumstance; my father, Imran Amanjee, who set his own university plans aside to support his family; and my late grandfather, Suleman Bux, who left school at fourteen to sustain the family business. Each thing I get to do is a homage to their unrealised dreams.
A working life, in places
Where the work has taken me
Cape TownSouth Africa
Home base — medicine, research & building · now
Languages
- EnglishFluent
- AfrikaansProficient
- isiXhosaLearning
- isiZuluLearning
- EspañolLearning
Go deeper