TOP OF THE TREE
From village child to varsity boss
● When Professor Mamokgethi Phakeng is handed the keys to the University of Cape Town on July 1, she will probably be the first South African vice-chancellor with ink on her arms.
“Believe” is tattooed on her left arm, “Forgiven” on her right.
The words are cornerstones of her Christian faith, she says. “I got the tattoos at a time when everything was going well in my life. I was nailing things and I thought: ‘It’s easy to forget that I’m just a sinner who has been forgiven.’ I got the tattoos to remind myself that there’s nothing special about me. I’m just another person who works hard. I have been granted grace and favour — and all I have to do is believe.”
Phakeng is a fab academic and has the Twitter handle (@FabAcademic) to prove it. She’s a social media luminary, who is not scared of anything — not even algebra. The 51-year-old scholar is fluent in the language of geometry and comfortable with the linguistic nuances of emojis, meme-speak, hashtags and selfies.
She’s got a PhD in maths education, which will be useful because she’s going to need all her problem-solving maths-whiz skills to steady the good ship UCT, which has had three years of turbulence.
From ‘ghetto fabulous’ stock
But let’s go to a tree in Marapyane village in the former homeland of Bophuthatswana in 1972 — that tree was five-year-old Mamokgethi’s first classroom.
“If you don’t know any other life you’d see it as normal, but looking back I realise that it was rough. We were poor,” she says.
The year she started school, her mother restarted school. Wendy Mmutlana, a domestic worker, returned to the classroom to do Standard 6. People laughed at the mother-of-three, who was as old as the teachers, in her school uniform, but it didn’t bother her. She graduated and became a teacher at a primary school.
Phakeng describes her mother as “ghetto fabulous”, which she says is the township version of vivacious. “She’s outgoing, loud, funny, smart, resilient, and she’s got a sense of humour for days.”
While her mother was making her way through high school, Phakeng was quietly becoming a maths boffin. She didn’t realise that being good at maths was “a thing”. She just enjoyed it — at first simply because it was a subject that required no memorising of dates or names. One just has to grasp the big idea, which came easily to her. She liked the certainty of maths. It just made sense. And it gave her freedom — the freedom to think.
After matriculating, she obtained a degree in pure maths from the University of Bophuthatswana and then went to the University of the Witwatersrand, where in 2002 she became, as every article about her mentions, “the first black South African woman to acquire a PhD in mathematics education”.
The “first black woman” badge is something she’s proud of, but, she says, it’s also a burden.
“If you think about it, to have only one black African woman with a PhD in maths education in 2002 is embarrassing. I had the responsibility to make sure I wasn’t the last one.” She launched the Adopt-a-Learner Foundation to support students from rural and township schools.
According to Phakeng, being a black woman in the maths field is a double whammy. She has had to fight to be seen as equal and equally capable.
“Because you fight you get known as this person who is pushing, but you have to push to get opportunities and recognition, and that makes people think you’re a selfpromoter, but if you don’t push, you get pushed . . . to the bottom.”
When she gets an opportunity, she knows everyone is watching. “I have only one chance to nail it. If I fail, people say ‘Well, she failed because she’s a black woman’ — and I’m out. And then it’s not only about me, it’s about all black women, and all black people. Even the VC position comes with this burden of intense scrutiny. I don’t have the privilege of messing up one time.”
Phakeng was the vice-principal for research and innovation at Unisa, serving as professor of mathematics education before joining UCT as its deputy VC in 2016. She was on a golden trajectory. As a scholar with international standing, executive experience and as a black woman, she fit UCT’s equity target. She was a dead cert to replace UCT’s outgoing VC Max Price — or so one would have thought.
But in the week the VC post was advertised, a malicious e-mail circulated, suggesting that Phakeng’s doctorate was fraudulent. It was a baseless smear, causing the eminently qualified Phakeng to decide not to throw her mortarboard into the VC ring.
There were times that Phakeng had felt that UCT wasn’t welcoming, but this was the first time she had been openly attacked. “I was accused of not having acclimatised to UCT’s ‘culture’. I was too loud, too colourful, too whatever,” she says.
Eventually a senior scholar told her he was going to nominate her because he believed she was the right person for the position. It wasn’t about her, he said. It was about the institution. Phakeng says she agreed to apply because UCT is important — for South Africa and the continent.
The beginning could be the end
It was a drawn-out, overwhelming and scary process, that needed to get the go-ahead from UCT’s senate, institutional forum and council — and eventually she was told she had been chosen.
“My mother was so excited. I told her to calm down, because this could be the end of me. It’s such a tough job, with one vice-chancellor having had a heart attack on the job, people losing their minds, and death threats.”
But Phakeng’s mother wasn’t worried. She knew her daughter would be fine. When Phakeng was born — on November 1, All Saints’ Day nogal — it was inside an intact amniotic sac, which, according to legend, is special. The nuns present at the birth told Mmutlana that, whatever her daughter did, it would be amazing.
Despite their prediction, Phakeng is going into her new position with eyes wide open. Even in her application letter, she wrote that anyone who applied for the VC’s job was crazy.
It’s true. Jonathan Jansen’s book As by
Fire , which looks at the student protests of 2015 and 2016 from the perspective of university leaders, leaves little doubt that it’s a thankless job — equal perhaps only to the job of Bafana Bafana coach: everybody has opinions about how it should be done.
At this, Phakeng laughs. She says her new job is actually like being the coach of Barcelona — she’s a Barça fan.
“Barcelona recruit the best players and they all have complexities, but, hey, they score goals. We expect them to win. In this country, people expect UCT to remain on top. They have no idea what it takes; they just expect it to happen. Nobody knows who the coach of Barça is — not even fans — but they all want the team to win.”
She did the impossible
She’s not completely unknown at UCT.
Black staff members recognise her and when black students spot her on campus they stop her for selfies. She says some white students know her (some also want selfies) but, up until recently, most white staff had no idea who she was.
In December, when the exams were held in a tent because of the threat of protest action, Phakeng went to the tent to see how things were working. There, a white lecturer mistook her for a student and asked her to sit down. Someone whispered to the lecturer: “No, no, she’s the DVC.”
Phakeng has a special connection with students — not because she looks young enough to be one, but because she hangs out with young people online.
According to a recent graduate, Phakeng is a role model for young black students.
“She’s inspired us. We think: ‘If she can do it, then maybe I can too.’ ”
She’s already done the impossible: she’s made maths cool.
Her first day as VC — July 1 — is a Sunday, but Phakeng, who is known for arriving at work at 4am and leaving at 9pm, will be on campus.
“I’ll just take a walk around to see if anybody recognises the new chief in town,” she jokes.
Phakeng is well liked and, despite the malicious e-mail, a popular choice. Students think she’s cool and supportive; academics think she’s astute and efficient. Still, UCT is a fraught environment and — between the students, academics, alumni, the government, media, and the public — she will be pulled in all sorts of directions.
Those many different strands all have competing interests, and if too many of the strands get pulled, things may unravel.
Such an unravelling happened in 2015, when UCT became a site of protest around transformation, colonialism and fees.
Phakeng says, with the way fees were increasing and the government’s response, it was only a matter of time before a rupture.
Soon after the protests started, she and many of her colleagues marched with the students, calling for a zero fee increase.
“I know what it means not to have fees and I know that being smart is not good enough when you’re black and poor.”
She says #FeesMustFall was a national issue and that the students were impatient and angry because it seemed to them that the VCs, who insisted a zero increase couldn’t happen, had become spokespeople for the higher education minister.
“The students felt they weren’t heard and, of course, the slash-and-burn approach gets attention. They were quickly called hooligans and so they became hooligans. Would it have been different if the VCs had said ‘Yes, we agree, fees can’t increase this way, so let’s stand together and tell the government that this is unattainable and come up with a plan for funding’? I don’t know. It’s unfair for me to say this because I wasn’t vice-chancellor.”
If things flare
But she soon will be. Although there is an uneasy truce at the moment, UCT’s institutional culture hasn’t changed that much. Issues around transformation, fees and colonialism are likely to flare up again — so how will she deal with it?
With wisdom, courage and humility, and she’s been praying for double doses of each.
“I am going to need the wisdom to do this work because there’s no manual to being the best VC. I’m going to need the courage to make tough decisions because I know every decision will make someone unhappy. And, when things work, I must have humility, and I must also have humility if I don’t know how to do something to ask those who do,” she says.
She’ll also need a great deal of luck — and she has already got Lucky. Literally. In 2012, she married Lucky Phakeng.
“I tell everybody: ‘I got Lucky and he just got me.’ My husband is my upgrade in every way. Before I met him I thought Mageu Number 1 was the thing, but he introduced me to plain yoghurt. He swears by it. If I say I’m not feeling well, he says: ‘Maybe you should have some plain yoghurt.’ ”
On her blog, Phakeng writes there was a time in her life when she thought everything about her needed fixing. “I thought I was not smart enough, I thought my bum was too big and my eyes too small. I thought that nobody liked me because I was too boring, ugly and nasty.”
But as she’s grown older she has become satisfied with who she is. “When I turned 40 I realised, actually, I’m fine. I’m OK. I’m comfortable in my own skin.”
In a way, that’s her vision for UCT, for the university to be “unapologetically African” and be comfortable in its own skin too.
Students felt they weren’t heard . . . they were called hooligans, so they became hooligans