Meet a great mind

Accolades and awards

Mamokgethi Phakeng has a doctorate in maths education from Wits. She’s a National Research Foundation B1-rated scientist, with more than 80 research papers and five edited volumes published. She received the National Science and Technology Forum award in 2011 for innovative research on teaching and learning mathematics in multilingual classrooms.

In 2013 she was named South Africa’s most influential woman in education and training, and in 2014 the most influential woman in academia in Africa. She was awarded the Order of the Baobab (Silver) in 2016. She has over 36 000 Twitter followers and was a competitive ballroom dancer, and if there’s a good dancer in the room she can still get down, she says.

On the student protests

“As a result of the protests, black students have become more confident — and that’s significant,” says Phakeng. “The learning space is now contested and the intellectual space is not occupied by the voices of only middle-class and uppermiddle-class students. The protests have given black students confidence to speak, to say this is their university. In the past, black students felt too grateful just to be there. Now, they are saying: ‘We don’t have to be grateful; it’s our university as well, we belong here.’ ”