360º PERSPECTIVES | ISSUE 7 | 2020/2021
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Hope and promise fulfilled » Eldorado, Valhalla, Meadowlands, Gugulethu (our pride)– the apartheid bureaucrats who named South Africa’s desolate black townships clearly understood irony.
D
OCTOR NTOMBIZONKE YVONNE KHESWA
was born in the dusty squalor of Tembisa (meaning ‘hope’ or ‘promise’ in isiZulu), a poorly serviced dormitory township started when thousands of black people living on freehold land around Johannesburg were forcibly removed and dumped there. While in high school, Dr Kheswa moved to Durban where she matriculated. A diploma in analytical chemistry at Mangosuthu Technikon (now Mangosuthu University of Technology) followed in 1999, after which she was employed as a laboratory technician by sugar giant Tongaat Hulett. She completed a BTech in Chemistry at the Durban University of Technology in 2004 and moved to the Sugar Milling Research Institute in the same year. In 2005, her family relocated to the Western Cape where she was offered a job as a target maker by iThemba Laboratory for Accelerator Based Sciences (iThemba LABS), an NRFfunded multidisciplinary research facility focused on the use of particle accelerators to produce radioisotopes for medical use and the conduct of applied nuclear physics research. >> Dr Ntombizonke Yvonne Kheswa. > Image Credit: Nickay Photography
