FEATURE
ALUMNI IN ACTION
A LIFE OF SERVICE Since training as a teacher at Homerton, Sister Bernadette Chabongora (BEd 1981–85) has juggled a career at the top of Zimbabwe’s education system with a life of service caring for her community as a member of a religious order. She talked to the Homertonian about her time at Cambridge, the opportunities it led to, and how the friends she made at Homerton rallied round when the pandemic hit four decades later.
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ister Bernadette Chabongora’s early education was disrupted by two things – her decision, in her late teens, to join the Sisters of the Child Jesus convent, and guerrilla warfare. Having attended her local village school and a boarding school, both in rural Zimbabwe, Sister Bernadette continued to study for her A levels after taking her vows and becoming a nun. But the unrest due to the protracted guerrilla war caused her school to be closed, barely a month after starting A level studies, so she and a fellow junior nun were sent to London to complete the course. “I’d never left Zimbabwe before,” Sister Bernadette recalls now. “We stayed in a hostel run by nuns, in Swiss Cottage.” After finishing her exams Sister Bernadette decided to stay on in the UK to train as a teacher, arriving at Homerton in the autumn of 1981.
Sister Bernadette at Homerton in the early 1980s
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HOMERTONIAN
“It helped that I had been to boarding school,” she says of the transition to College life. “It prepared me to live with people from different backgrounds. I was so excited to be going to university.” Older than her classmates, a member of a religious order, and one of very few Black students in Cambridge at the time, it can’t have been easy to have had so many points of difference between herself and her contemporaries, while so far away from home. But Sister Bernadette thoroughly enjoyed the training, and still remembers those who helped her to feel welcomed. “There were some other Catholic girls in College, so we used to go to church together. And I used to visit the convent up the road. Also the caretaker’s wife used to invite me over and make me feel at home. We were placed on the corridor according to our surnames, so I was next
