Witsies around the world

Witsies around the world

HEATHER DUGMORE FOLLOWS FOUR ALUMNI ON THEIR DIVERSE CAREER JOURNEYS...

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Silva Magaia

Civil engineer (MSc Eng 2004) Location: Maputo

The most challenging part of my work is neither engineering nor commercially related; it is human,” says Maputo-based civil engineer Silva Magaia. “I have learned in my professional life that dealing properly with people is one of the most important aspects of any activity. Respect is key. The same applies to fitting into and leading a team. In my opinion, this skill should be incorporated in the curriculum as a compulsory subject in all tertiary education disciplines.”

In 2016 a lifetime opportunity came Silva’s way when the government of Mozambique appointed him as CEO of the state-owned Maputo South Development Company (Empresa de Desenvolvimento de Maputo Sul, known as Maputo Sul), to lead the Maputo-KaTembe and South Link Roads construction project.

“The contractor is China Road and Bridge Company. The project includes the construction of the Maputo- KaTembe, the longest suspension bridge in Africa and the 53rd longest in the world; and three sections of road totalling 187km, linking Mozambique to South Africa and Swaziland.”

It’s familiar terrain for Silva, who was born in 1964 and grew up in what was then Lourenço Marques, now Maputo. His family lived in what he describes as “the city’s slum areas”. His father worked for the Mozambique Ports and Railways Company and his mother was a fish market vendor, as was his stepmother, who raised him and his nine siblings when his parents divorced.

A few months after Mozambique achieved independence from Portugal in 1975, Silva started secondary school. It was a time of profound change. He joined the Mozambican Youth Organization, OJM, and became the leader of its science and engineering chapter when he enrolled at Eduardo Mondlane University in the early 1980s for his undergraduate degree. After qualifying, he worked as a project manager for some years. Wanting to do his Master’s at Wits, Silva headed for Johannesburg. His dissertation was on alternative building materials and techniques for low-cost housing, and he subsequently constructed a full-scale dome model using earth bricks at an experimental site in Maputo.

Apart from the technical and conceptual expertise he gained through his Master’s, he adds that his time at Wits taught him to do be “a doer, not a talker”.

A major challenge of the huge Maputo Sul bridge project was that much of the land in its path was occupied by homes, businesses, public facilities and services such as gas pipelines and underground cabling. Silva was expected to manage this and get the project moving faster without compromising quality and safety. Eventually, 1 500 properties were relocated.

This did not happen without a storm of criticism but Silva says they avoided major social disruption and legal cases. “The secret was empathy and clear communication in people’s own language,” he says, adding that he learned this from Nelson Mandela.

He feels the relocated families gained something in the process: “For the first time in at least three generations, these households have a secure plot of land in areas covered by formal spatial plans.”

The next big challenge is the sustainability of the project, which will depend on tolls, he explains.

The personal toll of a responsibility this size is considerable. Silva recalls a particular moment when a ship arrived from China carrying the 57 segments of the steel box girder for the main deck of the bridge. “Everyone else was celebrating; I felt quite ill with anxiety.”

The works are approaching the end at an impressive pace and quality, reflected in the project being named one of the 2017 Fulton Awards winners in the infrastructure category.

Silva is now giving presentations to banks, schools, companies and communities, locally and internationally, on what he has learnt about “balancing the technical and the conceptual, the formal and the human, including managing people’s expectations”.

Home for Silva today is the suburb of Polana, where he lives with his wife Telma. They have two married daughters, a teenage son and a grandson. He plays soccer on weekends, writes short novels, paints and loves being the DJ at family parties. He enjoys visiting game reserves and is spoilt for choice in his part of the world.

Life in Mozambique today, he says, has many faces. Maputo “feels secure and calm”. But life remains extremely hard for most people. There are many serious issues to address, but still,

“Moçambique é maningue nice”, as the popular song goes. The weather is great all year, the fish is fresh, the beer is cold, the beach is there, and there’s plenty to do and see, including the newest landmark: the Maputo-KaTembe bridge.

Anna Barbosa

Specialist Portuguese-English translator and interpreter (BSc 1993) Location: Brazil

I have had such a rich life and I thank my father and mother for this,” says Anna Barbosa, who was born in Curitiba, Brazil in 1970. Her father, Wander Moreira, was a footballer and was hired to coach the Malawian national team when she was four. The family moved to Malawi, where she attended a British school and learned to speak English.

“As a child living there it was great. My father was well known and we had a luxurious post-colonial lifestyle. It was only later on that I realised how twisted it was.” Her father’s next football post was in Somalia in 1980, followed by Mozambique in 1986. Anna completed her schooling there. The family moved to Hillbrow in Johannesburg in 1988, when her father was appointed coach of one of South Africa’s legendary teams, Moroka Swallows.

“It was so lively in Hillbrow, especially for us as we had just come from a socialist country. It was still mainly white but there were lots of foreigners, including a sizeable Brazilian community,” says Anna. She attended Damelin College to improve her English and was admitted to Wits in 1989.

She met her Brazilian husband when she was a student and he was a chef for Nando’s in South Africa. They were married in 1992 and lived in Berea.

To pay her student fees she worked in the chemistry lab helping with research and in hotels and curio shops, where her ability to speak Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and English was an asset. She graduated in 1993 and later became a tour guide, at a time when tourism to South Africa was on the rise. “I had a BSc but my only science-related job in South Africa was translating manuals for machinery imported from Italy by Haggie Rand.”

Her husband was then appointed the food and beverage manager at the Polana Hotel in Maputo, and she moved with him, working as a secretary and interpreter for Onumoz, the UN peacekeeping mission in Mozambique. From there they returned to Brazil.

For many years Anna taught English and was an examiner for the Cambridge English language proficiency tests. She now specialises in translating scientific, pharmaceutical and medical texts from Portuguese to English for an international company and does selective work as an interpreter. She’s interested in alternative healing therapies too. “I’m a would-be doctor and ended up doing medical work through a different path. Part of healing is about seeing all people as souls, seeing something beautiful in everyone, and trying not to be judgmental,” Anna explains.

She loves the easygoing, warm, generous character of Brazilians and lives with her children in Florianópolis, an island city in the south of Brazil with “great energy, great seafood and great beaches”. Southern right whales come to calve there and its beaches attract thousands of tourists in summer. “They say the island sinks in summer with all the people,” she says.

“There is lots to do that’s free here, such as music concerts,” says Anna. Her son has just started university, which is free, with high standards for entrance.

The Brazilian diet features a lot of rice and beans. But Anna still loves South African classics like milktart, Mrs Ball’s chutney, curry spices from the Oriental Plaza, rooibos tea and biltong, so her mother (who is still in South Africa) has to bring supplies when she visits.

Joshua Jackson

Public financial management adviser (BA 1998, BA Hons 1999) Location: Papua New Guinea, Iraq, Afghanistan, Indonesia, UK...

Joshua Jackson’s British father and South African mother went to Lesotho for a two-week holiday and stayed there for 15 years. That is where Joshua was born in 1977. He went to school in Johannesburg and majored in economics and international relations at Wits, where his passion for economic development was sparked. He started his working life in the National Treasury in Pretoria and subsequently obtained a Master’s degree at the University of Sussex, UK.

Describing himself as “a travel junkie”, he has visited over 80 countries and lived in eight of them, ranging from Papua New Guinea to Iraq and Afghanistan. He was first sent out by the UK’s

Overseas Development Institute and then worked as an independent consultant to help governments prepare, allocate and spend their budgets.

At times he lived in style, at other times not. In 2004 he lived in a converted container in a car park in Baghdad, along with other consultants helping the new Iraqi government to get its systems and processes running.

Joshua is married to a Venezuelan ophthalmic nurse, Jhennie. They have two young children who were born in Indonesia, where he was a public expenditure management adviser to the Indonesian Finance and Home Affairs ministries.

The couple met in Venezuela on one of Joshua’s trips. “I went down to reception at my hotel and there was this rather attractive Venezuelan woman who was on a work trip. At first, we communicated for hours using Google Translate!”

Working in Papua New Guinea at the time, Joshua was subsequently posted to Afghanistan and Jhennie moved to Ireland. After a courtship conducted over the time zones, they were married in 2011 and went on a six-month honeymoon around the world.

Joshua spent seven years in total in Papua New Guinea. “I was carjacked at gunpoint four times in three years as I lived a very local experience, which meant moving around in some dangerous locations in Port Moresby, the capital city. Aside from this, it is an absolutely beautiful, diverse country of mountains, rainforests and islands; home to a population of six million.”

His next posting was to Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan. “I felt much safer there,” he smiles.

His latest posting was to Indonesia’s capital city of Jakarta for five years. “The first two years were tough as foreigners are not allowed to work in the medical field, which meant Jhennie could not work.”

His own work has brought the satisfaction of seeing Indonesia’s budget transparency score improve by 10%. (South Africa’s budget transparency is usually rated in the top three in the world.)

In Jakarta the couple lived on the 43rd storey of a 55-storey apartment building, with extraordinary views but where they experienced an earthquake one night. “We woke up and the building was literally swaying while cracks appeared in the walls,” he says. “Indonesia is in the ring of fire for earthquakes.”

It was all part of life in Jakarta. “The city really grew on us and the people are friendly. Jakarta is considered by many to be the traffic capital of the world, so we never went out on a Friday evening; we would admire the city from our apartment. To get around we used an app called Gojek to book motorcycle taxis, which are far faster than cars. There’s a Go app for everything: GoDeliveries, GoClean, GoMassage.” They learned the Indonesian language and enjoyed local foods like nasi goreng (fried rice). They joined the international church and met people from all over the world as well as locals.

The Jacksons are now based in the UK and Joshua is working for Crown Agents.

Stephen Matseoane

Medical doctor (MBBCh 1959) Location: New York

Dr Stephen Matseoane was born in 1929, and was one of five children growing up at number 66, Sixth Avenue, Alexandra, north of Johannesburg. He and his friends played in the streets, competing with traffic and pedestrians. “Life was precarious and risky but exciting in this oasis of gallantry and cultural support,” Stephen says.

“Many of us attended the Lutheran Mission Elementary School. Our teachers were enthusiastic professionals who showed an interest in our education. Discipline was rigidly enforced and corporal punishment liberally prescribed.” It was no use complaining to your parents, he says; they assumed you deserved what you got.

Stephen’s parents were hardworking people who routinely rose at 3am, when his father would catch the bus to Doornfontein. He rented a room there and made vetkoek, which he sold to commuters arriving at the Noord Street bus station. Stephen’s mother was a domestic worker and also ran their home, which did not have running water.

When Stephen was a teenager, his parents became increasingly unhappy about the company he was keeping: “Drug trafficking, crime, gangsterism and poor policing were becoming rife, so they moved me to a boarding school in Tigerkloof in the Vryburg district of the Northern Cape, which was run by the London Missionary Society. I found it hard adjusting to the rural environment, and the school was run like a military camp as most of the teachers were war veterans.” After matriculating, Stephen headed for Fort Hare College and majored in zoology and chemistry. He was accepted into Wits Medical School in 1954 and graduated in 1959. He did a year of internship at Baragwanath Hospital, and was there at the time of the Sharpeville massacre, when police opened fire on a crowd demonstrating against the pass laws. “I saw ambulances bringing in people shot mostly in the back. Our responsibility as junior members of staff was to distinguish the patients who were dead on arrival from those who were alive, and determine whether a living patient needed care in the emergency room, operating room or hospital ward. It was a harrowing experience.”

Stephen was particularly interested in obstetrics and gynaecology and wanted to specialise in these, but was told by the hospital administrator at Bara that it was not possible. “Disappointed but not discouraged,” as he puts it, he answered an advertisement looking for medical graduates to work at Bronx Lebanon Hospital in New York.

“The decision to leave South Africa was not easy for me. I was the eldest son and felt a need to set up in Alex, help my family, and advance the ambitions of my siblings, especially after all my parents had done for me. But given the state of our government, our security was not assured. I told my parents I could not build my future under the prevailing circumstances. They gave me their blessing and I left South Africa.”

He set off from Durban in a cargo ship in 1960, and first did his residency training in the Bronx Lebanon and Mt Sinai hospitals. In 1965 he joined the staff of the Harlem Hospital Center for Obstetrics and Gynaeology at Columbia University. In 1970 he was appointed associate professor and ultimately Clinical Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology and Director of Ob/Gyn.

Along with his colleagues, he also started family planning clinics and a Pap smear and colposcopy clinic that has helped reduce death rates from cervical cancer in Central Harlem.

Stephen married a social worker, Carol (who died in 2006), and they had three daughters; two are doctors and one is a speech therapist. “Children are like the stars; you don’t see them every day but you know they are there,” he says.

Today, he is an emeritus professor at Columbia and a member of the New York Gynecologic Society and the New York Obstetrical Society.

His home is a high-rise building on Riverside Drive, overlooking Riverside Park and the Hudson River in New York City. He loves the city but notes with concern the large number of homeless people and increasing poverty and drug addiction in the US. Another disturbing trend is the “rekindling of nationalism and tribalism” in a number of countries. “Democracies have been at the forefront of the humanities, science, mathematics, engineering and technological advances and have brought levels of prosperity, security and health to some but not to the majority of people,” says Stephen. “We need to work harder on the distribution of the benefits of democracy to all. What matters most to me are the successes and struggles of ordinary young folks finding their way in this world.”

Looking back on his life, Stephen says: “I thank my parents for being my guiding star and giving me moral, social and financial support. I thank Wits University for giving me wings to soar and to make my dream come true. It has been an exhilarating journey.”