Dr Naledi Pandor reflects on a life of service

Dr Naledi Pandor at the University of the Western Cape's honorary doctorate ceremony at the Old Mutual Conference Centre in Kirstenbosch on Friday.

In the 1940s, a youngster sat in a mathematics class taught by Oliver Tambo, then a young teacher not much older than his pupils.

It was decades before Tambo would leave apartheid South Africa and lead the ANC from exile after the organisation was banned in 1960.

Sitting in his classroom was Joe Matthews, then a student who would go on to become a lawyer and a senior figure in the same movement.

And so much did Tambo impress his pupil that Matthews would tell his children for years afterwards that he had been the best mathematics teacher he ever had.

"My dad was a lawyer, but he talked about education a lot as he had been impacted by the great mathematics teaching of a young teacher at his school, OR Tambo," said Naledi Pandor , one of Matthews's children, who would grow up to become one of the most senior women in SA government, serving in five different Cabinet portfolios before becoming the minister who took Pretoria's case against Israel to the International Court of Justice.

When she came home and said she wanted to study English and history, her two favourite subjects, her parents encouraged her to pursue her interests.

They did, however, insist she add a teaching qualification to her degree.

Pandor, now 72, took the advice, and it set the course of the next 14 years of her life.

She taught at a comprehensive school in London, in classrooms in Gaborone and at a teacher training college in Taung before joining the University of Cape Town in 1989.

There, she lectured black students who had come through an apartheid schooling system deliberately funded at a fraction of the amount spent on white children.

That teaching career, and the family that steered her into it, is what the University of the Western Cape was recognising on Friday night when it made her an honorary doctor at the Old Mutual Conference Centre in Kirstenbosch.

She was one of seven honoured, alongside former Irish president Mary Robinson, Advocate Adila Hassim SC, UN investigator Francesca Albanese and Professor Emeritus Loyiso Nongxa, along with two women who did not live to see it, Charlotte Maxeke and Mandisa Monakali.

She received her first from the Cape Peninsula University of Technology, followed by honours from Stellenbosch University in 2013, the University of Lisbon in 2017 and University College Dublin.