Harriet Ngubane

Ngubane was born on 11 November 1929[1] in rural Inchanga near Pietermaritzburg in the former Natal Province.[2] She was the third eldest of six siblings, among them former cabinet minister Ben Ngubane.[2][3] She was raised on a Roman Catholic mission but in a Zulu family.[2][4]

After matriculating at St Francis College in Mariannhill, she earned a bachelor's degree and then a master's degree in anthropology at the University of Natal,[2] where she was mentored by Eileen Krige.[4] She taught part-time at her former high school while studying at the university's Durban campus.[2] She later studied social anthropology on a scholarship at Cambridge University, where she completed her PhD in 1972.[2][4]

After completing her PhD, Ngubane returned to the University of Natal, where she worked as a research fellow at the Institute for Social Research. However, her professional prospects in South Africa were hindered by apartheid laws, and Ngubane spent a year in Birmingham, England as William Paton lecturer at Selly Oak.[4] She received the Ioma Evans-Pritchard Fellowship in 1974 and spent another year at St Anne's College, Oxford, where she revised her PhD thesis for publication.[4] Thereafter she was a lecturer at the University of Edinburgh in 1975 and a Ford Foundation research fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies of 1976.[5]

Ngubane's doctoral thesis was published as Body and Mind in Zulu Medicine (1977), an influential ethnographic study of conceptions of health and illness among the Nyuswa-Zulu.[2] The book argued that Zulu conceptions of bodily health were closely related to notions of spiritual health and social wellbeing.[4] Another central interest of Ngubane's research was social change, including as a result of colonialism and apartheid, and its effects on Zulu belief systems and cultural practices.[4]

From 1978 to 1984, Ngubane worked for the United Kingdom Ministry of Overseas Development in Swaziland,[4] and in 1985 she was an adviser to the United Nations's International Labour Office on policy regarding women's issues in Lesotho.[5] In 1988, she returned to South Africa to become a professor of social anthropology at the University of Cape Town.[5][3] Upon her return to South Africa, which coincided with the beginning of the country's democratic transition, she became involved in land reform activism and policy,[3] including as a member of the Advisory Commission on Land Allocation, to which she was appointed by President F. W. de Klerk in 1991.[5]

In South Africa's first post-apartheid elections in 1994, Ngubane was elected to represent the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) in the National Assembly.[2][6] She served two terms, gaining re-election in 1999.[1] In later years, she was involved in the design of Freedom Park[2][7] and continued her academic research, which became increasingly political in the late 1990s.[4]

Ngubane was married to Jethro Sibisi. They had seven children together, one of whom is Sibusiso Sibisi, a former chief executive officer of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research.[2] Ngubane published under her married name, Harriet Sibisi, for the early years of her marriage, but later went by her maiden name in a conscious identification with Zulu custom.[4][8]

She died in October 2007 after a lengthy illness.[2]

• 1992 interview with Padraig O'Malley