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| A
well-chosen name equips PA's (MS)2 director for a long and successful
battle against injustice, first in apartheid-plagued South Africa
and now in the classroom. |
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Not
many adults remember their very last biology class, but Temba Maqubela’s
will live forever in his memory.
It took place in the town of Umtata, near Nelson Mandela’s
South African birthplace, in 1976. Despite a love for science, and
even despite a love for the science teacher—his mother—Maqubela
was having trouble concentrating on his lesson. With just a month
to go before his scheduled graduation, he knew his future was set.
An outstanding student with an interest in medicine, he had scholarships
lined up and would gain a university education like his accountant
father, his biochemist mom and his grandfather, a world-renowned
educator.
Also distracting Maqubela that October day was his work with the
South African underground to set the stage for an insurrection that
would bring down apartheid. As he tried to concentrate on the biology
lesson, his mind wandered to the cells that were forming, the action
that was already beginning. Mandela and the movement’s other
leaders were in jail. Soweto, in Johannesburg, had been burning
since June. Before that disturbance was over, more than 500 youth
would be killed for protesting the government-enforced segregation
system.
Maqubela’s mother knew nothing of his involvement with the
liberation movement until the door to her classroom flew open and
four burly white policemen burst in.
“We have come,” they said in English, “to take four
terrorists.”
“The word ‘terrorist’ sounded strange to me then,
and I still have very complex feelings when I hear it,” says
Maqubela, whose first name means “hope” in Xhosa, the
local language. He had never been in a physical confrontation and
did not know how to use a gun. His
anti-apartheid activities involved talking, planning, strategizing.
He and his friends debated politics, exchanged visions of a better
future and looked forward to a just society.
But in that fated biology class, there was no doubt who the accused
terrorists were. Before his stunned mother’s eyes, Maqubela
and three friends were dragged away.
At the police station, they were interrogated: What did they know
about scheduled resistance activities? Who were their contacts in
the movement? Who had guided their political thought and taught
them to set up cells? Why did they possess books by “Communist”
authors like Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X?
Being minors, they were released on their own recognizance and assigned
a time to report to the police station for further questioning.
They never kept that appointment. Realizing they could no longer
be effective in the movement and facing probable jail sentences
of 8-10 years, the four activists decided to flee the country rather
than risk long-term imprisonment or worse.
With no chance to make an appropriate farewell to his home and family,
to scholarship and medical school plans, to his pretty childhood
friend Vuyelwa and other realities that had comprised his life for
a dozen and a half years, Maqubela left with his three classmates
for Soweto. Then, disguised as miners traveling home on a Friday
after a long week’s work, they boarded a northbound train.
Near Botswana, they disembarked and headed for a hole in the border
fence. Once inside the country, they were—like thousands of
other escapees—granted asylum.
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Left
to right at left, Pumelele, Temba, Vuvu and Kanyi—Success, Hope,
Joy and Light—pose for a picture in 1992, five years after the
family’s safe arrival in Andover. |
IN BOTSWANA
High school graduation in the usual sense having evaded him, Maqubela
tried to continue his education by taking correspondence courses through
a London-based institution. Botswanan universities refused to enroll
the South African refugees, for fear of reprisals from neighboring
South Africa, but eventually Nigeria, far to the north, agreed to
educate the displaced youth of South Africa there. With an airline
ticket provided by the United Nations, Maqubela traveled to the University
of Ibadan, where he earned a B.S. degree in science with honors.
Maqubela could have stayed in Nigeria, which he describes as comparatively
peaceful and comfortable. Instead he returned to Botswana, teaching
near the South African border and continuing to work underground to
overthrow his homeland’s government.
He was in Botswana when an aunt told him some young women from South
Africa had been there looking for him. He went to find them, and discovered
one was Vuyelwa, whose name means “joy.” After a long-distance
romance, with many trips across the border and even a detention and
interrogation for Vuyelwa, they were married.
It was also in Botswana that Maqubela first heard the name of Phillips
Academy, when his student Juanita Smith ’88, daughter of the
U.S. ambassador Dane Smith ’58, asked him to write her a recommendation
for admission. He complied, and she was accepted. |
FATHERHOOD
AND FLIGHT
On May 24, 1985, Vuyelwa gave birth to a son, whom she and Temba named
Sikanyiselwe, or Kanyi, meaning “light at the end of the tunnel.”
Knowing the boy would be without citizenship if he were born in exile,
Vuyelwa, known as “Vuvu,” had returned to South Africa for
her confinement. Since Temba could not travel there without putting
his life in danger, it was nearly three weeks before he first set
eyes on his son.
On June 13, right after the mother and baby’s arrival in Botswana,
Maqubela went on a nocturnal errand to buy diapers. At the store,
he met a dear friend who had served as witness at his wedding. The
friend told him two things: first, his own wife was pregnant, and,
second, he had heard a rumor South African soldiers would soon come
to attack refugees in Botswana.
Maqubela congratulated him on the former news and disregarded the
latter as not credible. By the next morning, his friend, like dozens
of other emigrés within the anti-apartheid movement, was dead.
Maqubela believes he himself was spared because Kanyi’s birth
had prompted a move to larger quarters, so he could not be found at
his last-known address.
Confirming that his name had been on the list of planned victims,
and reading in the newspaper that the South Africans intended to return
and finish what they’d started, Maqubela struggled to protect
his family. Since the “antiterrorist” activity took place
at night, he and Vuvu each evening pretended to retire, but in reality
they often jumped over a wall behind their house, taking their newborn
under cloak of darkness to homes of expatriate friends from England
or Ireland. Since no one knew who was cooperating with the South African
forces, Maqubela says, neither white nor black Africans could safely
be trusted. Dane Smith and his wife, Judy, conspicuously dined at
the Maqubelas’ home, hoping to signal the South Africans that
these were important people whose slaughter would draw America’s
wrath. The ambassador also worked quietly to arrange for the family’s
emigration. Finally a U.S. humanitarian organization offered to sponsor
the Maqubelas, and in April 1986 they flew to New York to begin a
new life. |
AN
INAUSPICIOUS START
The Maqubelas’ first months in America were difficult. Along
with Russian Jews and Vietnamese immigrants, they were placed in a
Fifth Avenue homeless shelter teeming with filth and drug dealers.
The $200 check they’d brought could not be cashed until they
completed the complex process of obtaining identification papers,
and a $60 weekly allowance from their sponsors did not cover both
food and diapers, so the couple took their sustenance at a soup kitchen
and cooked only for the baby. The local schools refused to recognize
Temba’s Nigerian degree, making it impossible for him to find
a teaching job. Through a temporary agency, he got a few hours a day
of work at the American Museum of Natural History at $4 per hour.
Eventually, the family qualified for food stamps.
Poverty was an eye-opening experience for the Maqubelas, who had been
members of the affluent intelligentsia in South Africa. Temba recalls
how a cashier at a New York market chastised Vuvu for using food stamps
to buy fresh haddock. “Honey,” his wife reportedly told
the startled clerk, “the taste buds are the same, whether you
are using stamps or cash.”
In August of that year, a friend of one of the colleagues who had
hidden the Maqubelas in Botswana persuaded the Board of Education
to give Temba a shot at teaching. He was relieved, until he learned
his assignment would be not in chemistry, but in bookkeeping, physics
and computer literacy. Having never seen a computer, he struggled
to stay ahead of his students at Long Island City High School, poring
through books each night so he could teach the material the next day.
What happened next sounds like one of those “six degrees of separation”
stories. In New York, Maqubela met up with a couple with whom he had
taught in Botswana. They invited him and Vuvu to their wedding in
New Hampshire.
“We had believed all of America looked like New York or the movies,”
he says, “but when we got to New England, I thought, ‘Here
we are in the United States, and you can see the sky. You can see
green trees. I love this place!’”
While the bride offered to help Maqubela set up an interview at another
New England prep school, a wedding guest, PA English teacher Ed Germain,
offered to introduce him to the academy’s dean of faculty, Kelly
Wise. Maqubela was invited to Andover for an interview. Before he
had even parked the car at Andover, he spied Juanita Smith, who joyfully
welcomed him and Vuvu to what would become their new home. |
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Temba
Maqubela thrives on encouraging young people in the sciences.
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EMBRACING
SUCCESS
In 1987, Maqubela joined the PA faculty, and six months later the
couple’s second son was born in Cambridge, Mass. They named him
Pumelele, meaning “success.”
Over the past 15 years, Maqubela has taught in and, for half a decade,
chaired the chemistry department, taking a two-year break to complete
graduate work in chemistry at the University of Kentucky. Under South
Africa’s separatist policies he would have qualified only to
teach black students, but at Andover he quickly became an outspoken
advocate for increasing both the number of minority teachers and the
flow of students of color into the sciences. He joined the (MS)2 steering
committee shortly after his arrival and later worked a summer as the
program’s interim director. In 2001, he became director of (MS)2,
which he sees as both an essential component of PA’s credibility
in educating “youth from every quarter” and an essential
building block of his own job satisfaction.
“There is nothing wrong with teaching students who do not look
like you,” he says, “but there is a whole lot more satisfaction
in being able to see that people who do look like you can also do
good work.”
Today Maqubela works year-round for (MS)2—teaching, planning,
recruiting, promoting and administering—while also continuing
to teach two chemistry courses in the regular Phillips Academy program.
Vuvu teaches at the nearby Pike School and serves as a house counselor
in PA’s Stimson House East. Kanyi, now a senior at Andover, was
elected by his fellow students last spring as school president for
2002-03, and Pumelele is in the Class of 2006.
“I push science at (MS)2 and I push science with regular PA
students; I push science wherever I am,” says Maqubela. “Security
in other fields often results from having contacts, but in science
and technology it’s what you know, rather than whom you know,
that counts. In such an environment, no one can tell you you’re
inferior because you are black. I am convinced that science liberated
me.” |
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Design: Jamie Perez (MS)2 '01
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