A Teacher Who Never Stopped Being a Student

Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka has held some of the most powerful positions a person can occupy – Deputy President of South Africa, Executive Director of UN Women, United Nations Under-Secretary-General – yet at heart, she has remained a teacher throughout her life. What drives her is not the office but the problem and the people behind it: the child who can’t read, the graduate who can’t find work, the young woman told to step aside. She has been orbiting these questions for fifty years, from the South African township where her mother taught adults to write, to the corridors of the United Nations. “Already at primary school,” she says, “I had made up my mind that I want to be a professor.” 

During her Richard von Weizsäcker Fellowship, she is bringing that lifelong preoccupation to Germany: studying how the country’s education and training system prepares young people for work, with a view to taking what she learns back to South Africa and to a continent whose median age is nineteen.

The kitchen classroom: where it all began

Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka was born in 1955 in Clermont, just outside Durban, in a household where education was not just an aspiration but an atmosphere. Her father, a teacher, came home with exercise books to mark. Her mother, a community health nurse by day, ran literacy classes in the family kitchen in the evening. Phumzile was her unofficial assistant from the age of eleven.

“I felt like I was a little adult for those moments,” she recalls. What moved her most was the transformation she witnessed among the grown-up students: “The greatest joy was when they had learned to write and to count. Then they could manage their own money. The seed was planted there.” 

The triple oppression: grasping the issue of race, gender, and class

The adults sitting in her mother's makeshift classroom had not simply failed to learn. Apartheid, the great injustice of their time, had made sure they never could. Poverty and the discrimination of women made it worse. Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka calls it the “triple oppression.”

Following the Soweto uprising of 1976, she was banned from studying in South Africa and crossed the border for a degree in Arts and Education at the National University of Lesotho, as much an activist as a student. Her fiancé Bulelani Ngcuka was in prison for refusing to testify against members of the African National Congress (ANC). As a young teacher back in South Africa, the security apparatus monitored her, too. The couple eventually married in August 1985, twelve days after Bulelani was released.

Exhausting to be Black: apartheid and the making of a political self

Her escape came through a YWCA youth conference in Singapore, where she pushed for an anti-apartheid resolution. Her visibility earned her an international post in Geneva. She spent five years working on youth programs across Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, simultaneously campaigning to isolate South Africa internationally. 
“I always say to people, it’s exhausting to be Black,” Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka recalls the need to always be on watch and the urge to always actively resist apartheid. “Wherever you were, you felt like you’re an ambassador of the fight against apartheid. That consumed you. This is just who I was.”

From resistance to responsibility: liberating the oppressor

In 1994, Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka entered South Africa’s first democratic parliament and quickly held government roles: Deputy Minister of Trade and Industry, Minister of Minerals and Energy, then Deputy President from 2005, the first woman to hold the position. The move from resistance to responsibility – “to bring down the temperature” – took some learning: “You're trying to create a country where people had to learn to live and work with the people that they used to regard as enemies.” 

“Thank God for Mandela,” she says. He was a good example in leading others to push back feelings of revenge and retaliation: “Your biggest victory as a freedom fighter is when you liberate your oppressor. And you cannot liberate your oppressor by having sustained unending anger against them.” 

As Minister for Trade and Industry, she promoted skills development for the young. She later built on this with her flagship program, the “Joint Initiative on Priority Skills Acquisition” (JIPSA), which she launched as Vice-President to better prepare young people for the labor market.  As Minister of Minerals and Energy, she pushed the electrification of communities and opened the mining industry to Black South Africans who had been systematically excluded from their own country’s resources. She describes it as probably her period of greatest impact: “We created stepping stones for people. I really was very proud of that.” 

She resigned as Deputy President in 2008, shortly after President Mbeki was recalled by the ANC. “I was exhausted,” she says – and she had wanted, for a long time, to go back to her first love: Education. 

The gap that won’t close: education and gender inequality 

She founded the Umlambo Foundation, which focuses on improving education in under-resourced schools. And she went for another degree on the same topic, with a doctorate at the University of Warwick, UK. Her research question: How can mobile learning support teacher development in under-resourced schools? The subject was entirely in character: technology in the service of teachers, and teachers in the service of the poor. 

From 2013 to 2021, she led UN Women. Among the initiatives she launched was “HeForShe,” which invites men to stand up for women’s rights. She also discovered that the UN was not exempt from the inequalities it aimed to dismantle. "It was not enjoyable,” she says drily. “Gender inequality is so deep, and it's everywhere."

Youth empowerment: Educating job creators, not job seekers

As a Richard von Weizsäcker Fellow, Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka is returning to the question she has circled her entire life: How to make education accessible for all and equip the young for the labor market that awaits them. By 2050, one in four people in the global labor force will be African. Many will arrive unprepared to participate in it.

During her years leading South Africa's JIPSA initiative, Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka had built internship pipelines and sent young graduates abroad to work. Some came to Germany. She still occasionally meets them: "Someone comes to me and says: I went on the program and now I am whatever, whatever. It just warms my heart." 

But it has not been enough. Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka still sees the same structural disconnect – between what is taught and what is needed – that frustrated her twenty years ago. Germany's vocational training system is one of the things she has come to study, to understand what may be transferable and what not.

She is clear about what education for work should mean in a world that is facing profound transformation: "Education must be about problem solving. You are getting educated because you are living in a world that has got problems. Once you have got some education, your responsibility is to be a job creator, not a job seeker." She also is direct about what older generations owe younger ones: not to be carried, but to be listened to. 

Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka was eleven years old when she first witnessed the power of education in her mother’s kitchen in Clermont. She has been acting on that conviction ever since.