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Harriet Ngubane

Harriet Ngubane (11 November 1929 – October 2007), formerly known as Harriet Sibisi, was a South African social anthropologist best known for her work on Zulu belief systems. Though educated in England, Ngubane spent the latter years of her career as a professor at the University of Cape Town. She represented the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) in the National Assembly from 1994 to 2004.

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