After six years of self-imposed exile as a teacher in Swaziland who is also a correspondence student studying Hebrew returns to South Africa shortly after the June 16th Soweto youth uprising in 1976. She has returned to complete the research for her MA degree which involves a philological analysis of the original Hebrew version of the Song of Songs. Her return is marred by experiences of racism. Inspired by the words 'Black bird flying in the dead of night' in Paul McCartney's song she finds a clue to understanding the meaning of blackness in the Song of Songs and so begins her adventure into the translation and understanding of the Song of Songs in the time when the black consciousness struggle against white oppression began, and also in the time during which the mass Soweto student uprising shook South Africa to the core, paving the way for eventual collapse of apartheid. As a son of a miner, I was born in Johannesburg, South Africa. I grew up in the East Rand mining town of Boksburg. I matriculated from Boksburg High School. After high school, I was conscripted into the South African Defence Force for compulsory national military service when I was 17 years old. After my military service, I went to the University of the Witwatersrand. After graduating with a BSc honours degree I worked for a short period for the Department of Agriculture in Potchefstroom as an agronomist. As an obligatory member of the South African Citizen Miltary Force, I was called up to do 3-month camps on the 'Border' which was the theatre of the so-called counter-insurgency 'Bush War'. In between postgraduate university studies I also worked as a wage clerk on the South African Railways and as a travelling chemical sales rep. In my career as an academic, I was a molecular biologist at the University of the Witwatersrand, where I lectured courses in microbiology, molecular biology, biotechnology and evolutionary biology. On the research side, I was involved in genomics, and plant and microbial biotechnology. I also conducted research into the genomics of strange and weird animals known as entomopathogenic nematodes. I retired in 2019, however, I am currently an honorary professor at the University of the Witwaterand and I also work as a research writing consultant for the University of Johannesburg.
