Nomathamsanqa “Noma” Masiko-Mpaka is the embodiment of the impact of social injustice in South Africa. But this SU alumna is proud of her lived experience, as it drives her passion for her work at the Embassy of Ireland in Pretoria.
Noma has been their Gender, Human Rights, and Human Security Programme Manager for the past two and a half years, managing policy support, advocacy, strategy, and development.
She covers these three thematic areas for the embassy, with a strong focus on gender equality and gender-based violence (GBV), assisting the Embassy on how to “engage with South Africa and civil society around GBV and gender equality – broadly around human rights and peace and security matters in the Southern Africa region”.
Noma says a new trend she is observing through her work, is the severity of the GBV crisis in the country being acknowledged by South African authorities and society. “For a long time, we’ve been trying to convince the government that this is a crisis, and it was almost falling on deaf ears. I think the #TotalShutdown movement and years of work previously, helped us get here.
“Another development I’m starting to recognise, is the importance of the private sector in fighting GBV – it is no longer seen as a ‘government problem’. It is a societal problem.”
She lauds the gains of human rights and democracy. “If we’re talking about human rights, we need to discuss the ways in which certain human rights violations would affect women. Ours is a very patriarchal, very anti-women democratic system. We’re often very gender blind, but I think we need to have that gender lens on everything we do.
“I’m a black woman from the Eastern Cape, raised by working class people. My grandmother was a domestic worker. Social justice issues are in my DNA. That’s what makes the work exciting for me – when you’re talking about gender equality, human rights, human security, to me these issues are not theoretical. They are my lived experience.”
She says she was “pleasantly surprised” during her MA in International Studies at SU in 2013. “It was an incredibly amazing programme. The class was very diverse with people from all over the continent, and the world, I got a chance to go on an exchange programme to Oslo, Norway, and that also contributed to inform my thinking around peace and conflict dynamics.”
Her mother died while she was writing her thesis, but she had good support from her SU lecturers and supervisor. “My work at SU allowed me to also get my MSc in Security, Leadership and Society from King’s College in London, and progress to other areas of work.”
Next up is her PhD – she plans to contribute knowledge to the GBV field. “A lot is written about GBV academically. I would love to be a contributor of knowledge as a black woman in the Southern African region, and to see GBV ended in my lifetime and gender equality becoming a reality.”
- Are you an extraordinary alumna working towards gender equality? Share your story with us, to be featured in our next publication. Please direct your email to Sindiswa Jamba at swan@sun.ac.za, telling us (in 100 words or less) who you are and how your journey can add value to this effort.
