Women of colour often lead from the front when holding together these broken bits of our society.

Dr Darlene Ajeet Miller is a senior lecturer at the Wits School of Governance, where she is committed not only her students but to transformation and the decolonisation of the academic project in South Africa.

Radical black brilliance often has few allies, says Miller, but it is the body of the empathetic black woman academics that provides succour and protection against an academy that is often hostile to radical black brilliance. “Women of colour often lead from the front when holding together these broken bits of our society — whether it is the precarious student, the rebelling teen or the drug addict child. As universities democratise, these social ills penetrate the halls and walls of the space of learning, and our male leadership is often overwhelmed as these social ills knock on each door of the university,” she said.

Through her work at Wits, she takes a holistic approach to teaching, where she is challenged to find a balance between idealism and the sheer volume of academic tasks. She tries to make the lecture room less foreign by inviting vernacular into the classroom, indigenous examples, endogenous (local) approaches and solutions as well as instilling a high standard of scholarship. “Where my workload has not been too onerous, as it often is for black brilliance, I have shared yoga classes before lectures and during evenings and started a food garden at our school to remind us, as the dispossessed, that we have to reconnect with the Earth in order to regain self-governance through our bodies.”

Miller says that it is the love that permeates her work and that contributes to the task of re-enchantment of our society, in which her students carry the same love into their work and into society. “The octopus has three hearts that pump luhlaza (blue-green) blood: I hope that, octopus-like, I am one of those women leaders that holds bits of our broken society together, and helps to craft a mosaic of brilliant African agents of planetary transformation,” she said.

— Rumana Akoob