WAUKESHA – More than an observer, Rejoice Sithole has been participant and teacher in and researcher and historian of the social systems of her South African homeland. At age 66, she will retire from teaching sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Waukesha at the end of June and return in July to where she started.
Born in Blaauwbosch, a small township not far from Newcastle, Sithole earned a teacher’s diploma from Umpumulo Teachers College in Mapumulo, South Africa, in 1954 and spent the next 15 years as an elementary school teacher and principal. Believing she had a calling in social work, she returned to school, completing a bachelor’s degree at the University of Zululand in 1974. After another year as a teacher at a high school in Durban, South Africa, and two years doing social and community work, she came to the U.S. for further studies. She earned a Master of Social Work degree from Washington University, St. Louis, MO, in 1979 and accepted part-time teaching positions successively at St. Louis Community College and Washington University. For the next 5 years, she held a full-time teaching position at St. Olaf College, Northfield, MN, all the while working on her doctorate. In 1990 she finished her Ph.D. in sociology in May and started teaching at UW-Waukesha in September.
After 11 years and many sections of American Minorities Groups: Race and Ethnic Relations, Marriage and Family, and Introduction to Social Psychology courses here, she will return to South Africa “to take it easy for a year or two and help care for my new grandson,” born to her daughter in March, she says. She will live with her sister in their ancestral home, which means relinquishing some of the conveniences she’s become accustomed to, like clothes washers and driers and continuous electricity. “Here I can do laundry any time without observing rain,” she comments on American life, “and it is a relatively safe environment.”
Back in her native land, she will continue the research she started on a sabbatical leave in 1998-99, documenting the social history of the community in which she grew up, and still wants to write a book about it. In addition, she has been very involved with her church and will remain active and also hopes to do some tutoring. Sithole will retain her membership in the American Sociological Association and wants to come back for some of the conferences – but to the Midwest only in the seasons when she would anticipate there not to be snow.
Besides the fond memories she carries from working with students and witnessing the impact she has made on them in teaching and relating her own experience, she takes particular joy in remembering going to Chicago in 1994 to vote for the first time. The fall of apartheid in South Africa and the calling of free, democratic elections made for an “exciting and emotional time.” She did not expect that in her lifetime, nor did the others who were voting at the same site. “It was like a party,” she describes.
Sithole, who has lived in Waukesha for the past 11 years, will teach American Minority Groups one last time this summer and then will move back to Blaauwbosch, near Newcastle, Natal, South Africa. |
