STUDENT CLOSE-UP

Motivation

By Dale Smith

How does a boy from a poor family farm in rural South Africa wind up 9,000 miles from home studying for a doctorate in astrophysics at MU?

The short answer: mostly on foot. In 1976, outside the small town of St. Faiths, Basil Menzi Mchunu was born into the culture of apartheid and the life of subsistence farming in a barter economy. His grandfather, a traditional healer, encouraged him to make medical school his goal. So, beginning at age 7, Mchunu hiked barefoot the five-mile round trip to elementary school. He made the trip faithfully, come what may, over dirt roads and bridgeless waterways. During the rainy season when the creeks rose, he stopped on the near bank, stripped, swaddled his books in his clothes, wrapped this package around the top of his head and paddled across the water floating on any handy log. If he arrived at school late, the teacher at his one-room school routinely whipped him.

Thursdays were especially tricky. That was the day that he, as head boy of the farm, was responsible for driving the family’s cattle to a place where he waited in line to dip the herd in a pool of water treated to kill ticks. He could count on arriving quite late to school on Thursdays and on receiving a correspondingly severe whipping. Many of Mchunu’s friends so feared the beatings that they left home each morning as if going to school but rarely attended classes.

After eight years in this school, Mchunu headed to high school, which was a 10-mile round trip from his home. He awoke at 4:30 a.m. each day to walk to school, which not only lacked a library and science laboratories but also was chronically short of textbooks. His first science course started in 11th grade, but the texts didn’t arrive until the following year, just five months before graduation.

At the beginning of his senior year, Mchunu and a friend moved as squatters into an abandoned house 10 minutes from school. His friend, Henry Ngcobo, took Mchunu on weekend bus trips to nearby Durban and Port Shepstone to earn money doing odd jobs for white families. It was the first time in his life that Mchunu had cash of his own. During that year he saved 1,000 rands, or about $400.

In 1994, Mchunu enrolled at the University of Zululand in KwaZulu-Natal, his home province. The university accepted Mchunu’s money as half of his first semester’s tuition, and he began classes flat broke and with little prospect of earning the other half by midterm. Another student told him that, even though he was out of money, the university would not drop him as long as he earned good grades. He did. By his sophomore year, he was on scholarship. In his four years at the historically black University of Zululand, Mchunu took instruction from a total of two professors and their two assistants. But he remembers those years as his happiest because, with a library on hand, he suddenly found himself with a wealth of books.

In 1999, by mere coincidence, Mchunu and MU engineering professor Aaron Krawitz sat at the same luncheon table at a scientific conference in Port Elizabeth, South Africa. Krawitz, who was there as part of the University of Missouri South African Partnerships Program, remembers thinking that Mchunu was earnest, articulate and bright — an impressive person all the way around. He gave Mchunu his card and offered to keep in touch. They didn’t. But about four years later, Krawitz sent an e-mail to find out what Mchunu was doing. Mchunu had been the first recipient of the Southern African Large Telescope fellowship and was finishing a master’s degree in physics at Rutgers University in New Jersey. He told Krawitz he was thinking of applying to MU’s doctoral program in physics.

Basil Menzi Mchunu, son of poor farmers, arrived in Columbia in August of 2004 to begin studying for a doctorate in astrophysics. He funds his studies partly with a teaching assistantship in the Department of Physics and Astronomy.

When he finishes, he plans to move back home and bring astronomy to the children of his country, many of whom desperately need a better educational system. He’ll be one of just a handful of black South Africans with doctoral credentials in physics and astronomy. Until then, he’ll continue returning home to his family farm once a year or so. But going home, he says, is emotionally difficult. His family is still very poor, and the farm’s soils are worn out, so there is little hope for a better life.

Still, Mchunu tells his story without a trace of bitterness. Bad situations, he says, motivate him the most.

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Last Update: November 15, 2007