MMBONISENI ENOS NETHENGWE, a masterful Science and Mathematics teacher ever to have emerged from Thengwe village in Limpopo, finally bowed out from this physical world on November 1. This adherent of the Black Consciousness philosophy waged a fierce and protracted battle against a congenital diabetic condition that resulted in a stroke that paralysed him.
The sheer length and considerable period he battled the condition has left even the most loquacious amongst us utterly speechless. Even in his final days, spent at a Tshwane hospital, when he had lost his speech, he refused to be silenced and carried a board and pen with which he wrote to communicate.
It was as if he was taking his cue from Jamaican-born poet Claude McKay, who, in one of his classic verses of 1919, “If We Must Die,” writes:
“If We Must Die,
Let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned (down) in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursed lot.
If we must die, O let us nobly die
So that our precious blood may not be shed in vain;
Then, even the monsters [Monstrous diseases that] we defy
Shall be constrained to honour us though dead!
[O kinsmen! We must meet the common foe!
Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one death blow!]
What though before us/me lies the open grave?
Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack [disease],
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!”
In the invocative spirit of McKay, Nethengwe fought and fought, continuing to fight until his physical being could no longer afford him an ounce of energy to fight any longer.
For many of us who have been blessed to experience the full spectrum of the rich tapestry of his multifaceted character, the never-say-die spirit that McKay invokes was mirrored in the honorable and dignified manner in which our quintessential friend, Comrade Enos Mmboniseni Nethengwe, conducted himself throughout his life, in his illustrious career as an educator, and indeed to his last day and last breath.
Gifted and deeply endowed with an admirable talent to effortlessly explain relatively complex scientific and mathematical concepts in simple, down-to-earth elementary terms, his death leaves both a painful yet proud mark within the Science-Technology-Engineering-Mathematics (STEM) teaching fraternity.
Early Life and Education
Hailing from the Royal family of Thengwe La Vhatavhatsindi, he excelled as an outstanding student at Robert Mmbulungeni Secondary School. Armed with a deep belief in his ability to tackle any academic or non-academic subject, he took a keen interest in general subjects at high school, only to swap them for the natural sciences at the University of Venda, where he first registered for a BSc (Bachelor of Science) degree in 1988.
Those with experience would readily admit that the very idea of a student walking onto the hallowed varsity grounds with no formal background in the hardcore natural sciences, deciding to pick Physics and Mathematics as his major subjects in his first year of BSc, is not just too steep a slope to climb, but one fraught with potential pitfalls.
Yet Nethengwe did exactly that and went on to sail smoothly through his undergraduate BSc degree. During our first year at varsity, Physics and Mathematics were reputed to be a dreaded combination that constituted a basket of subjects infamously dubbed the Big Four (viz. Physics, Chemistry, Mathematics, and Biology).
Nethengwe excelled in all four and went on to cap his degree with a University Education Diploma (UED), purely because his mind, body, and spirit were deeply imbued with an undying love for teaching.
Between his transition from high school to varsity, he taught at Luvhone Primary School and Robert Mmbulungeni Secondary School.
A Teacher’s Teacher
A true product of his village, after completing the varsity phase of his studies, he went straight back home to “pay his dues,” teaching Mathematics and Science at Thengwe Secondary School.
He not only taught science learners and students but also went on to teach the teachers themselves, which earned him, from amongst his close friends, the nickname the “Teacher’s Teacher.”
Single-handedly, Nethengwe dedicated all his time to teaching Science and Mathematics students at Thengwe and at Duthuni, where he also worked, including on weekends, without so much as a sponsor behind him to finance his efforts and without charging students.
While weekend classes are today a norm for Grades 11 and 12 in many rural schools, where teachers make students pay extra for those classes, Nethengwe taught purely out of love for his community. He was not driven by a profit motive but solely by a passion to see his community and society grow and meet the challenges of modern times.
This earned him love, admiration, and reverence from his learners. Upon learning of his passing, one of his former learners and now a respected Civil Engineering academic at the University of Cape Town, Gundo Maswime, recalls: “I am devastated to hear this. Before I started grade 12, I used to go to his house many times in November and December. He would spend half a day teaching me Matric mathematics and physics. This made a big difference in my studies and, inevitably, my life. I am glad that even though I last saw him in person over 10 years ago, when he was by then already emaciated by the battle against his ailment, I was able to thank him properly for the free Mathematics and Physics lessons he gave me.”
A contemporary of Nethengwe, Peter Mukwevho, himself a Science teacher, tells of how Nethengwe loved teaching Science and Mathematics so much that he would many times wake early from home and travel the 20-plus kilometres to the University of Venda in Thohoyandou. There, the two of them would prepare and prime learners to confidently execute their presentations for the nationwide Young Scientists Expo competitions.
Their learners excelled and scooped a number of Young Scientists Expo prizes at the national level, such as the ones they participated in at the University of Pretoria. But the deep love for Science and Mathematics and the sheer and admirable dedication to the teaching of the subjects present only a tiny glimpse of the multifaceted character of Nethengwe.
The Soccer Player
He was also a brilliant, skilful soccer player, falling only “this short” of performing literal magic on the soccer pitch. Any fielded squad of his soccer team, Thengwe Flying Peace (whoever comes up with these names for soccer teams? Mamotentane Hot Beans, Remember My Promise!!), would draw frowns from rivals and supporters alike if it excluded him. A “sleeky” midfielder in the field of play, his nickname “Chief” was more an appreciation of his soccer skill than a reflection of his royal bloodline.
Core Values and Character
Dedication, honesty, a hardworking ethic, insistence on the need for fairness and justice to be ranked superior to peace, persistence (of almost religious level) on the need to understand all natural concepts and societal phenomena by breaking them down to their elementary levels of origin—these were amongst the underlying attributes that defined our friend Nethengwe.
You could also add to that list doing one’s best to live in harmony with one’s natural surroundings and its inhabitants.
Political Activism and Black Consciousness
I first met him in 1988 at the University of Venda in our first-year BSc class. Almost spontaneously, we clicked on that first encounter when I discovered that Nethengwe was readily receptive to the Black Consciousness philosophy.
This is the thinking foregrounded by Steve Bantu Biko and his contemporaries in the late sixties as a necessary attitude of mind and a way of life that should be adopted by all self-respecting black people to reverse the psychological effects of white racism.
A brilliant thinker who doubled both in front of and behind the scenes as our political strategist, his inputs, advice, and interventions in our Azanian Students Movement (Azasm) and Azanian Students Convention (Azasco) Univen branch meetings always came across with an aura of respect and were rich in substance.
It was as if Nethengwe first carefully fished out all his thoughts from a deep fountain or well of wisdom and thoroughly tossed and reasoned them over in his brain before verbalising.
As a founding member of Azasm at Univen, he occupied several leadership positions in the branch, including the position of branch secretary, where he served for much longer than in other positions.
He was instrumental in strengthening the presence of BC at Univen and represented the Univen branch at the Medunsa congress of 1990, where Azasco was formally launched as a tertiary BC structure distinct from Azasm.
He possessed excellent secretarial skills, and the branch reports presented both at branch meetings and at national congresses were distinctly more organised when he served as branch secretary. Through his ideas and mobilisation, Azasco also managed to establish a prominent presence in the SRC at Univen.
Nethengwe believed in the totality of the power of ideas, backed up by tangible action, as the ultimate vehicle toward changing society for the better. For him, it was not so much how many halls you filled with heads but rather how many heads you filled with useful knowledge.
Endless pursuit of knowledge, and once acquired, the consistent teaching of it to pass it to the next generation, he believed, was the essential fuel rod of an element guaranteed to propel a people toward a free and egalitarian society advocated by Biko and his revolutionary comrades.
Living His Principles
Where Black Consciousness taught us the theory of Communalism as an economic system used by our ancestors throughout Africa, through which people shared what they had, Nethengwe lived it. His work with students exemplified his belief that what he had was theirs and what they had was his, too. It is the interdependence of people and the building block of a socialist society.
Nethengwe was a member of the Azanian People’s Organisation (Azapo) to the end. One of his last public activities, already very ill, was the almost 200-kilometre trip to Polokwane to protest in front of the Limpopo Premier’s office about the looting of the Venda Building Society (VBS) bank.
A Lasting Legacy
Many like myself shall remain deeply grateful and forever thankful to have brushed shoulders with one of the finest and most magnificent human beings ever to have walked the face of the Earth.
Out there, those of you who, like us, knew and interacted with him at close range, may you take a moment, pause, and spare a thought in remembrance of our dear friend Mmboniseni Enos Nethengwe wa Mutavhatsindi, a Black South African citizen from Limpopo, Venda, in Thengwe.
He was a man of honour and a true South African citizen who consistently preferred the name Azania for his country of birth. A scientist and science teacher’s teacher, a master educator and a wizard of a soccer player.
The proud legacy he leaves us deserves to be honoured by his comrades who toiled with him in the political trenches, by the teaching fraternity within the STEM subject streams in which he gave so much, and to be celebrated by those he dazzled on the soccer pitch.
Go in peace, Enos, a dear friend of 37 years. You have taught us much more than one can put with pen and paper. The fierce and unrelenting fighting spirit that you displayed as you battled that diabetes-induced ailment has not only left us dumbstruck but has posed to many of us deep challenges that radiate far beyond the reach of the palms of our hands.
You were one heck of a soldier, and in honour of your unrelenting fighting spirit, we bid you heartfelt farewell in the paraphrased verse of McKay:
You did not die like a whimpering weakling in the face of the disease; you went as you lived, a man of honour, pressed to the wall by ailments, dying, but firing and fighting back.
Tuwai Nga Mulalo Mutavhatsindi wa Thengwe.
- Enos Mmboniseni Nethengwe was born in Thengwe, Venda/Limpopo/South Africa on 30 July 1967. He died in Pretoria on 1 November 2025. He will be memorialised at a special service on Friday, 07 November 2025, at 14:00 at his home village of Thengwe. His remains will be interred to Mother Earth at his home village, Thengwe, on Saturday, 08 November 2025.
- Dr Rudzani Nemutudi holds a PhD in Semiconductor Physics from the University of Cambridge (UK). He is the Deputy Director at the National Research Foundation (NRF) iThemba Laboratories in Cape Town and is the Associate Secretary General of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP).
