How Africa News
When Dr Evelyn Moshokoa became pregnant in 1989, she thought all her dreams were shattered.
She was 17 years old at the time and her school forced her to pack her effects and head back home to her parents in Kgapane township in South Africa’s Limpopo province.
She could no longer sit for her final matric exam, the final high school test in South Africa’s education system, in that year.
At that time, no one, least of all Moshokoa, would have thought that she would bounce back to become South Africa’s first black female urologist.
In a country that has just 250 urologists, with much fewer being black, this is no mean achievement.
Now aged 44, she looks back and says her baby motivated her to work even harder than she otherwise would have.
In an interview with a local media outlet, she said: “I went back the following year and I wrote my matric and did wonders, I was [among the] top six best performing students in 1990.”
She added: “Having a child was not part of my plan to escape the poverty; it was a very depressing time in my life. When I was home with my daughter, she was my alarm. I would be breastfeeding and studying at the same time.”
She graduated with a degree in Medicine in 1998 and decided to specialize in urology at a conference she attended in Washington in 2000.
She has risen in profile to become Head of Urology Department at the University of Pretoria, where she has inspired several more black women to take up urology.
Watch Dr Moshokoa participating in a discussion about infertility in South Africa below.
