And last week, the Rhodes Fund announced that Shazrene’s sister, Naseemah, had won a 2013 Rhodes Scholarship — the only “sister act” in the 109-year history of what may be the most renowned international graduate scholarship programme in the world.
Naseemah, who at 23 is eight years younger than Shazrene, said she felt “humbled and grateful” as a Rhodes recipient, and thankful to big sister (now an astrophysicist at the South African Astronomical Observatory in Cape Town, South Africa), with whom competition was apparently never an issue in childhood. “We were never rivals growing up, since we went to different primary schools,” said Naseemah.
“Growing up, my sister was actually my role model. She knew she wanted to be an astronaut at the age of 12, and I distinctly remember her teaching me about the solar system when I was about 5 or 6. Shaz never, ever told me that I was too young to understand anything. She always explained everything to me (that was when I was willing to listen!).”
Born and raised in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, Naseemah left the country in 2004 to attend school in Ireland. For a 15-year-old girl the experience was a major transition. “I had a huge sense of culture shock, especially since I was one of two African students in a wealthy preparatory boarding school,” she said. “The way that I coped was by getting involved in almost every extracurricular activity offered by the school, so by the end of the day, I was too tired to feel homesick.”
She then attended Harvard, graduating this year cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Social Studies and African Studies. Naseemah now works for the Centre for African Cultural Excellence, an organization she co-founded earlier this year. Her senior thesis was an arts literacy project that “focuses on training teachers to use the arts as a teaching tool in order to break the colonial legacy of rote learning and corporal punishment that is still pervasive in the Zimbabwean educational system.”
Post published in: News