Sunday Times (Johannesburg) - July 3, 2005
Rowan Philp

OLIVE Shisana was raising her own school fees by ploughing a mealie field near Polokwane when a passenger jet flew overhead.

About 12 years old, the girl pointed to it and told her brother: "One good day, I will board a plane like that and fly everywhere, and learn about everything."

And then, she told her brother Chris Sono, she would seek to answer the biggest questions in her troubled country.

Last week, she got a job that gave her the opportunity to do exactly that.

Shisana was appointed as the first black - and first female - chief executive of the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC), where she has built a comprehensive HIV/Aids programme over the past four years.

Her ambition has grown: Shisana wants to turn the HSRC into an organisation that invites others throughout Africa to ask and answer the key questions for the entire continent.

To many top researchers at the HSRC - including the outgoing chief executive, Dr Mark Orkin - Shisana's appointment was hardly a surprise.

A social scientist and expert on the impact of HIV/Aids, Shisana returned from exile in the US in 1991 to take a series of jobs that would help transform South Africa's health system.

Starting by establishing a university public health programme with the man who has just appointed her, the HSRC chairman, Professor Jakes Gerwel, Shisana tied together health infrastructure in the then new nine provinces in 1994, and then became director-general of health.

And having helped put HIV/Aids on the national policy agenda, she was then credited with getting the issue on the main agenda at the UN, while working as director of community health at the World Health Organisation.

But Shisana has also trodden on some big toes - toes on feet that she'll now have to dance with.

In 1996, former Health Minister Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma assigned the blame for the funding scandal surrounding the Sarafina II Aids play to Shisana.

But she refused to accept blame and - in a series of typically forthright statements - effectively bounced it back, leaving Dlamini-Zuma to carry the can.

The straight-talking gene seems to run in her family. Last month, her brother, Professor Themba Sono, was first on the witness stand at the Schabir Shaik corruption trial, and testified about how Shaik boasted of his contacts with Jacob Zuma.

Shisana doesn't seem to have the time to deal with questions whose answers will make no difference to the lives of Africans. By "key" questions, she doesn't mean academic inquiry that gets a good showing in the journals, but rather the stuff that makes policy happen.

Last month, Shisana watched with a social scientist's eye as thousands of squatters in four provinces rioted and clashed with police over a lack of sanitation and other services.

Already she says: "I'd like to see research projects in places like Khayelitsha and Crossroads, to ask what led people to riot; why didn't they get these services; to look at the local government hotspots."

A study of local government systems in Africa is also near the top of her wish list (she's keen to compare them with community structures within Switzerland's cantons), and so is internal migration and, of course, HIV/Aids.

Although the HSRC head office is based in Pretoria, Shisana will run it by video conference and other hi-tech links from the branch office she has built up in Cape Town over the past four years.

A mother of two, she lives there with her husband, industrial psychologist William Shisana and, jokes Orkin, no-one was about to ask her to give up her beloved walks on Bloubergstrand.

The past five years have seen a revolution at the HSRC - or perhaps it's a rescue.

Once an agency often serving to underpin the National Party government's apartheid theories, it was surely the weakest of the country's eight science councils in 1999.

The Medical Research Council was quickly transforming, the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research was globally competitive, and the National Research Foundation was guiding world-class projects in fields from astronomy to laser development.

Orkin paraphrased one review panel's description of the HSRC at the time as "bureaucratic, inward-looking... and producing work of dubious quality".

Although its parliamentary grant has grown steadily from R65-million to around R90-million since 1999, he said the organisation's earnings had grown from R5-million to a staggering R140-million.

Its research programmes have increased from three to 10, and now answer questions ranging from the sustainability of the "second economy" boom to the extent of fathers' emotional involvement in an increasingly non-nuclear-family society.

Meanwhile, its complement of full-time research staff has ballooned from 50 to 150, and each researcher, Orkin claims, has increased research output by an average of more than 300%. If these figures are accurate, then the HSRC is worthy of a major research study by the HSRC.

Orkin said the Social Aspects of HIV/Aids programme - which Shisana has headed for the past four years - had seen by far the biggest growth, and now commanded double the revenues of the next biggest programme.

While most other researchers were asking "What does HIV/Aids do to me?", Shisana, as executive director, decided she would ask, "What is HIV/ Aids doing to us?"

Orkin said that, having secured funding from Switzerland and the Nelson Mandela Foundation, Shisana had produced "the first definitive study on the national impacts of HIV/Aids".

"Olive started with no office in Cape Town at all, so she built up both the programme and the HSRC's whole office down there - that shows you the incredible energy she has," said Orkin.

"I am notorious for sending people SMSs and e-mails after midnight: from Olive, I'll always get a live reply."

Now, Shisana wants the agency to grow even further.

"I think the HSRC is poised to grow further, and outward into Africa - linking up with research organisations to co-operate on the important questions; to research together, and seek funding jointly," she said.

"Growth should focus much more on the humanities: the importance of history, language and culture in gaining new insights about being South African, and African. We must know these things to know how we as a people have coped with the enormous changes in our country."

This year, 42 years after she saw the airliner with her brother, Shisana was working in the same field again.

This time, she was planting sunflowers.

Shisana and the Sono family had just won a land claim for their 23ha plot in Roodewal, north of Polokwane, having been forcibly removed in 1968.

Shisana also built an iron-roofed shack on the plot and, with her six surviving siblings, is awaiting a title deed in December, in a claim made not by the community, but the family itself.

Her father, a schoolteacher, farmed peanuts, maize and beans there.

But this is no nostalgia trip.

"This lovely rural life was suddenly rudely interrupted when the then government decided that the rich fertile ground was not for us, and sent big trucks to move us. We are land claimants," she says simply.

The shack has been erected partly to prevent a land invasion, and the land has been claimed by the family as a future source of income, and because it is theirs.

Chris Sono says: "My mother used to visit a white family in the suburbs [of former Pietersburg], and their white children would be splashing in the pool.

"Olive just took off her clothes and dived straight in; with no invitation or anything - and this in a time when black people, you know, couldn't even think of doing such things.

"But my sister doesn't worry what people think: in this job too, she'll dive in there, whether it's a popular thing to do or not, and she'll be brilliant."

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