As part of observing Women’s Month, the University of Pretoria (UP) is profiling women within different UP spaces.

Dr Lerato Mokoena, Lecturer in the Department of Old Testament and Hebrew Scriptures at UP’s Faculty of Theology and Religion, embodies the Bible’s Matthew 5:13, which reads, “You are the salt of the Earth”.

Dr Mokoena thinks her decision to study theology was divine intervention. “I initially wanted to study medicine,” she says. “I applied at the then MEDUNSA but got accepted for a programme I didn’t want. I went to study graphic design but dropped out halfway through. I’m a theoretician, and I needed a space that encourages theory building to thrive. I then somehow took my chance with theology. I still maintain that it was a calling. I have no other way to explain it, because I could have been anything in the world.”

She started her theological studies at the African Institute of Missiology in conjunction with the University of Pretoria in 2012. “I have never looked back since. I completed my doctoral studies in 2019; I was 27 when I obtained my PhD, in Old Testament Studies. I worked for various institutions before coming back to work for my alma mater in 2021. It has been a marvellous journey, filled with grace and divine blessings.”

Dr Mokoena’s career has grown in leaps and bounds since then. Some of her most notable career highlights include being included on the prestigious Mail and Guardian 200 Young South Africans list, as well as Avance Media’s 2020 list of the Top 100 Most Influential Young South Africans.

About the challenges that come with being a woman in the modern world of work, she says, “Womanhood generally is tough business, and I think anywhere we are faced with the perpetual struggle of being infantilised by men. However, from my own position and ideological posture, I maintain that the struggle is being black and being a woman, not just a gender postulation. All these antagonist identities collapse on one body. My issue is racialised, patriarchal, sexist and ableist capitalism, because it is by that very fact that I am coerced into spaces that are antagonistic towards the humanity I possess, and that which has been denied to me. Mine is a question of what it means to be human more than what it means to be a woman.”

Dr Mokoena believes there needs to be a greater understanding and acceptance that women are also human beings. “Society as we have it cannot reconcile itself to accommodate my subjectivity. Mine is that which has an intimate history with violence and, as such, does not have a grammar of suffering, due to its gratuitous nature. This society cannot embrace me as a woman before it embraces me as a human being.”

In future, Dr Mokoena hopes to become a professor at the Harvard University Divinity School.