It’s easy to be confused by Nokuzola Faith Nkosi’s names. A lecturer in the Department of Veterinary Tropical Diseases in the Faculty of Veterinary Science at the University of Pretoria (UP), you type in her email address as “Faith”, yet her name pops up as “Nokuzola”. Even if she introduces herself as “Nokuzola”, once people hear that she’s also known as “Faith”, they tend to drop “Nokuzola”.  

“I don’t mind being called either one of them,” she says. “A lot of people call me Faith, and I’m okay with it, because it’s a prophetic way of saying I must live by faith and not by fear, and just keep moving,” she says.

This nonchalance is typical of Nkosi’s easy-going and flexible persona. She attributes her bubbly energy to her love of exercise. Her sport of preference used to be netball, which she played at school and in the first four years of her university studies, during which she played at the level of University Sports South Africa. She also played while working at the Agricultural Research Council. When loadshedding led to traffic delays that caused her to be late for matches, she swopped netball for swimming, and these days, she goes to the gym about four times a week.

What makes Nkosi’s enthusiasm so refreshing is that it isn’t focused on puffing up her own importance – it’s directed towards making an impact on others.

“A good life for me is indicated by my contribution to the world around me, through my actions, my words, anything I can possibly offer that contributes positively to the environment around me,” she says.

This guiding principle has influenced almost everything in her life. Recently, it even led to her taking part in a pageant focused on uplifting women.

With this drive to help others, Nkosi had no doubt about what she wanted to do with her life – she wanted to be a medical doctor. However, making a common mistake, she applied to only one university. When she didn’t crack its tough entrance requirement, her father took the matter into his own hands and started researching other universities. He found out that the University of Zululand was still taking last-minute, in-person applications, and he and his daughter drove there from their home in the village of Clau-Clau in Mpumalanga. 

“It’s about nine hours – crazy far from home,” Nkosi says.

She chose to register for a BSc in Biochemistry, thinking she would transfer to medicine later. She never did. After achieving top marks, she went on to do honours. She followed this with the then Department of Science and Technology-National Research Foundation internship programme, hosted by Mintek in Randburg, where she used gold nanoparticles to research potential HIV/aids drugs. This gave her the required skills and experience to apply for a position as a senior research assistant at what was then known as the Onderstepoort Veterinary Institute (now Onderstepoort Veterinary Research). Nkosi later joined UP and, while working there, obtained a master’s in Veterinary Science Tropical Diseases, developing molecular tools to detect pathogens in dogs. She graduated cum laude.

“I was exposed to the veterinary world, and it sparked something new,” she says. “It’s like a whole new world. I went from humans to animals, all by chance, really.”

Soon she will be the doctor she once dreamed of, albeit not a medical one, as she plans to submit her PhD later this year. It’s about using Luminex xMAP technology to detect various tick-borne haemoparasites in cattle and dogs in one go, a process known as multiplexing. 

“When I look back, it was a good thing that I didn’t get into medicine, because if I were in medicine, I would have been focusing on my immediate environment,” Nkosi says. “But doing research, my publications go worldwide. And the veterinarians I train are dispersed all over the world. I now have global impact. I never imagined this would happen.”

She also never imagined taking part in a pageant, but it didn’t take much to convince her to take part in Miss Bachelorette SA 2025, in which she was placed in the top five. 

“It’s a women’s empowerment platform presented in pageantry format, and it seeks to empower women who are independent, unmarried, between the ages of 25 to 55, and all shapes and sizes. They do this through philanthropy, beauty and fighting against gender-based violence. They’re fighting a pandemic that we’re facing as a country, especially when it comes to the femicide part in gender-based violence.”

Family circumstances have made her hyper-aware of femicide. In 2013, her brother’s girlfriend went missing when they were both students at the University of Johannesburg. Two years later, her body was found in a shallow grave.

“It changed my whole mentality,” Nkosi says. “Femicide affects and alters people's lives forever. If I, as a sister to the boyfriend, am still scared today, how much more are her family members? Femicide and gender-based violence are things that scar a person to the deepest part of the soul.”

She thinks women still face a lot of hurdles that are invisible to others and which they deal with silently. She mentions the pressure of “staying at the top and being that excelling-woman-in-science”. It’s this sort of thing that makes Women’s Month so valuable to her.

Nkosi’s drive to make an impact is also evident in the many roles she plays in the department, faculty and within her discipline. Her responsibilities in the department include being a team leader of research feedback and the journal club, which presents the progress of current projects and evaluates existing journal articles. 

Together with Professor Darshana Morar-Leather, Nkosi is one of the academics responsible for keeping track of grants and publications, and submitting them to the InfoEd system so UP can receive its subsidy from the Department of Higher Education and Training. She also coordinates activities for the Veterinary Professional Life module, which covers everything from wellness, veterinary business skills, communication, human-animal relationships, law and ethics to teaching students how to be well-rounded global citizen vets. Her responsibilities involve booking guest speakers and handling the organisation, transport and payment of its annual excursion to Freedom Park. 

In this capacity, she particularly loved it when she transferred from secretary to community engagement officer of the Onderstepoort Postgraduate Association. Now the first student rep on the committee of the Parasitological Society of Southern Africa, Nkosi has developed a virtual community for students to meet more than once a year at the organisation’s annual conference. And when she heard of two staff members in the faculty who needed stem cell transplants, she initiated a donor drive to help create awareness of this potentially life-saving procedure. 

Together with the postgraduate association and the non-profit organisation DKMS, which is dedicated to fighting blood cancer and blood disorders, they successfully recruited 78 new donors.

“I’m a person who really loves to advocate for people,” she says.