When the Future Seemed Impossible
I had little hope of attending university because of my family’s financial circumstances.
Towards the end of my matric year, while my classmates were discussing where their academic journeys would take them next, one of them asked me where I was going to study.
I replied, “Nowhere.”
She responded almost angrily. As one of the better-performing students in our class, she could not understand how I could have no idea where I was going. She continued scolding me, saying that my problem was that I did not communicate or socialise enough with other people.
But there was something she did not understand.
I knew my financial background.
I had been raised by my grandparents, who at the time were pensioners. University required money that I simply could not see where it would come from. So, when my classmates spoke excitedly about university, I could not allow myself the same expectations.
Yet I remained at school and continued studying.
I concentrated on something much simpler: doing what was within my power and control, and doing it to the best of my ability, without allowing myself to be consumed by things beyond my control.
Perhaps something deep inside me believed that somehow things would work out. Was it a sense that the universe had my back? Was it my ancestors? Was it God? Was it some combination of these? Or was what happened next simply coincidence and luck?
I cannot answer that scientifically. Where evidence can neither establish nor reject such explanations, perhaps intellectual honesty requires us to acknowledge the limits of what we know.
What I do know is what happened next.
Despite having almost no expectation of attending university, I did not give up on my studies. I matriculated with a distinction.
A Form I Did Not Expect
At the beginning of the following year, after I had received my matric results, my uncle, who was working as a security guard at the University of Venda, brought me an application form.
He told me that I should apply.
I completed the application with neither confidence nor any clear idea of how I would finance my studies. Once again, I was simply doing what was within my control.
I had seen students from my own village enrol at university, complete their first year and subsequently drop out because of financial difficulties. As I filled in that application form, their experience seemed a much more realistic picture of my own possible future than graduating from university.
Nevertheless, I applied.
Eventually, I found myself beginning the unfamiliar process of registering as a first-year university student. There were long queues, unfamiliar buildings, and processes that I did not yet understand.
My only apparent hope of paying the tuition fees was financial aid.
While queuing to apply for financial assistance, an administrator assisting students took my statement of matric results from my hand. Like many first-year students confronting university administration for the first time, I was unsure of the process. I handed her my results along with the ticket number we had been given while queuing.
She looked at my results and asked, in a manner that made me think I was wasting her already limited time:
“Why are you here wasting time in this queue?”
Before I could fully understand what was happening, she turned my statement over and wrote something on the back in red ink.
She handed it back to me and instructed me to leave the financial-aid queue in the auditorium and proceed to another queue in the main administration building, where I should go to the bursary office.
Then she immediately turned to the next student.
I was left standing there, confused.
I followed her instructions.
As I walked out of the auditorium, trying to make sense of what had just happened, I turned the statement over to see what she had written.
In red ink were the words:
FULL TUITION.
I proceeded to the bursary office and discovered that the distinction I had earned in matric qualified me for a Vice-Chancellor’s bursary covering my undergraduate tuition fees.
The same distinction that I had worked towards without knowing whether I would ever be able to attend university had unexpectedly opened the door to university.
Luck, Circumstance or Something More?
That experience has stayed with me.
What would have happened if, after deciding that university was financially impossible, I had also decided that there was therefore no reason to work hard in matric?
I did not know that a distinction would open this particular door.
I did not know that my uncle would bring me an application form.
When I was standing in that financial-aid queue, I did not know that an administrator would look at my results and redirect me somewhere completely different.
All I had done was continue doing what was within my control.
And this raises a question that has followed me through much of my life:
What happens when a person continues doing what they are supposed to do even when hope seems distant and almost alien?
Sometimes circumstances take a favourable turn that could not reasonably have been anticipated.
But how should we understand such moments?
Is it perseverance finally meeting opportunity?
Is it coincidence?
Is it luck?
Is it the universe?
Is it the intervention of our ancestors?
Is it God?
Perhaps different people will arrive at different answers according to their experiences and beliefs. Science may help us understand probabilities, causes, and observable relationships, but there are questions of meaning that are much more difficult to settle through empirical evidence alone.
I do not present my experience as proof of any supernatural explanation.
I simply know what happened.
I kept going when I could not see the road ahead.
And somehow, a road appeared.
Why I Am Writing This
There is another reason I am sharing this story.
My former Grade 12 Biology teacher at Nthetsheleseni Secondary School has twice asked me to return and give a motivational talk to learners from my village. The idea was simple: to show them that someone who attended the same school, came from the same village and experienced financial difficulties similar to those facing some of them could eventually obtain a PhD.
A former classmate has also suggested arranging an opportunity for me to speak to young people.
I have never found the opportunity to do it. My work has taken me far from home.
But there is also another truth.
I am not sure that I have it in me to stand in front of young people and give what is conventionally called a motivational talk.
Perhaps that is not how I communicate best.
And perhaps this is partly why The Philosophy of a Village Boy exists.
This platform allows me to tell the stories instead.
Not to tell young people that success is guaranteed if they simply work hard. Life is more complicated than that. Hard work does not automatically remove poverty, inequality, circumstance, or bad luck.
But my journey has taught me something more modest, and perhaps more defensible:
Even when you cannot control the outcome, you can still attend to what is within your control.
Sometimes that may lead nowhere.
And sometimes, without you knowing it, you may already be preparing yourself for a door that you do not yet know exists.
Join the conversation
Have you ever continued pursuing something even when there seemed to be no realistic path forward, only for circumstances to change unexpectedly? How did you interpret what happened: perseverance, opportunity, coincidence, luck, faith, ancestral intervention, or something else? Share your perspective in the comments below.
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