Born in Johannesburg, Joy De Beyer studied at the University of KwaZulu-Natal before going to Oxford to read for an MPhil and then a DPhil in economics. After Oxford, she began a 30-year career in the World Bank where she focused particularly on improving health systems around the world. Her roles included managing initiatives around AIDS, anti-smoking policy and health and education in Sub- Saharan Africa. This narrative is excerpted from an interview with the Rhodes Trust on 24 March 2025.
Joy de Beyer
Natal & Trinity 1980
‘I adored spending time with my grandmother’
I was born in Johannesburg but I grew up in Durban, which is a medium-sized coastal town in what was then the province of Natal and is now KwaZulu-Natal. I guess the most significant event in my life was my father dying just before my eighth birthday. He was a very young man – only 36 – but a chain smoker, and he died of lung cancer. That caused massive disruption in our family life, of course, and our grandparents became very important in my life and the lives of my siblings.
My grandmother was one of the first women to graduate from a university in South Africa, so education was extremely important to her. The Nationalist Party won the election immediately after the Second World War and my grandmother felt that the electorate had betrayed the country and she absolutely hated the apartheid government. Because of that, she didn’t want me to sound like a South African and she sent me off to elocution lessons so that I would speak the Queen’s English. I was truly grateful to her later when I was working in global development and I was able to be travel freely and not be outed as a South African.
As a little girl, I was desperate to start school so that I could learn to read. I loved stories and was always asking people to read to me. I remember being especially transfixed by The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett and The Little White Horse by Elizabeth Goudge. I wrote plays and got my friends to perform them in the playground at elementary school, and I adored spending time with my grandmother and hearing her stories. She was the person who encouraged me to sit the entrance exam for a very good private girls’ school, and when I got a scholarship, she agreed to pay the balance. It was a fabulous school, with a very quirky British headmistress, and it attracted wonderful teachers.
On applying for the Rhodes Scholarship
I started university in 1976 when the first really big anti-apartheid demonstrations were taking place. The apartheid system was very, very entrenched and everything was segregated. The only exception was at university level where if there was no university of the appropriate race group then Indian and so-called coloured students could go to white university. Even then, my university was probably 95% white. It was difficult to find opportunities for friendships across the colour line, so it was a bizarre society. Of course, many of us were very firmly opposed and we did get involved in activism. There was a sense that this society desperately needed change.
I studied sociology and economics and I ended up focusing on economics, mostly because it did not come easily to me, so I had to work really hard at it, and ended up doing really well at it. I ended up applying for the Rhodes Scholarship for family reasons too. My grandmother and her sister were very competitive about their grandchildren, so, when my cousin became a Rhodes Scholar, my grandmother told me I could do it too. I didn’t actually get it the first time I applied, but the selection committee encouraged me to apply again and I was successful. I was thrilled and excited, and so was my grandmother, of course!
‘I loved the glimpse into the full gamut of English society’
It’s hard to over-emphasise just how extraordinary it felt to come from apartheid South Africa to Oxford. I felt as if I’d been pulled out of the bowels of a deep, dark mine and into the sunshine, into the middle of the universe. I had anticipated being attacked as a white South African for South Africa’s politics, but in that very polite, English way nobody said a word. I loved the glimpse into the full gamut of English society and the chance to meet all the international students as well, although I did have a bad experience at the welcome party in Rhodes House. I had no idea there would be academics there as well, and when I talked to one man, he was very haughty and eventually revealed he was a professor of economics. To keep the conversation going, I asked what kind, and he said ‘Microeconomics. Haven’t you read my book?’ That was enough for me. I said, ‘You know, I haven’t read your book, and I hate microeconomics so I never will.’ Then I headed to the over end of the room and met Timothy who was on sabbatical from the World Bank. He was absolutely lovely and became a friend for life.
One of the things I did at Oxford was take up rowing, and I have never been so physically exhausted (or so cold in the mornings!). I played squash as well, and a friend and I would go up to London for concerts. The extracurriculars were a lot of fun, although I didn’t do quite enough academic work in my first year. I still remember reading out one essay to my supervisor and getting more and more uncomfortable because I knew I hadn’t got to grips with the subject. "My supervisor listened impassively, then very kindly said: “Good. You have rather missed the central point of the essay!” I was used to having a textbook and a clear syllabus, and the tutorial system was so different. When I spoke to my friends on the course, it became clear we were all doing very different things, so we started to get together on Sundays and teach each other. That made all the difference for me. I was particularly interested in the economics of communist countries and development economics, and I was very lucky that my friend Timothy arranged for me to work at the World Bank as an intern, comparing education and earnings in Tanzania and Kenya. I was then able to write my MPhil dissertation using that data and I extended my work to turn it into a DPhil.
‘It was like many jobs rolled into one career’
As I was leaving Oxford, my friend Timothy was at the World Bank, leading a team to learn about the Polish economy as Poland was rejoining the World Bank. I ended up being part of that team and having absolutely fascinating trips to Poland and that was my first major World Bank assignment. I went on to work in the health group and was very involved in working in health policy. Working in an organisation whose role is to lend money to low- and middle-income countries to improve their health and education systems was my dream job, and I was especially lucky to work in southern Africa, not least as it enabled me to travel back and see my family fairly often. I did a lot of work in Zimbabwe, and I grew to love it. That was a time when Zimbabwe was full of hope and promise, and I also worked with a group of black Zimbabweans who welcomed me as an equal and a friend. It was fabulous.
I spent around 30 years at the World Bank. I loved the work because you were always learning something. The expectation was that every three to five years, you would take your accumulated expertise from one part of the world and work on another part of the world or a slightly different field. So, it was like many jobs rolled into one career. I worked for a time in the global AIDS unit, and I also oversaw work on anti-smoking policies. Towards the end of my career, I was leading a course for senior healthy policy makers, in collaboration with the Harvard School of Public Health and elsewhere. Trying to improve health systems is difficult work, because they are unwieldy and they encompass so many different interests, but one of the skills I really developed was the art of listening with empathy.
I should say that Oxford also gave me not only my academic and professional life but also my emotional and personal life too, because that is where I met my husband. David is an academic, and like many couples, we struggled for many years with what he called the ‘two-body problem’ where we found ourselves in different locations for work. We were extremely lucky that both of our roles allowed us to telecommute, and this was at a time before the pandemic when remote working was rare. I feel incredibly privileged and fortunate to have had the career I’ve had, and I like to think I made some difference in the world.
‘Follow your heart’
I love going back to Oxford. I have so many memories, especially in Trinity College. I remember seeing tourists trying to get a glimpse in through the gates and I was thinking, ‘I live here.’ To today’s Rhodes Scholars, I would say, follow your heart, by which I mean, think about what’s important to you and pursue that. And also, be open to unexpected opportunities: keep a heart and mind that are open to the world, and when opportunities come, don’t be afraid to grab them.
Read Full Interview Transcript
Transcript
Interviewee: Joy de Beyer (Natal & Trinity 1980) [hereafter ‘RES’]
Moderator: Anya Chuykov [hereafter ‘INT’]
Date of interview: 24 March 2025
INT: Hi everyone. My name is Anya Chuykov. I’m in the Global Engagement Team at the Rhodes Trust and I am so delighted to be sitting here today with Joy de Beyer, Natal and Trinity 1980. Joy, thank you so much for being here today and for this gift to the community.
I am really excited to hear your story. Thank you for helping us launch the first phase of the Oral History project. Would you mind firstly saying your full name for the recording.
RES: I’m Joy de Beyer and I won the Natal Scholarship in 1980 and came up to Oxford then.
INT: Amazing. Do I have your permission to record this interview?
RES: You do indeed. It’s my pleasure.
INT: Music to my ears. Thank you so much. So we’ve got a lot to cover today but I think we should start right from the beginning. I’d love to hear a little bit about where you were born, where you grew up and what your childhood was like.
RES: Thank you. So I was born in Johannesburg, South Africa but grew up in Durban which is a medium-sized coastal town in the then province of Natal, now KwaZulu Natal. I guess the most significant event in my life was my father dying just before my eighth birthday. He was a very young man, he was only 36 but a chain smoker and died of lung cancer.
That, as you can imagine, was a massive disruption to our family life. My mother was left alone to raise three children, plus I have a much older sister from my mother’s first marriage. My father’s parents, my paternal grandmother and grandfather were really important in my life. In fact, my grandmother was the whole reason that I became a [s/l Rhodes] scholar.
INT: Wow. Oh my goodness, well we’ll have to learn more about that. Was she a Rhodes scholar as well or did she go to Oxford too?
RES: No. I was in, I think, the second year of women Rhodes scholars. You may know that initially, Rhodes scholarships were only for men under the terms of Cecil Rhodes’s will. He being a man of his time, nobody really anticipated, at that time, that women would live in the world in the same way that men did then.
My grandmother was amongst the very first group of women graduates from a university in South Africa. She graduated from the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg and she became a school teacher and education was extremely important to her. But that story can hold, how she influenced me to become a Rhodes scholar can hold a little bit if you like.
INT: Absolutely. We’ll come back to that shortly. But being from such an academic family, did you enjoy school when you were younger? What were you like at school?
RES: I loved school. I mean when I was a little girl waiting to start school when I was four or five, I desperately wanted to read. I loved stories. I was constantly asking people to read to me and couldn’t wait to get to school so that I could learn to read for myself and didn’t have to wait for someone else to have the time.
I went to the local government school in our neighbourhood. It was a wonderful school. I was very happy but adored school and learning. I was the little teacher’s pet because I loved it.
INT: That’s amazing. It’s so lovely to have that zest for learning from a young age. Did you have any particular favourite subjects that emerged from a young age?
RES: Well I always loved literature and stories just captivated me. In my fourth year of school I had a wonderful teacher who, at the end of the day, would tell us okay, get ready, pack up your books, get ready, and then she would read aloud to us. She read The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett and The Little White Horse by Elizabeth Goudge.
I remember being absolutely transfixed by those stories. I mean they’re both wonderful, transformative stories, full of adventure and human connection. They’re marvellous. It was wonderful reading them to my own daughters many years later.
INT: What a wonderful journey. Did your love of reading ever extend to writing yourself or was it just the reading that you loved?
RES: Yes, I mean I did but I’m not a wannabe author. I’m really happy to read other people’s books. We all wrote stories when we were kids at school. I wrote plays and then organised friends to perform them in the playground in elementary school which was lots of fun to me.
INT: What an imagination. That’s amazing. Do you remember any of the plays? Do you remember what they were about?
RES: No, I don’t but the same grandmother, when I was quite young, sent me to speech and drama lessons because she hated, sorry, I’ve got a cat on my lap, it just nipped at me, she hated the South African regime. The Nationalist Party won the election immediately after the Second World War and my grandmother felt that the electorate had betrayed the country and she absolutely hated the apartheid government.
She didn’t want me to sound like a South African so she sent me off to speech lessons so that I would speak the Queen’s English. So she was incredibly important in my life in all sorts of ways and I was truly grateful to her later on when I was working in global development and travelling well before South Africa’s first free and fair election in 1994, in the years immediately before when there was still a lot of antagonism and antipathy towards South Africa. I was able to travel in Africa, particularly in Tanzania for work and not immediately be outed as a South African.
INT: Wow. It sounds like she did so much for you. What were some of your favourite things to do with your grandmother when you were growing up?
RES: Well she and I both loved to read. She had a wonderful sense of humour and she loved wildlife and travelling. My grandfather didn’t really like to travel. So during the 1950s she travelled to all the great game reserves and wildlife areas in Africa by herself, with a guide and a great big white hat to shield her from the sun. She told me that one of her guides thought that she might be the Queen because she had this great big, white hat and looked kind of regal.
She had wonderful stories of migrations of animals and watching herds of animals and a picnic under a thorn tree with her guide having shooed away a couple of giraffes to make space to lay out her picnic cloth. So I adored spending time with her and hearing her stories. She encouraged me to sit the entrance exam for a very good private girls’ school, for high school and paid the balance. I was successful.
I got a partial scholarship and she paid for the rest and for the cost of my books which we had to buy. So my high school education was very much better than it would have been had I gone to the local government school. I went to a really fabulous school, Durban Girls College in Durban, which had a very quirky British headmistress who used to insist that we sit up straight with our knees, calves and ankles pressed firmly together.
She used to say, “The test for a chorus girl is to be able to hold three playing cards simultaneously, one in the knees, one in the calves and one in the ankles. If I can pass for a chorus girl, so can you,” which we all thought was completely hilarious because she was this very straight-laced, single, spinster woman.
[00:09:51]
She was very religious. She was very stern. She always wore her dresses cut high up in the collar and her hair in a very no-nonsense cut and no makeup and her nails trimmed off. So the idea of her trying out for a chorus girl was hysterical. But anyway, it was a school that attracted wonderful teachers. I had an amazing education and I’m deeply grateful to have been there.
INT: It sounds like you had some good laughs as well, which I think is a good balance.
RES: Oh yeah.
INT: Your grandmother just sounds like the best role model ever. I mean you’re so lucky to have someone like that to guide you and to look up to.
RES: Yeah, I was very lucky because the main raising of me was my mother. My mother came from a very big Lebanese family and education, they were not a family that, I think I was amongst the very first university graduate in my mother’s family, amongst the first, not the only because lots of my cousins but not my mother, nor any of her seven brothers or three sisters had any tertiary education, anything beyond high school.
So they were very different sets of values. My mother appreciated and supported my going on to university and doing a PhD but it wasn’t her world at all. She had no experience with that. So I think without my grandmother’s influence, that probably wouldn’t have happened.
INT: What about your siblings, were you close with them?
RES: I have two older brothers and a much older sister and I’m closest of all with my older sister who lives in London. My two brothers live next door to each other in Cape Town.
INT: Wow.
RES: I have a niece who lives in Oxford who, I think may be a little bit inspired by my stories of how marvellous Oxford was, studied there too.
INT: That’s incredible. The stories are passing through generations, I love it.
RES: Yeah.
INT: Can you tell me a little bit about your undergraduate education? Where did you go to university? What did you decide to study? What was that like? What was life pre-Rhodes like?
RES: I started university in 1976 when the first really big anti-apartheid demonstrations were taking place. So the Nationalist Party, the apartheid regimen was very, very entrenched and at the time, none of us saw how it could possibly end because the opposition party was very weak compared to the ruling party. So everything was segregated.
The only exception at university level was if there was no university of the appropriate race group then people could go to a white university. So there were a small number of Indian students at my university and a small number of so-called coloured students, people of mixed race but, for the most part, it was probably 95% white.
Certainly all elementary and high schools were racially segregated. It was difficult to find opportunities for friendships across the colour line so it was a bizarre society. Of course many of us were very firmly opposed. There were opportunities for activism, ranging from small student protests through much greater activities.
I have a cousin who ended up in jail for a while for his activism. I mean that was the dominant milieu to everything that was done, was a sense that this was a society that desperately needed change. I studied sociology and economics predominantly. The South African degrees at the time, it was a three year degree and you chose two subject majors.
Mine was sociology and economics. I was much more interested in sociology actually than economics. I didn’t really enjoy economics. I didn’t get it. In fact, after my first term, I went down to Cape Town for a holiday and said to my older brother, I just don’t know what’s going on in macroeconomics. I just don’t get it. I don’t understand these concepts. He looked at me pityingly with that look of an older brother and said, “If you don’t understand first year economics you must be bloody thick.”
INT: [unclear 00:15:35].
RES: Yeah, older brothers. Then he was more constructive and suggested I just get a different textbook and perhaps that would help. But because it didn’t come easily to me, I worked really hard at it and I got the class medal in economics that year.
So instead of dropping it instantly because this was not something that I enjoyed, of course I had to carry on having got the class medal and so I ended up majoring in economics. Never really loved it except for development economics, looking at how economies grow and issues of unemployment and really all the social issue really interested me a great deal.
Then in South Africa, if you want, you do a so-called honours year which is an add-on year in which you focus on one of your two majors. The sociology department said oh do come to us and do honours and we’ll give you an office and we’ll give you some teaching, there’s a possibility for a teaching career.
The woman in charge of the economics recruitment of graduate students said to me, wonderful woman actually, whose daughter has become an excellent economist in South Africa too, Jill Nattrass, said to me, “Well if you want to come here and do economics, you can, we’ll take you but we’re not going to beg.” So of course that was the more enticing offer. So I went on and did economics and that was what I studied in Oxford.
INT: Amazing. You say you’re more interested in social issues around economics, do you think that was shaped by where you grew up because as you say, throughout university life these social issues are so pressing, you were always grappling with them. Did that carry on with you throughout your life and your studies?
RES: Yes, it did. I worked all my life in the World Bank on global development issues. I think this training in sociology was really helpful as well as a complement to being an economist and the training in economics.
INT: Definitely. That sounds like a good combination. Did you have much time for activism or other extracurricular activities? What did you get involved in outside of your studies?
RES: So I had a pretty active social life with friends, lots of time at the beach. I did some volunteering. When I was in school I started reading books on tape which was a service called Tape Aids for the Blind, they were recorded books long before the- we’re now very used to being able to get audio versions of books but this was a service that a friend and I used to go down to a recording studio in town and take turns reading and following on and then they would make these into books.
So that was something, because I love reading, I wanted to enable people who couldn’t read to still hear stories. The standard amount of student activism, nothing particularly extreme but taking part in demonstrations and protests. I played squash a lot. I swam for pleasure.
INT: Your personal statement mentioned ballroom dancing. Is that something you took up?
RES: Oh yes. I only did that for a couple of years but I loved it. I don’t know where I got the idea to go ballroom dancing. My parents had loved dancing. Their idea of the best possible night out was dinner and dancing somewhere. So I joined a dance studio and just adored it.
There were always far more girls and women than men at these dance glasses. So they used to ask the men who were a bit better, to come and help out at the beginners class. There was a British chap called Malcolm from Manchester.
[00:20:04]
He used to come and help out. He asked me if I wanted to go dancing on a Wednesday night. There was an old colonial hotel called The Caster Hotel that had a beautiful dance floor, a ballroom. On a Wednesday night they had a two piece band and you paid next to nothing, the equivalent of £1 or something to go. There was music and ballroom dancing.
Malcolm and I were the youngest by at least 20 or 30 years. So he taught me a lot more on these Wednesday nights. But my terror was when they had, every couple of hours they would do something where you would change partners and all the women would be in one circle and the men in another and you would walk around in opposite directions.
When the music stopped, you danced with whoever you were standing opposite. It was fine dancing with Malcolm but dancing with these 60 and 70 year old men when I was 20 or something was a little terrifying.
INT: I can only imagine. That sounds so much fun. I wish there were some things like that now.
RES: There probably are. Ballroom dancing has actually had quite a moment. I mean it became very popular and I bet if you Google it, you’ll find places to go ballroom dancing.
INT: I guess one just has to look. That sounds so much fun. It sounds like you had a great time in your undergraduate years. Are you still in touch with any of the people you met? Are you in touch with Malcolm?
RES: No, not Malcolm. I don’t know what happened to him. But I am still friends with lots of, well a fair number of the people I was at school with, both elementary school and high school and university. I mean Facebook, which for all its negative political connotations now, were less but it has been wonderful for helping get back in touch with people who one had fallen out of touch with.
INT: Absolutely. One of the dwindling pros of social media I think for sure. I mean if you don’t mind, let’s come back to what made you decide for the Rhodes scholarship. I’m curious how you even found out about them because I mean as you mentioned, it was only a few years that women were even able to apply. What role did your grandma play in that?
RES: So it’s kind of a sweet story. My grandmother had one sister, just one sibling and she and her sister were quite competitive with each other. I don’t know what they were like as girls but by the time they were grandmothers, the competition was who had the more successful grandchildren. I think I helped my grandmother win that contest for quite a long time.
I had cousins, my cousins, there was a family of three brothers and the oldest of them, Robert, had not been particularly successful through high school. Then he went in to do his mandatory army training. After the end of that year, to his credit, he decided to go back to high school because he didn’t have a very strong performance in his high school.
He decided to go back to high school and repeat in order to do better so that he would be able to get into university. So he was a late bloomer, he did really well and then he shone at university and he got a Rhodes scholarship.
INT: Oh.
RES: So one day my grandmother, I was staying with her, I used to often go and spend time with her, she said to me, “You know, Joy, you should apply for a Rhodes scholarship. I said, “Well what’s that, Gran?” “It’s wonderful.
There’s the scholarship and Cecil John Rhodes left the money in his will and you go to Oxford.” I said, “Oh Gran, that sounds amazing but I couldn’t get one of those.” She said, “Oh please, Joy, if Robert can get one, so can you.”
INT: Brilliant.
RES: So I applied and the first year I didn’t succeed but the committee was very kind and said to me, “Listen, you’re young. You did well so do apply again.” So I had applied before my honours year when I had just finished the three year undergraduate degree so I applied again in m honours year and that year was selected.
INT: How was the selection process the second time round, the interviews, what was that like?
INT: I remember mostly one of the interviews on the first time round when the chairman of the Natal selection committee was a man called Tommy Bidford who had been a rugby player. That was what he was most known for, was being a rugby player. I mean he was pretty sexist and did not really think that women ought to be getting the scholarship.
I mean there were some women selected in that year so maybe he just didn’t think much of me so that’s fine. The second year, obviously the interviews went much better and I was a year older, maybe a little more self-confident but one of the most wonderful interviews was with a doctor called Dr Seedat who met me at his rooms.
We were talking and he was a delight, he was lovely. I mean we were really enjoying the conversation. He was so warm and kind. Then he said to me, “Oh come on, I want you to meet my wife. Come home with me.” So he took me home and I met his wife but his brother in law, who went by the name Fishy, nickname, was there as well.
Fishy was not nearly as warm and kind and lovely to me. He was probably not very, he clearly had very strong anti-apartheid feelings and there was quite some hostility directed towards this little white South African girl who his brother in law brought home with him. Maybe it was part of a test to see how I coped in a perhaps awkward social situation but it was interesting and truly memorable, even all these decades later.
INT: Whatever you did it worked. I do feel like part of the pro of being a Rhodes scholar is you get to encounter so many different world views and you encounter so many people that you learn to be comfortable in that discomfort and to have conversations which is so important. I have to find out, what was your grandmother’s reaction when you got the scholarship? Was she the first person you told? How did that go?
RES: Yes. I mean she was so thrilled and excited for me. She always loved when I came home occasionally. Obviously I wrote to her a lot. In those days we wrote actual letters on paper to people. There was no internet and phone calls were incredibly expensive so I wrote a lot.
She loved hearing about life in Oxford. She was, by then, too old to travel to come and see me but my mum was there to see me graduate in the [s/l Sheldonian 00:28:15] and so proud.
INT: That’s incredible. What a special moment.
RES: I was so excited to be there, I mean particularly because in those days, still in 1980, we were still no glimmer of political change. South Africa had been subject to sanctions and we felt incredibly cut off and isolated.
So when I came to live in Oxford, I felt as if I’d been pulled out of the bowels of a deep, dark mine, out into the sunshine, in the middle of the universe suddenly. I mean you can’t imagine how extraordinary it felt to come particularly from apartheid era South Africa into Oxford which is pretty close to the centre of the universe I think.
INT: Yeah, also so different. What were your first few weeks like? Was it quite the culture shock or was it just all exciting?
RES: Well first of all it was colder than I had expected. I had anticipated being attacked as a white South African for South Africa’s politics. Nobody said a word in that very polite English way. I mean I could have come from anywhere. I was on tenterhooks waiting, when is the attack going to come? When is somebody going to call me to account? They didn’t.
So Rhodes House invited Rhodes scholars to a sherry party, a welcome to Oxford sherry party, and I don’t know if that still happens, a few days into the first week of term.
INT: Not a sherry party but we do lots of things.
[00:30:21]
RES: I’m glad it’s not a sherry party anymore. Sherry is vile stuff. So I went along so excited to be in Oxford, so rather awed but mostly excited and very much with this when is somebody going to bring up a conversation about South Africa. I arrived in the beautiful wood panelled hall and full of excitement. I thought it was just Rhodes scholars.
I didn’t realise that academics who were there, people who were there on sabbatical were also invited to this sherry party. So I thought everybody was a Rhodes scholar. I walked in the door and there was a man standing alone. I thought oh okay, I’ll go up to the first person standing alone and start a conversation.
So I go up to this tall man and he’s in tight fitting clothes and his hair is neat and he's standing just by himself. I go up and extend my hand and say, “Hello, I’m Joy.” He looks down at me as if I were a piece of dirt and didn’t reply. So I said, “I’m at Trinity College. Which college are you at?” “Nuffield,” he said, in that tone of voice like don’t ask me anymore questions but I did.
I said, “What are you reading?” “I’m a professor,” he said. “Oh,” I said, “I’m so sorry. What are you a professor of?” “Economics.” “Oh,” I said. “I’m reading economics.” Silence from him. I tried one more time. “What kind of economics do you do?” “Microeconomics,” he said, “Haven’t you read my book?”
That was enough for me and I said to him, “You know, I haven’t read your book and I hate microeconomics so I never will,” and I turned away from him. It turned out that he was the hottest economist out of Chicago and for the following two years, every article that I read was thanks to Hal Varian for his insightful, and he was on sabbatical but I didn’t know.
I’d never heard of him. I mean I came from South Africa. Anyway, I turned away from him and I looked down the length of the ballroom and there at the far end was a man who was his phenotypical opposite. Where Hal Varian was tall and slim and blonde, there was this man who was short and he had unkept hair standing on end and his clothes were too big for him and his shirt was untucked and he was bearded.
He looked forlorn, where Hal Varian looked arrogant. I thought okay, I’ll go and try him. I walked all the way down and said to him, “Hello, I’m Joy.” He said, “Hello, I’m Timothy. Where are you from, Joy?” and I said, “South Africa.” He said, “Oh, how fascinating. Now I was in Johannesburg once. Tell me-” and he started to ask me questions and we had a most wonderful conversation. He became a very dear friend.
Actually it turned out he was employed at the World Bank and he was on a year’s sabbatical and he got me a summer job at the World Bank that year and then he later on hired me for a summer and was absolutely instrumental in my getting my job at the World Bank. So I guess the arrogant Hal Varian did me a really good favour by being so rude.
INT: That is the most incredible story and just your ability and the confidence to shake it off and keep moving is incredible. Did you have many experiences in Oxford like that? Did you find it quite challenging being one of the first or the first few years of female Rhodes scholars? Was that something you met challenge with?
RES: No, I didn’t because I think I was either the second or the third year, I can’t remember.
INT: Third, yeah.
RES: Okay. Oxford had got used to women. A lot of the colleges which had been single sex had gone mixed. By that I mean Trinity College, I think I was in the second year of women at Trinity. There was an American or Canadian woman, Martha, who was in the first group of women and when she walked into the Trinity College bursar’s office to get her keys or something, he looked up and instead of greeting her said, “I was opposed to women you know,” and that was her welcome to Trinity College.
The hostility was over by the time I got there so I didn’t. I very quickly made a wonderful group of friends, both amongst the graduate students in Trinity and also amongst the economic students in the MPhil that I was doing, a wonderful, wonderful group of friends. I’m close friends still with quite a few of them.
INT: Oh, that’s amazing. Did you manage to get to know many of your Rhodes cohort? I know that the house isn’t as a hub for students in the same way as it is now but did you spend much time there other than the sherry parties?
RES: So the warden used to host Sunday lunches and I did go whenever asked. I didn’t search out friendships amongst Rhodes scholars or South Africans. I mean it was really my close friendships were much more amongst people at Trinity and people in my economics group, so people with whom I was living and studying rather than people who I had a funding source in common with.
So the American Rhodes scholars had come over on the QE2 together so they’d had a week together and were pretty tight. A lot of them were pretty tight friends already by the time they arrived in Oxford.
So although I was friends with a few of my cohort and have loved getting to know some of them recently through reunions, I wasn’t in any close friendships particularly with Rhodes scholars. I did become very good friends with a couple of South Africans, not because they were South Africans but because they were such extraordinary and wonderful people.
INT: That’s amazing. Tell me a little bit about life at college, Trinity. What did you do? Were you part of any societies? What did you do to have fun as well?
RES: So the Trinity MCR had a pretty vibrant social life. We were all housed on staircase two above Blackwell’s book store. I had an amazing room looking across the Sheldonian. We had a kitchen and a common room so it was very easy to spend time with other graduate students from Trinity. They were just there hanging about.
I just took up rowing because after all it was Oxford and what’s the quintessential Oxford sport? Rowing. That was a lot of fun. I mean walking down to the river, it was cold, cold those morning.
INT: Yeah.
RES: I enjoyed the other rowers because they were rather alien to me. I remember one conversation amongst my rowing friends was, “Oh gosh, Fiona, I was just home for the weekend and mummy said to me oh Fiona, you simply must soak your hands, dear, you’re getting callouses from rowing.” I loved eavesdropping on conversations like that. I couldn’t imagine having a mummy who said I had to soak my hands.
INT: You still hear conversations like this around Oxford. It can be quite funny.
RES: Yeah. I mean I loved the glimpse into the full gamut of English society and all the international students as well. I mean it just added to this is who I imagined would be at Oxford amongst everybody else. Anyway, I loved rowing. The Trinity Women’s Eight got our bumps that year. We made four bumps on the bump supper.
I proudly owned my blade for many, many years, until I left Oxford and really it was impossible to take that blade on an aeroplane so it went on to somebody else who regretted not having commissioned and bought her commemorative blade.
[00:40:08]
INT: Wow. I respect the rowing and I respect the early mornings very much.
RES: Oh God, it was the most difficult. It was exhausting rowing at full pressure for pretty much the whole course, I have never been so exhausted in my whole life, to this day. I played squash for the college and loved doing that and just enjoyed- I travelled a lot. I bought an old car for £50 from a departing Rhodes scholar.
My friend Nancy and I drove up to London often to concerts. My brother, the same one who was so disparaging of my inability to immediately shine at economics had suggested to me that I take out a loan from the bank to go to Oxford. He said to me, “Listen, you don’t want to get there and not be able to do everything that you want to do. You don’t want to be constrained by just not having enough money so borrow as much money as you can imagine borrowing so that you can do everything.”
So I borrowed, I don’t know, £200. That was the biggest amount I could imagine being able to pay back. I mean you have to understand, my mother had no money. She’d had to sell piano one month.
So anyway, I had my £200 little extra and that went towards the car and the tickets to all the concerts. I love listening to classical music. I love theatre. So Nancy and I would drive in and out of London. I must say, I didn’t do quite enough work that first year. I did a lot of extracurriculars.
INT: I think that’s what first year is for. That is what it’s all about. It’s about the holistic experience.
RES: Yeah. I do remember one of the worst essays. It was an economics essay topic that I just really hadn’t been able to really come to terms with but I did what I could and I read it to my very kind supervisor in the morning. I mean I had never encountered one on one studying before.
This was obviously something very new and puts you on the spot in a way that sitting in a lecture room just doesn’t. Dr Seton listened carefully as I read aloud my essay, as I was growing more and more uncomfortable because there’s nothing like reading aloud stuff to realise just how poor it is.
He was staring out the window at the gentle rain falling on the quad and then he turned to me and he said, “Good. You have rather missed the central point of the essay,” and then proceeded to explain to me what it was.
INT: Wow. Tell me more about what it was like to study. Did you find the one on one system, Oxford is renowned for being difficult. Did it live up to its reputation for you?
RES: Yes. I mean I discovered that although I had been fairly well taught in South Africa, my lecturers in South Africa were not teaching the most current economic theories so there were big gaps in my education. I was way, way behind.
I was used to having a very clear syllabus and a textbook and knowing exactly what I had to master for the exams. Oxford of course was very, very different. In those days particularly the MPhil, there were some lectures but the lectures were regarded as kind of optional. The core work was with your tutor.
When I compared notes with other friends doing the MPhil, we found we were all doing completely different things. We were writing essays on completely different topics. There didn’t seem to be any core curriculum that we were all covering. So a group of five or six of us got together and we started teaching each other. We would meet up on a Sunday evening and we would take turns.
One of us would cook dinner and one of us would teach the others some topic in which we had just written an essay and we felt we really understood what we’d covered, the material that we’d covered. So we took turns teaching each other so that at least we had a core shared curriculum. That made all the difference for me, having those Sunday teachings with this little group of friends who were marvellous.
INT: Wow. It seems like your peers really got you through those tough times and how lovely to be together.
RES: Yeah. Absolutely.
INT: Did you have any other mentors or tutors that you really got on with? What topics did you really enjoy? You must have kind of surprised yourself going on to pursue economics given your initial dislike.
RES: I mean I really enjoyed economics of communist countries and development economics. So the man who I met at the sherry party, Timothy from the World Bank, I was having lunch with him one day and going for a walk afterwards and telling him I had to choose two elective courses. The development economics was a no brainer for me.
That was what I was most interested in. Then I told him I was going to do the economics of communist countries because I was fascinated by the effort at a more egalitarian redistributive system in an economic and social system which would be more egalitarian.
He said to me, “Oh no, don’t waste your time with that,” he said, “There were economists in the 1950s called Lange and Lerner who wrote a seminal article which proved that a planned economy couldn’t work. They’ve said everything there is to say about the economics of planned economy so don’t bother with that. Do econometrics instead.”
I said to him, “No, I’m really interested. I want to learn about what happened to efforts at a more equal society. Why don’t they work? What happened?” So I went ahead and did that and it was wonderfully taught. There was a Polish professor Wlodek Bruswho had been very high up in the Polish government and had had to leave in 1956 and then there was a professor called Michael Kaser who was very colourful. He always wore his gown.
Whenever you saw him, he had his gown on and he wore ankle braces to keep his socks up. I mean like a woman’s garters, old fashioned women’s garters to keep stockings up. Well apparently you can buy them for men and they go round, elastic and a little clip thing to hold socks up and he wore those. You could see them as he crossed his legs on his trouser legs. He talked about the caPITalists.
INT: What’s that?
RES: Yeah, what are caPITalists. It was the caPITalists versus the socialists. Well caPTalist turns out to be an archaic and acceptable pronunciation of capitalist.
INT: [unclear 00:48:14].
RES: He was also a wonderful teacher and absolutely fascinating. The whisper was that maybe he had been a spy because he was in Cambridge at the same time as Philby et al. I don’t think. I mean I don’t know who- he seemed to have been in Moscow at all sorts of pivotal moments. He was never outed as a British spy but who knows.
INT: I love the student gossip.
RES: It was wonderfully taught. It was fascinating. Timothy, my World Bank friend, called me up one day and said, “You know that course I told you not to take and you went ahead and took it anyway?” “Yes,” I said. He said, “Well I’m going to have to do a lot of work on Poland so could you come next summer and teach me everything you learned on that course.”
INT: There we go. You knew all along, you had a gut instinct and you went with it.
RES: Poland had been a founding member of the World Bank. Then when the iron curtain came down and the Soviet Union exerted its influence over the whole of Eastern Europe, Poland had been forced to withdrawn from the World Bank. In 1985/86, Poland rejoined the World Bank.
There’d been the solidarity movement and the Communism Party had been overthrown, solidarity had won an election and so Poland was rejoining some of the institutions of the west, including the World Bank. Timothy was in charge of leading a big World Bank team to Poland to learn about the Polish economy in society an I ended up being part of that team and having an absolutely fascinating couple of trips to Poland. That was my first major World Bank assignment.
[00:50:18
INT: How incredible. I am so excited to hear more about all your various projects but just to tie off a couple of questions asking about your Oxford experience, I wondered, did you write a dissertation when you were there and what did it focus on? Did you have a particular passion that you pursued there?
RES: So I’d say the first summer, Timothy had arranged for me to go to the World Bank as a summer intern. My assignment was to work on a data set that a man at the World Bank called Richard Sabot, who had a collaborator in Oxford, John Knight, and they had worked together and collected data in Tanzania and Kenya. It was data on people’s earnings.
They were very interested in the link between education and earnings. Kenya and Tanzania had very, very different policies about secondary education. Tanzania had tried to give as many people as possible access to primary education, and then relatively few people went on to secondary education.
Whereas in Kenya there was a much greater transition rate from primary or elementary education to secondary. So secondary education was less scarce and they were interested to compare what impact this had on earnings. So my job was to just run regressions, I mean just computing. It was really tedious but anyway.
At the end of the summer they asked me, John Knight in Oxford and Richard Sabot at the World Bank, whether I would like to write my master’s dissertation using these data. John Knight would supervise it. They would then get some extra analytic work done for free, with me in Oxford, and I would get a dissertation topic out of it. So that’s what I did.
Then of course the DPhil, if you take your MPhil thesis and turn it into a DPhil, you only owe one year of fees. I hadn’t expected to stay on for a DPhil but when I passed the MPhil exams not too badly and it was spring and you know what spring is like in Oxford, and I was so thrilled at passing the MPhil exams which had not been a foregone conclusion and spring was so gorgeous and I didn’t particularly have anything to go back to, any strong reason to go back to South Africa then, so I decided well how wonderful it would be to stay.
That locked me in to my DPhil thesis, which in a way was a shame because I wasn’t particularly fascinated. I mean this would not have been the topic I would have chosen to spend several years of my life immersed in. However, I was very lucky to have John Knight as a supervisor. He was the kindest, most generous and wonderful supervisor anyone could ever hope for so that was a good thing.
INT: That is absolutely incredible. I can’t believe this all came from just your first time coming to Rhodes House and having those interactions. It’s amazing. If we could just imagine for a second what would you have potentially written a dissertation about if it hadn’t been for this perfect opportunity? I know that’s a really difficult question to ask but I’m curious.
RES: Yeah. I mean I worked, to some extent, in the World Bank in education but more in health. If I had to go back and do my life over again, I probably would have studied medicine. I didn’t enjoy science at school but when I read, oh gosh, now my forgetfulness, the novel about Mr Casaubon.
I’m blanking on the name right now but there’s a quite famous novel, English 19th century novelist about Dorothea and Mr Casaubon and Lydgate. She marries this dry old academic but there’s a side plot about this Dr Lydgate who she really should have married and who’s a wonderful figure.
When I read this novel I was so inspired by Dr Lydgate that the end of my first year of university actually, on this trip down to Cape Town, I said to my brother, “I think I’ve made a mistake and I should be studying medicine. I would really like to be a doctor.” He said to me, “Well why don’t you go and volunteer in a hospital and see how you like blood and puke,” not a very sympathetic way of speaking.
Obviously that didn’t sound very enticing. But when I applied to Oxford, I did ask if I could study medicine and they said not without a science background. So it was too late. But it was fine because with my economics and working at the World Bank, I was able to work in the health group and was very involved in working in health policy.
INT: That’s amazing.
RES: What was the start of that question?
INT: No, it was just if you-
RES: What would I have done a thesis on. I would have done something in healthcare, something around healthcare or nutrition, something in that realm because that is what really fascinates me.
INT: Amazing. I think it’s about time we jump into our career which, you spent a long time at the World Bank and I’d love to hear more about it but once you’d met Timothy and had those experiences with him and done that internship, did you know that was where your career was leading to? Was it quite clear?
RES: Yeah, absolutely. To work in an organisation whose job is to lend money to low and middle income countries to improve the health system, the education system, etc, was just my dream job. I mean that was exactly what I wanted to do. It was the development economics, it was the being able to make the world better but incorporating travel was just an absolute dream.
INT: Travel sounds like a big perk. I mean it sounds like you worked on so many different projects but I wonder if there’s any that are a particular highlight to you. I’m also noting your passion for health and I know you’ve worked closely with anti-smoking. So I’m just curious to hear more about what projects you took on.
RES: So the World Bank is organised by geographic area. Initially there was the Poland work and that was really fascinating to get to know Poland across all different aspects of the economy and the society. That was a year as a short term consultant.
After that I got a job in the Southern Africa group. So I worked a lot on Tanzania, a lot on Zimbabwe, a bit on Botswana, went to Lesotho, Swaziland. I went once to Mozambique. So it was wonderful because I could pop in to see my family every few months on the way to a business trip and on the way back.
It was funny, initially when I went back and would arrive in Johannesburg, my whole family would arrive at the airport to come and meet me and then it dwindled and one or two of them would come and then just my sister would come to get me. I would get to my sister’s home and her kids would come running to the front door, Aunty Joy.
Then afterwards, by the time I kept showing up, they’d look up from whatever they were doing, “Oh hello Aunty Joy,” like you’re here again. So I was really, really lucky to a) work in a part of the world that was close to my heart, that I felt like I understood and knew a lot more about than unfamiliar parts of the world.
I felt bad because when I went to Oxford, I had fully expected to go back to South Africa, take my new found skills, whatever, and really work to make my country better. I felt guilty about not wanting to do that but when I finished at Oxford 1986, first of all I had this incredible opportunity at the World Bank and there was nothing to compare in South Africa.
Then to be able basically to do what I had wanted to do but writ large, not confined to South Africa but lots of countries to try to help to make people’s lives better, just was absolutely wonderful and to do close to home was brilliant.
[01:00:20]
So I did a lot of work in Zimbabwe. I grew to love Zimbabwe and in particular in those days, in the mid and late ‘80s, Zimbabwe was full of hope and promise. People had fought a civil war to be able to remake the country in the way that they wanted. There was such optimism, it was fabulous.
The World Bank was working with the healthy ministry in Zimbabwe to rebuild all of the infrastructure of the health which had been badly damaged by the war. It was fascinating. The people running the ministry were full of idealism and determination and it was wonderful.
Again, here comes the white South African stuff, here were a group of black Zimbabweans who welcomed me as an equal and friend. That was perhaps the best thing of all. I was working through my first pregnancy. The health ministry threw me a baby shower.
INT: Aw.
RES: Well it was the worst ritual humiliation I’ve ever been through but it was done with such love and humour. They dressed me up like a baby. They put a towel around my waist like a diaper, nappy and put a little white t-shirt on my bulging belly and a little white cap on my head and made big red round circles.
They gave me gifts that were wrapped in cloth diapers and I had to feel and guess what the gift was and if I got it wrong, I had to pay a forfeit of their decision. They made me sing, they made me dance. Trust me, no one ever wants to hear me sing. I mean I was so heart warmed. It was lovely that my colleagues in the health ministry in Zimbabwe cared to throw me a party. It was lovely.
INT: That is amazing. I mean I’d say I’d love to see photos but I’m sure you don’t want to show me one.
RES: I don’t know whether there are photos from that event.
INT: Am I right in thinking that you spent 39 years is it at the World Bank overall?
RES: I think about 30 years. So I started working there, well I don’t know if you count the summers but I started full time in ’86. I worked until the end of 2016.
INT: I mean what kept you going? You stayed there for so long, what kept you going [unclear 01:03:15]?
RES: I loved the work. I mean you always were learning something. If you had to engage in some area that you didn’t know, which happened all the time, you would hire an expert to come with you or you’d sit down with an expert or you’d read quickly, inform yourself as much as possible. So there was constant learning, constant travel. Wonderful people to work with.
I mean just marvellous colleagues and counterparts in the various countries across the world. The World Bank expects its employees to change jobs internally every three to five years so that you take your accumulated expertise from one part of the world and go to another part, work in the same field in another part of the world or a slightly different field so that you’re constantly carrying knowledge with you and learning new things.
So it was like many jobs rolled into one career. It was wonderful. I worked in the global AIDS unit helping countries write better strategies for their efforts against HIV and AIDS. I worked leading the work on anti-smoking policies, going round the world talking to academics and social activists and governments about the harms of smoking and what the most effective anti-smoking policies would be.
In addition to the main work of helping to build health systems and education systems, helping to improve nutrition. I also, towards the end of my career, was running a course which was targeted to senior health policy makers across the world and had been developed in collaboration with academics from the Harvard School of Public Health and elsewhere.
We would bring teams of senior policy makers from different countries, maybe 10 or 12 different countries. There were lectures and discussions in the morning and then applied exercise in the afternoon where people took what they’d learnt in the morning and heard in the morning and the new ideas and applied them to a practical problem for their own country.
That was fascinating and wonderful and I loved working with the people who taught the course. We took the course around the world to different places. I couldn’t really single out one highlight. There was so much and it was always different and always fascinating and always humbling.
INT: That’s amazing and also amazing that you managed to incorporate your interest in health as well into your work. But with that, and with working in global development and health policy, what are some of the challenges that came with that? What were some of the perhaps issues or challenges or road blocks that you came up against in your work?
RES: Well sitting trying to improve a health system is always I mean incredibly difficult. First of all health systems are big and unwieldy and encompass many different interests. There’s the organisational part of it, how do you set it up, how do you set it up so it’s efficient. There’s the financing part of it. How do you finance it, how do you pay people, how do you collect money. There’s what do you do? What are the priorities
There’s always scarce resources so where do you set the limits? How do you make your decisions about what’s going to be funded and what isn’t going to be funded? There’s a lot of room for reasonable disagreement in the answers to those. There’s no single right answer. It depends a lot on one’s values, priorities, etc.
So they’re incredibly complex and there’s always an enormous political element to it. There’s always going to be deeply vested interests. So there’s lots of different moving parts. I can hear somebody using some tool. I’m just going to close a door. Excuse me a minute.
INT: Absolutely. No problem.
RES: Sorry. I hope that will cut the noise a little bit. I’ll just drink my coffee a bit.
INT: No. I’m going to have some water.
RES: Okay. I’m sorry.
INT: No, don’t be sorry at all. I’ve just made a note of the time so we can, it’s never happened. Perfect. With those challenges, what are some of the skills? How have you navigated them and what advice would you give someone or a Rhodes scholar perhaps starting a career in this field and encountering these challenges? What’s something that got you through?
RES: Learn how to listen. I mean I think empathy and listening. The World Bank does a lot of really good training. I remember early on in my career a week long training that we did and we had to role play and we had to role play being on both sides of the table in a discussion. You were from the World Bank and you think this.
You are the health minister or the education minister and these are your beliefs and interests. Of course the scripts are set up to generate conflict. I was role playing the health ministry staff or whatever and I remember feeling so emotionally invested. It was a very interesting conversation and frustrating because these people from the World Bank just didn’t understand what was going on.
[01:09:53]
So we ran the role play and then ended and discussed what were you thinking, what did you think of that, what have you learnt. It was so insightful to step into somebody’s shoes, to really do it as an exercise and to learn that people, quite legitimately, come to discussions with quite different beliefs, needs, desires, facts, etc. To learn how to really deeply listen and probe and really try to understand what the other person is trying to do.
The Bank also ran courses in negotiation which give the same messages that often in a discussion there’s a huge set of shared interests that may not be evident in the things that people seem to be trying to get and to learn to probe and understand you may be asking for x but what is it you really need from x? What is it you want? Is there a different way to get to that?
Are there ways that our apparently conflicting needs might actually be not so conflicting? Might they be both satisfied equally with a somewhat more creative solution? So those things, to not take things at face value, to not assume that you understand where the other person is coming from but learn to really probe and to really listen and to really try to understand the other person. I mean those are, I think, such important skills and get you such a long way.
INT: Thank you for sharing, that’s so insightful. Yeah, active listening is so important in the world. It’s important to have people that know how to practice it. I’m curious, with so much travel, how does one navigate a personal life, a family life as well. How was that? Was it quite challenging at times perhaps?
RES: It was incredibly difficult. I’ve been lucky in being able to manage. Travelling 100 days a year is not compatible with having small children. So when our first daughter was born, I stopped working. I mean I was really lucky, the World Bank gave us, I think it was three months of maternity leave and then I had another three months of leave that was owed to me that I had accumulated and not taken. So I had six months.
But I decided I didn’t want to start travelling again and leaving a six month old baby at home. So I took two years, well actually, it turned into four years of unpaid leave so I actually interrupted my career when my children were very small and worked part time at home.
Various colleagues at the World Bank asked me to do some writing assignments and I did some other writing assignments for other people and worked part time. But before that, even getting to the point of being able to negotiate, so my husband is an academic. We met in Oxford.
INT: Wow.
RES: Yeah, so Oxford also gave me that, not only my career but also-
INT: Amazing.
RES: -my marriage, my emotional life. David and I, so he is a few years older than I am. We overlapped at Oxford for a year. He was just finishing his DPhil, I was just starting mine. Then he went to MIT. So he was in Boston, I was in Oxford and fine.
Luckily with just three eight week terms, as soon as term ended I would go fly to Boston and spend the vacation with him so I got to spend lots of time with him there. Then came the opportunity to try to get a job at the World Bank, a full time job and so that happened. He was in Boston and I was in Washington DC and that’s not too bad. That’s an easy commute for weekends.
Then he had to find a full time job. I mean postdocs only last so long, although his went on for five years. The job that he most wanted was here in San Diego. I was then, I don’t think I yet had my full time job at the World Bank. I had a series of one year contracts before but I wanted to have a full time job there. So we had a discussion, well how do we navigate that? Boston to DC easy but San Diego to DC not so easy.
But we decided we would both try and get the jobs that we wanted because if one of us didn’t even try, maybe it would come back to haunt us in resentment later on. So he applied for and got the job at UCSD in a new department they were setting up. That was his dream job. I applied and got the job in Washington DC at the World Bank. That was my dream job. So then we commuted across the country for several years.
Finally he said to me, “You know, one of my life’s ambitions is to be a grandfather and we have a few intermediary steps to take first so can we get on with it already.” So he had a sabbatical year coming up. We got married at the beginning of the sabbatical year. He came and spent the year in Washington. Our baby, first child was born towards the end of that year and then I took the unpaid leave, took four years off and lived in San Diego.
At the end of those years when I had to go back to Washington, he persuaded UCSD to allow him to go and live in Washington with me and pioneer distance teaching. This was years before Covid and anyone was thinking about teaching not standing in front of their class.
So he did that for a few years. Then after four years when permission came to an end and he had to come back to San Diego, the World Bank agreed to allow me to telecommute as a very special favour from San Diego. So then I telecommuted for many years.
INT: Wow. The perks of remote working and also the struggle of being such a successful couple. You both applied for the jobs you wanted and you got them.
RES: It’s what my husband calls the two body problem. It’s a variation on a philosophical problem.
INT: I like it. So you actually ended up-
RES: It’s called the mind body problem.
INT: Yeah. I love it. So you actually ended up quite far from home, quite far from South Africa and also quite far, in your personal statement you did say I want to be back in South Africa. How has it been living in the US? Have you enjoyed it?
RES: Until recently yes, very much. I am dismayed by the direction that the US has taken, dismayed, sickened but earlier on I was delighted and proud to become an American citizen. I think leaving South Africa was made easier by the fact that I felt that my career enabled me to do what I had set out to do but only on a global stage rather than just in South Africa so that felt fine.
I felt incredibly privileged and lucky to have the career that I had and the opportunities that I’ve had. I like to think I made some difference in the world, even if the differences didn’t always last. I love Zimbabwe but it felt like a worthwhile way to spend one’s working life. I don’t really miss South Affrica. I miss the beauty of it. Yeah, so life changes.
The things that we think we want when we’re 20 may not be the things that we get. I do, I feel incredibly lucky that I’ve had the most, and have the most wonderful life and I’ve had these extraordinary opportunities that have enriched my life immeasurably.
INT: You’re such a beautiful story teller and it’s just so lovely hearing all about your life. Am I right that you’re now retired and enjoying yourself? How are you finding retired life? What do you do to relax and have fun? What brings you happiness these days?
[01:19:43]
RES: I love being retired. I retired quite early, I was only 58 and that was because somebody at the World Bank for whom I have a healthy mutual disregard, was promoted to become my boss’s boss’s boss. I think really it was quite a personal thing. He didn’t like me and he didn’t think that I should have special permission to telecommute.
So when he was promoted, he said I had to come back to Washington or quit. So I went back to Washington with the thought that oh well, I’ll go for six months and then retire at the end of it. I wasn’t nearly ready to retire at the end of six months but at the end of 18 months, I’d spent a lot of time not living with my husband before we got married and I didn’t want to do that again now even though our children were grown up and had left home.
So as I explain to people, I love my husband more than I loved the World Bank at that stage and so I retired pretty early. But in the end, again, this is another man behaving badly whose actions, irritating and annoying, actually in some ways did me a big favour because I love retirement. I probably would have carried on working for another seven years until the mandatory retirement age, another nine years or whatever it was.
But I retired early and I volunteer to maintain a sense of purpose and a sense of not living a selfish life, doing things to help other people which is important to me. I do a little bit of consulting work for the World Bank. Former colleagues sometimes ask me to travel for them, to write reports and I do a little bit of that, mostly to remind myself that I still can write coherently. I play a lot of basketball which comes with its own broken bones.
So about 15 years ago I learnt about senior women’s basketball. It’s a half court so you don’t have to run all the way back and forwards down the court. It’s just a team of three in a half court. I had never played basketball before but I tried it out and I love it. So I play three times a week avidly with a group of women ranging in age from 50 into their 90s. I mean remarkable women, it’s wonderful.
I play a little bit of tennis sometimes. I love playing Scrabble. I belong to three book clubs. So all of that, I travel a lot usually in the summer, in Europe mostly, sometimes with friends from Oxford. This summer I’m going to be cycling in Switzerland for a week with a friend from Trinity and a South African Rhodes scholar friend.
INT: That’s amazing. Gosh, you’re having such a beautifully diverse and you’re keeping yourself busy. It sounds great. I hope you have less injuries though. I have to ask, I mean you’d previously mentioned to me that you still come back to Oxford occasionally. Are there any places that remind you of your student days? Are there cafés, restaurants, pubs, parks you love to visit still?
RES: I love going to the botanic gardens. I love going back to Trinity College. I mean there are so many memories. I remember first coming to Oxford and needing to, I mean I lived in college that first year, and needing to come in and there were a group of tourists and the college was closed but there were a group of tourists peering through the gates.
I remember walking in and thinking I live here. I do my laundry here. I’m so lucky. Look, these people are just trying to get a glimpse of the place where I live and wash my dirty socks. I love coming back to Oxford, going punting, going to the [unclear 01:24:36], just walking around the parks with Trinity College being so close to the parks.
For a while when I was in Trinity, there was a student, an undergraduate student who was blind but she loved to go for walks so I used to go with her for walks around the parks. I love walking round the parks. That’s always a delight.
INT: I do think that’s the best part of Oxford is the parks and just so much greenery in the city. I think it’s really unique. We talked about your love of reading before and you mentioned your book clubs. I have to know, have you read anything good lately? Do you have any reading recommendations?
RES: Oh gosh. One of my favourite authors is Ann Patchett. I love the way she explores personal relationships and the kindness with which she writes. I mean she has talked about saying there’s a lot of ugliness in the world and if you want to read about that, she’s not your author.
So she’s a wonderful person and so I enjoy her novels. I mean so many, thousands of good things that I’ve read but one novel that I read a few years ago that I haven’t stopped recommending to people is called This Is Happiness by an Irish writer called Niall Williams. Do you know him?
INT: I’ve not heard of him but it sounds beautiful.
RES: It’s a wonderful, wonderful novel. It really celebrates life and delight and living, squeezing out every drop of happiness out of life no matter what it is and kindness. It’s a wonderful, wonderful book set in rural Ireland in the late 1950s. It’s just a delight and beautifully written.
There are lots of contemporary, wonderful American novelists who I really enjoy. Gosh, now you’re going to put me on the spot. The Nickel Boys. I’m blanking on the author’s name. Let me turn around and look at my bookshelf.
INT: Yes, I’ve been admiring your bookshelf.
RES: Oh yeah. There’s a British writer who wrote something called Still Life, Sarah Winman, her book Still Life is fantastic.
INT: Nice.
RES: Sorry. You’ll have to do a little bit of editing. So James McBride is an American author whose books are fantastic, all of them. Amor Towles, another American writer who wrote The Gentleman in Moscow.
INT: Oh yeah, I know that one.
RES: I read quite widely. At the moment I’m reading Richard Powers The Overstory which is superb. I’m about halfway through and it’s really a book about trees for the most part. Another book that I read recently I loved called North Woods. It is, gosh, who’s it by?
I am blanking on the author’s name but it’s a really, really fascinating book. It’s a series of linked short stories that set in one place in a particular house in New England. The short stories span American history and touch on major periods of American history and then all link together in a beautiful way. Yeah, I read widely.
INT: So many good recommendations. I’m going to have to listen back through and write some of them down. It’s so beautiful to see your curiosity and just love for reading and learning and also just your positivity about it. It’s amazing. My very final question for you, and thank you so much for all of your time today, in fact actually no, I’ve got two more questions if you don’t mind, Joy. One is that I did just want to ask here on the recording I shared our personal statement with you and I just wondered what young Joy would think of you today and how you felt reading it and just what emotions came from that.
RES: So I had no memory of writing those things whatsoever. I’m glad to say young Joy did not embarrass older Joy. There’s a continuity between my young self and my life trajectory and my older self. I mean I think young Joy had no idea what a wonderful life awaited her. Maybe not exactly as I had anticipated but then who could possibly anticipate life.
[01:30:15]
In the stories I’ve told you, there have been chance remarks and chance meetings that have changed the course of my life in an extraordinary way. I just feel like I’ve been so lucky, so incredibly lucky. My life’s been much, much better than I could possibly have imagined it. How privileged I am to be able to say that.
INT: What a beautiful journey you’ve been on. I just haven’t been able to stop smiling this whole time, it’s been so lovely. If I could ask you, and I promise this is the last one but if you could give one piece of advice to Rhodes scholars today, reflecting on everything you’ve spoken about, what would it be?
RES: Can I make it two?
INT: Yes. As many as you like.
RES: Follow your heart and by that I mean think about what’s important to you and pursue that. Be open to unexpected opportunities. Just keep a heart and a mind that’s open to the world and when opportunities come, don’t be afraid to grab them.
INT: As you did and look where it led you. Thank you so much for your time today, Joy. It’s just been an absolute privilege to speak with you, to reflect and to laugh as well. It’s been brilliant. I really appreciate your time.
RES: Thank you Anya. It’s been a delight talking with you. Thank you very much.
INT: Brilliant. Well I’ll be in touch with next steps but for now that was the Oral History interview, so much fun and yeah, I’ll be in touch with you soon. Thanks, Joy.
RES: Thank you so much. Bye, bye.
[Audio ends: 01:32:11]
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[unclear] – unclear audio [s/l] – sounds like [ph] – phonetic |
[overtalking] – to an extent no conversation can clearly be heard [audio distorted] – connection issues/other noises which results in no conversation being clearly heard |