What follows hereafter is the story of how I became a man, a citizen and a scholar.

A significant precursor in the history of this autobiography is a lecture I presented at Rhodes University in 2008 at the invitation of Professor Catriona Macleod, then head of the psychology department. The lecture followed my selection as the first recipient of a Department of Psychology award termed the ‘Psychology and Social Change Project’, an initiative

The department's Certificate of Acknowledgement stated that the award was made in recognition of a ‘sustained and excellent contribution to social change and the field of psychology in South Africa’. As sometimes happens at ceremonies of this kind, I was asked to give a public lecture when I accepted the award. I chose an autobiographical theme and used the opportunity of my engagement with the psychology community at Rhodes University to examine the opportunities and challenges I had encountered as a clinical psychologist in apartheid South Africa.

By that time much had happened in my life beyond the demands of my position as the first African clinical psychologist in our country. For understandable reasons, the account given in the Rhodes lecture and the more substantive one given in this autobiography leave out matters which might be of interest to a wider audience. Among them are the rewarding one-and-a-half years I spent in the 1990s as the founding executive director of the Joint Education Trust, a Johannesburg-based, private-sector-funded organisation working in the education sector.

Excluded too is an account of the challenging and fulfilling period from 1994 to 1999, when I worked as the first director general of education during the years of Nelson Mandela's presidency. In August 1999 I resigned from that post in order to take up a full-time position as advisor to Professor Johan van Zyl, then vice chancellor of the University of Pretoria.