Dr Naledi Pandor at the University of the Western Cape's honorary doctorate ceremony at the Old Mutual Conference Centre in Kirstenbosch on Friday.
In the 1940s, a youngster sat in a mathematics class taught by Oliver Tambo, then a young teacher not much older than his pupils.
It was decades before Tambo would leave apartheid South Africa and lead the ANC from exile after the organisation was banned in 1960.
Sitting in his classroom was Joe Matthews, then a student who would go on to become a lawyer and a senior figure in the same movement.
And such was the impression Tambo made that Matthews would tell his family for years afterwards that he had never had a better mathematics teacher.
