Rolene Wagner has one of the toughest jobs in healthcare

The healthcare professional is passionate about her family - and public health. And she certainly has her work cut out for her as superintendent-general of the Eastern Cape Department of Health. By Sean Christie

- By Sean Christie

Rolene Wagner calls the Eastern Cape home these days, but the family home is in Cape Town's Lotus River, so we made a plan to meet there, with her mother's permission. When I open the door it's Wagner's mother small in stature, wearing a hibiscus-print dress - waiting to greet me.

“Cheryl,” she says, “hard ‘ch’.” She offers a cup of coffee and disappears.

Cheryl’s husband, Roland — Wagner's father — died last year after suffering a stroke. One of the first black systems analysts in the country, he taught information technology to generations of students at the Cape Technikon.

The Wagners were one of many families evicted from Harfield Village after the area was declared fit for whites-only occupation in 1969.

It's about building social capital through the work that we do

“We lived opposite the Harfield station, and then we moved here,” Wagner says.

In their new home in Lotus River, education was given an almost desperate emphasis.

Like so many spheres of life, education under apartheid was segregated with separate systems for whites, blacks and coloureds. For outstanding students in the latter system, a place in Harold Cressy High School in the city, boasting alumni like Rhoda Kadalie and Trevor Manuel, was desirable. Wagner was accepted for her promise as a pianist.

She and her fellow students participated in the schools’ boycott of 1985 in the Western Cape, repeating the year to signify disdain for the system.

It was Roland Wagner's great hope that his daughter would study medicine and become a doctor. When she graduated from the University of Cape Town’s medical school in 1996, he hugged her and said: “Now you can do what you want.” Wagner recalls these words with a sobbing laugh.