PALESA MMAMOSA MOKOENA

Baragwanath maternity matron who welcomed half of Soweto into the world

She rarely went anywhere in Soweto without being greeted by a stranger holding a baby and saying, 'Matron, you delivered me,' or, increasingly, 'Matron, you delivered my mother.' Palesa Mokoena always smiled and asked whether they had eaten.

Born in Witsieshoek in 1951 to a Sesotho-speaking family, Palesa was the daughter of a domestic worker who walked fourteen kilometres each way to a white household in Harrismith. At eighteen she travelled to Johannesburg to train at Baragwanath Hospital's nursing college, and she started on the wards in 1973. She would remain at what became Chris Hani Baragwanath for thirty-eight years, becoming a staff nurse, a sister in the neonatal unit, and Matron of the maternity wing from 1990.

She was on duty on the night of 16 June 1976, when the casualty ward filled with hundreds of injured schoolchildren. She never spoke of it afterwards, except to say that the nurses did not ask whose children they were. She studied for a diploma in nursing administration at the University of the Witwatersrand in the early 1980s, and mentored hundreds of student nurses, many of whom still send her cards on Matron's Day.

She married Jacob Mokoena in 1975 and raised two children in Orlando West, in a house with a green gate that every neighbourhood child knew. She was a lifelong Orlando Pirates supporter, loved samp and beans with a good gravy, sang alto in the choir at Regina Mundi, and kept a garden of marigolds that neighbours called the matron's border.

Matron Pa died peacefully at home in April 2024, after a short illness. She leaves her son, her daughter, her sister Mpho, and seven grandchildren.

“A baby does not ask whose child it is. Neither should a nurse.”