Mind Over Matter

Dr Ncumisa Jilata is the youngest neurosurgeon in Africa – no mean feat in this male-dominated field.

- Aphiwe Boyce

BEING second best was never an option – in fact, she viewed getting any less than a perfect academic score as a failure. This drive to be the very best is what paved the way for super-competitive 29-year-old Dr Ncumisa Jilata to become the youngest neurosurgeon in Africa.

The petite Ncumie, as she’s affectionately known, made history when she graduated from The Colleges of Medicine of South Africa – receiving her degree to raucous applause at a ceremony held in Durban last month.

Her journey into the record books was long and gruelling, she says, when she chats to us during a rare moment of downtime at her spacious home in a leafy country estate outside Centurion, Gauteng.

She had wanted to be so many things growing up in Mthatha in the Eastern Cape, she recalls. When she was 10 she dreamed of being a movie director, then a fashion designer, then an accountant.

But all that changed in 2003 when she was first introduced to the central nervous system. There and then her love affair with the human brain was born.

“All the body parts made sense to me but the brain really captured my attention. Everything starts with the brain – walking, writing, ruling the world . . . The brain is the seat of the soul and I wanted to learn more about it. That’s when I decided I wanted to be a doctor,” Ncumisa explains.

At the time she wasn’t doing biology in Grade 11 at Umtata High School, and realised she needed to add it to her subjects to realise her dream. This led to her cramming three years of the subject into one year during matric – but she cracked it and matriculated with flying colours. She then enrolled in the Faculty of Health Sciences at Walter Sisulu Univer­ sity in Mthatha, and graduated in 2009.