By Ntikana Ramohlale

Shabnam Shaik’s nine-year journey towards her groundbreaking PhD has been one of resilience and dedication to telling the unsung stories of a Muslim minority living with HIV/AIDS. Hailing from a single-parent household, Shaik is the last born in her family and the only one to get a university education. She obtained four of her previous degrees from the University of KwaZulu Natal, graduating cum laude in both her Honours and Masters degrees in Anthropology. 

Shaik brought with her a wealth of experience in academia having served as a tutor, a Graduate Assistant, lecturing Anthropology, Sociology, Humanities extended programmes and also supervising students at her previous university before seeking greener pastures at Rhodes, initially on a five-year contract, and thus beginning her PhD journey this side. 

Describing her move to Rhodes, Shaik said: “Even though it was a five-year contract, I felt like it would teach me so much, and it would give me the opportunity to create my own courses because previously as a contract staff member you weren’t allowed to do that.” She explains that even though some would consider it easy to teach what is given to them, Shaik lamented the practice of teaching courses that remain unchanged for years and explained that in creating her own courses, she would be growing as a scholar in the process. Shaik also praised the Anthropology department for contributing to such growth saying: “When I was offered the position at Rhodes, I knew I would be learning from a diverse Anthropology department because we’ve had some really really amazing people in this department.”

Reflecting on her PhD journey specifically, Shaik described it as long and having not been positive for the most part. She said: “My PhD is on lived experiences of Muslims living with HIV and that on its own is a very difficult topic, and I knew that but I think I might have underestimated the extent of the difficulty.” Shaik reflected on contemporary institutional standards that require PhD’s to be completed within certain time frames, and how such requirements restrict those in disciplines like Anthropology such as herself, to actually build relationships and immerse themselves in the cultures and live experiences of those they study.

She said that there were number of times that she thought of giving up on her topic and choosing an easier one as obstacles continued to mount. Shaik also reflected on how hard it was to gain access to research participants for her study, and how that prompted her to contemplate whether she still wanted to continue with the PhD at all. She says that despite the number of doors that closed on her face in her quest to gain ethical clearance, she still was driven enough to continue with the project saying: "When you have a population that is hidden, you are now risking any kind of progress that’s been made in the general population because you can start thinking that we have HIV numbers under control in general, but now you have a population where it is spreading and you don’t know about it and that is going to ,in turn, affect the general population”.

Speaking on the importance of building connections with her research participants, Dr. Shaik spoke on the importance of having face-to-face interactions, while compiling their life histories. In hindsight, Shaik concluded that the duration of her PhD journey was worth saying: Yes, it took me nine years before I had actually submitted, but if I had submitted in 2015, 2016, it would not have been a dissertation I would have been proud of." She says it was not peserverance but stubborness that kept her going until she eventually completed her PhD.

Shaik has a chapter coming out in the Global Handbook of Anthropology next year that looks at ethnomedical responses to Muslims living with HIV, published by Routledge. She is currently a post-doc fellow at the Critical Studies in Sexuality and Reproduction at Rhodes University and plans to continue publishing from her PhD work.