ABSTRACT
This portrait shares an account of my thoughts, feelings, and experiences as a black early career academic in South Africa. While calls for decolonization within tertiary institutions grows in South Africa the need to justify black excellence persist in “white spaces”. Questioning this persistence, I share the context within which my freedom must be seen and how resistance in my life has been cultivated. I was not born this way; I was made to be. The isolation experienced when white ears only hear white voices leads to tensions and contradictions and periods of frustration, tiredness, and doubt with a central question remaining of “what does one do to shield yourself against such hate”. I frame this portrait in the imagery of a shackled slave who has come to identify the keys to my freedom lay in the consistent resistance as an activist overcoming victimhood to victory with virtue as my cloak.
