Two Pairs of Twins Graduate Against the Odds at Stellenbosch University

The graduation stage at Stellenbosch University recently served as a bridge between difficult pasts and bright futures for two pairs of twins.

Divano and Diego Blankenberg grew up in Dura Flats, Atlantis. That address alone tells you something about the odds they were working against.

Gangsterism and crime are woven into the fabric of that community, and the list of young men who never made it out is long. Their father died of liver failure when the boys were six, which meant their mother, Audrey, suddenly had to be everything to two small children on her own. She did not have much money. There were times she could not afford to send her sons on school outings, and she felt that, the way mothers feel things they cannot fix.

But her children never went hungry, never felt unsupported, and never doubted that they were capable of something greater than their circumstances suggested.

The university had been part of their lives long before they enrolled as students. From Grade 7, the brothers participated in Stellenbosch’s SUNCEP programme, and in their final two high school years, they joined the university’s Talent Development Programme. Both left matric with distinctions. Divano initially studied electrical engineering before switching to mechanical engineering in his second year. Diego adjusted his own academic direction along the way. In their third university year, Audrey was diagnosed with cancer. Both brothers graduated regardless.

When twin sisters Clio and KD Sass graduated from Stellenbosch University, they were completing a chapter their mother Patricia Grace Rorich had been prevented from finishing four decades earlier. Patricia was studying medicine at Stellenbosch University in the early 1980s when she was detained for her involvement in anti-apartheid activism. After her release, she was informed she could not resume her MBChB degree. The university redirected her into a BSc in dietetics, which she completed. 

Patricia died of breast cancer when her daughters were three years old. Ernest Sass raised Clio and KD in Pinelands, with a large extended family from Elsies River involved throughout their childhood. The girls grew up knowing their mother’s story, understanding what had been taken from her and why.

As per Cape Argus: “When we walk across the stage, we don’t walk for ourselves alone,” Clio said. “We walk for the sacrifices our mother and father made, and for the sacrifices made by their parents and siblings before them.”

They lived in neighbouring residences during their undergraduate years, studied together and leaned on each other with the ease of two people who have been each other’s closest company their entire lives.

Clio earned a master’s degree in food science, awarded cum laude. KD had completed her BSc in mathematical sciences, with a biomathematics specialisation.

Congratulations on your achievements.

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