He won a Grey Scholarship, which enabled him to receive post primary education, and in 1931 he obtained a Teacher's Diploma at the Lovedale Training College in the Eastern Cape.
He left teaching after seven years to take up a better-paid job as messenger of the Native Commissioner's Court, and then as a rent collector for the Township Administration.
[1] The following year he studied under Professor Austin Winter Moore for five months at Rhodes University, made possible through a bursary awarded from the Bantu Welfare Trust.
In 1992 a second exhibition served to commemorate his 80th birthday, which was also celebrated with the artist at the King George VI Art Gallery in Port Elizabeth.
[1] His hospital drawings caught the attention of landscape painter Ethel Smythe who took an interest in Pemba and offered him tutelage.
Smythe possessed a large collection of books that introduced him to the work of Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, Diego Velázquez and impressionism.
His first commission came in 1950, in the form of a portrait of the educator and activist, Professor Davidson Don Tengo Jabavu for the University of Fort Hare.