However, her professional prospects in South Africa were hindered by apartheid laws, and Ngubane spent a year in Birmingham, England as William Paton lecturer at Selly Oak.
[4] She received the Ioma Evans-Pritchard Fellowship in 1974 and spent another year at St Anne's College, Oxford, where she revised her PhD thesis for publication.
[5] Ngubane's doctoral thesis was published as Body and Mind in Zulu Medicine (1977), an influential ethnographic study of conceptions of health and illness among the Nyuswa-Zulu.
[4] Another central interest of Ngubane's research was social change, including as a result of colonialism and apartheid, and its effects on Zulu belief systems and cultural practices.
[2] Ngubane published under her married name, Harriet Sibisi, for the early years of her marriage, but later went by her maiden name in a conscious identification with Zulu custom.