2/5/2010

Day two of monstrously large amounts of history lectures. We started out by talking about the time period between the “end of apartheid” up until the 1990s, which was a very depressing time for South Africa. I don’t want to go into it, but look it up if you feel like being horrified and depressed. We then talked about media and protest, mostly through the methods of music. Protest songs, national anthems, the like. After the morning lectures, we spent a couple hours taking a plant identifying walk, looking at trees and talking about the different characteristics of each. Then we put our knowledge to use, as we had a pile of branches and we had 20 minutes to separate them into what we deemed to be correct groupings. Not as fun as it sounds.
After lunch, we went back into the classroom to talk about more history. It was still a rough time for the area, and it made it even harder to know that while this all was going on, the man who was lecturing us, David, was a very strong activist. He knew many of the men who were tortured and killed, yet was able to talk about them like they were pieces of history. He met the man who killed Steve Biko. Don’t be fooled, David was an activist against apartheid, and is very much an open minded, wonderful man. It’s just very hard to have that much emotion and connection to something that devastating and recent. It makes it that much harder to learn about the tragedies.
The last lecture of the day was a photograph workshop, looking at and analyzing the works of South African photographers. It was a nice light way to end the afternoon, although I didn’t feel too uplifted for the rest of the evening. I cheered myself up with some singing, and then Hannah and I worked on our excel project for the night. Wish us good luck on a good grade! For the next couple of days, we are minus a few lecturers, as one of the cooks who used to work for OTS passed a week ago, and they are at his funeral. The cooks are gone too, so I had to get all of my shangaan in before they left. 3 days till Skukuza and you can actually read this! Words of the next few days: How are you? = ponjahne; I’m fine = neekohne/nefookeeley;