ixhanti lam

Recently I was searching for clues about Noni Jabavu’s life and I stumbled upon the pages of the 1935 edition of The Bantu World. I became intrigued by the representation of black women in the newspaper through a series of articles under the title “Bantu women on the move”. By exploring the archives of The Bantu World black women’s multiple identities begin to emerge providing an answer to the question posed by Nomboniso Gasa in the book Women in South African History: “Where are black women, their multiple voices and multiple forms of self-representation, which are often far from the ‘heroic’ subject and more along the lines of fighting for survival and struggling for dignity and self-expression?”
It is important to contextualize The Bantu World and its significance during the 1930s. In Les Switzer’s Bantu World and the origins of a captive African commercial press in South Africa, hedescribes the context of a reading culture in the 1930s by stating that “literate Africans constituted…

I was preparing a lecture for a group of pre-service teachers earlier today (Bachelor of Education, fourth year). The module is related to professional studies. This module is supposed to prepare students for becoming professional teachers. Sections in the module include discussions about the context of the education system, looking at SACE policy (South Africa Council of Educators), time management and offering case studies from schools.

While preparing the section on time management I decided to include a section on the timetable. Each school operates based on the effectiveness of the timetable. Most 'good' schools aim to have the timetable ready by the end of each year so that teachers know at the onset of the new year which classes they'll be teaching; this is called deployment. There are also schools which only have their timetable ready at the beginning of the year once there's a sense of how many teachers are available or whatever other admin that needs to be de…

I've been useless at blogging about this trip. Mostly because I was always too tired at the end of the day or I was mulling over the day and couldn't decide what to write about (it was easier just leaving a Facebook post in fact). But it's only fitting that I least write a final blog seeing as today is the last day of the trip.

India has been a lesson about many things and unfortunately I have very little original thoughts on my trip because I leave with the lessons I've seen been written about many times before: the inequality, the history, the traffic, the pollution etc etc. Of course this list runs the risk of framing India as the single story of what we mostly see on CNN or the media (perhaps excluding Bollywood). It's been an interesting 10 days which have left me with many questions. The trip spanned Pondicherry, Chennai and New Delhi (I would have loved to pass through Jaipur but after the New Delhi experience we decided against it).

The first mistake I made…

What a day! After surviving a three hour drive from Chennai yesterday-- no streetlights, reckless overtaking, incessant hooting, robots I can count on one hand-- we arrived in Pondicherry. It was cooler and quieter than Chennai. Pondicherry is right by the coast of what used to be a French colony. Today we started the day with Sku talking to MA students at Pondicherry University. Pondicherry University is a mixture of both buildings and forest across the campus (or jungle;we saw a snake slither across the road) . It's a postgrad university with only Masters and PhD students. The class Sku addressed was dominated by women. There's very little I can say beyond my observations about the campus as I spoke to very few students. The class dynamic was very apparent within the university as the cleaners around the university were women who are visibly poor, gaunt and old. The university is so expansive we couldn't walk from the gate to the Humanities building when we arrived. We h…