Emily making connections between observations and history

Our Spring Break excursion came around at just the right time for me. I think that all of us on the trip have been observing and understanding South Africa in new and interesting ways and it was refreshing to be given the opportunity to make connections between those observations and the history that has led to such. It was also interesting to compare our excursion to our orientation in that we have all grown so much in our understandings of South Africa and its complexity as well as or understandings of ourselves. I felt very thankful to be given the opportunity to learn and engage in parts of South Africa’s history that we had only thus far talked about in the classroom, especially considering that most South Africans themselves have never been able to do so.

 I was initially very surprised when I would tell Capetonians that I was going to visit Johannesburg and they would say that they had never been or that they had never left the Western Cape at all. Upon further thought though, I realized that I know plenty of Americans who have never visited Washington D.C. and in fact my own parents have hardly left the Northeast in the past five years. This realization has made me all the more interested in doing a little more travel around my own country since I have also only seen small parts of the place that I call home.

I was also very thankful to get to spend more time with students from the other house since I had recently noticed that my own laziness had kept me from hanging out with them more. Aside from all that I learned, I fell as though I spent the bulk of my social time on the trip either deepening friendships I already have with some personal/intense conversation and getting to better know people I had never talked to much better. These new connections provided a much-needed break up from the routines I feel as though I had fallen into in week’s prior and that was very valuable to me. I hope to continue to strengthen those friendships in the coming month.

Of all of the places we visited while in Johannesburg the Apartheid Museum, the Hector Pieterson Museum, and Sharpeville on National Human Rights Day. We live in South Africa as it is because of the effect that Apartheid has had on its people and their psychology. It was jolting to see that movement fully embodied in the rooms of the Apartheid Museum. We speak about racism and apartheid so much it becomes easy to subconsciously separate the policy and it’s paramount cruelty from the human cost of that cruelty. I was really struck by the rooms that listed the named of the killed and showed videos of the violence that actually occurred because it gave life to that which I hadn’t been able to imagine. It was interesting to have been able to make connections between what we have learned about apartheid and how it affected the people we have met in Cape Town to those in Johannesburg. Since I have been reading Don Mattera’s autobiographical essays that deal largely with Sophiatown it was also neat to be able to see visuals of that and make connections between that experience and District Six in Cape Town.