5 Feb 2009 – The Week in Review

All week at Black Sash we’ve been working on preparations for Friday’s big political events: the opening of Parliament for 2009, and the interim president’s delivery of the State of the Nation Address. The annual event is filled with much pomp and circumstance, includes many demonstrations and protests, and this year will be taking place during a time of political scandal and impending elections.

To catch up on the last week of activities, I’ll run through the highlights. Monday through Wednesday we spent the day at our internships and our evenings were consumed by house meetings, homework, and a “Conversational Xhosa” lesson. The latter was a two-hour intensive introduction to a language we’ve heard spoken almost everywhere we’ve traveled on the Western Cape. As we sat along the edges of the large, unused “Mandela Suite” bedroom, a friend of one of our program coordinators led us through slides of vocabulary and tried to teach us how to form the three distinct clicking sounds used in Xhosa. In the slowly darkening room, we broke into rounds of clicking and phrase repetition, which, to the casual observer, would surely have seemed peculiar.

Thursday most of us walked the 45 minutes to UCT for our first two classes, and arrived on campus to find it bustling with new students and orientation events. Large groups of new students clustered on the rugby field for food and games, while others were engaged in familiar ice-breaker activities on the steps of Upper Campus. It was a pleasant change from the mostly-empty campus atmosphere we’d encountered during our first weeks here, while the students were still on summer break.

When our second class ended, we all took the free Jammie (campus) shuttle from the main campus to the down town campus, and then walked about twenty minutes into the center of the Central Business District (CBD). We split into smaller groups to grab snacks or early dinners along St. George’s Mall before meeting up several blocks away at the Book Lounge, a hip, independent bookstore on Roeland St (near the much-celebrated Charly’s Bakery). In place of Marita’s Women’s Studies class that night, we attended a book launch/lecture for Ida Sussers “Aids, Sec, and Culture: Global Politics and Survival in South Africa”, which covered many topics relevant to our course. The relatively small main-floor room of the shop was packed with people – many of whom had written or researched other prominent works on the subject of AIDS and gender in South Africa. But because the room was full – with people stuffed into corners and leaning against bookshelves along the edges of the room – it was also very hot and stuffy, so when we managed to retreat back out onto the sidewalk an hour later, the cool evening air was very refreshing.

Some people chose to stay in town for dinner, and the rest of us walked back to the minibus taxi rank and grabbed one of the last minibuses on the Hanover Park line. Back at the house we started to make plans for Friday’s big events, drawing up posters for the “Arms March” protest and organizing times and places to meet in the city during the day of social and political action.