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Ubuntu Education Fund (www.UbuntuFund.org)
My time at Ubuntu was an important and memorable part of
my South African experience. The Ubuntu Education Fund is
a well known non-profit organization located in Port Elizabeth,
South Africa. Port Elizabeth is a part of South Africa’s
Eastern Cape, the hardest hit area of the country. The organization
is fantastic. I was introduced to a few Ubuntu representatives
after having given a speech at “South African Youth
Day” back in New York City, an event celebrating the
ability for young people throughout the world to change
things for the better; it was held on the anniversary of
the 1976 Soweto Student Uprisings. The co-founder and president
of Ubuntu, Jacob Lief, suggested that I give them a ring
once I’d gotten settled in the country, and was interested
in doing some volunteer work.
Trough a myriad of effective grass-roots programs, Ubuntu
develops schools and communities, pushing them towards self-sustainability
– essentially fostering community ownership of programs
initiated by Ubuntu. Currently, Ubuntu has A Partnership
in Cultural Exchange, an exchange program going on with
South African and America students. The South African students
are from Sivuyiseni Intermediate School in Kwa Magxaki Township,
picked for academic merit as well as personality/performance
outside of the classroom. The American students have also
gone through selective processes, and are from Fredrick
Douglass Academy II in Harlem. The Ambassadors recently
hosted the Harlem kids as they made their way to South Africa
last summer. The Young Ambassadors – a small group
of about ten or so children – are on their way to
New York City this spring.
The two groups of students
– those in Harlem and those in Port Elizabeth -- share
a paralleled curriculum in school, learning about the similarities
between American and South African apartheid (Jim Crow for
the former; ten years ago for the latter), focusing on the
civil rights movements that overturned both systems. It’s
through the paralleled curriculum that the students are
taught to understand their own lives, communities, and social
issues in a broader, global perspective…realizing
that many local issues are really the same, exact, issues
on a completely different continent…essentially, a
different world that isn’t so different, after all.
It is a lesson that both brings the greater world into a
sense of feasibility/tangibility – realizing that
people on a completely different side of the world can nonetheless
be very much like you – yet allows the students to
realize that their world is bigger than the parameters of
their own community.
While at Ubuntu, I designed and taught a 4-Day workshop
titled “The Role of Media & Its Impact on Youth
of African Descent.” In the workshop, I’d intended
to bring in my experience as a well-known member of the
youth media circle back in New York, and planned to get
them critically thinking a bit about how popular images
both in print and film influence their perceptions of themselves,
of others, and the world in which they live.
We did exercises that I often do, even alone, in my personal
time. For instance, we’d do a “Guess who’s
the editor of this sort of magazine?” experiment,
where the kids looked through the masthead to see if any
of the last names of contributing editors even mildly resembled
names that were familiar, or those with which they’d
be able to culturally identify. The Xhosa culture is a huge
demographic in South Africa yet still remains largely underrepresented
in the media. (I should note, though, that I applaud the
fact that this is quickly, soundly, and steadily changing.)
Unsurprisingly, the magazines which failed to portray images
and messages that were realistically in touch with the students
were the kind of magazines where the mastheads had no Okumus,
Ngxoxos. Gondwes, Mbeles, or other Xhosa (or even Zulu or
Tswana)-related surnames in sight. Smiths, Jordans, and
Van Zyls, surely. Yet, this is where many of the students
and their parents turned to for information on beauty, culture,
and lifestyle. There were very few examples where mastheads
were an integration of sorts – where, sure, you had
your Van Zyls but you had your Ngoxoxas, as well -- and
I’d shown how the content authorized by those rare
teams of multicultural editors just so happened to be much
more culturally aware/inclusive/informed than the others.
It wasn’t solely black or solely white or solely anything;
it was a cultural amalgam. And, like I said, it wasn’t
surprising, given the editors.
The point of the exercise was to get them to realize that
media is never unbiased; the very concept of ‘editor’
speaks to preference…editing out some things while
keeping or emphasizing others. A magazine, a news program,
a newspaper is but a collection of what a set number of
people find important. Get your news from as many varied,
broad-minded yet factually accurate sources as possible.
I’d told them that if they forgot everything I said,
the one thing to remember was to “question absolutely
everything.” That was the bottom line.
This was just one exercise we did; really, we delved into
a number of issues that even I didn’t anticipate speaking
about. We began with media though essentially moved through
gender studies, international relations, sociology, psychology,
economics...whoa! The teachers were surprised that I brought
half of the material that I brought, though said it was
powerful and needed to be discussed; they mentioned that
it was remarkable that that these kids could possibly be
learning this stuff at such a young age. They hoped they
were taking it all in. It was an incredible experience for
everyone, I believe, and certainly made me much more apt
to doing the same thing, even on a broader scale, again.
It was good stuff. By the end, I was surprised by the kids
who were suddenly fired up to create the school’s
first ever newspaper, a project in which they are now currently
engaged. These were really INCREDIBLE kids. I was proud
of them!
And that was my second portion of my most shocking experience
in South Africa; some of my students lived in informal settlements
– virtually metal shacks thrown together, an upgrade,
actually, from wherever they came from. It was often a sacrifice
on behalf of parents and families…if only they could
get their children closer to the city…closer to opportunity…closer
to schools, like Sivuyiseni, with programs like Ubuntu.
I remember some of my students walking me home one afternoon;
I wanted to take them to the movies though suddenly realized
I didn’t have enough for everyone. (It’s called
an undergraduate budget! LOL)
“It’s okay…you don’t have to spend
money or anything; we just want to spend time with you.”
It was incredible – not only were these kids fiercely
brilliant, coming to class when unbelievable catastrophes
were going on at home, still coming with a smile, with hands
raised high ready to answer questions, but they were so
non self-absorbed. There was never a “woe-is-me”
sentiment present, at all; these kids were personable, lively,
charming, charismatic, and stunningly intelligent. It made
me realize that I have no excuse for anything. Nothing at
all. And it made me want to give back that much more. “Who
knows,” they said at the end of our official Chicken
Dance, an opening and closing thing we often did to get
everyone pumped for class when the days were long. “Maybe
one of us will become a journalist.”
Intro
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