The Race to Winter School

As I mentioned at the end of my last post, on Tuesday we were sent an 882 page reader in preparation for the Winter School Retreat which will be held on a vineyard in Paarl, South Africa next week.  Winter School is of course the real reason that I've come here to South Africa (although there were certainly plenty of other reasons to visit!).  It’s a 5 day mini-school of lectures, discussions, and roundtables with participants (graduate students and professors from a variety of disciplines) from University of Minnesota, University of the Western Cape here in Cape Town, and University of Fort Hare in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa.  The theme this year is “Race for the Humanities” so we’ll obviously be focusing thematically on race.  Since receiving the reader on Tuesday I’ve been actively plugging away on the readings, spending most of my days at the National Library with Virgil, but I have also found a little time to enjoy Cape Town!

As I also mentioned at the end of my last post, on Tuesday afternoon I took the time to go and visit the Slave Lodge here in Cape Town.  I know that I visited it before when I was here studying abroad in 2008, but it was great to go back.  The majority of the museum is dedicated to the history of slavery here on the Cape, but what I actually enjoyed the most was a temporary exhibit on protest music during the struggle against apartheid.  It was a really cool exhibit, and I wish that I had been allowed to take photographs in the museum, housed in this long room with a little fake radio playing different songs as you walked around reading the boards that started in the early 1900s and worked forward.  I have to give a lecture in my advisor’s undergraduate class again this fall (I’ve given it twice now) entitled “The Dismantling of Apartheid” and I’m always looking for ways to change it and make it better and I think this year the change will be the addition of a section about music.  I’m feeling inspired :)

Outside of the Slave Lodge

Today I took a break from the library to walk through part of the Greenmarket Square area which is a market for tourists.  I have decided that it is time to update my jewelry collection back in the States (I know that anyone who has seen the numerous pairs of earrings on my little earring trees – yes plural trees - and the scores of necklaces hanging in my closet will thoroughly disagree with that decision, but I’ve gotten bored) so I bought myself a new necklace, see the photo below, and I started scoping out a few pairs of earrings.  I would have probably have purchased a few pairs but first I came upon a painting of an elephant that I simply had to buy for my grandma (all of you who know Grandma Pat understand - amid a sea of elephants, like any good African tourist market it was full of elephants, this one called to me) and I spent the majority of the small amount of money I was carrying with me on that.

My new, very long, necklace