A Clearing In The Bush Teaching South African Women S Writing

INTRODUCTION
‘Location’ as a notion and phenomenon is, for us as
a term, much richer merely than that of a ‘modern’
university in the Fens of East Anglia UK (in
Cambridge, but at the other university). It suggests,
additionally, our ethnic, ethical, political, gendered
and individual subject positions, and the imaginary
constructs which we build up and against which
we measure real experiences of texts, and ‘life’ more
broadly. As Mignolo (1994, p 508) puts it:
Despite all of its ambiguities and potential hazards,
however, the notion of the ‘post-colonial’ ultimately
foregrounds the politics and ethics of location in the
construction of knowledge: Žrst, because it clariŽes
the theorising of colonial experiences as non-neutral
with respect to where the act of theorising is (ethically
and politically, not necessarilygeographically)located or
performed, and second, because it inserts the personal
signs of the understanding subject (her or his ability ‘to
be from’ and ‘to be at’) into an imaginary construction.
The phenomenographical approach to learning and
teaching meshes well here with the theoretical and
analytical critiques enabled by the interpretative
devices of poetics such as the loci of enunciation, and
imaginary constructions. Learning/teaching theories
and approaches, and feminist and post-colonial reading
practices are the main enabling strategies for reading
the student and teacher’s experiences of our classroom
situation.
The main selected texts are by Zoe Wicomb (1987)
and Bessie Head (1977), with contextual reading in
Black Mamba Rising (1986) Tsitsi Dangarembga
(1988), Lauretta Ngcobo (1988), Miriam Tlali (1989)
and Mzwakhe Mbuli (1988) (the only male). Major
intended outcomes of the course are to introduce
students to a range of post-colonial women’s writing,
in context, to enable them to reflect on their own
subject positions and their own reading practices and
to become more familiar with the use of post-colonial
and feminist theory and practice.These are knowledge,
skills and attitudinal outcomes and the enabling
270 IETI 37,3
‘A Clearing in the Bush’: Teaching South African
Women’s Writing
Gina Wisker, Anglia Polytechnic University, Cambridge, UK
SUMMARY
This essay takes its title from a short story by Zoe Wicomb (1987), so as to begin to locate and Žnd a
way of expressing the experiences of reading, discussing and teaching a selection of South African
women’s writing to student groups in the UK. This paper looks speciŽcally at teaching South African
women’s writing on a ‘Black and Asian women’s writing’module, with some reference to other classes
in which South African women’s writing has been part of this study. In doing so, post-colonial and
feminist critical practices are usefully integrated with the learning theories of phenomenography and
experiential learning in order to better explore the developing learning experience. From where we are
located, it has been important to Žnd our own voices with which to articulate our responses to these
texts. Our own locus of experience, our ‘clearing in the bush’ is something we have grown gradually
to recognize and identify. It is hoped that we have been learning to appreciate the writings available
to us without translating them into the discourse of the colonial, nor Žlling them up with our own
particular meanings and the interpretations of a white feminist criticism. The post-colonial imaginary,
and the discourses available to us have meshed with our own experiences as students and teacher,
learners and readers in the process.
Innovations in Education and Training Internationa l
ISSN 1355-8005 print ISSN 1469-8420 online © 2000 Taylor & Francis Ltd
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals

learning and teaching practices employed (discussion,
video, artefacts, visits, testimony, logs, creative
responses and so on) reflect this. South African
women’s writing is approximately two weeks’ work
on this second and third year Women’s Studies
module, although students may choose to write their
essays or produce their creative work wholly or partly
on South African women’s writing and so extend their
study.
TEACHING POST-COLONIAL WRITING:
ISSUES AND PRACTICES
Negotiating ways of reading and discussing South
African women’s writing is a challenge in a classroom
thousands of milesaway from the source of the writing,
relying upon some potentially rather dubious or
confused preconceptions. Committed though they
may be, in the face of South African and other simi-
larly marginalized or hidden bodies of writing, many
students are silenced, and then, hopefully, intrigued
and excited. Part of the initial silencing derives
from the difŽculties of knowing how to interpret the
new and different. This relates directly to issues of
colonialism, imperialism, authority and the canon.
The canon of English literature and the practice of
literary study mirror the development of the growth
of the Empire. The canon itself is an empire built
and defended by certain dominant groups within the
establishment. As the work of Marxist critics such
as Raymond Williamsand post-colonial critics,such as
Gayatri Spivak suggests, political and cultural recon-
Žgurations lead to different reading practices as well
as to the challenge of different texts and different
contexts. Students largely used to a diet of the canon
and the new ‘improved’ canon (expanded a little with
some post-modern texts, something American, if
lucky, some Caribbean poetry) are likely to have had
their reading practicesdirected and their criticalappre-
ciation subjected to particular totalizing discourses.
Reading colonial and post-colonial writing through
a developing post-colonial lens of theory and practice
is a complex, fraught and ultimately, (it is hoped)
rewarding experience. Such is the case when we teach
and discuss South African women’s writing in under-
graduate and continuing education classrooms in the
UK where South African oranges once lay unbought
on supermarket shelves as a radical reaction against
apartheid, and many student bars were re-named
Nelson Mandela or Winnie Mandela. Post apartheid,
those engaged in reading and working with colonial
and post-colonial texts using post-colonial critical
practices are eager to work with the writing of South
African women. But our imaginary constructions of
South Africa litterour thought processes, and the locus
of the readers as well as the enunciators becomes
complex, an insidious blockage to our understanding,
a challenge to be taken up and engaged with using as
much sensitivity, personal response, and contextual
information handling as can be managed. Kaplan
(1986, p 177) engages with the issue of context and
loci of enunciation (and reception):
Unless we are actually specialists in the area from which
these foreign anglophone literatures come, and teaching
them in that context, our more than usually fragmented
and partial knowledge of the history, politics and culture
in which they were produced and originally read
frequently leads us into teaching and thinking about these
textsthrough anunintentionally imperialistlens, conating
their progressive politics with our own agendas, inter-
preting their versions of humanism through the historical
evolution of our own.
In the context of undergraduate classes in the UK,
many students are unaware of colonial and post-
colonial discourses and somewhat silenced in the
face of the unknown. They Žnd it difŽcult to articulate
an engagement with the texts of writers whose
experiences of life in no way seem to match their own.
Our fascination and (shared) difŽcultieswith speaking
about South African women writers can, on the one
hand, be seen (embarrassingly and unintentionally, of
course) as the lure of the exotic. On the other hand,
there is the politically aware sense that discovery,
labelling and critically constructed readings of texts
(probably, from a European position) of some of the
least available and read (or read of) a group of Black
women writers is liable to be an equally embarrassing,
unintentionally colonial appropriation. However,
silenced separatism gets us nowhere:
The problems of speaking about people who are ‘other’
cannot, however, be a reason for not doing so. The
argument that it’s just too difŽcult can easily become a
new form of silencing by default . . . But whites can
never speak for Blacks.
(Spivak and Gunew, 1986, p 137)
Spivak (ibid, p 137)offers a speaking position for white
readers:
Why not develop a certain degree of rage against the
history that has written such an abject script for you that
you are silenced?
Ignorance is destructive. Any critical piece on an
Teaching South African Women’s Writing 271

emerging literature will be a tentative step towards
understanding and recognition. It will unavoidably also
be some form of appropriation and translation. In order
to understand and respond with insight into new
literatures, like any other literature we have to relate to
our previous reading, and acquire some contextual
underpinning. This is all fraught with potential bias,
and the partial information which seems to be available
can skew our reading and attempts Žrst to understand,
then let the texts speak for themselves.
Spivak (1985):
problematizes the production and retrieval of subaltern
speech in light of its dependence on dominant discursive
Želds, which constitute subaltern subjects, deŽne their
modalities of expression, and structure the positions from
which they speak and are heard.
(Coroni, 1994, p 645)
Considering issues of recording and publishing another
emergent literature, Aboriginal women’s autobiog-
raphy and biography, Ferrier (1985, p 138) advocates
enabling a varietyof voices tospeak through biography
preventing the disruption of an imposed ‘authoritative’
version. She alsowarns against problems of misreading
‘alternative’ texts. Works by Aboriginal women writers
refusing to follow an established format, might be
merely disregarded and marginalized:
So when you choose your alternative,perhaps previously
– silenced subject, you need to employ a range of
strategies to engage with the complex ways in which
power and authority circulate.
Unless we recognize, we cannot comment and try
to understand, pass responses on, recommend, speak
about. Silence is no answer, and absence has been with
us too long. These texts need space to be produced
and read as far as possible with our understanding
of their aims, their context, their modes of expression.
Recalling Spivak, if we remain silent in awe of differ-
ence and probably tinged with guilt, we too have been
disempowered, and everyone loses.
The expression of South African women writers
has been almost entirely missing from the available
reading repertoire and our approaches are based
upon an imaginary which configures South African
writing as potentially bound up solely with testifying
to the violence and the dehumanization of apartheid,
necessarily always engaging politically with its
everyday and longer term injusticesin their daily lives.
In the face of such a shocking past and present, it could
be argued, what else could be writtenabout if one could
write at all and be published and read without
censorship?
In this study on the module, gradually we have read
and learned together of the ways in which apartheid
literally separated – divided in order to rule – the
different racial groups which comprise South Africa.
The experiences and the writing of these groups were
also separated from the world, denying their reading
freedoms by making any South African writing,
particularly that by women, an all pervading absence
even in their own classrooms. Not only did readers in
the UK see nothing of these writings, readers in South
Africa concentrated on the canon, and saw nothing of
them either. As Govinden writes of her own apartheid
education, Drum never appeared in ofŽcial classroom
reading, though it lay about in her home, and:
Can it be true that black women writers were writing
since the turn of the century, yet they never made their
way into my classrooms in this town on the north coast
of Kwazulu – Natal. Even Olive Schreiner’s The Story
of an African Farm (1883), though presented to me as
an exemplary model of ‘indigenous’ writing, was not
depicted for its singular South African perspective, nor
for its place in feminist thinking at a time when the world
was moving into the second wave of feminist thinking
and writing.
(Govinden, 1995, p 174)
Reections of her own experience were absent: ‘this
daily history was slighted by a politics of selection
working invisibly on behalf of my colonised self’ (p
175). And in the UK, though we have not suffered the
physical and psychological abuse, as have those under
apartheid, still an apartheid of the intellect has been
imposed through those years. We have been starved of
the reading, the insights, the cultural awareness and
articulation of experience of women writers. This is
not the polite inquisitiveness of the complacent: we
need to know, we need to share, but not to appropriate.
Oddly, perhaps, like Govinden we too have been
‘subjected to colonial discourse and simultaneously
prevented from criticisingempire “textuality”’ (p 175)
with those protected absences, that already ‘too full’
curriculum replete with the old and the new canonical
texts.
Textual choices, forms and treatments are vehicles for
shaping, guidance, control and limitation.As Boehmer
has pointed out, colonizers use a variety of textual
representations in order to render recognisable the
unfamiliarand new. Treatiesand declarations, records,
logs and the couching of descriptions of the new and
strange in familiar forms, myths, endowing them with
272 IETI 37,3

familiar names paralleling them with those from back
home are all ways in which colonizers have sought to
feel comfortable in new worlds, familiarize and then
to own through redescription (Boehmer, 1985, p 14).
In teaching South African writing – among other post-
colonial texts from different contexts – it is difŽcult
to establish some familiarity and pattern, making the
different accessible and to facilitate a situation where
differences deŽne themselves, speak for themselves.
Use of visitors, text, personal testimony, images and
video were strategies and vehicles in this attempt, as
I shall go on to discuss.
Personal experiences here are aligned with those of the
students. In effect, I was a participant observer in their
learning processes as together we began to read and
respond, creating our own articulations of thoughts,
feelings and arguments around the themes, issues and
writing practices of those women whose work we read.
Like the students I have had to move slowly through
this process. We needed first to establish what the
popular imaginary or even the ‘soap opera’ versions
of South Africa are, for us, here in a UK classroom.
On the one hand, there is a veritable wasteland, a
resounding silence interspersed with whispers from
potential women writers, and a gradually revealing
single voice, of Bessie Head, but the norm is a nearly
complete absence of texts.
On the other hand, there are the recent memories of the
daily intrusion of news coverage of violence, intense
poverty, car tyre necklaces, burning and shooting,
scandal and astonishing mythic presences as South
Africa moved into the popular imaginary. There was
cultural and media coverage feeding and sustaining this
imaginary from a country whose fruit we must not
eat(to maintain the sanctions)and whose people could
not speak directly to us, but shouted and screamed
and waved to the watching cameras, ran through mud,
(children often) being shot by men (white and black)
in uniforms, led by brutal-faced white thugs. Myths
are simpliŽed ways of coping with the complex and
their narratives provide us with shorthand responses.
It is also too easy now, post-apartheid, to embrace
the alternative myth, to buy into the version of the
imaginary which is constructed through the joining of
de Klerk and Mandela, the celebratory Nobel peace
prize, pop star icon visits and waves from balconies
of the powers who often, themselves, dithered over
embargoes and investments.
So how do we as teachers, students and readers engage
with these complexities and Žnd a discourse which is
critical to ensure that what we say and produce can be
recognized and assessed by a higher education system,
and also personally reective and engaged? On what
canwe base this since, except tothe very initiated,there
is still so little material available which tells us of the
lives of South African women today, and which reects
this in current literary production?
This learning theory, as well as feminist/cultural
critical practices, is used in order to investigate the
ways in which we, as a group in a speciŽc instance,
or series of instances, worked on the selected South
African women’s writing in the Black and Asian
women’s writing module. Some other, shorter
examples of working with South African writing with
UK based students are also mentioned.
STUDY
To begin the work on South African women’s writing,
speciŽc focus group questions were asked to identify
students’ knowledge and their versions of the popular
imaginary construction of South Africa. After the
module they were asked to write reectively on what
they felt they had gained, what developed and how they
had changed (if they had). Their responses to texts
underlie many of the comments here about them as a
group. I will also reect on my own engagement with
South African women’s texts and the issues they raise
about our reading practices, reading from different
cultural contexts and personal experience. We started
with a number of questions:
• What do students know about South Africa and
about South African women’s writing?
• Do they transfer their assumptions about African
American women’s writing – the most easily
accessed Black women’s writing – to this other
continent and other body of texts?
• Do they transfer the ‘soap opera’ media knowledge
of South Africa pre- and post-apartheid to their
reading and their reading expectations?
Questions led to discussion and recorded responses.
Students said they knew little about South Africa
except media versions of apartheid demonstrations and
stories about the rise and fall of Winnie Mandela. Many
of their assumptions about the themes and concerns of
South African women writers revolved around political
comment and overt arguments against apartheid. They
expected a concentration not speciŽcally political, but
sexually political, on such issues as the role of the
mother, relationships, marriages and sisterhood. Some
of their assumptions transferred from our reading of

African American women’s writing or Asian women’s
writing i.e. Buchi Emecheta and Flora Nwapa among
others. There was also a difficulty in separating the
speciŽc contexts and lives of speciŽc writers from the
general. Some comments follow:
I know very little of Black South African women writers.
Only one name sounds familiar even if I never read any
of her books and is that of Nadine Gordimer. What I
know of South Africa comes from the television and
some documentaries or from newspapers and magazines.
Invariably the news deals with problematic issues: riots,
political prisoners, racial hatred and the appalling living
conditions in shanty towns. When I was little my aunt
used to work on passenger ships and used to bring home
some souvenirs like wooden statuettesand necklaces, her
portrait of the country was quite rosy and touristy. The
only other female Žgures I know of are Winnie Mandela
and Miriam Makeba, whose voice has become a symbol
of pride and endurance. (student 1)
I think that my preconceptions of South African
women’s writing are probably rather stereotypical. I
think of Black South African women’s writing as
concentrating on the divide of colour in their country and
apartheid. I would think that the writing would be about
life with racism and of being seen and treated like
second-class citizens by the whites and Afrikanas. (sic)
I also knew of a person who lived in Johannesberg in the
seventies who criticised the blacks as being Žlthy, but
would not comment on the fact that they were forced to
live in shanty towns with a lack of money and limited
education because of the mentality of people such as her.
(student 2)
Teaching and learning: self, context and
strategies
To be honest I was, of course, more than a participant
observer in the process of the students’ development
and change. I was also a change agent, the teacher
encouraging reflection and engagement without
swamping – I hope – while I was, and still am, trying
to engage with a post-colonial discourse which
does not distance the work and feelings explored in the
work. What I do/did not want to do was to appropriate
South African women’s writing for the academy as
if it were one topical literary for consumption, one
construction in a series which one year might include
Victorian ghost stories, and in another the Scottish
regional novel. My own feelings were and are that
something so powerful and engaging could not just be
a replaceable set of texts on a syllabus moving in and
out of fashion. Also, teaching South African women’s
writing was less a closing down, a production of an
acceptable reading of a small canon of texts, than a
development and expansion in their knowledge and
approach to the texts in context. An additional aim
was to enable further reading, an expansion in their
self-knowledge, and in their imaginary. Teaching the
texts was much more a matter of finding enabling
strategies and suggesting, exploring and modelling
analytical and reflective modes of expression which
would enable engagement and development as post-
colonial readers without engulfment or silencing.
The classroom experience is a dynamic one affectedby
preconceptions about the material and issues studied,
and by learning/teaching styles and strategies(Trigwell
and Prosser, 1991, Biggs, 1993)Any teaching situation,
and particularly that using literary criticism, can
replicate the authoritarianism of government:
literary criticism requires for its dissemination a
pedagogical practice whose historical lineage ties it
to the development of supervisory techniques for the
governance of populations. This practice still has an
indispensible Žgure, the exemplary teacher / critic who,
through a process of supervision and correction,
embodies the authority of regulative judgement.
(Shum, 1990, p 7)
This pedagogical practice is inherited from Christian
missionaries. Its problem is that in seeking to enable
articulation, it regulates bureaucracies and ‘normal-
izes’ it. In order to try and minimize such intervention
and control, in an academic setting, we used reective
writing and reflective experiential response in each
session (see below) among other strategies.
A key learning theory underpinning and informing my
own approach as a teacher is that of phenomenography.
Phenomenography seeks in looking at the learning
situation, to take into account teacher and student
approaches and perceptions of learning, and the
complex context of our reading practises, our loci of
enunciation. We seek to make links with the texts in
context, so the ‘object’ of our learning is much more
complex than any diagram can easily suggest, and the
outcomes are a mixture of knowledge, skills and
attitudesincluding, amongst the latter, confronting and
dealing with ignorance and prejudice – covert or overt
– while articulating our own responses and avoiding
post-colonial reading practice mineŽelds.
Learning and teaching are influenced by both our
preconceptions (including pre-experience and pre-
knowledge as well as hidden, overt and covert
prejudices) as tutors and students, and our approaches
to learning. This involves learning perceptions and
274 IETI 37,3

approaches i.e. whether we are reectors or activists,
surface (assimilators) or deep (relaters to experience
and other understanding) learners (Entwistle and
Hounsell, 1975; Marton and Saljo, 1976; Ramsden,
1979). It also involves the tutor’s appreciation of,
ability to work with and further development of
learning approaches and styles, conscious or not of
their own learning and teaching styles and approaches.
All of these elements interrelate and change. It is a
fluid and volatile mixture. Perceptions, approaches
and styles affect the kind of learning and experience
which takes place, enabled (or otherwise) by the
various vehicles of study – which include texts,
teaching learning practices, assessment and reection
practices, materials, etc.
The objects of study in this instance, on this module,
are multiple. They include not only the selected range
of texts but also the post-colonial and feminist theories
and practices put into practice. The learning outcomes
are appropriately varied, including knowledge out-
comes (of texts, approaches, context) skills (ability to
reect change, respond, read, articulate) and attitudes.
In this last category there is hoped to be a shift from
various degrees of ignorance and even prejudice
(depending on individuals), to appreciation, empathy
and articulation without appropriation. All of this
activity is situated in the context of learning and
living, the learning location and our own intellectual
and physical locations which incorporates everything
from geography, history, culture and language to
personal experiences. Influences move between
students and tutors, materials, experience outside and
inside the classroom, and that there is influence,
change, reflection and development in a dynamic
interaction with the materialsand learning activitiesas
catalysers.
Situating our work and reading within post-colonial
discourses and theories has been immensely difŽcult.
But it has been much easier with the students on this
module (self selected, multi-cultural, highly creative,
used to engaging personal responses with critical
analysis)than with many of the other classes for whom
South African writing is a small or large part of the
syllabus, and who are less used to or less able to engage
reectively and experientially (because of curriculum
restraints). Some of these are adult groups in contin-
uing education classes with whom I have also worked.
They often bring with them an immense amount of
response ‘baggage’. Some of the adult continuing
education students, being older, have immensely useful
personal experiences of life in the colonies, for
instance, and many have been reading colonial and
post-colonial literature for years. Others have a one-
sided experience of colonial life which they would
now like to Žll out. Some are possibly expiating a kind
of colonial guilt by reading Black writing. Others are
occasionally betraying their own often unrecognized
or unnamed colonial approaches in the midst of
(intended) liberalism and tolerance. I am also worried,
however, about my/our own appropriation in teaching
these texts, and about the missionary zeal with which
I and others kneel before our students and present them
with the gift of South African women’s writing: ‘look
what you have missed, let me take you on an exotic
journey, open your eyes, help you to analyse with the
academic tools we are developing’. Some of what we
read will inevitably confront our own prejudices and
ignorances, and confuse us too about a guilt we had no
recognition of, a prejudice we had never had occasion
to recognize and deal with. Confusion is no reason to
avoid the opportunity to consider and deal with these
responses and issues. As Ngcobo (1998, p 40) puts it,
not everything we read of Black women’s writing will
suit us:
We as Black writers at times displease our white reader-
ship. Our writing is seldom genteel since it springs from
our experiences which in real life have none of the
trimmings of gentility. If the truth be told, it cannot
titillate the aesthetic palates of many white people, for
deep down it is a criticism of their values and their
treatment of us throughout history.
I do not want to be silenced or to stand in awe, to
appropriate, to expiate my own racial guilt, to cover
personal responses thoroughly with layer upon layer
of academic discourse which distances it, or to claim
an identicality, an essentialism about the lives of the
women who are writing, to merely engage both their
experiences as reflected in the work, and empathize
but remain unable to explore how and why they say
what they say as they do, what might enable or prevent
their expression, the conditions of its production and
consumption at home (South Africa) and abroad (UK,
USA, Australia, etc.). I will probably, however, have
to move through all of these stages in the appreciation
and constantly developing experience of reading and
discussing South African women’s writing. I can see
my students also moving through these stages.
CASE STUDY
I am going to look generally at the learning and
teaching strategies we use in the ‘Black and Asian
women’s writing’ module to enable students to engage
with cultural awareness, and personal responsiveness

to texts. During the module students are asked to keep
a reflective diary or log which records critical and
personal responses to the reading, and the way it
interrelates to their own lives. So, typically, a student
might note how they are changing their understanding
of an area of writing which is new to them or how
this reading surprises them, relates to events in their
own lives – about their mothers, daughters, friends – or
how it relatesto other issues and experiences to do with
race and ethnicity, or other forms of differences and
examples of oppression or of celebration arising from
these differences. The log intends to enable students to
become more reflective and to develop and change
attitudes. The other piece of written work is critical or
creative (and analytical) and asks students to respond
either in a conventional or less conventional way to
texts and contexts.
The organization of the module intended to enable
students to enter at the most accessible point. It also
enabled them to each identify themselves culturally
as different and interesting – so we started with a
cultural identiŽcation exercise. Those from Billericay
and Brentwood (Essex towns) were encouraged to
feel less mundane in recognizing their own cultural
origins, since those from America, Jamaica, or with
African partners, or, for example, from Brixton’s Black
community clearly had a great deal of interest to dis-
cuss. In such an exercise we studied African American
women’s writing from PhillisWheatley and Sojourner
Truth’s ‘Ain’t I a Woman’, to Nella Larsen’s ‘Passing’
and Toni Morrison’s Beloved. With these texts we
focused on issues of education, writing and publishing,
and thematically on writers’ ability and freedom of
mind as well as political freedom to express identity,
difference and problems inrelation to racial prejudices.
This introduced issues considered throughout our
reading, through the vehicle of African American
writing, the most widely accessible, and the most
frequently analysed by feminist criticism.
Our special focus on Toni Morrison’s Beloved
(1987) looked at such issues as oral storytelling style,
mothering and motherhood, lived memories of slavery
and racism, the effects on a nation of a past of pain and
enforced subordination, dehumanization and reiŽca-
tion, as well as magic and history, and the importance
of the community. As well as being an amazingly,
shockingly and touchingly powerful book it enables
students to engage with a number of thematic and also
technicalissues in Black women’s writing which relate
to their later reading. Some study of African women’s
writing, then South African women’s writing followed
on the module.
In order to fully relate to these largely new texts and
to somehow engage with them in context students
needed to get in touch with their own experience
and personal reflections. The experience could be
organized in relation to reading and the discussion
of contextual information but, for the module as whole,
it also encouraged students to integrate their study/
discussion/reading with theirown personal experiences
and lives. This involved using some class time for
discussing ‘what’s on top’ in relation to events and
experiences in the intervening week, and reading and
reecting on thoughts about past experiences – issues
of racism, difference, representations of women’s lives
and of cultural contexts in the media and in their daily
lives, integrating these experiences and reections with
their reading. This is particularly important when we
are approaching literature and discourses from other
contexts and loci.
Students might initiallyfeel their lives are unapproach-
ably removed from the women who live and write
in South Africa but while cultural contexts render
their lives different (I am not arguing for an essential-
ism of women’s experience) nonetheless, there are
many points of contact: relationships with mothers,
children and with partners; close social contexts and
their enabling and restrictive practices; experiences of
marginality and of cultural clashes. They are encour-
aged to engage more with class, age and gender as
well as ethnicity; issues of inequality and the ways
in which these affected the perspective on events;
with education, health and economics; withthe mythic,
magical, spiritual, supernatural and imaginative
dimension of peoples’ lives and experiences, and the
ways in which these imaginative experiences impact
upon and are affected by the material.
A key learning outcome of the module is development
and reection – attitudinal change. Let us then consider
what we put in place in the learning experience of the
module in order to enable students to move forward in
relation to Kolb’s learning cycle (Figure 1). This
diagram helps to visualize how we, as a group, moved
from recognizing and identifying our own experiences
and preconceptions through engagement with the
texts. With critical and some cultural contexts we
felt silenced, then gradually became able to make
abstract connections and try and fit what we read
into critical frameworks to help us to articulate
our responses. We tried to avoid appropriating the
writing for our own agendas, and move on, informed
by experience and reflection, discussion and critical
analytical work, to further experience, and so on. The
process is cyclical. New information encourages
276 IETI 37,3

further reection, which encourages change, and new
questions.
You can start the cycle at any point and students did,
depending on prior experience and whether they had
more conceptualization and theorizing than experience.
It was important for there to be a sharing of experience
reected on and fed in, and some experience actually
modelled in the classroom (an average classroom, on
a Monday afternoon inCambridge during the Autumn–
Winter term). It was also important that we gradually
developed critical discourses which would enable: a)
engagement with the texts as texts in their cultural
context, and b) reflective engagement with our own
experiences and those modelled or brought into the
room via others, videos, artefacts, music etc. Mapping
our activities onto the learning cycle we can see
that, for some, experience was a basis and reection
and abstract conceptualization followed. One example
is that of Tereza, a white woman married to a Black
African husband with bi-racial children. She moved
from London, which is multi-cultural, to Norwich,
which is not. Her personal experience of racism, and
cultural difference informed discussions construc-
tively. Her assessed work was a creative piece of
stitchwork and analysis. She engaged with this experi-
ence and produced a beautiful patchwork ‘pictorial
representation’ of black and white women in a tribal
village setting withchildren holding hands and holding
up the sun together to conŽgure power and relation-
ships of support (see Figure 2).
Stages of the cycle: concrete experience and
active experimentation
Our reading and discussion of the texts fits these
parts of the cycle, as does use of contextual material,
each other, videos and visitors. We developed a
critical discourse to engage with the writing of Head
and Wicomb, conceptualizing positions of Black and
‘coloured’ South African women (Zoe Wicomb is of
mixed Griqua descent) in relation to their experi-
ences and positions. Through the example of Žctional
characters we engaged with issues of marriage and
motherhood, sisterhood or lack of it, necessary collu-
sion, free speech or lack of it, lack of communication
and disparity of values between the working class and
educated middle class, and between the town and the
country.
The activities within the classroom involved discus-
sion, testifying moments and reective logs. Concrete
experience was both inside and outside the classroom,
and activeexperimentation such as videos, a sculpture,
stitchwork, and so on, were concrete products.
Reective observation
Reflective observation took place both within and
outside the classroom, involving discussion – ‘what’s
on top’ sessions – at the start of each class, and the
writing of learning logs.
Abstract conceptualization
This part of the learning cycle also ran within and
outside the classroom, and was enabled latterly when
students, more in tune with post-colonial theory and
practice, were able to stand back and Žnd similarities
and differences between the ways in which writers
from different culturally constructed knowledge
contexts articulated their creative and personal
responses through literary texts and images. This stage
was necessary to enable students to move beyond
silence in the face of the overwhelmingly new and
unknown, and of a confusing legacy of ignorance and
(unintended) collusion. One module outcome was/is to
encourage students to move beyond that version of the
learning cycle, and to keep learning, trying things out,
reecting and moving on – not becoming complacent.
My own version of the learning cycle helped me to
engage with the ways in which the students were
experiencing, conceptualizing and reflecting on the
work we read. This has been vital and active for me
and involved investing in a working visit to South
Africa in 1997, partially funded by the university. The
family travelled to Cape Town, Zululand and Durban.
We worked there with colleagues in educational devel-
opment and literature and, most importantly, with the
students. We were very lucky not to have to be tourists
but could rely on some generous and talented friends
and colleagues to explore issues and practises with us.
This has been precious and priceless. So too was being
able to just drive off into the landscape where sugar
cane Želds are comparable to the Želds of Berkshire
and a wildebeest would suddenly appear beside a
motorway on the way to a university campus, where
active experimentation
concrete experience reective observation
abstract conceptualization
Figure 1. Kolb’s learning cycle (Kolb, 1984, adapted)

Context of learning and living: language, politics, education, experience, media, history, origins, culture, race, class, age, etc.
Tutor preconceptions Tutor approaches
and pre-knowledge – reasons for, beliefs in
– of objects of study and conceptions of
– of outcomes learning and teaching
– of students activities
– of student learning – assessment
approaches – clariŽcation
– negotiation
– sharing
Objects of study: Outcomes:
Student preconceptions Student approaches
and pre-knowledge – learning styles
– of objects of study – reasons for, beliefs in
– of outcomes and conceptions of
– of context learning and study
processes (e.g.
assimilation, integration
with experience, etc.)
Vehicles of
study:
texts, critical
comments,
contextual
information,
experience,
reection,
discussion,
logs,
visits from S.A.
activists,
videos,
music –
artefacts for
S.A.
assessment
vehicles: logs,
critical essays,
creative and
analytical
responses
• Range of
selected S.A.
women’s
writing
• post-colonial
and feminist
critical
practices to
be put into
practice
• Our own
reections
and
responses
• Knowledge –
texts,
contexts
• Skills –
post-colonial
and feminist
reading
practices
• Attitudes –
movement
from levels of
ignorance
and silence to
appreciation
without
appropriation,
articulation
away from
prejudice to
valuing
difference
and
expressing
relative value.
Figure 2. Context of learning: classroom, shared space, time, year, room, semester, physical conditions and resources

students bought ripe avocados from a university market
seller, and we were often the only white people.
Some teaching and learning strategies: naming,
seeing and contextualizing
One strategy for teaching students studying post-
colonial texts is to ensure that students know something
of the context, the politics, geography, history and
culture affecting and influencing the writers they
read, and the situations in which their characters
Žnds themselves. Some of the language terms need to
be explained and used also. As Achebe and Ngugi have
pointed out, it is the writer’s task to assert ‘the right of
the [once colonized] to name the world for ourselves’
(Ngugi, 1991) so that their own stories are told and
interpreted their own way, the landscape and lives,
myths and experiences seen as suitable material for
literature: ‘I think it part of my business as a writer
to teach . . . that there is nothing disgraceful about
the African weather, that the palm tree is a Žt subject
for poetry’ (Achebe, 1965). These renaming and
revaluing strategies we have seen, for example, in the
performance poetry of Caribbean poet Valerie Bloom
who re-educated her Cambridge audience with the
proper words for green bananas, what salt fish is,
what is poisonous and when and how to deal with it,
and Jamaican Creole syntax so that they can hope to
start to understand, as outsiders seeking to enter on
invitation (rather than observe as quaint or reject as
different).
On our course Wicomb’s ‘A Clearing in the Bush’,
demanded some geographical, historical and linguistic
explanations: ‘Springbok’, ‘Radio’, ‘Skollie boys’,
‘Plateland’, ‘Cape Flats’, the fact that Cape Town,
although in Africa, can be really cold, the playing of
‘klawerjas’, ‘biltong beef’, what and where the bush
is, who Vervoerd was, what apartheid meant in terms
of splitting up people into ethnic groups and separating
them, even in universities, which then received corres-
pondence course education, ‘Coloureds’, a ‘doekie’
and so on – encompassing Afrikaner and African, and
different usages of English terms. These are basics but
they block some understanding and, unexplained, can
lead to confusion and rejection.
In our reading, strategies of incorporation are to
be avoided as another colonial move of dominance
equal to strategies of silencing. We learn about our
own social processes and the discourses we use in
an everyday sense when we examine those used to
create or stie debate around South African texts. As
Williams puts it:
We can only understand an effective and dominant
culture if we understand the real social process on which
it depends . . . I mean the prices of incorporation, the
modes o incorporation are of great social signiŽcance.
The educational institutions are usually the main
agencies to the transmission of and effective dominant
culture.
(Sarlo, 1994, p 575)
Williams (ibid, p 140) argues for two positions
responding against cultural dominance – those which
are ‘alternative’ and those which are oppositional:
Yet it is clearly something we can call alternative to the
effective dominant culture, and there is something that
we can call oppositional in a true sense.
Politicallyand ideologically, then, in our introduction
to and discussion of the texts of South African women
we, as Cambridge based undergraduates and teachers,
have several situations to negotiate, discourses to
decide between and choices to make if we really are
to engage. Finding the discourses and recognizing the
arguments and choices are liberating and empowering,
way beyond the reading of the highly selective texts
with which we are able to deal, given the short period
of time involved. But we can choose, in an engaged
sense, between alternative readings.
The reading of South African literature and of women’s
literature in itself is, in some ways, already ‘alter-
native’, as it is celebrating multi-culturalism and
difference. We can also read and express ourselves in
ways which are truly oppositional to the effective
dominant culture through the vehicle of such texts.
In doing so we are refusing and undermining or
denying its preconceptions, rejecting its philosophies
and constructing diverse, often oppositional others,
reading as politicized and gendered that which has
been rendered as neutral, to be dealt with in academic
discourse, and so on. It is a difficult task for under-
graduates faced with their Žrst module on Black and
Asian women’s writing! Students already engaged in
dealing with contradictory discourses and alternative
or oppositional cultures, bi-racial students, those who
have married into different racial groups, those
who have found themselves, at any time, in a cultural
minority, in particular, sometimes proved able, given
the right kind of reflective stimulating contexts, to
model oppositional expressions. These models enabled
students to move from silence and surprise, through to
expression without appropriation.
For us inthis particulargroup such a growth movement
was enabled speciŽcally both by members of the group

and by vicarious experience of the South African
writing context. By invitation we were able to work
one day with a white female South African artist, with
a background in a bi-racial marriage. She was engaged
with the difficulties of appropriation and silencing,
denigration and economic hardship surrounding the
production, appreciation and consumption of all sorts
of artwork (regulated and affected by cultural context)
Ruth shared with us her installation work, paintings,
sculptures, and a large range of materials used in the
various creative workshops she facilitatedamong men
and women artists prior to her leaving South Africa.
Women artists were still,she said, among the minority
for the usual economic and social reasons.
Other texts on the course helped our interaction with
issues in South African women’s writing. Toni
Morrison’s Beloved (1987) integrates magic and
history, and enacting and enabling re-memory, a
powerful experience for writer and readers alike,
and one relevant to our discussion and study of South
African women’s writing. As Smit (1995, p 4, writing
on the critical work of Govinden) has pointed out:
Even though many people – like Indians – have been
deprived of relating to the African context during the era
of apartheid’s cultural and educational hegemony, the
challenges of a transformedpedagogy and the contribution
to the building on a non-racial society may be partly met
by utilising practices of re-memory. This amounts to
individuals telling and retellingtheir stories in the context
of a re-thinking, re-feelingand re-experiencingof the past
in the light of different facts and a consciousness of
circumstanceswhich have been shrouded by the politics of
past oppression.
Particularly shrouded or misrepresented have been the
work of South African women writers who, burdened
triply with the combination, in a racist sexist and class
ridden world with a toxic mix of gender race and
economic disadvantages, have also been appropriated
as icons of the land, the nation’s values, and of tradition
by the male writers of their homelands in the move
towards national identity.
Engaging with the readings and situations of Head,
whose short stories engage with both gender and
power, also enables such oppositional reading. We do
not have to have those conŽgurations of power, class
and gender which we take to be natural and essential.
The beliefs we hold we discover to be socially and
culturally constructed and can be deconstructed and
replaced.
SPECIFIC TEACHING EXAMPLE:
WICOMB’S, ‘A CLEARING IN THE BUSH’
When I have control over native education I will reform
it so that the natives will be taught from childhood that
equality with Europeans is not for them.
(Vervoerd, 1958)
Zoe Wicomb’s short story ‘A Clearing in the Bush’ is
a central text easily identified with by students, but
needing contextual information and speciŽc references,
such as about racial divisions. Wicomb and her protag-
onist, Frieda Shenton are both ‘Cape coloureds’, which
needs explaining. Geography and history (Vervoerd)
are sketched in. The loci of ennunciation of readers,
author, protagonist and the text the protagonist (a
university student)is studying provide points of contact
and difference. Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas
Hardy (1891) is a familiar nineteenth century canonical
text on many syllabi:
Wessex spread like a well-used map before me, worn and
dim along the fold-lines . . . The scuffed greenstrop is the
chase where God knows what happened. Seduced, my
notes say. Can you be seduced by someone you hate?
Can trees gnarled with age whisper ancient ecstasies and
wave of darkness upon dark lap until the esh melts?
I do, of course, not know of these matters,but shudder for
Tess.
(Wicomb, 1987, p 41)
The clearing in the bush betrayed Tess. The landscapes
of the colonizer fill the imagination of the girls in
contrast to her own surroundings of ‘bluegum trees,
and behind them the bush stretches for miles across the
Cape ats, Bushes, I imagine, that send out wayward
limbs to weave into the tangled undergrowth, for I have
never left the concrete paths of the campus’ (p 41).
Retief’s correspondence university notes refuse her
reading (Tess was raped, not ‘seduced’). Frieda’s need
is to explore her own reading and experience, denied
by the concrete rigidity of the university campus paths
and paths of reading she must trace to conform and
pass. Her experience is denied as a coloured (Griqua)
African woman in her own country. She is as restricted
in experience as Tess, with whom she identiŽes.
Why pick this story? It has recognizable resonances
for the students themselves, providing a bridge with
their experiences of silencing of their own interpre-
tations. This, itself,is a clearing in the dense bush of our
haziness about life at a Cape University.
When we look at Zoe Wicomb’s A Clearing in the
Bush we are aware of alternative loci of enunciation
280 IETI 37,3

in a colonial space. These differences for UK readers
in the instance of Wicomb’s work are not of syntax
and lexicon, but of the cultural dimensions of her work.
She engages with political dimensions, the collusion
and rejection of the values of apartheid in an academic
environment; political and social dimensions of class
and origin, when Tamieta, the working-class African
cook is excluded (unnecessarily) from the student
boycott of Vervoerd’s memorial service; and gender/
culture/ politicaldimensions i.e.the effective silencing
of the student narrator inher response to the imperialist
originated text Tess of the Durbervilles. Tess, itself,
ironically enables engagement with issues of readings
and misreadings of events and values, in a gendered
and class related manner, both within the text and
in its critical reception. It is an ideal text to enable
the bridging between Frieda Shenton’s experiences
and those of the UK undergraduates, even because
some of the refusals, interpretations, experiences
and reections on difference it poses are different but
shared across continents and time. Sharing enables
engagement and articulation. The rest of the story then
goes on to lead us into something new and different.
In Wicomb’s tale there is a sustained dialecticbetween
the gendered, European adopted reading and inter-
pretation of the text and that of the narrator who relates,
in a very personal and immediate manner, to Tess.
There is also within Wicomb’s text a dialecticbetween
conformity to colonial imperial readings (of the
political situation in the mourning of Vervoerd, and
the gendered and politicised reading of Tess) and
radical engaged readings – the reading of the situation
by the politicized students who stay away from
the mourning rally and Frieda’s unwritten non-
‘conformist’ essay.
The ‘clearing in the bush’ is the university – an
intellectual clearing for students – and the space in
which the university holds Vervoerd’s remembrance
service. The party line of the university administration
is that this great man has been assassinated and that
this is a sad loss. My students knew of boycotts but
not Vervoerd, a demon in South African history as the
architect of apartheid. Contextual information enabled
further comprehension and sympathy/empathy. But
the story is more complex also. The one person who
does not hear about the boycott is the black cook
(the other narrator, or point of view (?), of the story).
On arrival at the service she is surprised to Žnd herself
alone:
Tamieta had no idea that the ceremony was for white
people only. Oh, what should she do, and the shame of it
ames in her chest. Wait until she is told to leave? Or
pick up the bag of working clothes she has just tucked
under her chair and stagger off?
(p 57)
The cook, Tamieta, underpaid and overworked, is
removed from the intellectual community of the
university because of class and economic position
rather than colour. More subtle then is her awkward
position when she attempts to ensure that she does the
right thing expected of her as a university worker. The
only Black African to appear at the remembrance
service, she is isolated. She is out in the clearing,
literallyvulnerable and excluded from the subversive,
alternative student enunciations.
Clearings are a protest, an enabling, a geographical
location, an intellectual and psychological space but
also a social space – and some get left out in the
clearing historically in African societies. This makes
them vulnerable (even dead). The political, racial,class
and gendered dimensions of the story become
gradually apparent.
BESSIE HEAD
We also looked at short stories by Bessie Head whose
work enables oppositional reading informed by gender
and power. Her harrowing personal story illustrates
for the students some of the oppressions of deeply
ingrained racial prejudice. Location and freedom of
enunciation are crucial in her work. Head’s mother’s
death (for a bi-racial affair) in a mental asylum and
her own chosen exile in Botswana, so that she could
have the freedom to write, illustrate the extremes
of conditions under which writing can be produced.
Looking at Head’s life, students speculate about the
dearth of South African women’s writing and the
conditions preventing itsowering. Transferring Alice
Walker’s arguments (1985) is also helpful. Walker
argues that our Black female predecessors, produced
little lasting artwork because of the economic condi-
tions under which they lived they would be baking
biscuits instead of producing water-colours of sunsets.
Using this as a jumping off point, students indiscussion
started to build up a picture more specifically South
African oriented. As under slavery, the Black South
African writers, they argued, would be likely to be
silenced by their economic deprivation and illiteracy
and by deliberate racist-based suppression of their
voices. Art is always difŽcult to argue for in times of
deep suffering and oppression – subsistence comes
Žrst, especially for women. Their responsibilities are
children and the family’s health, so art seems an

entirelyselfindulgent, pointless and non proŽt-making
activity.
Head’s own comments (1980) reflect her need to
represent her own life through testimony and then
Žction informed by autobiography, in relation to the
models she found when moving to Botswana. Re-
memory, establishing historical identity and a voice,
are crucial to her work:
When I moved to Botswana I merely picked up the
feeling of continuity Black people in South Africa ought
to have lived with, moving gradually from ancestral
times into new circumstances, without having their souls
and bodies violated in any way . . . My even keel is a
kind of recognition of what is normal, human and sane,
but oh, the normal, human and sane has to be for all
mankind.
Two short stories ‘Snapshots of a Wedding’ and ‘Life’
were discussed. The delicate handling of changing
valuation of women as the village becomes more
involved in the world of commerce is both identiŽable
for the group and yet invites comments on difference
of location and meaning. Faced with a woman he loves
and one who is rather selŽsh but has a well paid job, the
young man picks the latter to marry, but still relates
to the former. There is a balanced assessment of old
and new. One woman’s development and education
sets her not only apart from tradition, which could be
seen as positive progress, but makes her selfish and
wilful. Bessie Head places us centrally in the village
discussions and we find it hard to take sides in this
evenly handled community dialogue of values but can
certainly relate to it.
PERFORMANCE AND PROTEST POETRY
We moved from Bessie Head’s work to consider
poetry. Read alongside video (Mbuli’s video docu-
mentary The People’s Poet) as context and example,
we could further explore the ways in which location
enabled/disabled enunciation.
Performance poetry, like oral storytelling, must be
the most obvious victim of distance and difference
so difŽcult is it to be part of, so bound up, it seems, by
location and speciŽc enunciatary powers. We looked at
part of a video I brought back from South Africa by
Mzwhakhe Mbuli, the male South African praise,
performance and ‘people’s’ poet, whose poems are
delivered, in the video, against footage of riots and
police brutality, poverty, disadvantage and political
rallies. He too was imprisoned and his wife, seen
sharing the washing up, was threatened. The video
starts in the mid-1980s, before the end of apartheid.
From this contextual linking of poetry, power and
place, students started to gain a closer knowledge of
social and economic conditions and how poets can
speak out and be heard in safety (or otherwise). Their
connection with Mbuli and (below) Malange was
not one of similarity and identification (unlike that
withWicomb). Instead, they responded to the effective
rhetoric of the performance poetry, as well as that of the
speaker, Mbuli, in the video which contextualized his
poetry. Gadamer’s explanation of the hermeneutical
project partially explains this response of under-
standing, empathy and interpretation: ‘Where, indeed
but to rhetoric should the theoretical examination of
interpretation turn?’ (Gadamer, 1977, p 24). Rhetoric
is a bridge between interlocutors and the interpretation
of readers:
The best means for achieving familiarity with always
linguistically mediated information, Gadamer explains,
is rhetoric, the web of shared linguistic norms that
entangle reader with writer.
(Sommer, 1994, p 540)
Sommer’s dispute with Gadamer over the ease with
which such interpretation and understanding can
take place raises issues of the very difference of world-
views and of expression which he seems to play down.
Certainlyfor us, as with the need to explain terms used
in the Wicomb story, so separate language items in
Mbuli’s video/poetry needed explanation and so also
the complete worldview and actual experience could
of course not be fully understood. But rhetoric, the
power of Mbuli’s repetitions and emphases, the oral
rhythms and assertions drove home his arguments as
did metaphorical explorations of both the horrors
of apartheid and ways in which people might combat
them. Mbuli emphasizes differences in his use of
intertextuality (Biblical, canonical, political) but there
is also a deliberate building of bridges with these
references and with the use of African metaphor aug-
mented by straightforward polemic. So in “Crocodiles”
he argues:
When shall I write about daffodils?
When the ground is daily soaked;
With the blood of the innocent;
Nevertheless Agostinho-Neto the late Poet-President;
Used both the pen and machine
To achieve the liberation of Angola
The land is the key to social order;
282 IETI 37,3

The people are like crocodiles in the river;
And no one can Žght crocodiles inside the river
(Mbuli, 1988)
Wordsworth is a bridge; the reference to daffodils
emphasizes Mbuli’s literary imaginary and engages
with that of some of his audience (how many at a rally
we can only speculate with interest)while emphasizing
the distance of much of his audience from such
imperial(?) – imperially located(?) – references. But
Mbuli’s poem emphasises that while some readers
and listenersmay share a literary background, we need
to know more about the exact location in time and
space and in political contexts. References to political
leaders ground this as elsewhere do his references
to political victims (e.g. Ruth First, Mandela, and
then less internationally known, for example, Brian
Mazibuko, to be included in the role of loss and
honour). We probably do not know either the myth
or the local reality of fighting crocodiles inside the
river, but the repetition, the rhythm, the assertion, the
exploration, the persuasiveness and the (partially)
shared reference to crocodiles does enable us to build
a bridge to link with that he builds towards us.
Sharing with them some worker poetry – Black Mamba
Rising, (Sitas, 1986) enabled students to see that
women were active in the workers’ movements. I
added information and pamphlets about education
and union revolt from women workers in the late
1980s. Some of the assumptions about racial divisions
and politics were discussed, based on our study of
worker poetry, and that of Ingrid de Kok. In ‘I, the
Unemployed’, Malange (1986) underlines the links
between economic and political deprivation in graphic
detail, drawing links between the death of children and
of the country:
I am here dying of hunger
And my country is also dying
My children are dying too
Look at them:
How dull their eyes
How slow their walk and the turning
Of their heads
Nothing for them to eat
Can you hear?
They are crying
We know where we are with this poem (we think). The
images of dying Third World children haunt our TV
screens and newspapers. But Malange speaks directly
to us; her rhetoric powerfully crosses the barriers of
power difference and distance. Here is no wordless
sufferer. The popular imaginary and the soap opera
versions of South Africa are directly engaged here,
troubled, utilized for communication. Discussion of
this powerful, emotive poem is set in relation to another
response, in this case from Afrikaner writer, Ingrid de
Kok. She recallsbeing held back from racing out to see
the miners go past, prior to the Sharpeville massacre.
The poem records the ways in which under totalitarian
rule, protest is misrepresented, violence translated
into the acceptable or totally ignored. But the child’s
responses are true; she feels the contradictions. She
was ‘playing hopscotch on the slate’ as the miners
passed ‘their chanting foreign and familiar’. But she
felt the importance of their work and their mission,
and no fear, they were familiar. Called away where
people hid behind twitched, closed curtains, she was
fed misrepresentations, told they were molesters of
children. The poet records the deaths of the miners as
a result of a shared cultural deception:
‘Come inside; they do things to little girls’
For it was noon, and there was no jade pool.
Instead, a pool of blood that already had a living name
And grew like a shadow as the day lengthened.
The dead, buried in voices that reached even my gate,
The chanting men on the ambushed trucks . . .
(de Kok, 1996, p 197)
We discovered that it is too easy, perhaps, to define
the struggle as Black/white. Paralleling the radical,
emotional, experiential response from different cultural
groups limitssuch a destructive and simplistic polariza-
tion. Black and Asian South African women’s writing
canbe placedinto a wider context. Most students’ entry
into South African women’s writing was, in any case,
largely through the work of culturally enlightened
white writers: Doris Lessing, Nadine Gordimer and
Olive Schreiner.
In discussion, logs and creative or critical assessment
formats this particular group of students (inspired, no
doubt, by being the first to be involved in the small
scale research), responded to the works studied with
empathy, energy, and creativity.From Wicomb’s work
emerged issues of location, from Head’s – suppression
and speaking out in semi-autobiography. From Mbuli,
Malange and our session with Ruth, the artist and
workshop facilitator,sprang a richsense of context and
the lived realities of expression. To even begin to re-
image and to engage with and help enlighten the
popular imaginary versions of South African women’s
writing we need much longer, more and varied texts,
more (vicarious) context and experience. But this was
a rich experience which we created together. When

asked about how they engaged with the texts students
commented:
Having known what it is to lose my mother and feel
absolutely lost in the world I fully understand the
emotional deprivation that Bessie Head had to endure.
For me personally, to have lost the one person in my life
that loved me unconditionally is something that I am still,
but slowly coming to terms with – but for someone, such
as Bessie Head, to have been robbed of her mother,
denied the only access to unconditional love – to have it
severed by a governmental system, for me is a crime
against humanity and shows exactly what a sham
government the South African system was. (student 3)
I wanted to discover how far and in what ways the
use of various contextual stimuliand visits had enabled
students to develop their empathy with and under-
standing of the texts, and their desire to read and
explore further. One student wrote that:
[It] brought forward issues of white South African
women in relation to Black South Africans in post-
colonial times . . . [the lecture background information]
brought basic knowledge to an area I had previously
been relatively ignorant about, it was a good basis to start
from . . . Bringing in and talking about things, seeing
videos from South Africa which relate to life there was
very useful and makes it seem more real. The energy
and sense of frustration/ anger and the need to act came
through very strongly. The visual segregation was
shocking. (student 4 – this last comment in response to
the Mbuli video)
CONCLUSION
Mignolo (1995, p 172) puts the issues of post-
colonialism succinctly:
post-colonial theories and cultural histories are linked
to colonial legacies. These theories and histories not
only entail an effort to relocate the colonial and imperial
imaginary constrictions allocatedby colonial and imperial
powers but alsorepresentimportant moves of enunciation,
exposing the complicity between the sites of colonial and
imperial expansion and those of the production and
distribution of knowledge.
Post-colonial criticism constantly enables us to re-view
our own histories and our subject positions as itenables
us to view and re-view some of the texts and products,
some of the enunciations of post-colonial subjects, in
context. Phenomenography (after Biggs, 1993), linked
to the theory of experiential learning (Kolb, 1984)
enables teachers and students alike to become aware of
the site of the classroom or site of study as one among
several (including also life outside the classroom).
Aware, we can concentrate on the whole process of
experiencing and learning, actively, taking account
of preconceptions, prejudices, personal responses,
confusions and tentative explorations, together.
Learning is a dynamic experience. In this classroom
and module, our use of post-colonial criticism allied
with feminist practices enabled us to explore the
texts, our own imaginary constructions and our own
changing responses, aided by vicarious contextuual
experience (videos, music, artefacts, visits etc.) and a
learning/teaching format which encouraged reection,
engagement, and response.
There are some particular pleasures, and particular
difficulties teaching Black and Asian women’s
writing in the context of a classroom on a campus in
Cambridge which, unlike inner city campuses in
London, Birmingham or Manchester, for example,
has a very small population of students from cultural
origins other than white, working to middle class and,
broadly speaking, the East Anglia region, which itself
has a comparatively small multi-cultural population.
South African writing in particular presents issues
of difŽculty and pleasure for students because of the
dearth of information on South Africa, the soap opera
versions which have played on our television screens
for so many years, and the inaccessibilityof texts, even
the best known i.e. Bessie Head. Locating our own
positions of enunciation, finding the discourse to
respond, negotiating a shared and individual set of
(hopefully) more enlightened, richer, more articulate
responses to a very small part of this rich vein of texts,
of South African women’s writing, has been for me
and I hope more importantly (if evaluations and focus
group responses and assessment products are worthy
evidence) the students especially during the 1997/8
class with its greater emphasis on contextualization and
reflection, experimentation and bringing a little of
South Africa into the classroom.
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BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
Dr Gina Wisker is Director of Learning and Teaching
Development and co-ordinator for Women’s Studies
at Anglia Polytechnic University, Cambridge, UK,
where she also teaches English. Gina has published in
both women’s writing and teaching/learning areas. Her
Insights into Black Women’s Writing (1992) was
followed by It’s My Party: Reading C20th Women’s
Writing (1994), Empowering Women in Higher
Education (1996) and most recently Fatal Attractions:
Rescripting Romance in Fiction and Film (1998) Gina
is currently working on a book on postcolonial and
African American women’s writing, and continues to
edit the journal Innovations inEducation and Training
International.
Address for correspondence: Gina Wisker, Anglia
Polytechnic University, East Road, Cambridge, CB1
1PT.
Tel: +44(0)1223 363271
Fax: +44(0)1223 352973
e-mail:gwisker@anglia.ac.uk

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