September 13, 2000
Soweto to Storrs: A tale of pain and redemption

The Chronicle Volume 118 No. 216

These are a pair of extraordinary women, these two most powerful representatives of the youth African government. And they are looking straight across a small table into the eyes of a handful of American reporters and telling them of the strenuous forts to record the past, present and future of their country and to restore its oldest and most prestigious black university to its distinguished position.

These two women, Frene Ginwala, the speaker of the South African Parliament, and Naledi Pandor, chairman of the South African National Council of Provinces (a position equivalent the U.S. House speaker), are sitting not more than 5 feet across a table from me, a table that once might have been an ocean if not for the work of a University of Connecticut historian and his South African counter-parts who have bridged this sea.

The UConn historian, Amii Omara-Otunnu, and those working with him are announcing this day that they have received more than $1 million in grants to fund the work to be done. That work, which will come under a program called the UConn-ANC Partnership, includes gathering and preserving the written and oral histories of the African National Congress, and working to help the University of Fort Hare return to the position of academic strength and distinction it held
prior to white rule.

These two women, Ginwala and Pandor, reveal a sense of urgency when speaking of the plight of Fort Hare, the alma mater of Nelson Mandela himself, which Ginwala says has been relegated to a "subordinate status in society."

Under apartheid, and its restricted funding to black colleges, Fort Hare was set back immeasurably, so that now it must compete with formerly well-endowed white institutions for black students, staff and funds. Apartheid, Ginwala is saying, employed "quite diabolical" measures to make sure those at Fort Hare "would know their place and keep their place," so that, she continues, quoting an architect of apartheid, "blacks should not be allowed to gaze on the green pastures of the white man."

Those so-called green pastures were among the concerns of Nancy Bull, director of UConn's Cooperative Extension system, who visited South Africa this past summer with a delegation from Storrs to begin the work of assisting Fort Hare, a largely agricultural institution, rebuild itself.

Students and staff need training in creating maps with detailed geological information, in learning and adapting techniques for corralling and enriching the countryside for what are now largely free-range animal populations, clearing land for crops, developing floriculture and methods to raise plants hydrophonically.

Another member of the delegation, Deborah Sunday, discovered that because of restrictive budgets that are based on 2-year-old enrollments when the university was at its lowest ebb, the Fort Hare library staff had not added a new book to the collection in four years. Sunday's concern is books and information technology, as she is administrative librarian for UConn's Homer Babbidge Library. Yes, the library had some computers, but they were the dinosaurs of that industry, virtually useless in today's e-world.

She discovered that staff and student morale was low and 80 positions were being cut throughout the university through a voluntary severance program. And, both women said, that visit changed their lives.

Witnessing poverty and deprivation has a way of doing that if you're from a comfortable community like Storrs, viewing for the first time a poverty-enchained community like Soweto, South Africa.

"It's a beautiful country, full of so many possibilities," said Sunday. "One of the things we found hopeful was that the strategic planning group at Fort Hare was thinking of challenges, not setbacks," she said.

But in the surrounding villages, where running water was scarce and electricity often unheard of, there were different moods to contend with.

"The little kids were happy, but with the older kids there was barely suppressed hostility, Sunday observed.

"If you asked any one of us, we would have said that the visit increased our knowledge of the struggle for human rights," Bull said "And it made us more aware of bow comfortable o own lives are."

On one excursion to the countryside, Bull and her group visited Robben Island, where Nelson, Mandela was imprisoned for many years. After viewing Mandela's cell, the tour guide revealed that he, too, had been a political prisoner.

Taking others to see the site of so many anguished years was "part of the healing process," the guide told his visitors.

That healing process will continue in Storrs as well as when the partnership begins its work. To varying degrees, the lives of four women, Frene Ginwala, Nale Pandor, Nancy Bull and Deborah Sunday, have been touched and transformed by the important groundwork being laid in two continents for the past, present and future of this country in flux.