STUDENTS FIND CHALLENGE, INSPIRATION IN SOUTH AFRICA

IHRE students gather at the beach

As a political-science major and an active member of the African-American students' organization Sisterhood, Nia Turner '05 has done quite a bit of thinking about race and culture. But it took a radical change of context to drive home the lesson of how tightly race and culture are intertwined. When Turner visited South Africa last summer to participate in the International Human Rights Exchange, she found herself occupying an unfamiliar place in the elaborate system of racial classification that apartheid left behind.

"The racial identity that I'd always had in the United States just didn't translate," Turner said recently at a report on the IHRE she gave along with Paula Arboleda '05, Alnisa Bell '06 and Lauren Friedman '05, who all participated in the intensive four-week course in human-rights theory and practice last summer. The American students were all paired with African students as roommates, ensuring that learning was not limited to the classroom. Spending so much time with people whose assumptions about social categories didn't match their own was illuminating, but often unsettling, the students said.

"Race is very complexly defined in South Africa, " Bell noted. "It's much more than skin color — language, mannerisms and dress all come into play."

Turner and Bell, both African Americans, discovered that South African students tended to regard them as "coloured," the appellation that was given to people, mostly of mixed race, who held a sort of intermediate status under the apartheid regime. Arboleda, who is from Colombia and identifies herself as Latina in the United States, found herself in more or less the same category as Turner and Bell. And Friedman had her first extended experience of being a member of a racial minority, albeit an economically privileged one.

The IHRE program was offered in Cape Town, South Africa, for the fourth time last summer; it drew 72 students from seven universities in southern Africa and 12 liberal-arts colleges in the United States. Participants in the interdisciplinary program studied a core curriculum centering on fundamental issues in human rights. Each student also chose two of four electives: "Health and HIV/AIDS," "Development and Poverty," "Culture and Identity,"and "Democracy and Media. "

Mornings were spent on lectures in the core courses. Electives, in the afternoon, offered films, panel discussions, lectures and several off-campus activities, including site visits to local NGOs involved with human-rights issues. A tour of a nearby township, one of the residential areas to which black Africans were confined under apartheid, "made North American inner-city ghettoes look like the Hamptons," Turner reported.

Studying human rights in a South African context gave the students a perspective they might not have had at home, they said, because the struggle of the majority population for basic civil rights was so recent and so fresh. "South African students really feel the responsibility for the future of their country," said Arboleda.

Turner noted that the change of context awakened an interest in gender studies that she hadn't felt before "because I thought of it as sort of a white issue." An introduction to HIV/AIDS issues in Africa gave her a much more complex picture of how race, gender and sexuality intersect.

Another striking difference between the Bryn Mawr and Cape Town campuses, Friedman and Bell pointed out, concerned sexual orientation. Few of the South African students recognized sexuality as a human-rights issue, even though the South African constitution, adopted in 1996, is reportedly the only one in the world that bars discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.

The Bryn Mawrters said they were impressed and humbled by the African students' knowledge of world history and affairs, and all reported themselves inspired by their African counterparts' engagement in and enthusiasm for the democratic process. "There was such a sense of hopefulness," Bell concluded.

Bryn Mawr students who are interested in applying to the IHRE program, which carries academic credit equivalent to a one-semester course, should contact Assistant Dean and Director of International Programs Li-Chen Chin. IHRE will begin accepting applications in January. To read a thorough summary of the students' report, which was part of the "Making Sense of Diversity" series sponsored by the Office of Intercultural Affairs and the Center for Science in Society, see http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/
sci_cult/diversity/southafrica.html.

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