After teaching at Thandi Sibeko last Friday I joined up with my DC teaching colleagues and the GETEP leadership to tour Liliesleaf Farm in the Rivonia section of Johannesburg. It was a safehouse for ANC activists (including Nelson Mandela, who would pose as a domestic worker there) and planning ground for MK or "Umkhonto Sizwe" ("Spear of the Nation") the radical, militant wing of the ANC. The farm was raided by police in July of 1963, leading to the arrest of 20 anti-apartheid activists, including Mandela who was already serving a jail sentence. The ensuing Rivonia Trial is one example of how Mandela the lawyer (and others in the ANC) used the courts as a platform for their beliefs.
We spent most of Saturday doing curriculum planning with our South African teaching partners. We were back at it Sunday morning, this time learning how to navigate Blackboard, the platform we will use to facilitate communication between the DC and Johannesburg/Pretoria schools. Sunday afternoon the US and South African teachers visited the Cradle of Humankind World Heritage Site. The original plan was to visit the Sterkfontein Caves, home to some incredible hominid fossil finds. In the end, we did a more Disney-like tour of a man-made cave at Maropeng (meaning “returning to the place of origin” in Setswana). The exhibition was interactive and thought-provoking. If it weren't so far away, I'd recommend it to my colleagues who teach World History and Geography I....field trip!
By the way, Sunday was National Women's Day in South Africa. On August 9, 1956 about 20,000 women marched to the Union Buildings in Pretoria in order to protest the abhorrent pass laws, one of the primary methods used by the Nationalist government to control the black majority during the apartheid era.