Fourteen students will be part of Western's first ever South African study abroad opportunity this August.
The 20 night trip, from August 5-23, will include travel to Johannesburg, Durban and Capetown, as well as a night in a Zulu village, a two-day safari through Pilanesburg National Park and a climb through the Drakensburg Mountains, said Vernon Johnson, a political science professor and trip organizer.
The study abroad opportunity is being offered through a company called Soul Tours and is hosted by the political science department and Fairhaven College.
Professor Vernon Johnson (left) sits with local drummers at Spiers Winery outside Cape Town. Johnson and 14 students will be part of the first ever study abroad opportunity to Africa to be offered by Western. Photo courtesy of Vernon Johnson
Western graduate student Dara Yost will be working as a teaching assistant during the trip.
Yost is writing her thesis on race in education reform, comparing and contrasting the U.S. and Africa, she said. This trip to Africa will be an opportunity to do research for her thesis, she said.
She is excited to see Roman Island where Nelson Mandela, her hero, was jailed and the city of Soweteo where uprisings began the anti-apartheid movement.
Western senior Kristin Jensen said she is most looking forward to seeing elephants and other jungle animals on the safari. She has been studying international relations and is interested in areas of the world that are most contentious, she said.
The trip is offered as Political Science 497 or Fairhaven 497 and is worth five credits.
Preparation for the trip includes a prerequisite one credit class during spring quarter on the history of South Africa and issues the country is currently facing.
Johnson said he hopes to find opportunities for service learning internships for students while he is there, he said. His long-term goal is to establish sites where Western professors can do research and teach.Johnson, who teaches African and Third World Politics, has been to Africa several times and will be the only Western faculty member and chaperone. He will be heading down to South Africa July 15 before students arrive.
The summer travel course called “Race, ethnicity and class: Contesting identities in contemporary South Africa” comes on the heels of a June 18 court decision to include people of Chinese descent in the list of those who benefit from affirmative action under the nation’s Black Economic Empowerment Legislation.
The population of South Africa is only 75 percent African, Johnson said.
Both Johannesburg and Durban have a great deal of South Asian culture, Johnson said. He said the class issue here is that there is a sizable middle class and poor group that is typically non-white.
“Class is more important than race in determining who gets what, when and how,” Johnson said.
Durban is located on the east coast and has a sizable Indian and Chinese population. People from India and China arrived in the 1870s as indentured slaves and contract laborers and now comprise 2–3 percent of the population in the region. The way they came to South Africa has many parallels to the American slave experience, he said.
The area was settled by the Dutch in the 1650s. At first there were no Dutch women so men began cohabitating with the local African women, he said. Later on, Dutch families began to settle in Cape Town, making the settlement more permanent. This is when interracial sexual relationships became taboo.
This cohabitation produced children a new social category of “coloured” people, Johnson said. This social category later became a legal definition.
Johnson said he has been trying for several years to organize a study abroad in Africa, but the trip needed at least 12 students and not enough people signed up in years past.
Johnson teaches a race and public policy class in the fall that he hopes will offer students and opportunity to explore some of the same issues the trip will.
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