Vacation's Over.

So not a lot has gone on since the start of this week that many would be interested in reading, but that is not to say that I have not been extremely busy with things here in Africa. First of all, it is safe to say that vacation is over. We have officially started classes. And by officially, I mean that classrooms are being filled with hundreds of international and first-year students, as the upperclassmen have not felt the need to join us in our woes just yet. I would like to compare my first week of varsity (how they refer to school in South Africa) to that of freshman year at Trinity. In both cases I entered a new place, with all new faces, and that sense of confusion and chaos as I rushed around trying to find my classroom in a timely fashion. However, there is so much more uncertainty added to that process when you are put in a foreign country, a third world country at that, and have become an international student. I have had to wait in line to register for classes, only hoping that I would qualify by the University’s standards and be able to fit it into my schedule. I have had to wait in several endlessly long lines in order to obtain my student ID card that will allow me access to places, such as the library, the outdoor pool (which I have frequented already), and several computer labs. I have waited in line to sign up for societies (comparable to clubs in America) and sports organizations. It should be clear by now that a lot of my time from the end of last week up until this week has been spent standing impatiently and sweating profusely in long lines to do things that in America would be as simple as logging in online and pressing at most, 5 buttons, to accomplish. Well as the title as my blog reads, TIA: This is Africa. Enough said.

In coming to South Africa, I had made sure to prepare myself within my major by taking enough class that I could go abroad and study classes that were completely unrelated to psychology. While some my find this academic semester a complete waste of time because it does not necessarily coincide with what I am going to school for and what I plan to do in my life, I beg to differ. I do not see the point in going to a foreign country, with hopes of immersing myself in an entirely different culture and gaining a new perspective on the world, and taking classes that are so specific to the subject matter of psychology. Why not take classes that I would have no chance of taking back in the states and really getting a chance to learn, first hand, what the culture of South Africa is all about. With that frame of mind, I have come to choose a schedule that consist of three classes (in addition to my Trinity class with Dr. Moore): Sex, Love, and Taboo; Afrikaans; and African Instruments.

The first class, called Sex, Love, and Taboo is a class that focuses not on the actual activities involved in love and sexuality, but rather the vocabularies of African languages with regard to sex, love, and taboo. It is a class that compares how different languages in South Africa are used to discuss and express feelings about these sorts of topics. In our first reading, we learned about the everlasting debate as to whether language shapes the way we perceive the world or whether the way we see the world influences how we form our language. It is an interesting dispute as you think about the categories that we put things into based on the words that we have within our language. If we do not have a word for a given concept or object, does that mean that we do not recognize its existence? We discussed how the words of a language can often represent what is important in a given culture. For example, in certain regions of Canada, there are over 13 different terms for the different conditions of snow, as opposed to the few words that are used to describe snow and ice in many places of the world. This signifies the prevalence of snow within this culture and the importance it has to these people in comparison to members of more subtropical climates, where the only form of frozen water they have ever seen is in ice cube trays in their freezers. Well that is a brief summary of the information that we went over in our first lecture, so hopefully it provides a little food for thought for those interested.

The second class that I have enrolled in is the language of Afrikaans, which is one of the 13 languages spoken in South Africa. Because English is the predominant language in much of Cape Town, and is the language of instruction at UCT, I did not have to come into the semester with any prerequisites that are often common among students going to study in Europe or South America. However, I could not seem to get past the idea of learning such a cultured language that comes from the very country in which I am living for the next 4 months. No, it may not be practical in the long run because I am fairly positive that South Africa is the only country that really recognizes the language, but it was a subject of great interest to me so I went ahead with my desire to learn Afrikaans. So far we have learned how to meet and greet people and are currently going over subject pronouns so that we can have the basics mastered when we go on to more complicated dialogue.

The final class that I am taking at the University of Cape Town is African Instruments. In this class, we will learn how to play several different instruments native to the continent of Africa. This class consists of meetings with a small group of 5 or 6 people for intensive learning, as well as a larger ensemble in which we play with a group of 20 or so students. The instruments that have been shown and listed as being used for the class are as follows: East African Kiganda xylophones, West African djembe, Central African Kundi harps, Mangwilo and Mongolongondo xylophones, and several others from the country of South Africa. Now I cannot tell you what any of these mean or how they are played, but I am hoping that after a semester’s work I might even be good enough to come back to America and start recording with some of the big shots. Coming from absolutely no previous musical experience, and having been told on countless occasions that I am tone deaf, this should be a course that really challenges me in ways that I have not seen before.

I am hoping that the combination of these three classes, in addition to the course taught by Sibs, I will have finished my semester with exactly what I have come to accomplish. I am looking to learn about the South African culture and while I understand that I cannot become a true part of the South African people, I hope that I can gain a better conception about who these people are and how they live their lives.