{pp}Local jeweller Uwe Koetter, made famous this month by his wedding ring gesture to SA’s first same sex couple, has stepped into the limelight once again with his offer of a jewellery bursary to Cape Technikon.

“Sadly, at this time of year, many students reconsider their options and find that they are unable to afford to continue their courses”, says Johan Louw, chief designer at Uwe Koetter Jewellers.

{pp}“I know the risk a woman takes in the sheer effort of writing, placing herself beyond accepted margins, abandoning the securities of less daunting, much more approved paths.” – Yvonne Vera, Opening Spaces

From the legendary Nongqawuse to the lines of anti-pass protesters marching to Pretoria, from labour activists to township leaders, women have formed an integral part of South African history. Dating back from pre-colonial times, through the apartheid years, and into the democratic present, women have made a notable contribution to the shaping of South Africa. All too often, however, the role of women has been woefully under- or mis-represented. Moreover, women’s participation has often been measured within a specifically patriarchal context.

{pp}Constitution Hill Public Programmes and the HSRC Press are hosting another interactive and thought-provoking debate on whether South African society has learned anything at all from the experiences of women in our distant and more recent past. In the course of this InsideOut debate, we hope to uncover fascinating, controversial and illuminating aspects of South African history.

Contributors to the recently launched Women in South African History: Basus’iimbokodo, Bawel’imilambo / They remove boulders and cross rivers (HSRC Press) will kick off the debate at 3:30pm on Saturday 10 March 2007 at No. 4 Lekgotla Space (next to the Constitutional Court), Constitution Hill, Braamfontein, Johannesburg.

{pp}“They tell us the past is another country. Yet think how the past shapes the lives that come after …The history of our lives is your history, as your lives will be the ground from which your children grow. A history so terrible and so beautiful, so base and so heroic may seem strange and hard to comprehend, but it is irrevocably a part of your life too.” – Communist Party of South Africa activist Hilda Bernstein.

Although an increasing body of historical literature has focused on liberation movements in South Africa the role of women in the country’s political history is less well documented. Representation and Reality: Portraits of Women’s Lives in the Western Cape 1948-1976 (HSRC Press) is an important addition to the growing work on the social and political lives of women during the apartheid era. In the book, author Helen Scanlon analyses how apartheid legislation remade gender relations in the Western Cape in the period just after the National Party came into power and how this in turn affected individual women’s lives.

{pp}“It’s a city of love, it’s like a mother, there’s love.” - Former District Six resident. “There is no hospitality here in South Africa, in Cape Town in particular.” – Congolese refugee.


Cape Town, like cities all over the world, brings together people from vastly different backgrounds. And, like other cities, it evokes a diverse range of feelings which reflect the experiences and memories of the people who live in it.

{pp}“Through the minute, seemingly marginal, ‘unfashionable’ groups and small movements, we very often find an exceptional route into unknown worlds and neglected, yet important, social processes.” – Shamil Jeppie, Language, Identity, Modernity: The Arabic Study Circle of Durban, South Africa

As author Shamil Jeppie wryly points out, a short study of a group of Gujarati-speaking men with an obsession to promote Arabic may appear a rather peculiar exercise. However, he continues, to take this view can impoverish historical writing in post-apartheid South Africa. As the new democracy develops, there is less urgency to look purely at politics and more space to explore the multi-textured events and movements that have been an important part of South African social history.

{pp}Is there a ‘dumbing down’ of public and intellectual discourse in South Africa or are you simply excluded from the society of debate? When survival is your modus operandi, is introspection as foreign as dim sum?

Or is the ‘dumbing down’ an idiom of overly intellectual writers; an unchallenged canon of discourse amongst academics who believe that readers lack sufficient vocabulary, comprehension, or thinking skills to even buy their books?

{pp}A laptop stolen in Johannesburg has been recovered and will be returned to the rightful owner within the next few days, this is thanks to a Johannesburg based anti-crime initiative.

{pp}New Hollywood blockbuster, Blood Diamonds, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, has raised the hackles of many in the SA diamond and jewellery industry as well as questions about their integrity.

Though the diamond industry's response to the film's depiction of the trade in arms for diamonds - better known as Blood Diamonds- has been widely dispersed, our vocal jewellery industry appears to be avoiding the subject altogether. It would however seem, that the diamond industry response, though appropriate, has not quelled the tide of interest and concern that would fully sate the South African public.

{pp}In the first exhibition on British artist Julian Opie in South Africa, David Krut Projects will show several portraits from three of Opie’s most recent series of prints: ‘Ruth Smoking’, ‘Ruth with Cigarette’ and ‘This is Shahnoza’. These large, striking works show Opie’s clarity of line and colour – his use of primary colours and of bold black strokes – to startling effect. They also demonstrate Opie’s facility with different surfaces so that images produced as Lambda prints leap from the frame and screenprints on paper have all the desired tactility of their medium.