apologies for not having updated my blog in a while. the week after we got back from the rural areas was one filled with assignments. not to mention our zulu written and oral exams. we did not have any lectures except zulu class that week so that we would have a lot of time to complete everything before we left for Johannesburg that friday.

that week we visited possible accommodations for the Independent Study Period (ISP) where we will be living independently together, doing our own research, interviews etc, and then coming up with a thirty or so page paper at the end of it. many of us are looking forward to living independently and it will be a fun time living altogether (let's hope). by this time, most of us have more or less an idea of what we want to do for ISP (there will be a separate blog for what I want to do).

that week we also attended one of the events of the Time of the Writer's Festival at the University of kwaZulu-Natal (UKZN). the event we went to was a discussion at the Elizabeth Sneddon Theatre and there were five invited speakers. the event itself commemorated Dennis Brutus, an activist during the apartheid era who did a lot of work for equality in SA. all the speakers were writers/author. they were professors, journalists, etc and all knew dennis brutus personally. each of them was given time to speak about dennis brutus and whatever social and political issues they felt strongly about. it was an interesting time and they all had things to say that related back to what we have been studying in our Social and Political Transformation seminar as well as other things that we have observed. I thought that it was a pretty good time. up on the stage were six intellectuals that felt strongly about what they spoke about and they had voices of influence, each with something interesting to say. btw, one of the speakers was Mahatma Gandhi's granddaughter (Gandhi spent many years in the province of KZN). in the future, i just wish that my voice will be a voice of influence for other people and that it can make a difference. how do I achieve this? we'll have to find out.