Restore the right to learn with Ausis, uMakhulus and uGogos: A reflection on Youth Month and returning to the wisdom of female knowledge keepers

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Youth Month is a time to reflect on the historical role of young freedom fighters in South Africa’s liberation struggle. It is also a time to think more deeply about the challenges facing our education system and how we are serving young people as a nation.

Authors June Bam and Sylvia Vollenhoven call for incorporating the wisdom of traditional female knowledge holders. They advocate fetching the Ausis, uMakhulus and uGogos, our connection with the feminine Divine, to create intergenerational and uniquely African solutions to modern problems.


Fetching Ausi Lena

by Sylvia Vollenhoven

The 300-kilometre road from Cape Town to Vanrhynsdorp is relentless. West Coast reserves nudge the Nama Karoo, and it takes a turn towards the enigmatic once you pass the Cederberg. The chatter in the car dies down. With fiery inquiry, another kind of talking begins in this gradual road trip ritual. A Khoekhoe Chief, a theatre director and a storyteller, consult everyone present – in search of an Ausi.

Ausi Magdalena “Lena” Adolph’s smallholding in Vanrhynsdorp is adorned with crystals for protection. Photo: Syliva Vollenhoven

The Ausidi, the female knowledge keepers of the Khoe-descendant people, traditionally ensured a seamless connection with the feminine Divine. In the cities, we have left their gifts behind, until recently. In the settling dust of the car, Ausi Magdalena “Lena” Adolph comes out onto her stoep to greet us – waiting beyond time and knowing beyond words. A faded statue of Mother Mary, rescued from a nearby Roman Catholic Church, is turned away from us. An abundance of Namaqualand crystals are scattered about the smallholding.

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In no time at all, Aus Lena and I discover that we both grew up with absent fathers who were Muslim and with the same surname. I become Nana (Sister) Sylvia, and there is no doubt in her mind that we were led here by something greater than the need for her guidance in the matter of a ceremony for Stellenbosch University.
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A flow of Khoekhoegowab accompanies the greeting from Chief Danab Bradley van Sitters. Theatre director Basil Appollis hugs her with a gesture that is more redolent of a reunion than people meeting for the first time. In no time at all, Aus Lena and I discover that we both grew up with absent fathers who were Muslim and with the same surname. I become Nana (Sister) Sylvia, and there is no doubt in her mind that we were led here by something greater than the need for her guidance in the matter of a ceremony for Stellenbosch University.

Sylvia Vollenhoven, Professor of Practice at the University of Johannesburg’s Faculty of Humanities. Photo: Henk Oets.

I have a long list of research questions, but I never get to ask them. Ausi Lena – or Ouma Lena, as most people know her – answers everything I have written down before the words make their way to my mouth. We have come to ask her to assist with a very special |Nau rite of passage ritual. She hauls us away from our prepared scripts, doing a deft fast-forward to how the preparations will happen. We have completely bypassed the formal request for participation. It is merely the beginning of this ancient and yet familiar dance with Aus Lena that leads us firmly beyond the confines of prosaic parlance and into the realm of an elevated understanding of what is required.

When we are done with our explanations that we wish to do a │Nau ritual for Krotoa in the lead-up to a ceremony at Stellenbosch University for the formal renaming of a building, she responds with a short Khoekhoe folktale. The jackal sees a tortoise for the first time. After contemplating the animal for a while, the jackal announces: “Hier is ’n ding, binne in ’n ding (Here is a thing, inside a thing).”

Ausi Magdalena “Lena” Adolph is restoring the statue of Mother Mary for the Roman Catholic Church in Vanrhynsdorp. She sees no conflict between practising her traditional Khoekhoe beliefs and her church activities. Photo: Sylvia Vollenhoven

It is her way of asking us whether we grasp the layers of meaning as well as the profound impact of the work we are doing. ’n Ding binne in ’n ding becomes my guiding mantra for the next while as we negotiate the tricky terrain of Khoekhoe cultural politics, a university with a dark past and my own inner turmoil.

In the few days we spend with Ausi Lena in Vanrhynsdorp, she prepares us for the work ahead. Later, she journeys by bus to Cape Town to be the guiding force in the proceedings, which end with a group of young female initiates doing the │Nau in honour of Krotoa, and with the formal renaming ceremony at Stellenbosch University during Africa Month.

The world around me reflects the power of the process with visits from /Kaggen the Mantis, powerful dreams and Krotoa communicating with Ausi Lena as easily as one would receive a conventional phone call: “She says she does not want only this building named after her. Her name should also be on a place that is working with abused women and children, because she suffered serious abuse as a child and as a young woman.”

Then Ausi Lena, who hardly knows any details of the life of Krotoa !Goa /Goas of the ||Ammaqua and the Goringhaiqua – a young woman who was a servant in the household of the colonial commander Jan van Riebeeck and who went on to become a translator, negotiator and key figure at the Cape in the 1600s – describes in detail the abuse suffered by Krotoa. Her descriptions match the scenes out of the play Krotoa Eva van de Kaap almost exactly, without her ever having heard of the work. Until this moment, I have regarded these scenes I have written as “faction”, creative accounts based on archival research. But listening to Ausi Lena, I am forced to reevaluate the source of “my creativity”.

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When colonial brutality, missionary zeal and apartheid aggression destroyed sacred aspects of our culture, ripping it out of our hearts along with our names and our mother tongues, other equally powerful rituals filled the gaping spiritual holes left behind.
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When Ausi Lena guides a group of traditional leaders, including Danab Bradley van Sitters, Chief Autshumao Mackie Mackenzie and Elder Glenda Herman, through the ritual of the │Nau, it is a life-changing moment for all of us. This ancient ceremony has been performed traditionally as a rite of passage, but it is also done to mark a major transition in the life of a person or community.

I am given a new name at the end of the ceremony: Mîbahe Hāge. I add it when doing spiritual work to one I have received previously, Bara-ta-ken. Together, they could read as “the one who was told and who came on the pathway of the horses”. Sylvia Elizabeth pales by comparison.

When colonial brutality, missionary zeal and apartheid aggression destroyed sacred aspects of our culture, ripping it out of our hearts along with our names and our mother tongues, other equally powerful rituals filled the gaping spiritual holes left behind.

A│Nau ritual for Krotoa was held in the lead-up to a ceremony at Stellenbosch University for the formal renaming of the building on 20 May 2023. Photo: Liné Loff

Author Don Pinnock, who is a Research Fellow at the University of Cape Town’s Centre of Criminology, writes in The Conversation that “Cape Town’s bloody gang violence is inextricably bound up in its history”. He says that the disruption of apartheid has set off a chain reaction that “now requires military intervention”. The destruction of family and community cohesion has been profound.

One route out of the claustrophobic tensions of family life was the use of alcohol and drugs. This became the standard path of many men. Children were shaken loose in different ways. One way was into early sexual relationships and perhaps marriage.

Another was into the fierce youth subcultures on the streets which became ritualised in the violent youth-gang culture, reinforcing the neighbourhood climate of fear. The situation was to be compounded by rising unemployment at the younger end of a potential labour force and the consolidation of illegal markets that required “soldiers” to protect.

What these gangs did in order to survive in the face of tremendous odds was to rebuild the lost organisation and domestic economy in the new housing-estates. This time, however, their customers and they themselves were often also their victims.

Source: The Conversation, "Cape Town’s bloody gang violence is inextricably bound up in its history" (7 August, 2019)

In his book Gangs, rituals & rites of passage (1997), Pinnock writes:

[A]dolescence is also hugely creative. It is a time of anticipation for something indescribably other – a longing for magical transformation and a rejection of the mundane. It demands ritual space, a time and a place where young men and women can become introduced to the unknown man and woman inside themselves. They need to discover when childhood ends, when and how adulthood begins and what their culture expects of them …. But Western cultures have largely lost what most pre-industrial cultures knew: These needs and excesses have to be dealt with by ritual guidance and initiation, not by punishment and imprisonment …. We need wilderness and extravagance. Whatever shuts a human being away from the waterfall and the tiger will kill him.


A reflection on the right to learn through fetching Ausi Lena

by June Bam

Things were vastly different decades ago in the 1980s and early 1990s. Then, as high school teachers across South Africa, we had a favoured text: Pam Christie’s The right to learn: The struggle for education in South Africa (published in 1985 by Sached and Ravan Press), and later, on the Cape Flats, a book titled Our community in our classrooms, written by history school teacher Roy Prinsloo and lecturer Maureen Robinson (published by UWC in 1992). What both texts had in common was the importance of understanding historical context in education and the need to free ourselves from oppressive and exploitative apartheid education. We taught our students these key foundations for an emancipatory education through listening to real stories and the deep knowledge of everyday experiences in our communities. As township school teachers, we were committed to a strong ethos of Africanising schools through this relevant community knowledge of the past. Somehow, that era has come to an end, and we find schools in the townships in turmoil, with high fences and security guards (if they can afford them) to protect their already vulnerable youth and teachers from ruthless, prowling gangs and ubiquitous criminal syndicates. Feminist elders like Ausi Lena have been pushed to the margins of society, outside these barricaded fences of education. They are no longer the respected ones who sustain cohesion in their communities, fighting off hunger and despair. Today, they live in daily, shared fear of criminal onslaught and gender-based violence in local schools and their communities. The Ausi/uGogo/uMakhulu no longer holds the sacrosanct knowledge-sharing role that sustained communities spiritually, such as protecting ecosystems and providing food security. 

Professor June Bam, Centre for Education Rights and Transformation, Faculty of Education, University of Johannesburg. Photo supplied.

Today, Ausi, uMakhulu and uGogo are subject to a second layer of violent racial and class displacement – no longer only through apartheid’s forced removals, but from within her street, her community and even her home, which may be the frequent victim of stray bullets from everyday gang violence often spurred by bottomless despair and poverty. What happened? 

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During the anti-apartheid struggle, many of the teachers in these townships across the country were grounded in the Ausi/uGogo/uMakhulu tradition of passing on vital intergenerational indigenous knowledge systems – though not so named at the time, and not spoken about openly. [...] They had a distinguishable ethic and commitment to good-quality teaching: “Let us live for our children.” Many belonged to the early intellectual formations of what became the South African Democratic Teachers’ Union (SADTU) in the early 1990s, with its priority focus being on liberatory pedagogies in the classroom. 
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During the anti-apartheid struggle, many of the teachers in these townships across the country were grounded in the Ausi/uGogo/uMakhulu tradition of passing on vital intergenerational indigenous knowledge systems – though not so named at the time, and not spoken about openly. Our teachers with this knowledge came from diverse backgrounds in rural and urban areas and were often members of the Teachers’ League of South Africa (TLSA), affiliated to the Unity Movement (NEUM) and Isaac Tabata’s African Teachers’ Union; he was mentor to the marginalised anthropologist Archie Mafeje, who emphasised the primary importance of local authentic knowledge in critically understanding our political and economic realities. They had a distinguishable ethic and commitment to good-quality teaching: “Let us live for our children.” Many belonged to the early intellectual formations of what became the South African Democratic Teachers’ Union (SADTU) in the early 1990s, with its priority focus being on liberatory pedagogies in the classroom. 

Ausi Magdalena “Lena” Adolph visits Robben Island with Chief Autshumao “Mackie” Mackenzie to pay respects to the memory of Krotoa, who died on the island in July 1674. Photo: Sylvia Vollenhoven

Despite their noble and undoubtedly successful pedagogical intentions, many of these teachers were displaced through apartheid’s forced removals from these indigenous knowledge environments, where they had been reared by Ausi, uMakhulu and uGogo around the galleys (fires) and taught the ancient rituals (drinking their mandatory immunity herbs before going to school, for example). Such teachers could not always openly teach these values in schools, as they were under the watchful eye of school inspectors who tried to ensure that apartheid curricula were implemented. Activist teachers and activists, like Mathew Goniwe, Fort Calata, Jean Pease and Gertrude Fester, and the many others who organised youth and parents to value their own African ways of knowing in the struggle to overthrow the apartheid education system and to affirm their own indigenous identity, could suffer incarceration, banning or even violent deaths in the 1980s. Introducing youth to indigenous knowledge systems and the community’s ritual archive was dangerously subversive, as it questioned the credibility of the fundamentals of apartheid’s Christian national education, ie, quizzing the superiority of white, Western civilisation and knowledge and its associated racial, capitalist economic system as the indisputable and superior “truth” of how “the natural order of things” in South Africa ought to be.

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Introducing youth to indigenous knowledge systems and the community’s ritual archive was dangerously subversive, as it questioned the credibility of the fundamentals of apartheid’s Christian national education.
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This indigenous knowledge subversion started a long time ago. As an illustration, the /Xam speaker Dia!kwain, shocked and traumatised by the gratuitous and speedy extermination of wildlife and ecosystems by the colonists at the Cape at the beginning of the twentieth century, storied in his indigenous language about the Ausi (his mother) who warned about throwing stones at the swallows because they signal rain and the gathering of clouds. This is not mythical past knowledge; this is ongoing, surviving, present knowledge and teachings of the Ausi, uMakhulu and uGogo on the importance of nature conservation and ecosystems. /Xam and !Diakwain were just telling ordinary, everyday, ancient human stories of survival in the region from what their Ausi and other elders had taught them. Despite displacement, the indigenous stories remain in communities, contrary to colonial assumptions.

Our ancient stories can restore our dignity in listening deeply. Going back to our traditions and human values to fetch the Aus Lenas among us means to revive the ethical and good cultural practices and knowledge of the Ausi/uGogo/uMakhulu, which will lead us back to healthier rituals and a waterfall of healing, which for centuries sustained our communities’ basic rights to knowledge that matters and that counts in its relevance in sustaining livelihoods and dignity. To listen deeply around the galley (fire) is to hear our deep intergenerational storying on what matters in our politics and economies.

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Despite displacement, the indigenous stories remain in communities, contrary to colonial assumptions. [...] By bringing Ausi/uGogo/uMakhulu back into the classroom and diverse sites of learning for our youth in communities, through both formal and informal education – in our streets, in the townships and in our schools, colleges and universities in Africa – we restore the right to learn and to reclaim being equally human across the racial and class divide.
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By bringing Ausi/uGogo/uMakhulu back into the classroom and diverse sites of learning for our youth in communities, through both formal and informal education – in our streets, in the townships and in our schools, colleges and universities in Africa – we restore the right to learn and to reclaim being equally human across the racial and class divide.

In South Africa, we say “Mayibuye!” – return, re-member (put back together the pieces of who we are in our colonial and global capitalist displacement) and resurrect the archive of ancient feminist knowing and sharing, to restore economic equality not just for an elite, but for all. Similarly, elsewhere in Africa, in Ghana, the Akan metaphor of the proverbial Sankofa bird means it is not taboo to go back to fetch what you have forgotten.

Sylvia Vollenhoven, Professor of Practice at the University of Johannesburg’s Faculty of Humanities. A project manager in Stellenbosch University’s Division of Social Impact and Transformation to assist with coordinating the Krotoa Building renaming process in 2023. Author of The keeper of the kumm: Ancestral longing and belonging of a Boesmankind. Tafelberg, 2016.

Professor June Bam, Centre for Education Rights and Transformation, Faculty of Education, University of Johannesburg
Author of Ausi told me: Why Cape herstoriographies matter. Jacana, 2021.


 

Read more:

The renaming of the Krotoa Building at the University of Stellenbosch and “A !Nau for now: crossing oceans inside”

Krotoa neem haar volwaardige plek op US-kampus in

Sodat ons nie die rol van Krotoa in die Kaapse geskiedenis sal vergeet nie

Frazer Barry: "Ik heb ervoor gekozen om Khoi te zijn"

’n Blik op die produksie Krotoa: Eva van de Kaap

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