The Great Cory Library Fieldtrip! Blog 26, Cape Town and back

Sun 10 Aug: Early Saturday morning I drove from Grahamstown to Port Elizabeth and then flew to Cape Town for the final launch event for The World’s Great Question. Saturday was Women’s Day in South Africa and the launch was fittingly held in Kalk Bay, where there is a Schreiner memorial and where some Women’s Enfranchisement League activities and meetings took place. Readings from Schreiner’s letters were chosen accordingly, with her principled fervent disagreement with the developing WEL ‘votes on the same terms as men’ policy and the implicit ( and often quite explicit) racism of this featuring large in my choices. As this suggests, there IS a link, and a strong one, between the Schreiner Letters project and the Whites Writing Whiteness one. blohplaqueaThe Kalk Bay memorial to Olive Schreiner resulting from a South African Sunday Times initiative is rather pedestrian and shabby, but at least it exists and its plaque recognises that she should would have rejected the vote for white women only.

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Last updated: 11 August 2014


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