Campus Connection

Students explore history and racial segregation alongside students from University of the Free State

This summer UW-La Crosse students joined students from a South African university on a trip across the southernmost African country. They explored the country’s political history while examining systems of racial segregations that once defined and still shape both of their nations today. During the three-week study abroad experience, May 31-June 22, seven UWL students and five students from the University of the Free State (UFS), South Africa, travelled together to Johannesburg, Pilanesburg, Marquard, Bloemfontein and Cape Town. They lived together, studied together and came to a deeper understanding of how race and racism shape their daily lives.

“The sites visited provoked intellectual thought and raw emotions as the horrors of racism and racial oppression were laid bare to both UWL students and the students from South Africa.”

The group delved into the political history of South Africa, visiting sites such as: Freedom Park, the Voortrekker Museum, the Apartheid Museum and Mandela House. “They had enriching, thought-provoking round-table sessions with Sello Hatang, Leon Wessels and some of the staff from the Nelson Mandela Foundation,” explains John Grider, UWL associate professor of history. “The sites visited provoked intellectual thought and raw emotions as the horrors of racism and racial oppression were laid bare to both UWL students and the students from South Africa,” he adds. This study abroad program, a pilot of the first Global Education student-staff exchange, was a partnership between The Institute for Reconciliation and Social Justice at the University of the Free State and UWL’s History Department. This year students also toured major attractions in the area such Sterkfontein, a set of limestone caves near Johannesburg, and what is considered the “birthplace of humanity,” the Cradle of Humankind at Marupeng. Interactive days at the Mphebatho Cultural Museum and Pilanesberg National Park, as well as an excursion to Korannaberg to view some San paintings, provided an opportunity to further survey the place of natural, environmental, and cultural heritage in a globalizing, modern world. Grider, chair of UWL’s Department of History, was joined by UFS staff and faculty JC van der Merwe, Dionne van Reenen, Shirley du Plooy and Matau Setshase to lead the study tour across South Africa. In Bloemfontein, the lecturing staff facilitated several full-day classes and dialogues at the UFS. Afterward, students presented on their insights and showed serious and deep engagement with legacies of segregation in many different contexts. During the closing evening’s discussions with Professor Francis Petersen, UFS rector and vice-chancellor, staff conveyed that, while they usually expect personally transformative moments during such engagements, there is always hope for real critical developments and deepened understandings of how we see and are seen. “Students on the tour exceeded this hope by seriously grappling with a large array of social and political challenges and initiating lively, inclusive discussions, debating in their own time and spaces,” says Grider. The plan is to reverse the program next summer with South African students coming to the U.S. where they will visit Washington, D.C., La Crosse and other sites in the region. The goal is to run the exchange every year, alternating between the U.S. and South Africa and eventually offering both trips in the same year with the same group of UWL and South African students.