What do elephant, newspapers, and rimbewu have in common? South Africa, and now Elizabethtown College. The connection is the Bowers Writers House Scholar-in-Residence, Maggie Messitt. She is an immersion journalist and creative nonfiction writer. In 2003, 24-year-old Maggie Messitt bought a one-way ticket to South Africa and planned to stay there for 18 months. She ended up living in rural, northeastern South Africa for eight years, choosing to live in a tent at first. During this time, she founded a writing school for women and edited a community newspaper. Eventually, Messitt also wrote a book about the people and circumstances she encountered, titled “The Rainy Season.”
When asked why he chose her to be a scholar-in-residence, Director of the Bowers Writers House Jesse Waters said, “When I found out about this first book that she was writing and what she had going on, I was intrigued by it. I liked her energy and her passion, and I thought this is someone who would be really good for the Elizabethtown community.”
Unlike previous scholar-in-residences, she and her dog Shinga will be staying at the Bowers Writers House for the entire 2015 Fall Semester. During her first event there, “South Africa in Three Acts: Elephant, Newspapers, and Rimbewu,” Thursday, September 10, Messitt explained that she often approaches storytelling as a curator, allowing the reader to make connections for him or herself, and her lecture was no exception. She described different aspects of South Africa, but didn’t tell the audience what to think about them. Instead, she asked her audience to consider each and to think about what they say about South African history, and the world in general.
The first topic she explored involved elephants. She explained that the human-made boundaries of Kruger National Park, a conservation area the size of Wales, came with responsibilities to keep nature balanced. Elephant living there have grown in numbers. This led to culling, or killing a certain amount of a species, to avoid negative impacts on other species. Messitt said that people feel a “special connection” with elephant and, because of this and international pressure, the culling of elephants was outlawed in 1995. Everything looked fine from the outside, but there were problems. Messitt saw some of the signs for herself while in a microlight following a wild fire with grass and fire experts from the Park. The burnt trees were snapping due to overgrazing. In 2008, there were about 20,000 elephant in the Park, but capacity is about 7,000. The ban on culling was lifted. International pressure to stop the practice returned.
After sharing this information, Messitt went on to talk about newspapers in South Africa, or more accurately, the lack of rural newspapers. After opening a newsroom “in-between a chicken shack and the railroad tracks,” she also worked with the community to stress the importance of media in a democratic nation. During apartheid, or legal racial segregation, there were only three television stations and the newspapers were censored. She gave an example of Photographer Sam Nzima witnessing the Soweto Uprising in 1976. He took photographs of the students shot by the police. The officials tried to confiscate the rolls of film, but he managed to hide one. For publishing these in an international newspaper, he was pushed out of the urban areas and into the rural homelands to hide, eventually put under house arrest until the end of the apartheid in 1994.
The last aspect of South African rural life that Messitt talked about was rimbewu. This xiTsonga word means sex, both the act and gender. Messitt then introduced these statistics, “One out of three girls is raped by the time she graduates from matric – high school. And every eight hours, a woman is killed by her husband or boyfriend. In fact, [South Africa is] the number one place in the world for spousicide. You can’t talk about South Africa without thinking about the crimes against women, most often committed by a family member, that very few people discuss.” She also explored how complicated AIDS education has been. She explained that, although the apartheid government gave away free condoms before it fell apart, they weren’t trusted. Many thought the condoms were transmitting the virus. She also discussed how polygamy, the role of bride-price, and the Catholic Church’s ban on condom-use contributes to the HIV-AIDS epidemic and gender inequality.
South Africa is changing, but Messitt showed that it still has challenges, especially negative effects of man-made boundaries and restrictions on many aspects of life. First-year Mika Thomas recalled, “The idea of the rainy season bringing about a fearful type of hope was a really powerful image for me. That kind of lingers with me still.”
Maggie Messitt’s next events are October 13 and November 10. More information is available at www.etown.edu/writershouse. She will also be around campus, eating in the Brossman Commons and working on her second book in the High Library.
-Rachel Lee
