AFRICA MEETS AFRICA IN NEWTOWN

Publication titled “Making a Living through the Mathematics of Zulu Design” to be launched at Newtown event.

The Africa meets Africa Project seeks out innovative solutions to learning problems in South African schools by tracing the knowledge embedded in objects of cultural expression, and the skills that go into their making. The project is producing a series of educator’s resources relating all South Africa’s indigenous language groups, the aim being for teachers to work with the full series and so be able to explore the full southern African cultural heritage as their own.

Each book and film is implemented with a series of ready-to-teach learning materials for the classroom at various Grade levels and with a teacher training workshop programme, presented in partnership with provincial education departments. During the previous implementation project, Africa meets Africa: Making a Living through the Mathematics of Zulu Design, 900 KZN Mathematics and Arts and Culture educators were trained in beadwork and weaving skills and how to teach mathematics through those skills. Learners also studied, and analysed mathematically, the work of master Zulu weavers and beadwork makers.

What makes this methodology so successful, say educators, is that the Africa meets Africa approach forms a bridge between the abstract and sometimes esoteric nature of Mathematics and very familiar and everyday objects such as baskets and beadwork. In rural areas, the visual language of Zulu design offered an entry point to the textbook learning of mathematics in English – most often an unfamiliar language.

Hot on the heels of Africa Day celebrations and Newtown Celebrates Matric Month – Sci-Bono brings Ndebele learners to Newtown to discover the mathematical symmetry and proportion revealed in Ndebele women’s design language.

The Africa meets Africa Project and Sci-Bono Discovery Centre in Newtown will present a unique way of doing Mathematics on May 27. Four Ndebele artists, including the celebrated Esther Mahlangu and Francinah Ndemande will create Ndebele paintings on the front wall of Sci-Bono Discovery Centre. They will be helped by a group of Ndebele speaking school learners from rural KwaMhlanga and from urban Daveyton. When the paintings are almost done, a mathematics educator will use the artists’ design language to teach mathematics ‘off the wall’ to the learners.

Also to be launched is a series of books and documentary films called the Africa meets Africa: Ndebele Women designing Identity which integrates the learning areas History, Visual Arts and architecture and Mathematics at FET Phase Level (Grade10 to 12). Written by Historian Dr Peter Sekibakiba Lekgoathi (of the University of the Witwatersrand), Mathematician Dr Chonat Getz, architect professor Peter Rich and Africa meets Africa Project director and arts educationist, Helene Smuts, this 52 minute documentary film was produced by heritage film specialist Guy Spiller. Together the authors demonstrate how the Ndebele design language, better known rather superficially in contemporary branding, emanated from a history of land dispossession as a means of maintaining cultural identity. So sophisticated is this design language developed by Ndebele women that it is often described as a southern African classicism. In mathematical terms, Mathematician Dr Chonat Getz investigates the remarkable sense of symmetry and proportion revealed in Ndebele women’s design language as builders of their homesteads, in the painted walls embellishing their homes and in their beaded adornment.

A limited number of Africa meets Africa: Ndebele Women designing Identity and Africa meets Africa: Making a Living through the Mathematics of Zulu Design will be on sale at the launch on May 27. Orders may also be placed at the launch.

Visit Africa meets Africa at www.africameetsafrica.co.za for sample pages of Africa meets Africa: Making a Living through the Mathematics of Zulu Design, and the preceding Arts and Culture resource, Africa meets Africa: The Power to Speak.