Interviewed for an article in the Sunday Tribune.
Writing
Memories of Inanda: Edward Ximba
Mwelela Cele interviews Edward Ximba as part of the Memories of Inanda documentary, produced for the eThekwini Municipality’s Ulwazi Programme. Mr Ximba discusses the Shembe Church.
Nazareth Baptist Church (Alternatively called “The Nazarite Church” “iBandla lamaNazaretha”, or the “Shembe Church”) is an African Initiated Church founded by Isaiah Shembe in 1910.
It has approximately 4 million members. The religion bans smoking, drinking, and fornicating. It is seen as a mixture of Zulu tradition and Christianity. It reveres Isaiah Shembe as an African Messiah and emphasises the Ten Commandments.
Midlands Writers Trails
Midlands Writers Trails, compiled together with Lindy Stiebel. Writers featured include Imraan Coovadia, Wilbur Smith, Fred Khumalo, Jenny Hobbs and John van der Ruit while stops include Michaelhouse, Hilton College, Caversham Mill and Press, the Howick Falls and the Mandela Capture site.
Memories of Inanda: Ela Gandhi
Mwelela Cele interviews Ela Gandhi as part of the Memories of Inanda documentary, produced for the eThekwini Municipality’s Ulwazi Programme. Ela discusses her grandfather Mahatma Gandhi, the Phoenix Settlement and her work as an activist and politician.
Ela Gandhi (born July 1, 1940), granddaughter of Mahatma Gandhi is a peace activist and was a Member of Parliament in South Africa from 1994-2004, where she aligned with the African National Congress (ANC) party representing the Phoenix area of Inanda in the KwaZulu Natal province. Her parliamentary committee assignments included the Welfare, and Public Enterprises committees as well as the ad-hoc committee on Surrogate Motherhood. She was an alternate member of the Justice Committee and served on Theme Committee 5 on Judiciary and Legal Systems.
Shot at the the Durban University of Technology in April 2010
Memories of Inanda: Musawenkosi Cele
Mwelela Cele interviews Musawenkosi Cele as part of the Memories of Inanda documentary, produced for the eThekwini Municipality’s Ulwazi Programme.
Mr Cele discusses his ancestral home, which housed the first doctor’s surgery and post office in Inanda.
Memories of Inanda: Thulasizwe Goba
Mwelela Cele interviews Thulasizwe Goba as part of the Memories of Inanda documentary, produced for the eThekwini Municipality’s Ulwazi Programme.
Local Users, Local Language, Local Content
Presented at the IAMCR 2012 Conference, Durban, South Africa.
The Ulwazi Programme uses the public library infrastructure, Web 2.0 technologies and the community to collect and disseminate indigenous knowledge and local histories. This user-generated content is compiled in an online digital library in the form of a website and access is provided through current mobile and web technologies. In this paper I describe the history of the programme, its objectives and its structure. The website’s usage statistics are then unpacked to reveal the demographics of its users and popular content, with a focus on the use of the regional vernacular, Zulu.
The Digital Memory Toolkit – a free resource to assist community projects
Digital technologies provide all manner of new opportunities for the recording and dissemination of local knowledge and histories, outside of the already established chains of cultural transmission. Greater access to the Internet and the proliferation of mobile phones and other digital devices, coupled with the multiple ways in which people in the present are engaging with the past, points to the potential of these new technologies to facilitate new modes of recording and sharing local knowledge, cultural practices and histories.
The democratising potential of these digital technologies is great, in that they offer opportunities for traditionally marginalised groups to record and share their local knowledge and histories on the Internet, from their perspectives. They have therefore given rise to (amongst other things) the broad category of “digital memory projects,” including undertakings such as community-run museums, community archives, so-called indigenous cultural centres and alternative approaches to those commonly employed by cultural institutions (Sandell, 2002). The variability of digital technologies is vital to the success of these, and is seen to encourage dialogue, multiple authorship and the exchange of ideas and opinions. In contrast to the closed authorship, fixed ideas and practices of museums, libraries and heritage institutions, digital files circulate more freely and are open to further editing, co-authorship and interpretation. This suggests a more democratised mode of production as different constituencies can collect, interpret, alter and create new meanings for digital content as they see fit (Parry, 2007).
A Case Study in Community-Focused Indigenous Knowledge Management
I contributed to a book on knowledge management for development, focusing on my work with the Libraries and Heritage Department. Its available on Amazon for a crazy expensive price!
Prevailing ideas about knowledge management in post-apartheid South Africa have been marked by notions of redress, the recognition of previously marginalized narratives and categories such as intangible heritage and indigenous knowledge. Key to these developments has been a democratizing turn, a participatory approach to the development and management of knowledge resources. Born of changes in the broader political context and the policy environment, the Ulwazi Programme is a new South African heritage initiative that has been set up by the eThekwini Municipal Library’s Libraries and Heritage Department to preserve and disseminate indigenous knowledge of local communities in the greater Durban area. The Programme, in the form of a localized Wiki, functions as a collaborative online archive of local knowledge and histories that are collected from the community by volunteer fieldworkers and then shared via the Internet and on cell phones. This utilization of a combination of open-source and social media applications for archival and heritage purposes is unique in South Africa. The chapter presents the structure and the implementation details of this indigenous knowledge preservation system.
- Publisher: Springer US
- Publication Date: 2014
- Publication Name: Knowledge Management for Development: Domains, Strategies and Technologies for Developing Countries
Along the Way
Along the Way is a book inspired by Doung Anwar Jahangeer‘s CityWalk. In December 2007 a call went out to Durban’s creative community inviting proposals for an upcoming art festival, Cascoland. Under the theme of “mobility,” the festival was to take place along a specified route with the aim of interaction with public space. As we walked the city it became apparent that the route was less about the buildings, walls and roads;the traditional infrastructure of the city;and more about the people we met along the way. We decided to focus on these people, to celebrate their lives in some small way.
SA Blog Awards
For those of you who follow us on Twitter or are fans on Facebook, this is old news, but last Saturday Grant (aka mol-d) attended the SA Blog Awards at the One and Only hotel in Cape Town where Sprig won the Best Green Blog for 2010.
Other winners include the Best Travel Blog (www.getaway.co.za/page/blog), the Best Group Blog (www.rlabs.org), the Best Photographic Blog (www.guywithcamera.co.za) and the Best South African Podcast Blog (www.zanews.co.za).
Rover of mine
Article published in last week’s Sunday Times by my dad, on his epic trip overland from South Africa to England.
