Perseverance runs deep in Dolana Mogadime\u2019s family.<\/p>\n
Her mother was a teacher and her father a doctor. In other places at other times, their careers would have provided a comfortable life for their children. In Apartheid-era South Africa, their race made them targets of systemic discrimination.<\/p>\n
From 1948 to 1994, black South Africans, along with people of other races, were oppressed by a series of laws privileging white South Africans<\/a>.<\/p>\n Mogadime, an associate professor in Brock\u2019s Faculty of Education, recently shared some of her family\u2019s experience at the opening of Mandela: Struggle for Freedom<\/a><\/em> at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights (CMHR) in Winnipeg. The exhibition explores the fight against Apartheid, from the legacy of Nelson Mandela to the efforts of human rights activists in Canada.<\/p>\n Seeing the exhibition was particularly poignant for Mogadime as it features the contributions of her mother, Caroline Goodie Mogadime, as a human rights defender.<\/p>\n \u201cI felt a tremendous connection to why my parents made Canada their home,\u201d she said after sharing their story during the opening\u2019s keynote address.<\/p>\n \u201cThey wanted a better future for their children through education. The impact of the Bantu Education Act of 1953<\/a> was one of the push factors that drove their decision to leave South Africa for Botswana in 1961. My mother returned briefly after that to give birth to me during the \u201960s in Pretoria, South Africa.\u201d<\/p>\n The Bantu Education Act strictly controlled the education of black children, who received very few resources compared to white children.<\/p>\n From Botswana, the family moved first to Zambia and then to Canada in the 1970s.<\/p>\n “My family arrived from Zambia with UN passports as refugees. We immigrated to Canada\u00a0through the\u00a0protection of the\u00a01951\u00a0UN Convention on the Rights of Refugees<\/a>.\u00a0Even if we were all born in South Africa, we were\u00a0stateless<\/a>\u00a0and not citizens of our own country\u00a0due to Apartheid. ”<\/p>\n \u201cMy father was a physician. We\u2019re very fortunate that he was the first class of medical students at the University of Durban that was able to be let in as African people, as a black man,\u201d explained Mogadime.<\/p>\n \u201cWe were lucky to be able to come to Canada via the fact that a hospital was looking for someone like him.\u201d<\/p>\n In Canada, her mother worked full time as an Ontario teacher but still made time to volunteer at the African National Congress (ANC) office in Toronto sharing the reality of Apartheid with Canadians. Mogadime learned about what was happening in South Africa through her mother\u2019s talks at local churches and women\u2019s organizations.<\/p>\n As an adult, Mogadime explored her mother\u2019s activism for her master\u2019s research through a series of oral history interviews.<\/p>\n She shared her mother\u2019s story with the CMHR after reading about an oral history project on the anti-Apartheid struggle in Canada.<\/p>\n \u201cI felt the work that women did, and especially African women did, their contributions should also be featured in that oral history,\u201d Mogadime said.<\/p>\n Today, video excerpts of her mother\u2019s oral history appear alongside displays on Prime Minister Brian Mulroney and former Canadian UN Ambassador Stephen Lewis. The exhibition also includes artifacts, interactive elements, videos and art.<\/p>\n \u201cIt does give me so much happiness to see that the role of African women is acknowledged. We were people of agency. We were fighting there along with men to make a difference and to make change,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n Mogadime\u2019s family has a long history of participation in the anti-Apartheid struggle.<\/p>\n Her great-grandfather, Henry Selby Msimang, was one of the founders of the South African Native National Congress, which later became the ANC. He and other African intellectuals at the time challenged the human rights violations of the 1913 Land Act<\/a>, which gave most of the country\u2019s land to a white minority and forced most of the black population out to \u2018Native reserves<\/a>\u2019 in isolated areas with poor agricultural land.<\/p>\n Mogadime addressed the injustices of the Land Act and the human rights violations committed under Apartheid when she spoke at the exhibition opening.<\/p>\n \u201cI felt the need to speak about the agency African people had in fighting for their rights and that resistance was part of what Nelson Mandela inherited when he himself joined the struggle,\u201d Mogadime explained. \u201cI felt it was important for my talk to honour the presence of these African Intellectuals in the historical memory of the struggle for freedom.\u201d<\/p>\n Mogadime\u2019s grandmother was a teacher and successful entrepreneur, a remarkable feat at the time given her race and sex. Both she and Mogadime\u2019s mother instilled in their families the importance of giving back to the community when one has been fortunate enough to receive an education.<\/p>\n Seeing her mother\u2019s contributions recognized at the exhibit was rewarding for the Brock professor.<\/p>\n \u201cI do think she\u2019s a great role model for young women today, for black women to know there were teachers that were out there years ago doing this kind of human rights work,\u201d Mogadime said.<\/p>\n \u201cHer message is really about the notion of self-empowerment and voice; Not being overtaken by challenges, but actually learning things like having the resilience to think that you can actually act. Do things. Change things.\u201d<\/p>\n Her family\u2019s experience has shaped who Mogadime is today as an individual and an educator.<\/p>\n \u201cI just have a sense that whatever I do, it should be connected to my colleagues somehow,\u201d she says. \u201cI think to some extent the idea that I\u2019m part of a community, and that whatever I do is part of that community. It\u2019s not just myself as an individual.\u201d<\/p>\n Mogadime initiated the institutional agreement between North West University<\/a> in South Africa and Brock University in 2005 that has been renewed several times. It has enjoyed many successes including graduate student internships and faculty exchanges between the two universities.<\/p>\n