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Dungi Cynthia "I am a sort of inspiration to the Merivate kids" DUNG!, A VIVACIOUS, BROWN-SKINNED woman, is seated behind her desk in her office at the University of South Mrica, which is located on a hilltop above Pretoria. Her short Mro haircut lends height to this otherwise small but lithe woman. Her bright eyes sparkle. She speaks softly, in measured tones, about growing up in the northern Transvaal, and later her experiences at Harvard University in the United States. Ironically, Dungi's Guzankulu former homeland is located not far from the rural area remembered so fondly by Mrikaner Jean Viljoen from her youth. "Dungi means 'mixed up with happiness.' I am the first girl born after a string of boys. My mother was saying I am mixed up with happiness.... I am told I was born in a small town in the northeastern Transvaal in 1955. But my father was a principal and my mother a nurse, so my father changed positions and moved to another school which is north of Pretoria. People [Africans) no longer live there as they wen~ shifted to the townships. In 1960 I started school. Then my father moved again. this time to an area about eight or ten miles from UNISA [University of South Africa) and he took a job teaching Tsonga [language ). We moved to Atteridi~eville [a large African township outside Pretoria) where I spent my primary years and during that time good secondary education was available at only what they called boarding schools in the homelands. So my father took all of us to the homeland of Guzankulu.... "My mother was Sotho and my father Tsonga so we grew up in a home with both languages being spoken and we spent our time mostly with the maternal side of the family of the southern Sotho people. But I can't gauge the standard of the Tsonga we learned from my father's side because he comes from a very well educated family and they all spoke English. In the 117 DUNG! CYNTHIA MERIVATE area of the mission stations, my family were sort of the pioneers of the early English-speaking families. "But among the Tsonga they still have a high rate of illiteracy. They still cling to traditions, and the people are repressed. It is a very oppressive society. Women especially. She is just there to give birth and to look after the men. So all of our people will tell you the history-that the women are inferior. We do have some women who are coming out. But as a minority ethnic group [within South Africa) in the past there are not many Tsonga women in groups to which I belong-maybe one or two." While Dungi disapproved of the homelands in South Mrica, she is painfully aware of the educational lag between blacks and whites in that country. As an educator , this woman, now in her early forties, believes that in Guzankulu the quality of education and medicine were superior to those found in the urban townships. "One thing I will say about the homelands is that they had their own schools, their own hospitals. Now, we have a younger generation of Tsonga women who are working in the townships around Guzankulu who are professional . "The leader of Guzankulu willingly agreed to return to South Africa, but like some other homeland leaders, he was not progressive. Dungi noted that "people had been detained. No unions were recognized, and free speech had been suppressed. The ANC found it difficult to work within Guzankulu as was the case in most of the other former homelands." Nevertheless, the Tsonga people overwhelmingly supported the ANC in the general election, as was the case, too, in all the former homelands, with the exception, of course, of KwaZulu. "The first middle school I attended was in the Guzankulu area and that was mainly an Afrikaner run school by Afrikaner farmers around that area. We studied what they called the fifty-fifty program: half my subjects were in Afrikaans and the other half in English-up to Standard eight which is like grade ten. Then my brothers were in a Swiss mission school in the northern Transvaal next to a Swiss missionary hospital. My grandfather incidentally was a self-ordained [laughter) Swiss mission priest, but he was a teacher by profession so that is why my father took my brothers to that school. "I decided to shift and move there because that was more...

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