Diana Ferrus | |
---|---|
Born | |
Alma mater | Utrecht University |
Occupation(s) | Writer and storyteller |
Employer | University of the Western Cape |
Notable work | "A Poem For Sarah Baartman" |
Website | web |
Diana Ferrus (born 29 August 1953, Worcester, Western Cape) is a South African writer and storyteller of mixed Khoisan and slave ancestry. Her work is published in Afrikaans and English. Ferrus leads writing workshops in Cape Town while working as an administrator at the University of the Western Cape. [1]
Ferrus is best known for her poem about Sarah Baartman, a South African woman taken to Europe under false pretenses and paraded as a curiosity. [2] She wrote the poem in 1998 while studying at Utrecht University. [3] [4] The popularity of this poem is widely believed to be responsible for the return of Bartmann's remains to South Africa. [5] The poem was published into a French law. [6]
Ferrus is a founder of the Afrikaans Skrywersvereniging (ASV), Bush Poets, and Women in Xchains. [7] She has a publishing company called Diana Ferrus Publishers and has co-edited and published a collection of stories about fathers and daughters. [4]
Cape Coloureds are a South African ethnic classification consisting primarily of persons of mixed race African, Asian and European descent.
Sarah Baartman, also spelled Sara, sometimes in the diminutive form Saartje, or Saartjie, and Bartman, Bartmann, was a Khoikhoi woman who was exhibited as a freak show attraction in 19th-century Europe under the name Hottentot Venus, a name which was later attributed to at least one other woman similarly exhibited. The women were exhibited for their steatopygic body type uncommon in Western Europe which not only was perceived as a curiosity at that time, but became subject of scientific interest as well as of erotic projection.
The Sarah Baartman is a South African environmental protection vessel—of the Damen Offshore Patrol Vessel 8313 class. The Sarah Baartman was commissioned on 10 January 2005. Named after Khoikhoi woman, Sarah Baartman, she was built by Damen Group, of the Netherlands, at one of its Romanian shipyards, and was designed to be capable of patrolling South Africa's entire EEZ, including the area around the southerly Prince Edward Islands.
Sindiwe Magona is a South African writer.
Antjie Krog is a South African writer and academic, best known for her Afrikaans poetry, her reporting on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and her 1998 book Country of My Skull. In 2004, she joined the Arts faculty of the University of the Western Cape as Extraordinary Professor.
The Central Karoo District Municipality is a district municipality located in the Western Cape province of South Africa. Its municipality code is DC5.
Zoë Wicomb is a South African-Scottish author and academic who has lived in the UK since the 1970s. In 2013, she was awarded the inaugural Windham–Campbell Literature Prize for her fiction.
The Sarah Baartman District Municipality, formerly the Cacadu District Municipality, is situated in the western part of the Eastern Cape province of South Africa, covering an area of 58,242 square kilometres. The area of the district municipality includes seven local municipalities. The seat is the city of Gqeberha, although Gqeberha is not itself in the district. As of 2011, the languages most spoken among the 388,201 inhabitants were isiXhosa and Afrikaans. The district code is DC10.
Afrikaans literature is literature written in Afrikaans. Afrikaans is the daughter language of 17th-century Dutch and is spoken by the majority of people in the Western Cape of South Africa and among Afrikaners and Coloured South Africans in other parts of South Africa, Namibia, Zimbabwe, Botswana, Lesotho and Eswatini. Afrikaans was historically one of the two official languages of South Africa, the other being English, but it currently shares the status of an "official language" with ten other languages.
Ingrid de Kok aka Ingrid Fiske is a South African author and poet.
S. A. Agulhas is a South African ice-strengthened training ship and former polar research vessel. She was built by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries in Shimonoseki, Japan, in 1978. S. A. Agulhas was used to service the three South African National Antarctic Programme research bases, Gough Island, Marion Island in the Southern Ocean and SANAE IV in Antarctica, as well as various research voyages.
Afrikaners are an ethnic group descended from predominantly Dutch settlers first arriving at the Cape of Good Hope in 1652 in Southern Africa.
Cookhouse is a small village located in Eastern Cape province, South Africa, some 170 kilometres (110 mi) north of Port Elizabeth and 24 kilometres (15 mi) east of Somerset East, on the west bank of the Great Fish River.
Hetta Amor “Amore” Bekker is a South African radio personality, author, MC and columnist. She was the host of Tjailatyd, an Afrikaans radio show broadcast by Radio Sonder Grense (RSG), the Afrikaans language Radio Service of the SABC. As an author, Bekker published her first cookbook (Tjailaresepte) in June 2010. As of July 2010 she also writes a column for the Afrikaans-language women's magazine Finesse.
Venus is a 1996 play written by American playwright Suzan-Lori Parks about the life of Khoekhoe woman Sarah Baartman. Set during the 19th century, the play opens in South Africa where Baartman was born, before transitioning to Europe as Baartman begins to perform in freak shows in London. The play then transitions to Paris where she continues her freak show act before dying in 1815 after being under the study of a group of French scientists led by Georges Cuvier. Her deceased body becomes the subject of a pseudoscientific autopsy that focuses on Baartman's steatopygia– a condition which Cuvier, uses to his academic advantage. Parks' work is not intended to be historically accurate, but rather uses the concept of Baartman's career to explore colonialism, racialization, and the historical sexualization of Black women; as Parks explains, "most of it's fabricated... It's questioning the history of history... It embraces the unrecorded truth." Venus won 2 OBIE Awards in 1995-1996.
Faldela Williams was a South African cook and cookbook writer whose books inspired generations of cooks after her to preserve the culinary heritage of South Africa's Cape Malay people.
The Life and Times of Sarah Baartman is a 1998 South African documentary film directed by Zola Maseko.
Jane Raphaely is a British-born South African journalist, editor and a women's magazine publisher. She is best known for editing Fair Lady and was at one time the co-founder of Associated Media Publishing, publisher of Cosmopolitan, Femina and O in the South African market.
Sarah Eva Goldblatt was a South African journalist, teacher, and literary editor of C.J. Langenhoven's writing. She is the first woman to have poems published in Afrikaans.
Elizabeth Dorothy Baartman is a South African judge of the Western Cape Division of the High Court of South Africa. Before President Jacob Zuma appointed her to the bench in August 2009, she was an advocate and prosecutor for the National Prosecuting Authority. She also served a decade as a magistrate in Cape Town.