The National Department of Arts and Culture launched the Development Plan for the John Langalibalele Dube Memorial Site on Saturday 25 February 2012 at the Ohlange High School, Inanda. The programme started with a wreath laying ceremony at the family grave site and proceeded with a function held on the adjoining sportsfields of the school.

Guest speakers included Ms Baleka Mbete, former Deputy-President of South Africa, members of the Dube family and Mr Paul Matshatile, National Minister of Arts and Culture. Mr Matshatile shared some details of the R65 million development of the John Dube Memorial site with the 500 guests at the function. He unveiled a scale model of the development which has kicked off with the restoration of the grave site.

Both Dube homesteads and the study rondavel will be renovated, a concert hall and performance space and craft centre will be built and a music, dance and drama school will be developed from existing classrooms on the school grounds. The old double storey stone house will be renovated and refurbished for visitor accommodation. The road infrastructure upgrade linking the different elements of the memorial site will include a commemorative pedestrian bridge.

We are very pleased to announce that an article ‘Content development in an indigenous digital library: A case study in community participation’ by project leader Betsie Greyling, published in IFLA Journal in 2010, has been selected to appear in the journal’s Editor’s Choice collection on indigenous knowledge. Congratulations!

To view the article and the others included in the collection, please click on the following link - http://ifl.sagepub.com/cgi/collection.

Last Sunday we took a tour of the Marianhill Monastery in Durban.  The area has a fascinating history – tied in to the Trappist Monks and their missionary work as well as being responsible for educating a number of liberation leaders. Of interest to us was the grave of Benedict Vilakazi, who was an educator and author.  Although he was born in Groutville, he was educated at Marianhill, where he also later taught.  A full profile can be read here, on the KZN Literary Tourism website.

The grave is situated prominently at the front of the graveyard, which is across the road from the Marianhill Cathedral, and might be a good site to add to the heritage map we are currently developing.

Benedict Vilakazi's Grave

Towards the end of 2010 we developed a mobile interface for the Ulwazi Programme’s Community Memory website. All signs were pointing to an increase in internet access via mobile phones in South Africa and we felt that the Ulwazi Programme should accomodate this trend. We are pleased to announce that since then visits to the website from mobile phones has increased from 5% to 20% with the second most popular browser amongst our users being the Opera Mini mobile browser.

Ulwazi's users browsers

At the Indigenous Knowledge and Technology Conference in Windhoek last year, we presented a paper titled ‘The Number in my Pocket: the Power of Mobile Technology for the Exchange for Indigenous Knowledge’ (see more on the conference here) which looked at ways to further interaction between the Ulwazi Programme and its users through mobile technologies, and this is definitely an area we will be exploring in greater depth in 2012.