When I first watched the Rabbit-Proof Fence, in 2004, I never imagined that I will know about Nina Simone when I returned for my studies at the University of Cape Town.
I was a young adult at the beginning of my early 20s. My dream was to be a Chartered Accountant and live happily ever after.
In 2004 I registered for a Bachelor of Charted Accounting degree at the University of the Western Cape. I moved into residence and began my accounting program.
Supplementing my academic life with socialisation, on weekends, I watched movies at the TV room with other dorm students.
We enjoyed western themed romance, thriller and comedy. On other days we watched African politicised action movies. I loved “My big fat Greek wedding”. I identified with the 30 year old, unmarried, ugly-duckling virgin, Fotoula. She made me happy showing the prospects of change and beauty. In my mind I planned my own wedding. But it was going to be in the future when I have completed my chartered accounting degree. A sleeping beauty rolling in money, I was going to have my big fat Greek wedding.
One Friday night we watched Tears of the Sun. Lights went down. The entire TV room was immersed in the movie. With the Nigerian royal line presidency meets rebel politics; the movie transported us to the violent streets of Nigerian politics. Western news reports claim that the entire royal line of Samuel Azuka’s Igbo family has been assassinated. Violence erupts throughout Nigeria as result. The coup d’état mastermind rebels go on a killing spree searching for Arthur Azuka, the Son of Samuel Azuka.
We were never the same again after watching this movie. I went through depression. It was my first time exposed to African international politics.
Unconsciously, I went through a psychological transformation. I began wondering if there was something big happening in our lives in Africa. I cried often without understanding why. So I began counselling sessions as a result. I failed assignments and began drinking. I stopped attending lecturers. Then I skipped them and only attended on certain days when I felt better.
On days I bunked classes I spent time in the TV room watching movies. I wanted to find inspiration to get back on track again. I was traumatized and wanted to get better. I had never seen refugee crises before. Until the mid-2000s we did not have television in my home. It was not until I left the University of the Western that I began seeing the refugee crisis of the Thabo Mbeki presidential era in Darfur. I was a university drop out at home, doing social activism work with the youth of my community. I watched in awe.
However, before dropping out of university, I watched one last movie that would send me to an emotional slumber. It was the Rabbit-proof fence. The movie and the setting of the movie made me feel like the children were representing my story in the dusty rabbit proof fenced farms of the Karoo region in the Eastern Cape. In the movie I was Molly, in my life Molly was me and Grace was my aunt. I did not recover from this.
With the realisation that counselling was not helping me, I resorted to dropping out in 2006.
After spending three years in social activism with the youth in my community, I returned to the University of Cape Town determined to be a lawyer. The lack of social safety and security for black girls in Cape Town townships made me feel the need to study law for their protection. Off I went to the University of Cape Town to submit my application in September 2009.
On advice, however, from two student recruitment officers, I applied for a bachelor of social science degree. I registered for International Relations, Public Policy and Administration and Social Anthropology the following year.
It was in the course of my undergraduate studies that my education took me to another continent, the Americas. There I learned about slavery, Jim Crow and the civil rights movement in the United States of America. It is here that I read and learned about Nina Simone, an African-American civil rights era activist musician.
I was advancing in my studies and learning to traverse and straddle disciplines and timeframes. I was awakening to my African womanhood with each lesson.
With her songs, Mississippi Goddam and Ain’t Got No, I Got Life, Nina Simone had me crumble again with a realisation that black womanhood is in a chronic state of global colonial oppression and disintegration in the black family. Already engaged with restorative justice in academic activism, and for the colonial injustice of Sarah Baartman, I decided to write my master’s dissertation on the social and structural violence suffered by black women in Cape Town townships.
My dissertation was an emotional climax after two decades of witnessing violations of black girls and women’s rights in my home town, Australia, America and Cape Town. I synthesised the experiences and settled with the understanding that black womanhood is under global server strain of the violence of coloniality and enslavement.
Now healed and married with two daughters, it gives me great pleasure to contribute to the discussions on the politics of coloniality as a continued human rights violation discourse on black womanhood in South Africa, Australia and America.
If US Representative Ilhan Omar is a worthy point of reference, America’s enduring politics of coloniality will help us understand how far worse colonialism is for refugee black women in these three colonies.
In this sense, I was very happy to write a proposal in response to Australian Book Review to write my articles on the three themes of statelessness, refugees and human rights for the Australian Book Review and partners, informed by this universal experience of black womanhood. 
Even though I will not be participating in the process, I am happy I had an opportunity to write this article as I wanted to participate.
Images: Lindiswa Jan and Rastafari Community (Empress Menen Asfaw).
Email us: lindiswa.jan@gmail.com
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❤💛💚 World Wide Bless ❤💛💚
Lindiswa Jan 