Threads of learning

The women arrived together and their chatter had that slightly nervous excitement that comes of being away from work, as they entered the training room.

It was 1998 and I was working on the 13th floor of an unlovely old office block on Bree Street in downtown Johannesburg. I was a web developer for an organisation that was busy providing online tools for civil society organisations during the early days in the new South Africa and there was a lot to do! Charities, campaigners, researchers were all busy setting up, organising and making change. Web technologies were in their infancy – we used a rather painstaking process of manually typing computer-readable markup codes in diamond brackets, around text and pictures to make the pages hang together properly and link to each other.

And once a month we invited people from our client organisations to come and learn how to make their own web pages so they could manage their websites themselves after we’d set things up.

This group was a little different from usual. One of my colleagues had persuaded the bosses at COSATU, South Africa’s Trade Union Congress, that it would be beneficial for the organisation to have some web editing skills in-house, so they sent all their secretaries to come in and learn this new admin task.

The day began with the usual go-round of introductions and expectations and before long they were on their way with formatting some practice text. They made light work of typing and managing things on the screen, but this very obvious competence was mixed with an unlikely diffidence. They had a lack of self belief which it would take me some time to find my way around. These were all women who’d been educated in apartheid South Africa’s segegated schooling system which denied resources and opportunities to the majority black population. Their lives were framed by all the consequential struggles you might expect of having a low income, a punishingly long working day, onerous responsibilities at home, male chauvinism in the workplace, and an education built on a disadvantage that was literally written into the constution. At the same time most had fluency in more than 3 languages, had raised several children, resourcefully managed limited budgets, and had an enviable typing speed. Necessity, I learned, may be the mother of invention, but not of self-esteem.

As the day went on, everyone created their own About Me! web page, formatting and colouring it with their newly learned coding skills. As they worked I went around with the office’s brand new digital camera, a large boxy contraption with a removable floppy disk, to take portraits of each student to add to their pages. The disk of images was then inserted into each computer so the students could add their face to their page. Finally we worked on how to transfer all the files to a dedicated space on the main webserver.

It was only then that the threads of the day’s learning really came together, when the magic of the internet’s connectedness revealed that the work they’d each done at their separate workstations was now bound together in linked pages each of which told their stories and carried the image of a sometimes beaming smile, sometimes ernest face from that day – the day they had away from the office when they got to learn something new together. We sat as a group and clicked through the finished website of pages that they had each created and I saw and felt a wonder that has never left me. There were hoots of laughter, wide-eyed surprise and the most infectiously joyful smiles. For not only had they told their stories. Those stories were now self-evidently valid content for all the world to see. It was as if everyone in the room had grown 5 inches taller

It was a recent chance encounter on a train that raked all this up again. I was explaining the odd turns that life takes which mean that one end of your working life bears absolutely no resemblance to the other, when it dawned on me that those women have much more to do with my work in the wool shop today, than I realised. I’m now 9000km north and nearly 30 years away from those days in downtown Joburg, but there is more than a trace of that extraordinary day with the COSATU secretaries which connects then to now, and makes a common thread between the knitters who come here to learn how to knit and leave with their first pair of mittens, and the joy of learning a new skill, of that skill belonging to you so that you can do it your way with autonomy, and for it to be validated and loved by other people.