Alex Gehman, Pitt in South Africa Summer 2024
Studying abroad absolutely influenced my life goals. I picked the program I did in part because a professor I really like runs it, but also because it overlapped with my interests in history and museums. The program definitely satisfied both of them. As for history, one of the required classes was about South African history. I found this increasingly relevant as the program went on and we progressed through the timeline of events to the modern day. As we learned about the beginnings of apartheid, we took excursions to a variety of historical sites and memorials such as the District Six Museum and the Hector Pieterson Museum that made the facts sink in more. We were learning history while getting to experience it ourselves and keep the stories of people lost to time alive.
The other class during the program was called Writing as Witness. This was focused on considering our position as witnesses to the history we were learning about. Based on the book Museums and the Act of Witnessing by Ross Wilson, the witness can encompass a variety of roles such as the radical witness, character witness, eyewitness, and lay witness, all of which have their own relation to the information being presented to them in the museum setting. In combination with the history class, this meant visiting a lot of museums, taking in what they were saying, and thinking about what we as individuals want to do with that. This program came at the perfect time in my academic career. This past spring I’d taken a class on museums to test the waters of museum studies as a potential avenue to pursue in the future and ended up loving it. That class focused on the good and bad of museums as an industry and cultural symbol, while the South Africa class focused more on the individual’s experiences, which provided an interesting contrast and compliment between the two. The two museums I enjoyed most during my time in country were the Apartheid Museum and the Iziko Slave Lodge. Both history museums presented the country’s history but focusing on apartheid and slavery respectively. The ways they both presented information were unique compared to museums I’d been to before, and they stuck in my mind after my visits. It made me consider what I’d learned in my museums class and put it into practice.
The final part of the program that affected me was also from the Writing as Witness course. My professor had been in contact with some academics in country whose works were somewhat related, so we got to meet with them and learn about their research. One of them was an archivist who worked to preserve the history of protest at the university he works at, University of Western Cape. I’d interned with the archives at Pitt this past spring so I was excited to hear what he had to say. I hung on to his every word because it was all so interesting. His professional journey had taken him across museums, archives, and schools and I appreciated him giving his honest opinion on the benefits and drawbacks of each location. He talked about the need for a new generation of archivists to continue work like his and, while I’m not entirely sure I’d want to pursue archival work, it made me excited that there are people out there who appreciate history how I do and want to make sure others can access it.
Overall, the combination of these experiences gave me a revitalized excitement to pursue a career in history, whether it be archival work, museum work, teaching, or something else. As I’m getting to the end of my degree, I sometimes worry that I picked the wrong major, but times like this reaffirm that I did pick the right major.
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