Alumni News & Notes

Denise Zinn, Ed.M.’92, Ed.D.’97: Fort Hare’s Rebirth

by Lory Hough

She arrived at Harvard in 1991, a time of hope for South Africa, her country. That year a national peace accord was signed, promising to end apartheid. Black students began to be admitted to schools previously only open to whites. Discriminatory legislation like the Group Areas Act, which segregated races to different residential and business sections, was appealed. And just a year earlier, Nelson Mandela had been released from prison after 27 years.

Denise Zinn, Ed.M.’92, Ed.D.’97, executive dean of education at South Africa’s University of Fort Hare, remembers it well.

“There was an air of liberation in the country, a feeling that characterized what we had to look forward to. There was a sense of academic freedom,” she says during an interview in Cape Town with fellow South African native Bev Witten, director of the Ed School’s alumni relations office.

“Prior to this, the educational institutions were so segregated and under a mantle of authority,” she says, including her undergraduate college, the University of Cape Town. “We were always fighting against racism. I always felt I was being silenced.”

It was the exact opposite at Harvard, she says.

“When I got to the Ed School, being welcomed and sought after because of the experiences you had that might help others understand about Africa or resistance or overcoming struggle was liberating.

“My first semester, I had Professor Chuck Willie for a class. He said, ‘Harvard is lucky to have you.’ And he wasn’t just talking to me; he was talking to the whole class,” she says. “The fact that students bring their experience was a whole new way of thinking for me. In Africa, our teachers were put on pedestals. They were the ones with the knowledge and you were the one coming to learn from these great people, especially if you were in an historically white institution.”

Eventually, Zinn brought what she learned back to her country.

“I always knew I’d come back to South Africa and focus on education. I wanted it to be different, not steeped in the colonial education that we had gone through,” she says. “I wanted to bring back this fundamental shift of affirming what the learner has to offer and also to give people the sense that even though they’ve been through struggle, it actually makes you stronger. You have more to offer.”

The challenge today at Fort Hare, she says, is overcoming the school’s continuous struggles. For years the 90-year-old university was the only one open to black students and became a “cradle for revolutionary sorts,” says Zinn

“You can sit next to anyone and say, ‘I’m from Fort Hare’ and you automatically have a connection because it was an institution that nurtured a lot of leaders across the political spectrum,” she says. Mandela was educated there, as were Robert Sobukwe, founder of the Pan-Africanist Congress, and Oliver Tambo, a leader in the African National Congress.

As a result, the university became a hotbed of political unrest and was constantly being shut down because of riots and hunger strikes. In the late 1990s, in what Zinn refers to as “the bottom of a downward spiral,” the university almost closed for good. Student debts escalated and enrollment dropped to about 2,000.

Today enrollment has grown to about 8,000. Zinn says she is happy to be part of Fort Hare’s rebirth.

“There’s something really organic and rewarding in knowing that you’re part of building something that is important,” she says. “Within five years, I’d like to have a faculty that is able to understand the needs of the region and respond with a curriculum that allows a new generation of leaders and teachers to come into themselves and reach their potential.”