Zinn’s ‘swimming upstream’ inspires at Cape Times breakfast
SHIRLEY ZINN, who grew up on the Cape Flats and went on to get her doctorate from Harvard University, battling several obstacles along the way, says South Africa needs to relook its investment in education to extract the best value for money.
Zinn was speaking at the Cape Times Breakfast yesterday, where she took questions from a packed audience, including Brian Isaacs, her former principal at South Peninsula High School.
Asked about the #FeesMustFall protests, she said: “Our youth are angry, there have been promises made and not kept. We have a problem in terms of how we’ve invested in education over the years.”
Last year she released a motivational book, Swimming Upstream, which tells the story about growing up in Steenberg in the 1970s and attending the University of the Western Cape during the turbulent early 1980s.
Her parents did not finish high school, but Zinn told the packed audience at the Alhambra Restaurant at Islamia College in Lansdowne they understood the value of education.
From a young age her parents sought to inculcate values which would later serve her well when she was facing adversity.
“My father would say, and not just because we were girls, that ‘you need to find your financial independence, which means you don’t have to be dependent on everyone, you need to make something out of your life, even though we’re in difficult circumstances’.”
While she had coasted through high school with average grades, Zinn said her then biology teacher, Isaacs, and another teacher, Riyaad Najaar, now principal at Spine Road High School, sat her down.
“They said ‘you’re not the brightest pea in the pod, you’re not the A student, but you have the potential to do so much more’.
“I could have chosen to listen to the first part of that sentence and walked away with my tail between my legs, but they said something deeply profound to me, and this is why I believe education is so critical because it changes the lives of people fundamentally,” said Zinn.
During her first year at UWC, she became politically aware and this impacted on her studies, with her parents resolving that she would have to quit university.
She eventually returned, finished her degree, then completed her Honours and started teaching at Groenvlei High School in Lansdowne.
In 1992, she applied for a Harvard University scholarship, where she completed her Master’s, and then went on to study for her PhD, which she completed in 1997.