Volume 37 Nº 1 - March 2001

Reading Multiculturally in a Rainbow Nation Anneli Silvennoinen

Anneli Silvennoinen

It was Desmond Tutu who coined the colourful phrase 'rainbow nation' for our country of many cultures. Do you know that South Africa has 11 official languages to accommodate all the diverse cultural groups?

I was born in South Africa of Finnish parentage, so am a child of two cultures through birth and heritage and have experienced this multi-dimensionality all my life. In South Africa the black and white issue is so huge that people often do not realise that even within these two major racial groupings are a number of diverse and equally important cultural groupings. The black people belong to tribes of their own eg Zulus, Xhosas, Sotho and Pedi just to name a few. The white population consists of English and Afrikaans speakers as well as large groups of Greeks, Portuguese, Germans, Italians and Asiatics, besides the smaller groups such as the Scandinavians and the Baltic nations...

Anneli Silvennoinen is a graduate teacher BA H Dip Ed (Wits), graduate librarian B Bibl (Unisa) and has specialised in the field of teacher-librarianship with the Diploma in Special Education (School Library Science) (Unisa). She has been involved in the field of school librarianship for sixteen years and is currently the head of the Resource Centre at St Mary's School for Girls in Waverley, Johannesburg which is one of the top academic schools in the country. Anneli was on the executive of the Independent School's National Media Conference in 1998, is involved in numerous School Library Associations and a member of LIASA and IASL. The report on her Independent Schools Visitorship was circulated to 280 schools in southern Africa. She has presented papers at national conferences and run workshops for colleagues on the teaching of information skills.