Diana Ferrus

Signboard at the grave of Sarah Baartman in Hankey, Eastern Cape, South Africa

Diana Ferrus (born 29 August 1953, Worcester, Western Cape) is a South African writer, poet and storyteller of mixed Khoisan and slave ancestry. Her work is published in Afrikaans and English. Ferrus leads writing workshops in Cape Town while working as an administrator at the University of the Western Cape.[1]

Ferrus is best known for her poem about Sarah Baartman, a South African woman taken to Europe under false pretenses and paraded as a curiosity.[2] She wrote the poem in 1998 while studying at Utrecht University.[3][4] The popularity of this poem is widely believed to be responsible for the return of Bartmann's remains to South Africa.[5] The poem was published into a French law.[6]

Ferrus is a founder of the Afrikaans Skrywersvereniging (ASV), Bush Poets, and Women in Xchains.[7] She has a publishing company called Diana Ferrus Publishers and has co-edited and published a collection of stories about fathers and daughters.

References

  1. ↑ "Diana Ferrus". Who's Who SA. Retrieved 5 September 2013.
  2. ↑ Davie, Lucille (14 May 2012). "Sarah Baartman, at rest at last". SouthAfrica.info.
  3. ↑ "A Poem For Sarah Baartman". The New Black Magazine. 5 October 2007.
  4. ↑ Atwater, Deborah F. (2009). African American Women's Rhetoric: The Search for Dignity, Personhood, and Honor. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. pp. 15–16. ISBN 978-0-7391-3199-2.
  5. ↑ Maclennan, Ben (10 January 2005). "SA ready to take on marine poachers". IOL News.
  6. ↑ Buikema, Rosemarie (2009). "The arena of imaginings: Sarah Baartman and the ethics of representation". Doing Gender in Media, Art and Culture. London: Routledge. p. 82. ISBN 978-0-203-87680-0.
  7. ↑ "Diana Ferrus". Badilisha Poetry. Retrieved 5 September 2013.

External links

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