Entrepreneurship

Definition: An entrepreneur is somebody with a dream who is willing to take risks...what separates the entrepreneur from the dreamer is that he/she never gives up.

One of our teachers at Emafini Primary school had this definition on the board. It included a list of specific characteristics that define an entrepreneur including motivation, organization, self-disciplined, and reliable. Entrepreneurs are risk takers. Katie Snyder, a social studies teacher, and I had a conversation about what this really means. How does one get defined as entrepreneur? How often does one have to demonstrate entrepreneurial characteristics before people perceive one to be an entrepreneur? Perhaps this happens when a person exhibits these "characteristics" as part of a pattern, a part of the way the person lives and approaches life. Taking one risk does not make me an entrepreneur. Nor does having one dream. But, the definition did remind us that people, of all backgrounds and occupations, can have an entrepreneurial spirit and that the tangible results of this spirit do not necessarily have to be a business product.

At the end of our first day at Emafini, we had a discussion about teaching and learning in South Africa. How do teachers teach creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurship? Particularly, how do they teach these characteristics when, during their lived experience, their creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurial spirits have been stifled by an educational system designed to do so for non-white South Africans? So now, at least, children of color are being taught what entrepreneurship is? But, how do they live with this spirit? How do they see this spirit in their loved ones? The contradictions we have read about and are beginning to witness are striking. How does the very educational system that was originally designed to perpetuate inferiority for non-white South Africans and superiority for whites, now become the very system that can liberate? Coombes (2003), in her discussion of public monuments like Robben Island (which we are going to visit next week in Cape Town) talks about the contradictions in South Africa when she says, that public memorials have to "incorporate within it the signs of both the history of total destruction and dehumanization and the triumph of the human spirit over all adversity" (pp.69-70). These contradictions represent the daily tensions in South African society. The teachers and principal who have so graciously welcomed us into their school talk about these tensions/contradictions openly and honestly.

References

Coombes, A. (2003). Visual culture and public memory in a democratic South Africa: History after Apartheid. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.