EVE ANNECKE

The Long 

I grew up in Tshwane, South Africa, daughter of an entomologist with a special focus on biological control, and mother who worked raising her five children - later in life becoming a gifted hospice worker and police trauma councillor. One grandfather was a farmer, and the other a medical doctor - renowned for his work on malaria in the Lowveld. Both my grandmothers came to live in South Africa by ship from the United Kingdom - living on farms around Tzaneen in days without electricity, when my mom went to school in a donkey cart. My dad’s greatest joy was being out of school, in the bush with his father. 

 

My mother and father were steeped in simple, natural worlds rapidly diminishing, and they created childhoods for us that were unfettered by convention. My father’s scathing scorn for authority, politicians and multi-national pharmaceutical companies was well entrenched in his children long before we had any idea what a politician was, let alone the ‘rampant greed’ of the MNC’s.

 

I was raised to read widely and, without much formal structure, discovered worlds of contemplation, transformation, learning through intense joy, and connections with nature. Apartheid-designed, “Christian National Education”, with its de-humanising emphasis on homogeneity, dominance and mind-body-soul numbing exercises of assessment made perfect fodder for my catapult into Montessori education.

 

Prior to and during the South African transition to democracy, I was immersed for a decade in the first Montessori pre-and primary schools in the country. Studying this system of education in the United States aged 18, and then in Italy at 24, along with the practice of starting non-racial schools, formed the pioneering and rigorous basis of my lifetime work in transformative learning. 

 

In a post-apartheid South Africa, story-telling, dialogue, process facilitation and imagining different futures formed the threads of further work in the transforming public sector in the 1990’s. Working with women in creating beautiful spaces for children to learn in vulnerable, and often violent, communities was the pathway we chose to implement a Montessori approach. 

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From 1998, my family and I moved from Johannesburg to Stellenbosch. I fell in love with a tiny place, not even on the map, called Lynedoch. Over the next nearly two decades, I co-founded Lynedoch EcoVillage (the first mixed income ecovillage in South Africa), Lynedoch Development (a non-profit property development company) and the Sustainability Institute. It’s on Google Maps now. In this time I completed an MA in Management Learning at Lancaster University, UK. My thesis was called You Teach Who You Are, and part of it covered leadership for sustainable futures.

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As an extra-ordinary lecturer at Stellenbosch University, I co-created a masters’ level programme in Sustainable Development, taught at the Sustainability Institute. My own post graduate teaching focuses on sustainability, leadership and environmental ethics, facilitation for just transitions and complexity. I know there is no such thing as sustainable development - but it’s the name we thought of at the time, and now it’s a bit stuck. I love the challenge of teaching and supervising in an arena in which the students often point out there is no hope. Only there is.

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