International Witsies

BONNY NORTON

By Heather Dugmore

At six in the morning, summer and winter, you’ll find Professor Bonny Norton (BA 1978, BA Hons 1983, PGDip Ed 1978) doing 40 lengths in the indoor pool at Lord Byng – the local school near her home in Vancouver, Canada.

“Most of the schools here are publicly funded and they share their facilities with the community. It’s a wonderful way to start the day,” says Bonny, who specialises in literacy, language, sociolinguistics and identity in the Department of Language and Literacy Education at the University of British Columbia (UBC).

She and her Wits alumnus husband Anthony Peirce (MSc 1984), professor of mathematics at UBC, diligently book their swims in advance as part of social distancing during the pandemic.

They have lived in Canada since 1987, initially in Ontario. In 1996 they both took up positions at UBC, a leading Canadian institution with 50 000 students at its Vancouver campus.

“It’s never easy relocating but we became part of the community through UBC and our children’s schools. Canada is a multicultural, multilingual country and welcoming of diversity, so I felt comfortable here,” she explains. “We have put down roots here, our children were schooled here and we have lived in the same 100-year-old house for 25 years.”

She says their neighbourhood, West Point Grey, is like Parktown North in Johannesburg. “It’s a leafy suburb with old homes and it’s close to the university, so a lot of academics live here. A significant difference is we don’t have high walls and we say hello to everyone as we walk down the street. It’s also close to two beautiful beaches – Jericho Beach and Spanish Banks.”

Bonny says that when they first moved to Canada her father said “you’re going to need to decide whether you are South African or Canadian”.

“I’ve never had to decide because I’m neither, and one of my main research interests is the multiplicity of identity. I am a living example of this: my roots are in South Africa, and my life and work is in Canada, South Africa, and other parts of Africa and the global community.” Her work explores ideas about identity and how it is “multiple, changing, and a site of struggle across time and space.”

Bonny is a world leader in her academic field and was voted a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and the American Educational Research Association. This year she was made a University Killam Professor, the highest honour UBC bestows on faculty. The award is made to academics who have received national and international recognition for their work.

In addition to identity, Bonny has done remarkable work on children’s open access storybooks, available for free on the internet. She is a research advisor for Saide (originally the South African Institute for Distance Education), which developed the African Storybook initiative, an online collection in Africa’s many different languages: https://africanstorybook.org/. This was the precursor to the Global Storybooks project that Bonny leads at UBC. She and her team chose 40 stories from the African Storybook and translated them into over 50 languages for countries across five continents. The team’s ongoing digital innovations, in print and audio, take you on a multilingual adventure around the world: https:// globalstorybooks.net/

“Through my position at UBC I have access to wonderful networks and resources to continue my work in Africa, including bringing students from African countries to study in Canada. I also helped develop the Africa Research Network in Applied Linguistics and Literacy, together with the late Dr Pippa Stein (BA 1976, PGDip Ed 1977, BA Hons 1987) from Wits and Professor Sinfree Makoni, who grew up in southern Africa and is now at Penn State University,” says Bonny.

“One of the many things I love about South Africa is the initiative; people get on with things. When I first came to Canada I never expected to get money from anyone because in South Africa we always just make a plan even if we don’t have funding.”

Prior to the pandemic Bonny visited Wits and Johannesburg regularly; she has friends and a sister Dawn (BA 1986, PGDip Ed 1986, BA Hons 1991, LLM 2010) and brother Jeff (BA 1977, LLB 1978) and she publishes with Professor Leketi Makalela at Wits.

“I was fortunate to get a good education in South Africa. I started at Wits in 1974 and it confirmed my concerns that something was very wrong and unjust in our society,” says Bonny. “I immediately got politically involved at Wits but I was only there for the first six months in my first year as I was an AFS (international exchange programme) student. I went to the US for the second half of the year.

“In the US, I also realised that South Africa was not alone in its racism and sexism. The history of insidious, systemic racism in the US is shocking. Canada, too, has a history of destroying indigenous communities. The government is now working to address the injustices.”

Bonny returned to Wits before the 1976 Soweto uprising. She was voted onto the SRC, wrote for Wits Student, and participated in many protests. She focused on helping black Wits students at the Baragwanath residences who needed academic support. “I would drive out there on a Tuesday night and as much as they were keen on the academic support, they insisted on stopping to watch the soap opera, Dallas, which we did religiously.”

Academically, Bonny says, she had the privilege of learning from people like the late Professor Phil Bonner from the History Department. “Wits taught me how to write and to do thoughtful, careful research. I was very proud to get a first class in history as well as applied linguistics as the standards were very high.”

Home for her at the time was a progressive community in the village of Crown Mines, dating back to early 1900s Johannesburg. This is where she met Anthony, also a Crown Mines resident.

The couple love to walk. “We walk and talk, and a lot of our decisions are made this way,” Bonny says. “Our first walk was in Crown Mines – Anthony asked if I wanted to go for a walk on the mine dumps. The walks improved from there but in all these years, we have never stopped walking and talking, and, of course, swimming.”

Bonny and Dean Blye Frank at UBC.