My name is Valerine Molo, I am from a small town in the Free State known as Hoopstad.  My interest in Heritage started when I was a first year at Sol Plaatje University, one of the first group to do Heritage in South Africa as a course, and I went on to graduate with the Post Graduate Diploma in Heritage Management from Rhodes University.

I am passionate about heritage because I want to take part in the preservation of our history, to be able to teach future generation about the importance of where we come from, who we are and why we are different. Heritage brings a sense of belonging, identity and dignity in order to define who we are.

Some of the projects I worked on include social inclusion, grading of heritage site in my hometown, a family tree telling my lineage story and most interesting of all, a digital heritage project.  Here I was able to tell a story about the traditional artefacts displayed in the house of my grandmother through a project titles ‘In The House of My Grandmother’, an intimate example of a decolonised curation practice.  The handle for the Instagram account is @living_heritage_at_home

I would say that my experience with this course was one of the most amazing thing I can ever imagine.

Doing the course was very exciting, it was broad in a way that we had time to explore more about heritage work.

I have learned a lot from the guest lectures we had, how heritage sites are graded, getting into the world of digitization of museums with presentations of our own ideas to one employee of Robben Island.

Our lectures were very supportive when the pandemic started and a new program was implemented.

I would recommend this course to anyone who would be interested in exploring more in Heritage Studies and learning about our history and how can we protect our heritage for future generations.