September Update

Hello! It’s been over a month, since our last post. I knew you all were enjoying summer vacations and wouldn’t notice something not arriving from us. But as you finish your Labor Day weekend, I know that we are overdue for an update.

Us pictured here with our director, Steve Wiebe Johnson
and community leaders from the Lwandle township.

The boys are almost done with their third quarter, and have been heavily involved in netball and the school play. We moved in July into a nice big rental house, where we are happy to be able to have pets and to host visitors, like you, as well as meetings and local networking for relationship building. And we have been working hard – as we get used to things here, we take on more responsibilities at SADRA (Southern  African Development and Reconstruction Agency). Among other things, we helped host a training for election mediators, and became official election observers last month. Our mission director visited. We continue with school trainings. Dan works with the pastors’ network, and we are starting to work on some of the needed infrastructure for SADRA, like social media. I’m currently working on developing monitoring and evaluation materials for our peace education projects, such as measuring understandings of conflict and level of gang affiliation, for example, before our intervention.

Dan at meeting of Grace Community Church leaders, Colesberg

Our last update “A week in the life” outlined our preparatory work for a project in the gang-affected high schools, and the cross-community dialogues being carefully encouraged in a couple of areas. It is slow work, and as we get to know locals, more than one has told us that we are wasting our time. I spoke at a Unitarian Fellowship recently, and realized that many people have distanced themselves from reconciliation, and from how deeply healing will need to go. But I am fascinated by what I hear from other folks, and I come back to something I heard at the mediation training that seemed particularly innovative: Stereotypes are the gaps between real and perceived identities, and reconciliation is reducing that gap. Think about that for a moment. I had to, but it fits, doesn’t it? So the rest of this update is going to be more reflective and personal about the themes that we are working on as peacemakers.

Kathryn presenting at election mediators training, Cape Town

Identity work is tricky. In defining ourselves, we carry identity and our baggage with our strongest emotions, and it is very easy to become defensive when put in a mixed group talking about identity. Do blacks ever see me as more than white? You can’t tell by listening or looking at me that I was born in Africa. Then I say I’m American, but how would you know that only one of my grandparents spoke English as a first language? Then there’s my pacifist and Mennonite upbringing with its own flavours and value shaping. And then there’s my unique experience of being raised in an inner-city ghetto in California – my sister is the only other white person I know with this history. Along with the blacks, Hispanics, and Pacific Islanders of my neighbourhood, I was bused to white high schools as part of a desegregation policy in the 1980s*. Black kids wouldn’t sit next to me on the bus because I was white, and white kids wouldn’t sit next to me in class because I lived with black people. So I know what prejudice and fear look like; but from a young age, I could also recognize the common humanity just below the surface.

Dan with teachers in workshop for
conflict management and team-building,
Khayelitsha, Cape Town 

My younger sister and I were the only two white kids in our elementary school of over 700 students. It was an intense place of learning about our civil rights heroes, with special assemblies for Malcolm X, as well as Martin Luther King Jr. One skit we did every year was to reenact the Rosa Parks story; the woman exhausted after a long day who refused to take her place standing in the black section of the bus. It’s a beautiful story of conscientious objection that led to change, and I loved the story, especially because there was a heroine. I suppose I understood that I was never going to be given the part of Rosa when our classes performed this skit for the school, but I didn’t know why I always had to play the bus driver. I asked the teacher this question – while honoured to have one of the few speaking parts, I didn’t like to always be the villain in the story; could I play a different part? This made her laugh, but she couldn’t even answer me – I just needed to be the bus driver. It was not until many years later I put it all together. As the only white child among several hundred students in the upper grades, that was my role. That community, still raw from the pain of the civil rights movement just twenty years before, could not cast me as a different character. There were parents who were vocal in their disapproval of a white girl even being at their school, and my teacher both stuck up for my right to be there, and made me the bus driver.

SADRA has initiated a local cross-community dialogue right where Oscar (our Director) lives – leaders of white and black bordering neighbourhoods sat down together for the first time a couple of weeks ago, and started to get to know each other. We have been using John Paul Lederach’s Little Book of Conflict Resolution, where he talks about how to build new relationships and break old patterns of relating. He underscores the importance of identity, saying “In my experience, issues of identity are at the root of most conflicts.” How we relate to others has everything to do with how we define ourselves. If after defining ourselves we decide that it is not worth investing in a relationship with those who are different from us (also a defined identity), then discussions about reconciliation and restitution become academic. As SADRA, we are trying to integrate identity work into our peace trainings, and sometimes we feel like pioneers on uncharted ground. 

Kathryn with community activists, Manenberg, Cape Town

In July, our family attended the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown, where we saw an amazing diversity of talent and thought-provoking presentations. One such was the panel “Theatre as a tool for activism and healing,” with experts from South Africa and all over the world. They concurred that the expectation of theatre to bring cross-cultural healing has both marred Art as genuine expression for its own sake, and skewed the agendas of theatre organisations that need funding. Money is available for the Romeo & Juliet stories of cross-boundary love, but not enough is being done within communities struggling with identity issues. “Social cohesion” has become a catch phrase in development and non-governmental work, and one South African panelist gave this example: the government has just launched an anti-racism song – they throw tons of money at something like this and expect social change. Theatre can be a very effective component for healing, but while trying to prove itself in a cause-and-effect scenario with a happy ending, it can lose the complicated truths and contradictions that arise with our need to both mourn and celebrate. Back to my elementary school skit - who should play the bus driver in the Rosa Parks skit? Should it rotate to be fair? Does fairness matter? Do we get so paralyzed by these questions or political correctness that we fail to immerse ourselves in the good stories?

The politics of identity, Apartheid Museum, Johannesburg

If reconciliation is working to close the gap caused by stereotypes, now is the time to work at that both here in South Africa, where twenty years have passed since their painful civil rights struggle, and in the US as you approach your national elections. Anyone working to expose the gaps between perceived and real identities, who can stay patient and listening instead of defensive, and can live with the mystery of contradiction, is actively engaged in peace-making. Join us in this exciting work, and let us know how it’s going!

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