By
Rebecca Spiro and Lena Glickman
The
week we’ve been assigned to write about was too full with sights, experiences
and ideas to sum up in this post. We spent nine days in Johannesburg meeting
with speakers, driving around the city and its outskirts, visiting museums, and
reflecting as a group. Our task was not only to get a sense of this new place,
but also the politics and history that have shaped it.
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The recycling project at the Orange Farm
Human Rights
Advice Center has created around 30 jobs for
community
members.
|
On
our second day, we visited a township outside Johannesburg called Orange Farm
which faces many struggles representative of other South African settlements
affected by apartheid. We saw it through the lens of the Orange Farm Human
Rights Advice Center, an organization that operates a preschool, recycling
center, and advice office. All of this takes place on land that they do not
technically own, but the recycling center has produced so many jobs that it
would now be unrealistic for the government to seize back the land.
The
director of the organization, Bricks Mokolo, spoke of the bureaucracy involved
in providing safer structures without land permits. He talked a lot about
economic justice in the face of post-apartheid neo-liberalism, and at one point
said, “If they don’t give it to us, we’ll take it.”[1] Pre-paid
water meters and electricity are two extreme examples of the increasing
privatization that they fight here. The Orange Farm Human Rights Advice Center
appeared to be a genuinely community-driven organization. It was exciting to
see the same kind of critical ideologies that we discuss at school, like
grassroots movements and alternatives to capitalism, put into action.
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Lena and Rebecca stand with Bricks Mokolo,
director of the
Orange Farm Human Rights Advice Center, outside
a
community radio station that they partner with.
|
While
academic connections were interesting to make, we especially appreciated the
optimism inherent in a human rights center. Seeing small homes made out of tin
and children in dirty clothing through the eyes of such a proactive
organization was extremely heartening. This got us thinking about the ways we
do and do not understand South African struggles. In general, when we
experienced a personal connection to an issue it became clearer to us. Interacting
with people and seeing their lives up-close was quite different from trying to intellectually
conceive of poverty, histories of torture, and race and class disparities from
a distance. For example, one of our speakers was an activist at the Treatment
Action Campaign, an HIV/AIDS prevention effort. Their mission statement was
interesting, but when their Capacity Building Officer Luckyboy Edison
Mkhondwane spoke about the realities of dealing with access to medication and
the stigma attached to being gay and HIV-positive, we understood and cared
more.
Our
visit to the Khulumani Support Group also revealed the personal aspects of South
African history. Khulumani is a center that offers legal advocacy and emotional
counseling for victims of apartheid and post-apartheid government abuse. It was
one of the first places we visited where the emotional dimension of the issues
we had been learning about were explicitly discussed. They showed us a video
about widows whose husbands were killed by police in the 2012 Marikana mining
strike. Khulumani provided art therapy for these women who, previously denied a
voice, now felt confident in expressing their grief, hope, and anger with the
government. Hearing about experiences we couldn’t even imagine, spoken by
people we could relate to, brought these hardships closer to home.
Additionally,
hearing tragedies spoken of as real-life, everyday feelings transformed them
into matter-of-fact situations with as much hope as sadness. Often, when we conceptualize
conditions of poverty without a connection to the impoverished, we victimize
people and remove them of their agency. In Johannesburg, we got the chance to
put faces and daily rhythms to the nameless victims we see in the media. Staying
with host families for a weekend helped transform the people of Soweto from
“the people”—so easily reduced to statistics—into individuals with their own
opinions, mannerisms and things to do. We went to church, watched movies, hung
out with neighbors, and helped cook dinner. Not only did this help us see our
host families as individuals, but it also helped us feel less like tourists and
more like members of a family. We found relief in being treated as individuals
and not just white faces. Our sustained time in Windhoek will hopefully bring
that same feeling of normalcy and belonging that we began to feel during our
homestays.
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Sarah and Rebecca connect with their host
siblings over a soccer game
between two Soweto rivals.
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One
last hope we’re carrying from Johannesburg to Windhoek is that we’ll begin to
view each other and ourselves, as much as we do locals, as both products of our
culture and as individuals. Within our group we carry many differences, but
it’s already been very rewarding to feel so comfortable and have such open and
challenging conversations with one another. In our first week we began to build
meaningful relationships with a new group, a new country, and a new historical
perspective, and it is these relationships that will shape our experience in
Windhoek as a whole.
[1] Bricks Mokolo, director of Orange Farm Human Rights Advice Center;
conversation on August 21, 2013 in Orange Farm, South Africa.
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