Duncan Guy Scott, BSc, BA, BA (Hons), MSc. School of ..... sociological relationship between religious peacebuilding and transformation in South. Africa. ...... are just 0.7 doctors and 1.1 nurses per 1000 people (Organisation for Economic ...... The second coding cycle involved moving from manual coding to coding using.
A Sociological Study of the Relationship between Christian Religious Peacebuilding and Transformation in Post-Apartheid South Africa
Thesis Submitted in Fulfilment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy
By
Duncan Guy Scott, BSc, BA, BA (Hons), MSc
School of Social Sciences, Education and Social Work Queen’s University of Belfast September 2017
For my wife, Christina Williamson
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Table of Contents List of Tables and Figures .......................................................................................... iii Abstract ....................................................................................................................... iv Acknowledgements ...................................................................................................... v List of Acronyms ....................................................................................................... vii List of Transcription Abbreviations ............................................................................ ix Introduction .................................................................................................................. 1 Chapter 1. Overview of Religious Peacebuilding Theory and its Relationship to Transformation in Post-Conflict Societies ................................................................. 12 Chapter 2. The Meaning of Transformation in Post-Apartheid South Africa ........... 45 Chapter 3. Christian Religious Peacebuilding in South Africa.................................. 67 Chapter 4. Research Design ....................................................................................... 88 Chapter 5. Christian Understandings of Transformation as Material Change, Personal Change and Relationship Building .......................................................................... 118 Chapter 6. Material, Individual, and Relational Transformational Practices: Two Case Studies of Faith-Based Transformation Work ................................................ 169 Chapter 7. The Potential and Limitations of Partially Individualised Religious Peacebuilding in Post-Apartheid South Africa ....................................................... 201 Conclusion ............................................................................................................... 234 Bibliography ............................................................................................................ 253 Appendix 1 ............................................................................................................... 292 Appendix 2a ............................................................................................................. 296 Appendix 2b ............................................................................................................. 297 Appendix 3a ............................................................................................................. 298 Appendix 3b ............................................................................................................. 299 Appendix 3c ............................................................................................................. 300
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List of Tables and Figures Table 1. Field research tasks undertaken during August-December 2013 ............... 98 Table 2. Summary of interview participant details ................................................. 104 Table 3. Categories of religious peacebuilding........................................................ 203
Figure 1. Map of Greater Cape Town – Summary of observation and interview sites .................................................................................................................................... 99 Figure 2. The Warehouse offices and storage hall .................................................. 121 Figure 3. The Wetton neighbourhood, showing its semi-industrial character ........ 121 Figure 4. Warehouse participants’ understanding of transformation in South Africa .................................................................................................................................. 142 Figure 5. The Manenberg People’s Centre Warehouse ........................................... 147 Figure 6. Flyer advertising transformational development training days at The Warehouse................................................................................................................ 173 Figure 7. The second Unity in the Church Forum during one of the group discussion periods ..................................................................................................................... 179 Figure 8. ‘The World’ at The Warehouse ................................................................ 185 Figure 9. Two of many council-owned flats in Manenberg, opposite Fusion’s office .................................................................................................................................. 193
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Abstract This thesis responds to the gap in religious peacebuilding literature on religion’s role in the post-apartheid transformation project in South Africa. It uses the case studies of The Warehouse and Fusion, two Christian faith-based organisations (FBOs) in Cape Town, to evaluate the potential of transformation as a form of religious peacebuilding. The thesis collected qualitative data using participant observation and semi-structured interviews with 46 participants over a period of four months and, using thematic analysis, found that the FBOs conceptualise full transformation as material, individual, and relational change in society. The organisations’ focus on personal transformation and relational transformation is a distinctive feature of their transformation strategies which differs from the material approach associated with the state. Arguing that the case study FBOs have adopted transformation as a lifestyle and see the individual as a primary site of transformation, this thesis analyses the organisations’ work in relation to Beck’s (2010) religious individualisation thesis and Ganiel’s (2016) theory of extrainstitutional religion, and compares Fusion and The Warehouse to the anti-institutional Emerging Church Movement and extra-institutional Christianity, respectively. Using Brewer, Higgins, and Teeney’s (2011) conceptual framework of strategic social spaces, the thesis contends that the organisations’ individualised approaches allow them to occupy marginal strategic institutional social spaces that enable them to pursue peace in ways mainstream churches often cannot. In presenting the possibilities for peace offered by a lifestyle of transformation this thesis nevertheless emphasises that, in contrast to Beck’s assertion that traditional social categories no longer structure society, class and race still define life in post-apartheid society. Because of these social structural constraints, this thesis uses the term ‘partial individualisation’ to describe the case studies’ organisational characteristics. It suggests the idea of partial individualisation facilitates comparison of religious peacebuilding case studies, thereby promoting theoretical improvement in the religious peacebuilding field.
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Acknowledgements I firstly wish to thank the Warehouse and Fusion communities in Cape Town for their willingness to take part in this research and share their ideas and ambitions for social change in South Africa. It felt like each staff member welcomed me daily into their routines, genuinely and graciously inviting me to become involved in their activities. I am also thankful to the many representatives of churches and organisations across Cape Town whom I met at The Warehouse and who agreed to participate in this study. I hope the findings in this thesis will go some way to realising the social change they pursue. Conducting research across continents requires substantial resources – financial and otherwise – and I would have been unable to carry out this study without the considerable support over three years of the Commonwealth Scholarship Commission in the UK. I would also like to acknowledge the Human Sciences Research Council for offering me a visiting research fellowship in Cape Town between September and December 2013. The Human and Social Development team provided a familiar and welcoming base from which to do my fieldwork, and their generous provision of a computer and access to printing services was extremely helpful. I would like to make special mention of Professor Sharlene Swartz, my former manager at the HSRC, for the exceptional example she sets as a researcher. Her mentorship has inspired me and I prize her advice and friendship. At Queen’s University of Belfast my thanks go to my principal supervisor, Professor John Brewer, whose enthusiasm for and commitment to this project was already evident in the emails we exchanged more than a year prior to the start of my PhD. John’s vast experience and breadth of knowledge was invaluable at each stage of the research process, not least during the tough periods that inevitably potted the road to submission. I would also like to thank Dr Cheryl Lawther, my second supervisor, for her insightful feedback on each chapter and for the supportive role she played throughout the write-up stage. Dr Marta Trzebiatowska, lecturer in the School of Social Science at the University of Aberdeen, also provided very helpful guidance in the first year of my studies, during which time I was enrolled in the Department of Sociology at that university. It is often said that doing a PhD can be a lonely undertaking. I certainly experienced this at times, perhaps heightened by spending long periods away from friends and
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family in South Africa and from Christina, my wife, in Canada. I was therefore all the more thankful for the group of friends I developed in Belfast and Aberdeen. To mention just a few, the post-graduate community in Queen’s University’s School of Sociology, Social Policy, and Social Work – especially Claire Cole, Grainne Boyle, Mandy Martin, and Julie Harris – provided daily support in the office, as did Sandra Rios and Rachel Anderson at the University of Aberdeen; my housemates Luke, Katharine, and Matthew McDowell have provided the closest thing to a family in Belfast; and Iosif Kovras, Neil Hart, Angus Morrison, and Murray Hunter, gentleman and scholars all, have often been there for a coffee and a chat, sometimes over Skype. I would also like to thank my family for their emotional support during the past three years. My mother, Debbie Chalmers, my father, Ian Scott, my step-mother, Julie Shannon, and my sister, Jessica Cowles, were all a constant source of encouragement. Thank you for tolerating me when I repeatedly told you that 15 degrees Celsius is not cold and complained that you were not experiencing ‘real’ winter weather, only the equivalent of a Belfast summer. Above all, thank you to my wife, Christina Williamson. Christina, historian by training, sommelier by calling, is undertaking a PhD of her own and really did not need the worry of a second one. Amidst it all she set a high standard with her constancy in love and companionship during some of the most trying times. I will do my best to match it in the years to come.
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List of Acronyms AGM
Annual General Meeting
AIC
African Independent Churches
ANC
African National Congress
ASGISA
Accelerated and Shared Growth Initiative for South Africa
BEE
Black Economic Empowerment
BSA
British Sociological Association
CMM
Central Methodist Mission
CODESA
Convention for a Democratic South Africa
CRS
Catholic Relief Services
CWD
Catholic Welfare and Development
DRC
Dutch Reformed Church
ECM
Emerging Church Movement
ESRC
Economic and Social Research Council
FBO
Faith-Based Organisation
GEAR
Growth, Employment and Redistribution
GNU
Government of National Unity
ICCO
Interchurch Organisation for Development Co-operation
IFP
Inkatha Freedom Party
IJR
Institute for Justice and Reconciliation
IMF
International Monetary Fund
Kairos SA
Kairos Southern Africa
LSM
Living Standard Measure
MCC
Mennonite Central Committee
NDP
National Development Plan
NGO
Non-governmental organisation
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NGP
New Growth Path
NHI
National Health Insurance
NP
National Party
NPA
National Peace Accord
OECD
Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development
PACTS
Pan-African Conciliation Teams
PCR
Program to Combat Racism
RDP
Reconstruction and Development Programme
REMHI
Project for Recovering Historical Memory Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica
SACBC
South African Catholic Bishops’ Conference
SACC
South African Council of Churches
SACLA
South African Christian Leadership Assembly
SRC
Social Responsibility Committee
TAZ
Temporary Autonomous Zones
TRC
Truth and Reconciliation Commission
UDF
United Democratic Front
USIP
United States Institute of Peace
WCC
World Council of Churches
WCRLF
Western Cape Religious Leaders Forum
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List of Transcription Abbreviations (.)
Brief pause
[i]
Inaudible
[l]
Laughter
[lp]
Long pause
[p]
Pause
[s]
Stutter
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Introduction
Throughout the world, religious conviction fuels conflict. Ulrich Beck (2010: 173) has warned that ‘Religion can kill you!’; scholars in various disciplines have written on why this prognosis is inevitable (Huntington, 1996; McTernan, 2003; Juergensmeyer, Kitts, and Jerryson, 2013). However, this representation of unavoidable violence ignores the peaceful influence religion can have, and has had, on society. All major religious traditions advocate the dignity of human beings and stress the importance of respectful relationships as the foundation for peace (Bartoli, 2004; Denny, 2004; Gopin, 2004). These and other religious values have profoundly influenced modes of justice in modern society (Wilson, 2010), most recently with respect to truth and reconciliation commissions as mechanisms of transitional justice (Philpott, 2007). Religion is a site of violence, but it is a site of peace, too. The history of Christianity in South Africa exemplifies religion’s ambivalent relationship to peace and conflict. This was most strikingly evident during the apartheid era, when the Dutch Reformed Church (DRC) outwardly supported segregationist policies while other denominations actively fought to undermine the National Party (NP) regime. While a large body of literature has analysed the peacebuilding activities of the church during apartheid, religious peacebuilding scholars have paid less attention to Christian faith-based activities under democracy. The exception to this has been scholars’ examination of religion’s role in the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) (for example, see Graybill, 2002; Meiring, 2002; Shore, 2009), a study of the organisational peacebuilding activities of a multi-racial charismatic congregation (Ganiel, 2007), and a small-scale review of five church leaders’ motivations for promoting social justice campaigns in their congregations (Bowers du Toit and Nkomo, 2014). In part, the lack of writing on post-apartheid religious peacebuilding activities can be attributed to the church’s withdrawal, until relatively recently, from the public sphere as an advocate of political accountability. The church’s post-1994 attitude of cooperation with the African National Congress (ANC) government is what Bompani (2006: 1137) has referred to as the church’s ‘alignment and non-confrontation with the government’. Where churches have been active, for example in welfare and development initiatives, there is no indication in the literature of how this has
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contributed to lasting peace in the country. This thesis argues that the religious peacebuilding field’s lack of attention to the variety of post-apartheid Christian activities represents a gap in the literature. One of the values of the religious peacebuilding field is that it presents a holistic concept of peace. As Omer (2012: 10) asserts, religious peacebuilding ‘is intricately associated with questions of justice or “positive” peace and the transformation not only of direct and obvious violence, but also of structural and cultural forms of violence’. It has close conceptual ties to the field of conflict transformation, a wide-ranging approach to peacebuilding that emphasises changed relationships and changed institutional structures to deal with the symbolic as well as material roots of conflict (Lederach, 2005). Omer’s comment suggests that it is appropriate to use a religious peacebuilding framework to analyse how Christian activities have contributed to the post-apartheid transformation project to establish lasting peace in the country. An important justification for this thesis is that existing studies which focus on the church as a change agent have principally defined transformation narrowly, in terms of a socioeconomic developmental agenda and from a theological perspective (Kareithi, Rogers, Bowers, and Herman, 2006; Swart, 2008; Bowers du Toit, 2012). While these studies are by no means wrong, they focus on modes of development rather than examining transformation holistically for the ways in which religious people and organisations either disrupt or reaffirm structural and cultural forms of violence. Only Ganiel (2006, 2007) in the social sciences has examined the sociological relationship between religious peacebuilding and transformation in South Africa. This study builds on Ganiel’s work to theorise the link between Christian religious peacebuilding and transformation. Her case study of a single congregation provides a starting point for this thesis’s more sustained examination of the racialised relationships of power that hamper South African transformation, sometimes despite individuals’ best intentions. This thesis responds to the gap in the literature by examining the work of two Christian faith-based organisations (FBOs) based in the city of Cape Town, South Africa. It adopts a qualitative approach, drawing principally on Michael Burawoy’s (1998a, 1998b) reflexive science model and the extended case method. During approximately four months of fieldwork in Cape Town, South Africa in 2013, I conducted slightly more than 76 hours of participant observation at the two main case study organisations. I also conducted a total of 46 semi-structured interviews with staff 2
members at the organisations and with a selection of people, including church leaders, who interacted with them on a regular basis. These interviews produced approximately 38 hours of audio data. The extended case method is a theory-driven approach to conducting empirical research. It suggests that by purposively sampling case studies, a researcher can use the analysis of findings to add to and critique existing theory. To the best of my knowledge, the extended case study method has not been used in any religious peacebuilding study to date and is therefore an important methodological contribution to the religious peacebuilding field. Following the sociological character of this study, I use the definition of religion provided by Giddens and Griffiths (2006: 534), who define religion as ‘a cultural system of commonly shared beliefs and rituals that provides a sense of ultimate meaning and purpose by creating an idea of reality that is sacred’. In examining two case study organisations, which I introduce below, I took into account both their organisational identities as well as the religious values and beliefs that motivated them to conduct their work. The Warehouse and Fusion: Introducing the two case study organisations The two case studies in this research are small Christian FBOs based in different locations in Cape Town, a city regularly accused of failing to confront the social, economic, and spatial divisions originally engendered by apartheid policies (Kamaldien, 2012). Both organisations use the idea of transformation as a guiding principle in their faith-based development work. The first of the two case studies, The Warehouse, is based in the relatively central, semi-industrial area of Wetton. Originally associated with an Anglican parish, it is now an independent multidenominational organisation that employs Anglican, Catholic, and evangelical staff members. When it started in 2003, The Warehouse initiated outcomes-based programmes that provided food packs and counselling directly to HIV/AIDS orphans and their carers, provided skills and resources for young people leaving school to seek out jobs or further education, and provided urban disaster relief through its Urban Gleaning programme. It also started an initiative, which never developed into a fullfledged programme, to encourage businesspeople in the racially diverse St John’s Wynberg Anglican Parish to provide seed capital and mentorship to unemployed people looking to start small enterprises in the city. 3
By late 2013, a decade after it began its work and the point at which I arrived to conduct my research, The Warehouse had completed a move away from programmatic development towards a facilitative approach. Its new strategy valued relationship building and empowerment of local church leaders rather than externally-directed initiatives of the kind it had favoured in previous years. The Warehouse increasingly organised its work around a specific idea of transformation, namely transformational development. While transformational development bears similarities to the socioeconomic transformation pursued by the state, it emphasises individual and relational change as complementary aspects of transformation. In the post-apartheid South African context, The Warehouse pursued transformation by 1) visiting church leaders in the Greater Cape Town area to help them formulate plans of action to address local needs; 2) facilitating what it termed ‘transformational encounters’, including development training events and discussion forums to encourage inter-racial relationship building; and 3) preparing and making available ‘transformational resources’ such as training notes and podcasts of sermons delivered by Warehouse staff members. I chose The Warehouse as a case study because as it continued in its work ‘serving the church in its response to poverty, injustice and division’ (The Warehouse, n.d.), it implemented a religiously inspired idea of transformation that allowed the organisation to reimagine its role in establishing inclusive peace in the city. Furthermore, The Warehouse has in recent years become recognised by other Cape Town churches as an experienced development organisation and is regularly invited to speak at church conferences or give sermons at church services. It was also the South African representative for the international Micah Challenge programme, which promoted the attainment of the Millennium Development Goals. As an organisation which is increasingly visible, with a diverse and growing network of churches and faith-based organisations, it is worth examining The Warehouse to understand how it functions as a multi-racial organisation, how it interacts with other churches and organisations, and how its character and ideas allow it to respond to specific transformation imperatives. The second case study, Fusion, was initially a project at The Warehouse but became independent from its parent organisation during my research in 2013. It works and is based in Manenberg, a deprived part of the city and a creation of the apartheid government. With its high levels of unemployment, poverty, and violence, Manenberg 4
epitomises the social, economic, and political challenges facing South Africa that stem from historical oppression and the current lack of political will. However, Manenberg also has peculiarities of its own. It is the heartland of two major rival gangs in Cape Town and one of the epicentres of the drug trade in the city. Fusion has responded to these particularities by focusing on youth in the area, many of whom are at risk of becoming involved with gangs and drugs. It seeks to build ‘a Transformational Community of young people formerly involved in lifestyles of destruction’ (Fusion, n.d.). Despite existing as a Warehouse programme since 2004, Fusion only occupied its premises in Manenberg in early 2012. Fusion’s office, on the second floor of the Manenberg People’s Centre, consists of just two small rooms. The office was little more than a base, with one ‘utility’ room in addition to the main office space. During his interview with me later in my research period, the director of Fusion emphasised how the organisation’s work mainly consists of walking and talking with Manenberg residents. He observed wryly that visitors to Fusion ‘believe that we don’t work – because they [staff members] never here, they out on the streets, you know’. The Fusion staff members fiercely believed that by living and working in Manenberg, the organisation could model an alternative type of community to the gangs in the area. Given that many of the young people they tried to work with had often experienced strained family relationships and viewed gang membership as a potential safety net, the Fusion staff members believed relationship building was central to the transformation process in Manenberg. They saw themselves as family – to each other and the young men and women – and stressed that the friendships they had with their ‘clients’ was unconditional. They described their methods in terms that explicitly distanced the organisation from the local church in Manenberg and the latter’s insistence on clean living as a Christian way of life, despite the local realities. Fusion drew inspiration from neo-monastic principles of embedding oneself in a community, and tried to subvert common church attitudes in Manenberg by welcoming young people into the Fusion ‘family’ irrespective of their involvement with drugs, alcohol, or gangs. A staff member at Fusion captured this sense of ‘in the world but not of it’ when he stated that ‘we believe that we should try and be church rather than go to church’ (Steve Davies, Fusion Staff Member, 27 November 2013). Fusion’s emphasis on relationship building, which had at one time put them at odds with The Warehouse, did not mean they eschewed any other activities to promote 5
transformation in Manenberg. For instance, they partnered with The Warehouse, churches and FBOs to publicise an international campaign against corruption that highlighted the extent to which corruption disproportionately affects the poorest in society. Fusion organised and hosted the culminating event in the hall at the Manenberg People’s Centre. During my research period they were also in the process of locating a suitable property to start a community bakery. Fusion anticipated the bakery would provide an opportunity for some of the young people in their network to gain professional skills and job experience, and to learn the life skills needed to retain a job once they were, hopefully, able to find one. In short, Fusion has imagined a type of religious peacebuilding qua transformation they believe is appropriate to their locale. It is worth examining how its pointed rejection of the local churches’ norms and expectations contrasts with The Warehouse’s structured strategy of engaging a city-wide network of churches, as well as how it compares with the transformation pursued by the state. Thesis structure This thesis is made up of nine parts including the Introduction. Chapter 1 reviews the literature on religious peacebuilding. The chapter first gives an overview of the fundamental precept of religious peacebuilding, namely that religion is neither principally violent nor wholly given to peace, a concept best represented by Appleby’s (2000) theory of the ambivalence of the sacred. I highlight the link in the literature between Appleby’s ambivalence thesis and scholars’ examination of religious traditions for ideas of peace and justice; I then make the conceptual connection between these ideas of justice and the field of conflict transformation, emphasising how religious peacebuilding activities can contribute to transformation’s goal of bringing about lasting peace. Chapter 1 also categorises religious actors’ involvement in peace efforts using an adapted version of Sampson’s (1997) well-known typology of religious peacebuilding activities, and describes how these relate to conflict transformation ideals. The chapter ends by outlining how scholars such as Brewer, Higgins, and Teeney (2011) have called for theoretical and conceptual improvements within religious peacebuilding studies. I present the framework of analysis Brewer, Higgins, and Teeney use to examine how religious organisations function in specific social spaces and describe how Ganiel (2016) has used this framework in her study of 6
peacebuilding in Ireland. This chapter argues that the latter study is an example of critically engaged religious peacebuilding, as it engages with Beck’s (2010) sociological thesis of the individualisation of religion in the wider sociological field and relates this to Christianity’s potential to encourage peace. Chapter 2 sets the basis for this study’s analysis of transformation in postapartheid South Africa through the lens of religious peacebuilding. It outlines the particular meaning of transformation in South Africa and reviews the current state of affairs in the country. The first part of this chapter describes the post-conflict political transformation needs that resulted from colonial and apartheid rule – these needs were met early in the post-apartheid era. The second part examines the post-apartheid necessity for economic transformation and reviews the effects of the ANC government’s macro-economic policies following the negotiated transition as well as its policies to increase access to the labour market and balance patterns of ownership in business. Thirdly, this chapter describes the post-apartheid social service transformation needs and describes the various indicators of incomplete transformation in the health, education, and housing sectors. Finally, the chapter discusses how, although cultural transformation has been partly successful, intransigent group identities continue to present obstacles to overall post-conflict transformation goals. This chapter emphasises that the challenges of engineering an equitable society that supports lasting peace are both historical and contemporary – the colonial and apartheid periods entrenched a two-tier social system that has been extremely difficult to overhaul, but the ANC government, which has been in power for more than 20 years, is also responsible for continued poverty, inequality, and the growth of corruption across all levels of government. Chapter 3 ties together the previous two chapters by reviewing the role of Christianity in promoting peace in South Africa during apartheid and in the current democratic period. The first part of this chapter reprises Appleby’s (2000) theory of the ambivalence of the sacred to describe how Christians, and their leaders in particular, have interpreted their religious traditions to both positive and negative effect for more than 200 years. The second part presents examples of the peacebuilding role of Christianity during apartheid, while the third focuses on peacebuilding examples after apartheid. I use the six-category peacebuilding typology first presented in Chapter 1 to organise the many and disparate instances of religious peacebuilding in South Africa since 1950. Though the chapter will not have been able to capture 7
every example, it presents as comprehensive a list as possible and details how these have contributed to transformation in South Africa. Chapter 4, the research design, describes this study’s methodological approach, introducing Michael Burawoy’s reflexive model of science and the extended case method. It subsequently outlines the data collection methods used in the study, including participant observation techniques and semi-structured interviews; it describes the technical details of how I sampled and gathered data; and it explains how I negotiated access to field sites and interview participants. The chapter outlines the thematic analysis procedure by which I examined the various research data and concludes by presenting the methodological challenges and possible weaknesses in the research design. Chapter 5 is the first of three chapters that discuss the research findings. Its main assertion is that the two case study organisations hold a very particular understanding of what transformation entails in post-apartheid South Africa. Thematic analysis of the interview data suggests that staff members see transformation in society as a three-part process of material, individual, and relational change. These can be defined as 1) material transformation (social development and structural change of social and political institutions); 2) individual transformation (the process of realising one’s identity in relationship with God, which results in the recognition of one’s power to respond to material needs and injustices in Cape Town); and 3) relational transformation (relationship building across the racial and class divides in Cape Town). Participants also insisted that there is a spiritual aspect to transformation that further differentiates their work from government initiatives. This chapter concludes by examining how race and class simultaneously inform the organisations’ transformational goals and frustrate their work as they try to put their ideas of transformation into practice. Whereas Chapter 5 focused on what participants said about transformation, Chapter 6 examines how participants tried to do transformation. It details the activities undertaken by both organisations as they pursue their goals of bringing about transformation in the communities with which they work. It shows how, in trying to position itself in a relatively neutral space in the city, The Warehouse acted as a middle-ground where people from across the city could meet and discuss issues of unity in the Church. The Warehouse has opened its transformational development training events and discussion forums to its network of churches. In so doing, it hopes 8
to challenge old power relations in society and the racialised development procedures they believe entrench reliance and perpetuate poverty. In contrast to this wide-ranging understanding of transformation, Fusion evinced a more localised approach to performing transformation. It has tried to embed itself in Manenberg society and focused on the marginalised demographic of high-risk youth in the area. They considered that government, civil society, and Manenberg residents have alienated young people in the area and believe that a strongly relational approach is best-suited to respond to their target group’s needs. Their regular ‘prayer walks’ around the neighbourhood epitomise the organisation’s approach to its work: when I joined staff members on one of these walks, I was able to confirm that they did stop and pray quietly with people they knew and some people whom they did not. However, a large part of this process was maintaining a physical presence in the community and inserting themselves into the lives of Manenberg residents. Chapter 6 asserts that the organisations’ different transformational practices respond to the specific dynamics of the areas in which the two organisations work, suggesting that transformation is a multi-faceted process that can be approached in a variety of ways. Chapter 7 begins the analytical process of scaling up from the micro-interactions between people and organisations to comment on how they interact with the macrolevel forces that shape society. It foregrounds how the case study organisations developed their transformation strategies in response to the social structural pressures within the areas where they are based. Chapter 7 brings together the previous two chapters to evaluate whether the religiously inspired transformation work of The Warehouse and Fusion can contribute to peace. It uses Brewer, Higgins, and Teeney’s (2011) conceptual framework of strategic social spaces to describe how the organisations’ lifestyle-based approaches to pursuing transformation allow them to occupy specific intellectual social spaces (promoting new ideas related to peacebuilding) and institutional social spaces (promoting peacebuilding practices). Using Beck’s (2010) theory of individualisation in late modernity, which proposes that individuals must navigate society without the orienting power of social institutions including religion, Chapter 7 compares Fusion to the religiously individualised Emerging Church Movement (ECM) and argues that as the organisation operates outside of church structures, it is able to occupy peacebuilding gaps in strategic spaces of civil society that many other religious organisations would not be able to fill. Chapter 7 also argues that The Warehouse displays features of individualisation in its 9
work, but that this religious individualisation is tempered as the organisation maintains ties with its church network to encourage transformation. This thesis contends that The Warehouse is an example of ‘extra-institutional religion’ (Ganiel, 2016: passim) in the way that it differentiates its values from churches in South Africa but pursues its peacebuilding goals alongside them, operating in distinct institutional social spaces in the process. Because both Fusion and The Warehouse continue to face social structural challenges while conducting their transformation work, this thesis proposes that Beck’s theory of individualisation has limited applicability in the South African context, but argues that the theory still has considerable explanatory power, especially when used together with the theory of extra-institutional religion. The eighth chapter, the Conclusion, provides an overview of this thesis’s contribution to understanding Christian religious peacebuilding in South Africa today. It also discusses the thesis’s contribution to religious peacebuilding theory more broadly, with specific reference to its engagement with Beck, Ganiel, and the individualisation theory in a non-Western context. The Conclusion also presents policy recommendations for the case study FBOs and provides suggestions for further research. Conclusion This thesis responds to the gap in the religious peacebuilding literature on what role religious actors play in promoting transformation in South Africa today. Using Brewer, Higgins, and Teeney’s (2011) framework of analysis, it asserts that the case studies of The Warehouse and Fusion, which have adopted transformation as a way of life, conduct their religious peacebuilding activities in strategic social spaces. These allow them to reimagine religious peacebuilding practices that actively endeavour to create an alternative, more equitable, and cohesive post-apartheid society. It links this to what this thesis terms a post post-apartheid mode of religious peacebuilding, namely an emerging trend in Christian churches and organisations to be more critical of the ANC government and the slow pace of transformation in the country. This is an attitude which contrasts with what I refer to as the post-apartheid religious peacebuilding model in South Africa, which is characterised by organisations’ closeness to the state. This thesis presents the possibilities for peace offered by a lifestyle of transformation, but it also emphasises that the ‘extralocal forces’ (Burawoy, 1998a: 5) 10
which structure post-apartheid South Africa continue to affect the micro-processes of transformation. The evidence of the continuing importance of social categories of class and race in particular highlights the limitations of the individual as a site of transformation, although this does not discount it as a way to challenge cultural power imbalances that prevent the full transformation of society and the attainment of lasting peace. After analysing the strategic social spaces occupied by the case studies, this research concludes that the FBOs’ religiously inspired transformation activities have the ability to address cultural and symbolic structures of power, promoting cultural transformation in the process. In terms of its contribution to religious peacebuilding as a discipline, this thesis helps to improve the theoretical and conceptual grounding of the field by building on the nascent theory of extra-institutional religion and its peacebuilding potential, which has been pioneered by Ganiel in relation to Christianity in Ireland and Northern Ireland but has not been examined out of this context.
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Chapter 1 Overview of Religious Peacebuilding Theory and its Relationship to Transformation in Post-Conflict Societies Since this research studies the relationship between Christian religious peacebuilding and the ongoing transformation process in South Africa, this chapter reviews the religious peacebuilding literature. It asserts that while the drive to formalise religious peacebuilding theory and practice is a relatively new phenomenon, religion has long had ties to peace and justice, just as it has had ties to conflict. This chapter also explains how religious peacebuilding relates to the discipline of conflict transformation, arguing that the religiously informed concepts of ‘justpeace’ (Lederach, 2005: passim) and ‘political reconciliation’ (Philpott, 2012: passim) most strongly demonstrate the conceptual bridges between the disciplines. Chapter 2 then examines the specific meaning of transformation in South Africa and Chapter 3 provides a history of Christian religious peacebuilding in the country, focusing on Christianity’s links to transformation before and after apartheid. In order to cover the various aspects of religious peacebuilding, this chapter first introduces the growth and institutionalisation of the religious peacebuilding field, highlighting how it has professionalised over the past 15 years. Second, it discusses the theories and concepts that have been used to frame some of the most well-known arguments in the academic literature. Third, I link the religious peacebuilding literature to the theory and practice of conflict transformation, a field which takes a holistic approach to diminishing violence and establishing long-term peace in post-conflict societies. Fourth, I present six categories of religious peacebuilding and include examples of each of these to illustrate the practice of religious peacebuilding. Fifth, I examine the literature that calls for theoretical improvement in religious peacebuilding studies. I use this as a starting point to introduce Brewer, Higgins, and Teeney’s (2011) conceptual framework of strategic social spaces that allows for cross-case study analysis of religious peacebuilding efforts. This chapter also introduces Ganiel’s (2016) theory of extra-institutional religion and its peacebuilding potential within the strategic social spaces described by Brewer, Higgins, and Teeney. Finally, I give an overview of Beck’s (2010) theory of deinstitutionalised religion, which he describes as part of a larger process of
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individualisation in contemporary modern society. He suggests that religion’s capacity to act as a peaceful ‘agent of modernisation in the world risk society’ (Beck, 2010: 190) lies in its potential to break down barriers of difference, although he emphasises the rise of individualised religious practices rather than established religious traditions as the basis for this peace potential. Although some scholars have challenged aspects of the individualisation thesis, Ganiel shows in her research that Beck’s theory can offer insight into religious peacebuilding practices and help strengthen the theoretical basis of the discipline. The Rise of Religious Peacebuilding as a Field of Study Conflict is an enduring feature of religion in society. Yet in spite of religion’s age-old connection to conflict, a relatively small but established group of scholars and analysts argue that religious traditions have considerable potential to contribute to peacebuilding efforts (for a selection of prominent texts, see Appleby, 2000; Gopin, 2000; Lederach and Sampson, 2000; Abu-Nimer, 2003; Omer, Appleby, and Little, 2015). Political scientists and international relations specialists (Johnston and Sampson, 1994; Sandal, 2011; Philpott, 2012; Lynch, 2015), historians (Appleby, 2000, 2008; Wells, 2006), sociologists (Patel, 2006; Brewer, Higgins, and Teeney, 2011; Rios Oyola, 2015), and theologians (Volf, 1996; de Gruchy, 2002; DuBois and Hunter-Bowman, 2015) have all contributed to the growing library of literature on the topic. This body of publications, which I examine in the current chapter, encompasses empirical descriptions of faith-based initiatives, theory-building on religious thinking’s influence on transitional justice mechanisms, the hermeneutics of peace in sacred texts, and peacebuilding manuals for practitioners. Religious peacebuilding has not been the only fast-growing field of study in recent years, nor has its trajectory been unique. For example, Bell (2009: 2) comments on the tremendous success and concomitant ‘institutionalisation’ of the study of violence and memory: centres for memory study, courses, and dedicated scholarly journals have burgeoned. Similarly, growing interest in religious peacebuilding has been accompanied by a boom in independent and university-associated institutions, though this development is most noticeable in the United States. In an exhaustive study, Hertog (2010) identifies nine institutions in America whose programmes incorporate the study of the theoretical and practical aspects of religious peacebuilding. 13
In particular among these, the Religion and Peacemaking Center at the United States Institute of Peace (USIP) and the Religion, Conflict and Peacebuilding programme at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies (University of Notre Dame) have for just under 15 years been the engine rooms for new research into religious peacebuilding. Their influence in the field is all the more notable for the way they have advised US policymakers on conflict prevention programmes and led or funded several international mediation initiatives. The turn to celebrating religion’s potential to bring about and sustain peace began slowly in the 1990s. Since then it has grown to the point that Hertog (2010: 3) feels comfortable calling it a ‘worldwide movement’. This may be premature considering the scepticism of public religion that endures in academic and policy circles, especially outside of the United States. To wit, Brewer, Mitchell, and Leavey (2013) argue that religion has had a relatively uncontroversial history in American politics and civil society, whereas the history of religious wars and their effects still lingers in the European public imagination. Considering the ongoing debate over the public role of religion, Susan Hayward’s circumspect attitude more accurately captures the state of the field. She asserts simply that ‘religious peacebuilding has begun to move closer to the mainstream of conflict resolution practice and theory’ (Hayward, 2012: 1). To problematise further any overly optimistic analysis of religious peacebuilding, a small number of studies have critiqued narrowly focused methodologies within the field. Omer (2011), for example, warns against uncritical, ahistorical approaches to religion and criticises scholarship that searches singlemindedly for the good in religious traditions. Other studies have queried whether particular methodologies can contribute at all to comparative understandings of religious peacebuilding (see Brewer, Higgins, and Teeney, 2010, 2011; Omer, 2012). These analyses primarily point to the propensity within the literature to treat religion as an ‘independent variable’ (Brewer, Higgins, and Teeney, 2010: passim), thereby bracketing it off from other historical, political, and social factors at play. Descriptive case studies are particularly noticeable in this regard, as they tend to assert the potential for peace in religion by highlighting ancient values held within scripture and the ways these are useful in conflict interventions. Jeffrey Haynes’s (2009) article on religious peacebuilding in Mozambique, Nigeria, and Cambodia is a case in point. He describes instances in which religion has had a positive impact in conflict zones but stops short 14
of undertaking a comparative analysis of the examples. Instead, he states only that the examples were linked by the common theme of successful, as opposed to detrimental, religious intervention. These and other examples help to offset the idea that religion is fundamentally violent. However, on their own they do not promote conceptual and/or theoretical understandings of religious peacebuilding. The reflexive calls for conceptual and theoretical improvement in the religious peacebuilding literature indicate a maturation of the discipline – researchers have begun to critique their own field and open it up to theoretical innovation. Before I consider these arguments any further, I present some of the key ideas in the genesis of the religious peacebuilding literature, many of which remain prominent today. Militating against essentialism: Defining the nuance in religion ‘Religion can kill you!’ Such is Beck’s (2010: 173) warning. Indeed, it is impossible to ignore how violent religious beliefs can impel people to commit acts of terrorism. But the bedrock ‘belief’ of religious peacebuilding scholars and practitioners is that religious traditions hold within them the twofold prospect of violence as well as peace. Thus Daniel Philpott (2012: 8), a political scientist at the Kroc Institute in the United States, notes that the ancient texts of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism all contain ideas of ‘restorative justice, mercy, holistic peace, restorative punishment, [and] forgiveness’. These are all ideas that in recent times have inspired several truth and reconciliation commissions (Philpott, 2007, 2009a writes exhaustively on the influence of religious thought on transitional justice). Omer (2012: 6) describes this theological approach, prevalent in the religious peacebuilding literature, as the ‘sustained efforts to retrieve and cultivate non-violent and peaceful motifs within diverse religious traditions’. Other prominent scholars in this tradition are Marc Gopin (2000) and Mohammed Abu-Nimer (2003), both of whom are based at international conflict resolution institutions in the United States. The theological revisionist focus has led to a substantial body of work. However, Atalia Omer (2012), a religious studies scholar based at the Kroc Institute, contends that this branch of the religious peacebuilding literature, as foundational as it seems, ultimately stems from an influential contemporary work that emphasises the contextuality of religiously motivated action. The Ambivalence of the Sacred by Scott Appleby (2000), yet another Kroc Institute scholar, is so widely quoted in the literature
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that Omer (2012: 2) observes that ‘[m]ost of what takes place in the field of religious peacebuilding has been grounded, implicitly or explicitly, in Scott Appleby’s The Ambivalence of the Sacred: Religion, Violence, and Reconciliation and his phenomenological approach to religion’. In advancing his theory, Appleby seeks to dispel the suspicion of inevitable violence that has long permeated popular and academic perspectives on religion. This suspicion is epitomised in Samuel Huntington’s (1996) ‘clash of civilisations’ thesis, which many scholars have accused of glossing over the textured lives of global religions. For Omer (2012: 2), the clash of civilisations argument ‘renders religion as an ahistorical, monolithic, and unchanging essence’. The result, she contends, is ‘a self-fulfilling prophecy with both Islamists and xenophobic Western commentators, rendering their objectives in terms of ineradicable and irreconcilable differences’. She asserts that the beguiling ‘simplicity’ of this claim presents religion as an inevitable catalyst for conflict. Contra Huntington, Appleby’s ‘ambivalence of the sacred’ message turns on its head the mainstream essentialist attitude towards religion. Appleby’s theory jettisons the inevitable in favour of multiple interpretive possibilities. There is no dichotomous either/or case of good religion versus bad religion. There is instead, to use Beck’s (2010: 62) phrase, a ‘both/and’ situation whereby the effects of religion in the public sphere emerge from alternative and overlapping understandings of fluid traditions. Appleby asserts that to a large degree, religious leaders determine the path their followers will take in any given circumstance. Leaders, he writes, ‘define what is orthodox and heretical, moral or immoral, permitted or forbidden, at a particular moment’ (Appleby, 2000: 31). Appleby’s perspective leads him to argue that instead of automatically associating militancy with violent extremism, the term should be used to distinguish any religious actor who is deeply motivated by their spiritual convictions. On this view, militants for peace have the capability to promote tolerance in society and actively pursue justice by non-violent means, just as they have the capacity, if so led, to fuel conflict. Part of the strength of The Ambivalence of the Sacred is that it presents a thorough but straightforward argument, optimistic in its tone. The argument’s allure is evidenced by the number of scholars who have drawn on the ‘ambivalence’ framework to advance normative theories of religious peacebuilding. For example, it structures much of the work produced by the United States Institute of Peace. Calls for interfaith dialogue, a major component of USIP literature, make a particularly strong connection 16
to the possibility of irenic (re)interpretations of tradition (for in-depth descriptions of the diversity of interpretations of Islamic principles in particular and the possibility for peaceful interfaith discussion, see Abdalla, 2000; Smock, 2004; Smock and Huda, 2009). Locating the ambivalence in faith traditions allows religious adherents to imagine the ‘alternative futures’ (Gopin, 2000: 5) in any situation, what Gopin describes as recognising the possibilities presented by ‘the infinite hermeneutic variability of religious traditions’. The call for increased involvement of religion in conflict and post-conflict situations leaves open the question of what is religious peacebuilding. How do religions define peace and what sorts of justice do they envisage? How do these ideas inform and/or relate to religious peacebuilding activities? I discuss these issues in the following two sections. Religion: A source of ideas of peace and justice We have seen that within faith groups, ‘internal pluralism’ (Appleby, 2000: 245) allows individuals and groups to contest differing interpretations of a tradition. Internal pluralism means religious actors can confront the countervailing possibilities of peace and violence within religion. However, as Appleby (2000: 141) observes, this same pluralism can result in lack of agreement over the connection between peace and justice: Religions, in short, have not arrived at a universal set of values or priorities in pursuing peace. Religious traditions hold different worldviews and emphasise different peace-related values; even within any one tradition, people disagree on fundamental matters, such as the proper relationship between peace and justice or the philosophical and practical meaning of basic concepts such as reconciliation. Even the briefest review of the literature reveals an array of ethical values in world religions. Scholars claim many of these can be drawn on to ameliorate conflict situations (for further analysis of Christian, Jewish, and Muslim spiritual resources, see Bartoli, 2004; Denny, 2004; Gopin, 2004). Appleby correctly asserts that not all religions’ perspectives on peace align. Nevertheless, several commentators argue that world religions do at least overlap on certain basic points. Appleby (2000: 141) himself recalls Ghandi’s insistence that ‘every major moral and religious tradition has long
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emphasised the ideals of truth and nonviolence as the foundation for authentic and lasting peace’. Wilson (2010), too, notes that Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism all celebrate and defend the sacredness of human life. Daniel Philpott (2012: 63-4), meanwhile, asserts in his book Just and Unjust Peace that the three Abrahamic faith traditions – Christianity, Judaism, and Islam – converge in conceiving of peace as ‘rightly ordered relationships’ between people and between people and God. He notes that peace through right relationships is described in Jewish scriptures as shalom, a state of ‘health and prosperity, economic and political justice, as well as honesty and moral integrity in relations between persons’ (Philpott, 2012: 126). Philpott draws on theological literature to contend that this notion of holistic peace, which stresses a state of dignified wellbeing, also appears in Christian and Muslim texts. Scholars agree that promoting peaceful relations is the bailiwick of all major faith traditions. Yet as noted in the above extract from Appleby, finding common understandings of the ethics of peace is only one of the major issues religious peacebuilding scholars must grapple with. Analysts also need to elucidate the relationship between religion and ideas of justice; the following section discusses this. Religion and justice As with efforts to locate ethics of peace in religion, work done on the links between religion and justice has principally involved the ‘excavation of … tradition’ (Omer, 2012: 7) for justice-related themes. Omer refers to this as the theological approach to religious peacebuilding studies. Wilson (2010: 737) emphasises how religion has for centuries informed moral philosophy when she states that ‘existing theories of justice … have been influenced by religious values and religious actors such as St Augustine and Thomas Aquinas’. Continuing in this tradition, David Little (1999a, 1999b, 2002), a former USIP researcher, has written extensively on the subject of religion and human rights. In a self-reflexive piece, he reviews his own tradition, Presbyterianism, for the links between Calvinist thought and the principles that justify human rights. His conclusion, that ‘the liberal Calvinist tradition provides a particularly strong historical and theological foundation for a belief in human rights’ (Little, 2002: 77), exemplifies the theological strand of thought. In another paper, an extensive review of the literature on human rights and religion, Little (1999b: 165) describes how scholars ‘who are both
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religious believers and human rights supporters ... are obviously at liberty to draw arguments from their tradition that might prompt cobelievers to favour and support human rights’. Moreover, he asserts that ‘believers will more likely be motivated to comply with human rights if convincing arguments can be found in their tradition’ (Little, 1999b: 165). This reasoning resonates with Appleby (2000) and Gopin’s (2000) acknowledgement that sacred texts can be interpreted in ways that support processes of peace and justice. Little’s focus on the connection between religion and human rights is particularly relevant to the subject of peacebuilding, as human rights form the cornerstone of the internationally dominant system of liberal justice and the building of democratic institutions after conflict (Philpott, 2012). Strikingly, though, a review of the literature reveals that Little is among only a small group of religious peacebuilding scholars to study the ways faith traditions support human rights. In fact, a far larger group of religious peacebuilding scholars has elaborated on the ethics within religion (primarily Christianity) that sustain ideas of restorative justice. Little (1999a: passim) himself examines restorative justice as a ‘different kind of justice’ to human rights. He writes, ‘Restorative or remedial justice, by contrast [to retributive punishment], defines crime interpersonally and focuses on future reconciliation and the restoration of relations between victim and perpetrator, and with society at large’ (Little, 1999a: 66). Like justice based on human rights, restorative justice is predominantly associated with a secular paradigm. However, the tenets of restorative justice – restoration of victims, offenders, and communities – resonate particularly strongly with Christian ideals of forgiveness, interpersonal relationship, mercy, and reconciliation. Amstutz (2005, 2006) and Philpott (2012), for instance, both argue for the Christian basis of political reconciliation to confront past violence, and link this to principles of restorative justice. Scholars and practitioners of restorative justice, including those within the religious peacebuilding field, point to various truth commissions – now a staple transitional mechanism in societies emerging from conflict – as flagship restorative justice measures around the world. Some of these have clear ties to religious institutions, as in the cases of Guatemala (Recovery of Historical Memory Project, 1999; López Levy, 2001) and South Africa (Graybill, 2002; Shore, 2009). Thus far I have reviewed arguments for the religion-peace and religion-justice connections as two separate strands of literature. A third aspect to this discussion is the question of how justice relates to peace and vice versa, a topic fiercely debated in 19
the transitional justice and post-conflict literature (for example, see Fletcher and Weinstein, 2002; Aiken, 2010; Weinstein, 2011). Several religious peacebuilding analysts have tried to clarify the peace-justice nexus using the restorative lens I have just described. I examine these efforts below. ‘Political reconciliation’ and ‘justpeace’: Two holistic concepts of peace that incorporate justice One of the longest-running debates in post-conflict and transitional justice literature revolves around the proper relationship between peace and justice in societies emerging from conflict: Should peace follow justice or should justice follow peace? The consensus response is captured in the notion that ‘international criminal courts can facilitate peace-building and reconciliation’ (Clark, 2011: 345). In other words, the road to lasting peace runs through the legal system; peace, and possibly reconciliation, will follow once perpetrators of human rights abuses are convicted of their crimes. However, the dominance of this legalistic approach has been challenged in recent years with the considerable growth of national truth commissions – 40 commissions were established in post-conflict zones between 1974 and 2010 (Amnesty International, 2010) – with the result that reconciliation has become a particularly contentious subject of the peace-justice question. In its simplest form, reconciliation is the possibility that former adversaries can coexist in spite of past tensions or current differences (Trimikliniotis, 2013). A more expansive definition sees the possibility for reconciliation ‘to foster mutual respect, and, at its most ambitious, ... foster forgiveness, mercy, compassion, a shared vision of society, mutual healing, and harmony among parties formerly in conflict’ (Opotow, 2001: 160). It is this maximalist approach to reconciliation that critics see as more harmful than good. One reads about ‘the rhetoric of reconciliation’ (Dwyer, 1999: 82) and how it cloaks the persisting power imbalances and post-conflict machinations between political elites. Alternatively, it is ‘idealistic, utopian, unlikely to succeed, ... [and] guilty of moral overstretch’ (Philpott, 2012: 74). Critical commentators (for example, see Hirsch, 2011a, 2011b; Coulthard, 2014; Renner, 2015; Rosoux, 2015) are more likely to consider reconciliation as an outcome of justice, and even then may view it with some scepticism as a politically enforced project. Over against these arguments, the religious peacebuilding scholar Daniel Philpott is most distinctive for 20
his alternative approach to the reconciliation before/after justice debate. He draws on religious traditions of forgiveness and apology to contend that reconciliation is itself a form of justice. Daniel Philpott refers to the Abrahamic texts to propose a concept of postconflict justice as the cessation of hostilities and the restoration of right relationships between citizens and state institutions, what he describes as ‘political reconciliation’ (Philpott, 2012: passim). This view of reconciliation, which Philpott shares with Amstutz (2005, 2006), emphasises that reconciliation is justice and not, as is commonly asserted in the field of transitional justice, a competing goal in post-conflict societies. According to Philpott (2012), two restorative practices that help to enact political reconciliation are apology, which he contends can undermine the political and moral standing of an injustice, and forgiveness. Philpott (2012: 251) draws on religious traditions to assert that political forgiveness is integral to individual and community healing after conflict. ‘Forgiveness,’ he asserts, ‘purports both to destroy existing injustice and to construct a better politics’. In proposing his argument, Philpott follows in the footsteps of Donald Shriver (1995) and Miroslav Volf (1996), both of whom are well-known for contending (from a Christian tradition) that political forgiveness has distinct restorative potential for victims and perpetrators alike. The notion of comprehensive peace or shalom, which includes ‘economic and political justice as well as honesty and moral integrity in relations between persons’ (Philpott, 2012: 126), forms an important basis for Philpott’s theory of peace that includes justice. By tracing some of the restorative ethics that have sacred significance, such as apology, forgiveness, and mercy, we can discern overlaps between religious and secular ideas of justice – in restorative justice and in transitional justice, for example. Philpott (2012: 9) notes the historical value of ‘grafting’ religious values onto secular ones, remarking that the merging of religious and secular ideas gave impetus to ‘religiously inspired political reform movements of the last two centuries that have sought to promote liberal democratic politics’. Furthermore, he argues for the imperative to render religious ideas into secular language, since international postconflict justice efforts are often undertaken by organisations operating within a secular paradigm. The ethic of political reconciliation, which he has proposed in several pieces of work (see Philpott, 2006, 2009b, 2012), explicitly incorporates secular standards of international law, the inviolability of human rights, and ideals of restorative justice.
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Philpott is not the only scholar to offer a holistic concept of peace and justice that draws on religious principles. It is possible to distinguish the connection between Philpott’s ideas and the concept of ‘justpeace’ usually associated with John Paul Lederach, a member of the Mennonite ‘peace church’ and prominent peace studies researcher based at the Kroc Institute. Together with Scott Appleby, Lederach defines justpeace as ‘the reduction and management of violence and the achievement of social and economic justice [which] are undertaken as mutual, reinforcing dimensions of constructive change’ (quoted in Omer, 2011: 461). Compared with peacebuilding literature generally, the idea of justpeace bears distinct similarities to the concept of ‘positive peace’ (Galtung, 1969: passim), which emphasises the connection between peace and the long-term pursuits of justice, fairness, and equality. It is perhaps not surprising that the ideas of justpeace and positive peace resemble each other so closely, since Lederach continues to play a leading role in conflict transformation research, a strand of peacebuilding literature that pursues lasting peace and justice through holistic social change. His model of justpeace is nevertheless distinctive in that it is partly influenced by his experiences as a religious peacebuilding practitioner and therefore incorporates certain ideals specific to the religious peacebuilding field, including the primacy of reconciliation as a means to end conflict (Philpott, 2010). The secular and religious genealogy of justpeace is emblematic of a theme I have emphasised in this section, viz., the way scholars of religious peacebuilding have forged a distinctive field of study but also tried to integrate religious peacebuilding ideas into secular spheres. Broadly speaking, the practices of apology, forgiveness, and reconciliation – all of them deeply steeped in religious tradition – have successfully traversed the traditional religious-secular divide, helping societies achieve ‘wholeness in place of brokenness’ (Brewer, Higgins, and Teeney, 2011: 32). Some scholars have warned of the dangers of institutionalising political impunity, arguing that apology, forgiveness, and reconciliation are antithetical to establishing the rule of law in postconflict societies (for examples, see Brudholm and Cushman, 2009). Nevertheless, the world religions support human rights and the rule of law – we have seen Philpott, Amstutz, and Little articulate their thoughts alongside and together with secular ideals. Indeed, one of the clearest examples of how religious thought has influenced and interacted with secular theories in peace research is the relatively new emphasis within that field on conflict transformation instead of conflict resolution or conflict management. 22
The Connection Between Justpeace, Comprehensive Peace, and Conflict Transformation Principles Conflict transformation: A definition of a school of thought Within the field of peace and conflict studies, three main intellectual traditions dominate theory and practice (Mitchell, 2002; Miall, 2004; Paffenholz, 2009). These are conflict management, conflict resolution, and conflict transformation. Each approach conceives of peace and conflict slightly differently and holds alternative ideas of how to move from a state of conflict to a state of peace. Miall (2004: 3) summarises how conflict management theorists understand war overwhelmingly in terms of the absolute effects of power differentials: Conflict management theorists see violent conflicts as an ineradicable consequence of differences of values and interests within and between communities. … Resolving such conflicts is viewed as unrealistic: the best that can be done is to manage and contain them, and occasionally to reach a historic compromise in which violence may be laid aside and normal politics resumed. In contrast to this realist, ‘balance of power’ (Paffenholz, 2009: 3) approach within peacebuilding studies, proponents of conflict resolution believe that violence can be reduced and resolved. Theorists argue that any differences existing between groups of people need not result in violence; they criticise the conflict management approach for focusing on elite decision-making and ignoring the long-term, underlying causes of conflict (Paffenholz, 2009). Supporters of the conflict resolution approach suggest that through skilled, mid-level intervention, the root causes of violence can be identified and relationships improved between antagonistic communities through activities such as group dialogues and peace education workshops (Paffenholz, 2009). The third school of thought, conflict transformation, presents the same critiques of conflict management as does conflict resolution. However, transformation theorists also conclude that the resolution approach does not go far enough in its peacebuilding efforts either in terms of building new relationships or with respect to restructuring society so that conflicts do not reignite in the future (Mitchell, 2002). In the years since Rupesinghe (1995) first presented the idea of conflict transformation instead of resolution and Lederach (1997) proposed his widely influential transformation-based
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framework for peacebuilding, conflict transformation has become the preferred peacebuilding model within the field (Mitchell, 2002; Dayton and Kriesberg, 2009; Paffenholz, 2009). Conflict transformation theorists contend that underlying issues should not only be identified, as in the resolution model, but also comprehensively dealt with. In this vein, Miall (2004: 4) observes that ‘transformation is therefore a process of engaging with and transforming the relationships, interests, discourses and, if necessary, the very constitution of society that supports the continuation of violent conflict’. Furthermore, whereas the resolution model believes that relationships will change after mutually beneficial agreements are agreed upon, the transformation model emphasises that better (not just changed) relationships between adversaries are vital to a lasting peace – they complement structural changes in the labour market, the political system, the economy, and social institutions of health and education. Thus Mitchell (2002: 20) asserts that ‘[r]elationships have to be replaced and rebuilt through deliberate and directed efforts, and reconciliation can only take place as a result of these efforts’. Conflict transformation and religious peacebuilding As Miall (2004) notes, transformation advocates have to a large degree been influenced by the thinking of Johan Galtung, a major figure in the foundation of the field of peace studies. Galtung (1969: passim) introduced the concepts of ‘negative peace’ and ‘positive peace’ to distinguish between different types of peace. Whereas negative peace refers to the end of direct, physical violence, positive peace emphasises the ending of indirect, structural violence (Galtung, 1969). The latter connects the pursuits of justice, fairness, and equality. It includes the much longer process of eradicating the original causes of the conflict and establishing a society in which previously antagonistic parties can interact peacefully and on an equal footing (Ganiel, 2007). Considering the characteristics of the three main approaches to peacebuilding, it would seem that conflict transformation is best able to realise positive peace, not least because practitioners try to operate at the levels of the individual, the community, and the state (Schmelzle and Bloomfield, 2006). Though not a religious peacebuilding scholar himself, Galtung (2000) makes a direct connection between transformational peacebuilding and the values inherent in some of the world religions. He states that his Transcend Method of conflict 24
transformation is based on Hindu, Buddhist, Christian, Daoist, Islamic, and Judaic ideals of collective wellbeing. To be clear, religious peacebuilding is not conflict transformation by another name. However, when religious peacebuilding theories draw on religious meanings of peace and justice (especially when these treat individual, interpersonal, and structural injustices as interconnected), they often interweave with the holistic conceptual basis of transformation. Indeed, Appleby (2000: 211-12) incorporates a conflict transformation lens into his study of the ambivalence of the sacred and states that he uses the term religious peacebuilding ‘to comprehend the various phases, levels, and types of activity, by religious actors and others, that strengthen religion’s role in creating tolerant and nonviolent societies’. Appleby asserts that religious peacebuilding activities can and do help to enact processes of transformation. However, as an important figure in the fields of both religious peacebuilding and conflict transformation, it is Lederach’s work on justpeace that serves as the best point of departure to discuss the links between religious ideas of peace and justice and the concept of conflict transformation. Three of Lederach’s most influential books on conflict transformation are The Little Book of Conflict Transformation (2003b), The Moral Imagination: The Art and Soul of Building Peace (2005), and Building Peace: Sustainable Reconciliation in Divided Societies (2007). In these and other publications, he draws on Biblical notions of mercy, forgiveness, compassion, and personal and communal wellbeing to validate his holistic conception of peace and justice, which addresses several levels of postconflict change in society: personal, relational, and structural (Lederach, 1997). Justpeace, which Lederach (2005: 182) defines as an ‘orientation toward conflict transformation characterised by approaches that reduce violence and destructive cycles of social interaction and at the same time increase justice in any relationship’, primarily focuses on improving interactions between individual people, between groups of people, and between people and institutions. It is, as the sociologist of religion Josephine Sundqvist (2011: 184) notes succinctly, ‘all about relationship building’. In emphasising the importance of relationships to building and maintaining peace, Lederach is not alone among religious peacebuilding scholars. I mentioned earlier in this chapter that other religious peacebuilding theorists, including Shriver (1995), Volf (1996), and Philpott (2012), emphasise reconciliation as part of the journey to, and end goal of, peace and justice. Lederach does the same. On an interpersonal level, Lederach’s conceptualisation of justpeace addresses interactions 25
between individuals who have been involved in a conflict. For example, Lederach (1999) describes at length how he used Psalm 85 – and within it the converging ideas of truth, mercy, justice, and peace – to structure conflict resolution workshops in Nicaragua in the 1980s, which attempted to build relationships between men who were previously at war with one another. Important as this individual-level reconciliation is, its greater significance is that it helps build the social foundations for ‘infrastructures for peace’ (Lederach, 1997: passim). These are the institutional mechanisms that allow societies to build peace in dynamic environments and sustain it over time. The infrastructures allow societies emerging from conflict to negotiate peace and justice in an inclusive way, involving high-level leaders in discussions and consulting grassroots community members on their material and cultural needs (Lederach, 2012). In this way, reconciliation acts on a societal level, too, to bolster its ‘peacebuilding potential’ (Paffenholz, 2009: 5). Lederach’s emphasis on inclusivity within transformation (guided by the principles of justpeace) is exactly what distinguishes the transformation approach from the conflict management and conflict resolution models described earlier (Paffenholz, 2009). Instead of focusing on the level of the state alone, Lederach (2012: 8) envisages ‘interdependence between the various levels of society affected by and affecting change processes’. One of these levels is at the level of the individual: conflict transformation theorists have argued that protagonists (especially leaders) of any conflict need to undergo psychological and attitudinal change to ensure transformation can occur over time (Mitchell, 2006; Spies, 2006). In this vein, Lederach (2003a) refers to justpeace as ‘a radical respect for human rights, and nonviolence as way of life’. It is the justification for a conflict transformation approach that, at least partly, rests on individual change. This is a conceptualisation upon which Lederach’s erstwhile colleague at the Eastern Mennonite University’s Center for Justice and Peacebuilding, Jarem Sawatsky, expands. Sawatsky (2008: 53) links the ideas of justpeace and transformation to the Torah and its emphasis on promoting justice within ‘the daily habits of all people’. He goes on to quote Thich Nhat Hanh, the well-known Vietnamese Buddhist peacebuilder, noting that the ethic of justpeace is, in Hanh’s words, ‘peace in every step: the path of mindfulness in everyday life’ (Hanh, quoted in Sawatsky, 2008: 53). Lederach’s idea of justpeace is holistic because it emphasises that changes within conflict societies should occur across different levels, and that these levels are 26
interdependent. The reconciliation-based approach suggested by Lederach and others does not individualise the source of conflict or forego justice as critics of reconciliation have argued elsewhere (see Hovland, 2005; Hirsch, 2011a, 2011b), but instead promotes equality, fairness, and respect in the interactions between people, groups, and institutions. As I described earlier in this chapter, the religious peacebuilding scholar Daniel Philpott (2012) refers to this sort of just peace as a state of right relationship. Indeed, the relational, restorative approach he endorses can be explored alongside Lederach’s justpeace to further make the link between religious peacebuilding theories and the concept of conflict transformation. To wit, Philpott’s (2012) concept of political reconciliation emphasises how peacebuilding is a personto-person but also a state-citizen process that involves access to justice, recognition of human rights, and the creation of democratic institutions that recognise citizens as full members of society. Philpott describes a comprehensive peace drawing on several religious concepts in the Abrahamic texts – shalom in Judaism, salam in Islam, and eirene (the Greek translation of shalom) in Christianity – which he asserts also connote justice, especially as this relates to the justice of communal wellbeing. As stated earlier, shalom is defined as a state of comprehensive peace (Philpott, 2012). Salam, meanwhile, similarly refers to ‘a general state of justice, not just a cessation of hostilities’ (Philpott, 2012: 156). Philpott draws on the ideas outlined above to specifically address postconflict contexts; he argues that a process of political reconciliation, encompassing acknowledgement, reparations, apologies, and the building of socially just and democratic institutions, is needed to move from violence and injustice to comprehensive peace and justice. Thus he states that ‘the peace that states may rightfully promote is wider than the negative peace of a settlement or the positive peace of human rights, democracy, and the rule of law and also involves a condition in which right relationship within political orders has been restored (at least partially) with respect to the wounds of political injustice’ (Philpott, 2012: 64). It is at this point – that is, where the personal, political, and social meet – that Philpott’s (2012) description of comprehensive peace and his idea of political reconciliation become important conceptual links between religious ideas of peacebuilding and secular conflict transformation at the state-level as well as the interpersonal one. To date, this chapter has introduced the key concepts related to religious peacebuilding and linked these to the concepts contained in the field of conflict 27
transformation. It has emphasised in particular that the ideas of justpeace (linked to Lederach) and comprehensive peace (linked to Philpott) illustrate how religious peacebuilding concepts – especially ideas of peace and justice – support the thought and practice of conflict transformation. The overarching conceptual link is that peacebuilding after conflict should be a broad-based process involving the state, communities, and individuals. For peace and justice to be achieved, antagonistic relationships and social, economic, and political barriers should be identified and deliberately replaced with cooperative relationships and inclusive social structures that enable a durable peace. Having laid this conceptual foundation, I present different types of religious peacebuilding activities in the following section to show how ideas of peace and justice are pursued in practice. On their own, none of these activities or groups of activities constitutes transformation; rather, a holistic approach involves a judicious mix of peacebuilding activities that aims for economic, political, social, and cultural transformation. Religious Peacebuilding Categories Scholars and practitioners have classified religious peacebuilding in a variety of ways. As Schlack (2009) notes, different classification methods have included categorising peacebuilding initiatives by country, by individual or institutional actors, or by general peacebuilding roles. In this overview section on religious peacebuilding activities I follow Cynthia Sampson’s (1997) well-known classification system for faith-based actors, which she first developed for the general field of peacebuilding and which David Steele (2008) has since adapted. Steele elaborated on the original four categories (mediation, advocacy, observation, and education) to reflect particular religious dimensions of peacebuilding. In Steele’s introduction to religious peacebuilding in the Catholic Relief Services (CRS) volume Pursuing Just Peace, he categorises peacebuilding roles in the following way: 1) Conciliation and mediation; 2) Advocacy and empowerment; 3) Observation and witness; and 4) Education and formation. Steele’s categorisation focuses strongly on the work of religious peacemakers in defusing ongoing conflict, what Little and Appleby (2004: 5-6) describe as ‘resolving and transforming deadly conflict’. They add that this is done ‘with the goal of building social relations and political institutions characterised by an ethos of tolerance and nonviolence’. To
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capture the distinctly post-conflict, transformation-oriented goals of religious peacebuilding to which Little and Appleby refer, I have added two categories to the classification system, namely transitional justice (for precedent, see Bouta, KadayifciOrellana, and Abu-Nimer, 2005) and relief and development. With regard to the latter category, several international FBOs have in recent years integrated a peacebuilding approach into their development activities, making this an important field of study (Gerstbauer, 2010). Although I mention several well-known South African cases in the examples below, I only comment on them in depth in the country-specific review of religious peacebuilding in South Africa (Chapter 3). 1) Conciliation and mediation One of the central arguments contained in conflict transformation theory is that peace and justice are realised through action at several levels of society. The first of these is mediation at the state-level of a conflict, primarily between country leaders; the second involves mediation, often unofficial, between leaders and influential nongovernmental actors; the third occurs among communities affected by conflict, with an emphasis on community-driven and community-oriented dialogue and development processes (Paffenholz, 2003; Dijk, 2009). The first two elements of transformation are relevant to conciliation and mediation religious peacebuilding activities. These activities involve negotiation between adversaries in what is commonly referred to as track two diplomacy. This usually takes the form of mediation sessions between representatives from a religious organisation and select protagonists of a conflict, usually political or military officials (Smock and Serwer, 2012). Prominent examples of formal religious conciliation and mediation efforts over the past 50 years include: Quaker conciliation initiatives to reduce suspicion between protagonists in the 1967-70 Nigerian civil war (Sampson, 1994); in 1988, John Paul Lederach led negotiations to end the conflict in Nicaragua (Nichols, 1994); and between 1990 and 1992, the Catholic lay community of Sant’Egidio worked with the Mozambican archbishop to help broker a ceasefire between the Frelimo government and the Renamo rebels, first building trust relationships based on their relief work and then coordinating peace talks (Haynes, 2009).
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In instances in which public mediation efforts are undesirable to one or more groups, peacebuilders can employ other informal methods to stimulate communication between the parties (Smock and Serwer, 2012). The Northern Ireland example is particularly illustrative in this regard, as church leaders played an important role in ending the internecine conflict by encouraging ‘backchannel political communication’ (Brewer, Higgins, and Teeney, 2011: passim) between leaders of the Protestant and Catholic communities. These meetings represented some of the first steps in transforming the conflict, eventually leading to the 1998 Good Friday Agreement. 2) Advocacy and empowerment Religiously inspired advocacy primarily involves faith-based actors agitating for peace and the re-enfranchisement of those worst affected by the injustices of conflict. As Bouta, Kadayifci-Orellana, and Abu-Nimer (2005: 7) note, advocacy focuses on ‘restructuring relationships, and transforming unjust social structures. It aims at strengthening the representativeness and in particular the inclusiveness of governance’. By decreasing the power differentials in interpersonal and institutional relationships, this type of religious peacebuilding links to the transformation agenda of building positive peace, including ‘the egalitarian distribution of power and resources’ (Galtung, 1969: 183). Steele’s (2008: 28) discussion of the church’s role in the South African antiApartheid movement provides a window into examples of advocacy: the movement included ‘internal’ advocates, including Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who supported the international community’s imposition of economic sanctions; meanwhile, ‘external’ advocates, such as the World Council of Churches and Pope John Paul II, publicly denounced the regime. The Buddhist primate Samdech Preah Maha Ghosanada provides another example of religious advocacy in the work he carried out in his native Cambodia. In 1993, he initiated a month-long march of hundreds of Buddhist monks in support of the upcoming elections, just as Khmer Rouge issued threats to disrupt the voting (Appleby, 2000). Additionally, the Catholic Church’s contribution to advocacy peacebuilding has been wide-reaching in recent times. Besides its championing of social justice, the Catholic Church’s understanding of peace emphasises that human rights are the foundation of human dignity (Steele, 2008). Catholic peace work over the past half30
century strongly bears out this vision (Smock, 2001) and is reflected in the way the Church has advocated political and judicial reform in post-conflict countries such as Brazil, Chile, and South Korea (Appleby, 2000). It was also deeply involved in opposing repressive communist rule and is quoted for the role it played in providing social and spiritual support to the Polish anti-communist movement (Appleby, 2000; Herbert, 2003; Philpott, 2004). Also during the 1980s, the Catholic Church in the Philippines actively opposed the Marcos dictatorship and led demonstrations calling on the regime to recognise Filipinos’ election of Corazon Aquino to the presidency (Youngblood, 1987; Steele, 2008). 3) Observation and witness Religious observers can act as monitors of conflicts and are involved in reporting either the possibility or occurrence of violence and political abuses. They often ensure they are present at important events prone to political volatility, such as elections and protests in opposition to repressive rule (Steele, 2008). In any of these situations, their physical presence can work passively to deter aggression between groups. In other cases, religious observers have reacted to the possibility of violence and formed human shields to protect people in danger (Bouta, Kadayifci-Orellana, and Abu-Nimer, 2005). Witness for Peace, an ecumenical religious organisation, and Christian Peacemaker Teams sponsored by the Mennonite Church are examples of external groups that have monitored political conflicts and human rights abuses and promoted peace in countries in the Middle East and Central America (Steele, 2008). On the other hand, the case study of the Zimbabwean independence struggle provides an example of an internally based organisation working to publicise the conflict abroad and lobby the international diplomatic corps to initiate negotiations between the relevant parties (Kraybill, 1994). In this case, the Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace in Zimbabwe coordinated with the London-based Catholic Institute for International Relations to encourage the process. Based on its mandate to investigate and publicise human rights infringements, the Commission continued its work in the post-independence period, notably publishing a critical report on the politically motivated human rights abuses perpetrated by the Zimbabwean military between 1980 and 1988 (Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace in Zimbabwe, 1997). The Commission for Justice and Peace in Zimbabwe illustrates how local support for a just post-conflict society 31
can help establish the ‘long-term infrastructure for peace’ (Paffenholz, 2009: 5). Observation and witness activities conducted by grassroots actors can help ensure the longevity of peace in ways that a single international intervention cannot. 4) Education and formation In her overview of the peacebuilding field, Paffenholz (2009: 5) comments that conflict transformation’s emphasis on ‘community-based bottom-up peacebuilding’ distinguishes it from other approaches. Alongside its focus on state-level and mid-level peace initiatives, the transformation school of thought proposes that local communities’ everyday experiences, as well as their norms and values, can be mobilised to address interpersonal and social structural barriers to peace. With regard to religious peacebuilding initiatives, education and formation activities are well suited to respond to the diverse causes and effects of conflict. Educators try to foster mutual understanding of a conflict and attempt to demystify ‘the other’, as well as prepare for peace by transferring conflict resolution skills to groups involved in conflict situations (Steele, 2008). This is often done at a neighbourhood or community level, as in Northern Ireland, where church leaders encouraged contact and relationship building between Protestants and Catholics through ‘integrated education, integrated holiday schemes, home-building schemes … [and] neighbourhood initiatives, such as issuebased mobilisation on drugs, crime, and women’s issues’ (Brewer, Higgins, and Teeney, 2011: 39). Another example of an education and formation initiative in Northern Ireland was the establishment in 1965 of the ecumenical Corrymeela Community. In the years before and after the Good Friday Agreement, Corrymeela held events to educate members of both communities on the details of the sectarian conflict and develop peacebuilding initiatives based on shared Christian values (Steele, 2008). The well-studied ecumenical examples from Northern Ireland are accompanied in the global context by interfaith projects. The latter have been particularly prevalent in the United States – Smock and Huda (2009: 4) note that ‘interfaith dialogue initiatives are probably more numerous in the United States than in any other part of the world’ – but have also been instituted in various other zones of religious conflict (on Bosnia and Herzegovina, see Peuraca, 2003; on Israel, see Abu-Nimer, 2004; on Nigeria, see Smock, 2006). The purpose of interfaith initiatives is similar to 32
ecumenical activities. For example, Ashafa and Wuye (2006) remark in the Nigerian context that interfaith dialogue participants (Christian and Muslim) are encouraged to try to form relationships and recognise doctrinal similarities, mirroring Northern Ireland’s ecumenical goals of ‘breaking down barriers, stereotypes, and developing contact in a religious context’ (Brewer, Higgins, and Teeney, 2011: 39). 5) Transitional justice In the aftermath of conflict, international and domestic actors have typically sought to instate democratic political order and establish a robust legal system. Human rights practitioners have generally considered indicting perpetrators of mass atrocities as part of this process, although this conventional idea of transitional justice has in recent years been expanded to include truth commissions, reparations, and official apologies (Laplante, 2008). From the perspective of religion in transitional justice, Brewer, Mitchell, and Leavey (2013: 190) refer to the ‘intrusion of religion into transitional justice studies’. It is a phrase that captures well the unease religion inspires in some human rights advocates (for example, see Brudholm and Cushman, 2009), but also the undeniable influence religious notions of restoration, reconciliation, and forgiveness have had on the expansion of transitional justice activities. With respect to types of transitional justice, religious actors have been noticeably involved in truth commissions. As a means of uncovering historical human rights abuses, truth commissions have established domains in which victims have been able to narrate their experiences (Minow, 1998) and have provided platforms for symbolic reparations and apologies by perpetrators (Philpott, 2007). Chapman and van der Merwe (2008: 4, emphasis added) comment that ‘as a symbol of their expanded mandates [as restorative processes], truth commissions are now commonly referred to as truth and reconciliation commissions’. Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s role as Chair of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission is perhaps the most-cited example of religion’s impact on truth commissions. In other global examples, the Guatemalan Catholic Church instituted the Project for Recovering Historical Memory (REMHI), which documented human rights abuses committed during the long-running civil war; and in Chile, Catholic leaders investigated human rights abuses committed during dictatorial rule (Appleby, 2000). Finally, a local Catholic church in the town of Bojayá, Colombia has helped victims deal with their emotions in the aftermath of a 33
massacre and encouraged social justice and peace by constructing grassroots narratives of the past (Rios Oyola, 2015). Scholars have sometimes criticised transitional justice as being overly legalistic (McEvoy, 2007) and top-down in its approach (Rubli, 2012). However, where grassroots organisations or mid-level actors, including well-known religious leaders, use the restorative principles of transitional justice to address local needs, their work exhibits a transformational character (Lambourne, 2009). Writing from within the transitional justice field, Lambourne (2009: 28) argues that ‘long-term … processes embedded in society’, such as the local Colombian church’s activities, can lead to sustainable peacebuilding and culturally appropriate pursuits of justice. At this point, there is a final peacebuilding category that deserves discussion, namely relief and development work carried out by faith-based groups combating poverty and underdevelopment entrenched during the lifetime of a conflict. Considering that Steele (2008) mentions social and economic justice among several types of justice that influence religious peacebuilding practices, it is surprising that he does not include relief and development as a peacebuilding strategy. Certainly, the religious notions of comprehensive peace (presented by Philpott) and justpeace (introduced by Lederach) explicitly include social and economic wellbeing as a facet of just and peaceful relationships. It also links to some of the aims of conflict transformation, viz., restoring justice, fairness, and equality. On the back of this reasoning, I include relief and development as a sixth and final category of religious peacebuilding. 6) Relief and development Religious relief organisations, which include global organisations such as World Vision and Catholic Relief Services as well as myriad local or regional groups, play an essential role in alleviating the hardships associated with economic, material, and physical deprivation, especially where these spring from conflict (Nicholas, 2014). They can engage with the political situations that affect the worst off in society (Clarke, 2006) and have the potential ‘to empower the poor’ (Clarke, 2007: 84) by satisfying their material needs for human development. With specific reference to conflict and post-conflict societies, Galtung (1969: 183) contends that positive peace is ‘intimately connected’ with research into post-conflict development; he views 34
development as a path to structural change in society and therefore part of the conflict transformation process. The study of religion and development is a growing discipline in its own right, as evidenced by the numerous pieces of work that have appeared in the past 15 years (for a selection of prominent publications, see ter Haar and Ellis, 2006; Clarke and Jennings, 2008; Deneulin and Rakodi, 2011; Clarke, 2013; Tomalin, 2014). Rakodi (2012: 621) notes that ‘research on the relationships between religion and development has blossomed in the last decade or so, after years of relative neglect’. It is a statement that reflects the progress made in the field of religious peacebuilding, as policy makers have realised the continued relevance and positive potential of religion, benefitting scholars and practitioners in both disciplines (Clarke, 2007; Nicholas, 2014). Although there has not traditionally been a strong link in the literature between religious peacebuilding theory and faith-based development theory, Nicholas (2014) provides a compelling conceptual basis for considering faith-based development in conflict-affected areas as a form of peacebuilding. She draws on religious peacebuilding work by Appleby (2000), Gopin (2000), and Smock (2004), as well as the FBO development theory of Ferris (2005) and Deneulin and Rakodi (2011) to propose a ‘framework for faith engagement’ (Nicholas, 2014: passim) in post-conflict societies. The framework presents an assessment model that gives FBOs an indication of the type of development interventions that would best harness local religious capacities as they try to bring about transformation in society that encourages lasting peace. Fundamental to Nicholas’s multi-modal peace and development framework is the understanding, voiced by scholars such as Bompani and Frahm-Arp (2010) and Deneulin and Rakodi (2011), that a singular approach to development as progress towards modernity or a measure of per capita GDP has never been sufficient for lasting change. Just as the conflict transformation school of thought has encouraged a holistic approach to peacebuilding, including locally based development as a means to restructure society to promote peace, so Nicholas presents faith-based development as incorporating several possibilities. With regard to the peacebuilding role of faith-based development organisations, Nicholas (2014: 251) distinguishes between FBOs that specifically ‘seek to increase peace and tolerance’ and others that try primarily to enhance human rights, democracy, or social justice and communal solidarity. Nicholas (2014) asserts that while each should pursue socioeconomic development, they should 35
approach this using an appropriate lens. In the case of peacebuilding, this lens would lead organisations to include the activities I have outlined above as complementary to and dependent upon their socioeconomic ones. Highlighting the link between peacebuilding activities and the religious relief and development sector, Gerstbauer (2010: passim) notes the relatively recent ‘mandate changes’ adopted by three of the most prominent international organisations. Within the past decade, World Vision, CRS, and the Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) have all explicitly embraced peacebuilding mandates. CRS, a nongovernmental organisation (NGO) aligned with the Catholic Church, implemented a strategic plan in the late 1990s whereby it adopted a ‘justice lens’ (incorporating human rights) that would be used to guide the organisation’s relief programmes. Similarly, the MCC, described by Vinjamuri and Boesenecker (2008: 169) as a ‘capacity-building organisation’ that focuses on community-level activities and ‘empowerment of local actors’, had by the 1950s already added ‘relief and service’ to the transformational peacebuilding aims of the Mennonite tradition. The long-term development work of these three transnationals, designed with the goals of increasing contact and discussion between groups, has had success in at once building infrastructure and strengthening community relations in conflict areas across Africa, Central America, and Asia (Gerstbauer, 2010; Welty, 2014). In another example, the Dutch Interchurch Organisation for Development Co-operation (ICCO) and its Protestant counterpart Kerk in Actie have since 2004 applied a conflict transformation approach to their cooperative development work with local organisations in countries including Afghanistan, Kenya, Sudan, and Uganda (Dijk, 2009). Descriptive accounts of different categories of peacebuilding, such as I have provided here, are able to review the state of the field – an ensemble of case studies sets the scene for an overview of religious peacebuilding. However, scholars looking to extend the conceptual reach of religious peacebuilding studies contend that the descriptive approach alone does not adequately represent the contingent relationships religious actors have with other members of civil society and the state (Brewer, Higgins, and Teeney, 2010, 2011; Hertog, 2010; Omer, 2012). Neither does it explain why religious peacebuilders are more successful in some contexts than in others. In this vein of critique, Brewer, Higgins, and Teeney (2010: 1021) write, ‘One of the consequences of the case study approach is to simultaneously isolate and localise the 36
effects of religion on peacemaking. Religion is separated from other factors and becomes the independent variable’. Hertog (2010: 39) similarly mentions the dominance of case studies in religious peacebuilding literature, arguing that ‘the conceptualisations and theories put forward are based on practice rather than on grounded theories based on systematic research’. Though my main aim in this section was precisely to give an overview of religious peacebuilding activities, the next section discusses frameworks of analysis as a complementary and underdeveloped part of the literature. Strategic Social Spaces of Religious Peacebuilding: Towards Theoretical and Conceptual Improvement in the Field One of the ways scholars inadvertently isolate the work of peacebuilders is by attributing religious actors’ success solely to their perceived neutrality and credibility as members of trustworthy, respected organisations. Smock (2006), Bercovitch and Kadayifci-Orellana (2009), and Al Qurtuby (2013) all present examples of this, though they are by no means exceptional cases. In Little’s (2007) study of influential religious actors, he argues for the need to understand the religiously inspired peacebuilding work undertaken by individuals. Through exploring 16 case studies, Little concludes that while the Peacemakers in his study operate within extremely different circumstances, the common denominator of their success is their strong religiosity. He states that their perceived religious ties give them ‘stature in the community and credibility to lead’ (Little, 2007: 5) and adds: ‘As religious leaders living in the community, the Peacemakers are trusted to have the long-term interests of the people at heart’. Little’s case studies show that religious peacebuilders might often be in a better position than secular ones to access the heart of a conflict, but he nevertheless situates religion as the independent variable or a resource to be mobilised. Even Omer (2012: 18), who otherwise holds Little in high regard for his extensive work on the subject of religion and human rights, categorises the publication as part of an uncritical ‘reportage mode’ in the field. Brewer, Higgins, and Teeney (2010) contend that it is difficult to conduct comparative analyses of the wider processes at work when religion is thus posed as an independent variable in peacebuilding studies. They state that ‘one way to conceptualise the role religion plays in peace processes ... is to distinguish the social
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spaces it occupies in civil society as special locations for religious peacemaking, which takes us well beyond enumerating lists of local civil society contributions’ (Brewer, Higgins, and Teeney, 2010: 1024). The spaces they conceive of are: •
Intellectual spaces: New ideas discussed; conflict re-envisaged in peaceful terms.
•
Institutional spaces: Alternative ideas implemented as novel practices.
•
Market spaces: Local and transnational networks tapped for resources to publicise and implement conflict transformation imperatives.
•
Political spaces: Civil society engagement with political peace processes; facilitation of negotiations between political actors.
Since the four social spaces interact with one another as well as with spaces of state governance, it is possible to discern the ways in which various religious peacebuilding efforts are mediated by the political environment (Brewer, Higgins, and Teeney, 2011). A brief example of what Brewer, Higgins, and Teeney (2010: passim) refer to as the dynamics of the ‘religion/civil-society/state nexus’ is the example of the Catholic Church’s opposition to the state in Poland. Catholicism was the national religion and as such had ties to the state. However, by standing in solidarity with the anti-communist opposition movement it developed a sufficiently independent political identity to occupy intellectual, institutional, and market spaces, as well as political ones (Brewer, Higgins, and Teeney, 2010). In contrast, the South African DRC, whose theology helped justify apartheid, was constrained by its close ties to the nationalist government. It did not distance itself from the state, with the result that the burden lay with ‘a few courageous individuals’ (Brewer, Higgins, and Teeney, 2010: 1031) within the DRC to denounce the apartheid regime and join minority religious organisations in occupying strategic spaces in civil society. In presenting their analytical framework, Brewer, Higgins, and Teeney (2011) distinguish between the concepts of place and space. They assert that the former denotes a geographical location with physical qualities, whereas the latter, in sociological terms, refers to ‘environments where sets of ideas, values, beliefs, and social practices provide a framework for social and personal life’ (Brewer, Higgins, and Teeney, 2011: 127). In her 2016 publication Transforming Post-Catholic Ireland,
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Ganiel draws on the aforementioned framework to describe how certain religious groups exist and work within strategic social spaces, with the possibility that they may be able to contribute to the post-conflict transformation of Northern Ireland, especially in terms of reconciliation. In studying the changing religious landscape on the island of Ireland, Ganiel (2016) describes the growth of a religious market that contains various forms of Christianity, including the once-dominant Catholic Church, established Protestant denominations, as well as what she terms ‘extra-institutional religion’ (Ganiel, 2016: passim). Ganiel (2016: 5) proposes that as Catholicism continues to lose its dominance as a social, religious, and political institution in Ireland, people nevertheless maintain their Christian faith in various ways that are ‘outside or in addition to the institutional Catholic Church’. This is the extra-institutional form of religion to which Ganiel refers in her analysis. In terms of Brewer, Higgins, and Teeney’s (2011) religion/civil-society/state nexus, the significance of extrainstitutional religion is that it works in specific spaces of society as part of a process in which the Catholic Church’s influence over the state and society recedes. Ultimately, this allows alternative religious expressions to gain legitimacy in the public sphere and contribute their opinions to national issues under debate. Ganiel’s research is distinctive among religious peacebuilding studies because she draws on Brewer, Higgins, and Teeney’s framework to conduct her analysis, thereby conceptualising the role of religion in relation to civil society and the state in contemporary Ireland (rather than simply describing a case study). There is a second distinction to her work, however, which is that she advances the theoretical basis of the religious peacebuilding field by engaging with Ulrich Beck’s sociological individualisation thesis – specifically the individualisation of religion. As mentioned at the start of this chapter, Beck, like his contemporary theorists of modernity such as Habermas (2006) and Berger (2014), in recent years abandoned the certainty of the secularisation thesis and argued instead for the continued salience of religion in modern society. In his 2010 book A God of One’s Own, Beck asserts that religion can be a force for peace in society. Indeed, the subtitle to his book, Religion’s Capacity for Peace and Potential for Violence, resembles Appleby’s theory of the ambivalence of the sacred. However, whereas Appleby argues for the peaceable potential of religion on the micro-level of the hermeneutics of religious tradition, Beck focuses his attention on how macro-processes within modern society affect the way religion functions.
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Beck’s analysis of the potential for peace in religion incorporates three processes. These are globalisation, ‘cosmopolitisation’ (Beck, 2010: passim), and individualisation. Beck (2000, 2010) claims that the first of these, globalisation, is a process through which the movement of information, people, commerce, ecological risks, and power in the form of transnational agreements disrupts national boundaries and destabilises social, religious, and political traditions. He writes that ‘from now on nothing which happens on our planet is only a limited local event; all inventions, victories and catastrophes affect the whole world’ (Beck, 2000: 11). In this state of hyper interdependence, Beck (2010) suggests that cosmopolitisation is a process that occurs in response to globalisation. Whereas globalisation is characterised by transnational movement across boundaries, cosmopolitisation refers to ‘the erosion of clear boundaries separating the markets, states, civilizations, cultures and not least the lifeworlds of different peoples and religions’ (Beck, 2010: 68, emphasis in original). In Beck’s understanding, cosmopolitisation is the basis for peaceful religion, as religion loses its grounding in bounded and exclusive nations and territories. Without clear boundaries separating one religion from another, Beck posits that religious exclusivity – represented most strongly by the monotheistic traditions – becomes impossible to maintain. Finally, in tandem with globalisation and cosmopolitisation, Beck describes how the process of religious individualisation enables people to choose whether they will subscribe to a religion and what form that might take. Beck (for example, see 1992, 2009, 2010, 2013) argued strongly over several years that society has undergone a process of ‘individualisation’ in the current era of reflexive modernity. In his interpretation, social institutions including the family, class, gender, and religion have lost their organising significance in society. Without these institutions – enduring groupings of ideas, rules, and values that structure society by reproducing normative practices and social roles (Martin, 2004) – individuals must create a life of their own in a ‘do-it-yourself’ style (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 2002: 3). As one of the institutions Beck asserts has become fragmented through globalisation and cosmopolitisation, religion is now another point of biographical, rather than social, determination. Beck (2010) proposes that in a time of institutional deracination, religious individualisation holds the potential for peace in religion. Specifically, if any person were to adopt a cosmopolitan outlook in choosing a God of their own that was not tied to a religious tradition with deeply established dogma, then that would present 40
the possibility of ‘including religious others in one’s own religiosity’ (Beck, 2010: 91) so that similarities rather than differences come to define the character of one’s relationships, whether direct or imagined. In developing his theory of the individualisation of religion, Beck (2010: 90) pointedly notes that ‘a God of one’s own’ is not a post-modern concept but rather ‘the pinnacle in a long process embedded in the Christian tradition itself’. By this he refers to the Protestant development of a personal God – what he refers to as ‘individualization within religion’ (Beck, 2010: 81, emphasis in original) or ‘Individualization One’ (Beck, 2010: passim). Beck juxtaposes this type of individualisation with the subject of his book, namely the very modern process of the ‘individualization of religion’ (Beck, 2010: 81, emphasis in original) or ‘Individualization Two’ (Beck, 2010: passim). In making this conceptual link, Beck presents not only the compatibility of religion with individualisation, but claims the absolute inevitability of the process. He contends that religion is ‘the source of individualization’ (Beck, 2010: 79, emphasis in original) and deems, ultimately, that ‘theology digs its own grave’ (Beck, 2010: 81). One of the tenets of Beck’s (2010: 52) thesis of the cosmopolitisation and individualisation of religion is that religion holds within it an ‘ambivalence of tolerance and violence’. The wording and sentiment is remarkably similar to the religious peacebuilding scholar Scott Appleby’s (2000) influential theory of the ambivalence of the sacred, which was discussed at length earlier in this chapter. But whereas Appleby spends considerable time providing historical examples showing how religious leaders can harness the mutability of religious tradition to promote peaceful agendas, Beck does none of this. Indeed, this lack of empirical evidence for his theory, together with a highly pragmatic account of how it might unfold in reality, forms one of the main bases for scholars’ critiques of the thesis. Speck (2013: 168), for instance, notes that Beck’s argument is ‘devoid of communal, practical and affective dimensions’ and is ‘as disembodied as it is de-institutionalized’. Mythen (2013: 124), meanwhile, acknowledges the benefits of the cosmopolitan values laid out by Beck, but casts doubt over ‘the blind spots [that] are present regarding the obstacles to this progression’. Leahy (2013: 152) similarly critiques the path to religious
tolerance
of
alternative
truths,
commenting
that
‘[Beck’s]
cosmopolitanisation thesis fails to identify triggers for a paradigm conversion’. That is, rather than proposing a Khunian notion of a paradigm shift that occurs through 41
‘conversions over time’ (Leahy, 2013: 156), Beck supposes that cosmopolitisation, whereby boundaries that guard ideas, truths, and identities are dismantled to the benefit of tolerant interdependence, relies on theoretical ‘falsification’ of the status quo in society. As a result, Leahy queries how such a theory could lead to shifts in attitude amongst real-life people. Mythen and Leahy’s criticisms of Beck’s argument centre around the unlikelihood of a sudden cosmopolitan turn in religion, mostly pointing to pitfalls in Beck’s description of how this might occur. Other critiques of Beck’s theory of religion’s potential for peace focus on his emphasis on the individualisation of religion as a key part of the process. Indeed, debates on institutionalised individualisation are more wide-ranging than Beck’s treatment of religion alone, with arguments against his claim that class has lost its institutional significance dominating discussions. For example, Mythen (2005), Atkinson (2007), and Curran (2013) all argue that class has become more, not less, important as a sociological category in reflexive modernity. With respect to religion specifically, Speck (2013: 168) notes that empirical research in the sociology of religion reveals that ‘sensation, feeling, [and] emotion’ are all key characteristics of the most popular forms of religion today. In contrast, Beck underlines the importance of rational thought in his attempt to outline a shift towards liberally minded forms of religion. Exasperatingly in the case of arguments that rely on empirical research of people’s attitudes and actions (for example, see de Beer, 2007; Achterberg, 2013; Botterill, 2014; Bak and Larsen, 2015), Beck (2007: 681) has simply maintained that individualisation cannot be proved or repudiated by considering individuals’ preferences or decisions as ‘individualisation really is imposed on the individual by modern institutions’. Perhaps the best attitude to adopt in the face of such an assertion is the one Bak and Larsen (2015: 18) take when they state that they wish to examine ‘the explanatory power’ of several theories of poverty, Beck’s individualisation thesis among them. It is in this vein that Ganiel engages with Beck’s thesis of individualisation – that is, to try to explain a new type of religious practice she describes as extra-institutional. In examining the form and function of religion in Ireland today, Ganiel suggests that certain expressions of Christianity are best described as a subtle form of individualised religion, what she terms a ‘middle way between free-floating religious individuals, conservative or fundamentalist enclaves, and collectivistic religions’ (Ganiel, 2016: 240). Thus she states the following: ‘Extra-institutional religion is individualized in 42
that people are taking responsibility for their own faith, and it is de-institutionalized in that people are growing ever more wary of institutional religions – even if they maintain some sort of relationship with them’ (Ganiel, 2016: 231). Ganiel places considerable emphasis on the structural significance of extra-institutional religion in the way that its partially individualised character allows it to act on the edges of institutional spaces such as the Catholic Church to promote peace in Ireland. This, she asserts, should allow middle-way organisations a special ability to interact with religious and secular groups across boundaries that previously may have been too rigid to traverse, with the ultimate goal of encouraging conversation and eventually reconciliation between them. Despite her enthusiasm for the transformational potential of extra-institutional religion, Ganiel (2016) is aware that more established institutions of the state and other religious groups will need to learn to interact with extra-institutional institutions over time, mainly through intentional educational processes surrounding the varieties of religion that exist on the island of Ireland. As a newly proffered conceptualisation of the peacebuilding potential in partially individualised institutions, there is every possibility that studies conducted in different settings could test its applicability outside of Ireland, offer responses to the challenges she identifies, and advance the conceptual foundation of the religious peacebuilding field at large. Conclusion: An Old New Concept Current interest in religious peacebuilding has accompanied the growing recognition in the social sciences of religion’s continued influence in politics and society. While this enthusiasm is timely, this chapter has demonstrated that whereas the drive to formalise religious peacebuilding in theory and practice is a relatively new phenomenon, religion has long had ties to peace and justice, just as it has had ties to conflict. Appleby’s theory of the ambivalence within religious traditions has been particularly influential in emphasising how religiously motivated groups and individuals have drawn on ancient ideas of justice, peace, reconciliation, and forgiveness to pursue peace and respond to conflict with non-violent methods. In light of Appleby’s contention that religion has always contained within it the potential for both violence and peace, it is apt to borrow a phrase from Jeffrey Alexander (2006: 9) and describe the contemporary focus on peace and justice in
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religion as an ‘old new concept’. Within this mix of the old and new in the field of religious peacebuilding, one of the main achievements has been the systematising of peace-oriented values held within religious traditions and the subsequent proliferation of religious peacebuilding initiatives. Drawing on the religious peacebuilding literature, this chapter has identified six categories of peacebuilding. These are as follows: 1) Conciliation and mediation; 2) Advocacy and empowerment; 3) Observation and witness; 4) Education and formation; 5) Transitional justice; and 6) Relief and development. In describing case studies within each of the categories, I have presented an overview of the range of religious peacebuilding initiatives. In taking this descriptive approach, I was nonetheless aware of the pitfalls of an overly inward-looking view of religion as a source of peace and justice. By discussing the importance of conceptual frameworks and the need for theoretical improvement in the discipline, using the example of Brewer, Higgins, and Teeney’s (2010) four strategic social spaces, I foregrounded how an outward-looking perspective has the potential to move beyond individual case studies and toward more generalisable conclusions. Furthermore, this chapter has introduced the theories of religious individualisation associated with Beck (2010) and extra-institutional religion associated with Ganiel (2016), emphasising how the authors propose that individualisation holds within it the potential that religion can act as a force for peace. This section of the thesis also established the connection between religious peacebuilding theory and the idea of transformation in post-conflict societies. Lederach’s justpeace and Philpott’s political reconciliation feature prominently as conceptual bridges between the two disciplines. The next chapter (Chapter 2) concentrates on the specificities of transformation in South Africa and outlines how the process has encompassed measures taken to rectify the effects of colonial and apartheid-era racism directed towards the country’s black African, Coloured and Indian populations (Seekings, 2008). These include attempts to restructure politics, business, the economy, health services, and the education system (Marais, 2011). Chapter 2 argues that although transformation in South Africa is unique in its context, the religious peacebuilding processes associated with holistic transformation in other post-conflict societies remain relevant for analysing the post-apartheid situation.
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Chapter 2 The Meaning of Transformation in Post-Apartheid South Africa
In the previous chapter, I gave an overview of the field of religious peacebuilding, including theory and practice. This included a review of the meaning of conflict transformation and religious peacebuilding’s conceptual relationship to this. I especially foregrounded how religious ideas of justpeace and political reconciliation relate to conflict transformation theory. I also noted that conflict transformation strategies are particular to each society, and that theorists and practitioners emphasise the need to consult communities on their needs and involve them in programmes for change. In setting the basis for this study’s analysis of Christian contributions to postapartheid transformation using the lens of religious peacebuilding, this chapter examines the meaning of transformation in South Africa and the degree to which it has succeeded as a national project to date. It argues that political transformation is the only aspect of the transformation project to have been fully realised, while incomplete economic, social and cultural transformation, as well as corruption and lack of political will, means many South Africans remain poor and unequal life prospects perpetuate antagonism based on race and class. This chapter observes that although the national transformation project has been impeded, it is still necessary and possible to pursue. The first part of this chapter describes the post-conflict political transformation needs that resulted from colonial and apartheid rule and explains how these have been met. The second part examines the continued need for economic transformation. It reviews some of the detrimental effects of the ANC-led government’s macroeconomic policies following the negotiated transition, as well as its policies to increase access to the labour market and balance patterns of ownership in business. Thirdly, this chapter describes the need to transform the provision of social services such as healthcare, housing, and education, and describes the incomplete process of transformation in these sectors. Fourthly, the chapter discusses how cultural transformation has succeeded in part but continues to present obstacles to conflict transformation goals. The chapter concludes by introducing the recent involvement of religious leaders and organisations in promoting transformation through advocacy and 45
development initiatives. This sets the scene for Chapter 3, which outlines Christian religious peacebuilding work in South Africa during and after apartheid. The Negotiated Settlement and Political Transformation in South Africa Achille Mbembe (2008: 7) provides a concise but comprehensive description of the transformation project in post-apartheid South Africa in the following words: ‘Transformation is the set of policies designed by the government and the private sector to redress past racial discriminations and to redistribute wealth and income to previously disadvantaged groups’. It is, as Mbembe (2008: 7) concludes, ‘social engineering’ on a grand scale. In the face of the all-encompassing system of apartheid, the ‘social engineering’ to which Mbembe refers included (and continues to include) every aspect of society. In a discussion document published two years after the first democratic elections, the ruling ANC highlighted the centrality of the state to the national transformation project. The document comments, ‘The struggle for the social and economic transformation of the South African society is essentially the task of replacing the Apartheid state with a democratic one’ (ANC, 1996). The latter part of the ANC’s assertion regarding state change can be defined as political transformation. In her study of transformation in post-communist societies, Birch (2003: 4) describes democratic political transformation in the following terms: ‘Democratization includes (but is not restricted to) two key changes in the way political power is structured in society: the inclusion of the citizenry in the selection of leaders, and the establishment of accountability among the leadership chosen through democratic mechanisms’. In South Africa, political transformation after 1990 centrally entailed overturning apartheid policies that excluded the non-white population from the political life of the country. Although colonial rule had generally barred black, coloured, and Indian South Africans from taking part in elections, political repression went into overdrive under the NP (Guelke, 2005). The Population Registration Act of 1950, which classified South Africans using minutely-defined racial categories, allowed the NP to instate ‘petty apartheid’ (Guelke, 2005: 27) in the form of segregated public spaces. Nine years later, the minority-ruled legislature passed the 1959 Promotion of Bantu Self-Government Act, which enacted ‘grand apartheid’ (Guelke, 2005: 27) in the form of the homeland system. 46
According to the NP’s intentions, the homeland governance system, which circumscribed black South Africans’ political rights to ethnically defined reserves, would ensure that ‘South Africa would be left with no African citizens’ (Guelke, 2005: 28) – devolved homeland governments were eventually to become ethnically homogeneous independent states. The project succeeded to the point that four homelands were granted independence under NP rule, stripping black South Africans of any political entitlement outside of their designated reserve. It was only when parliament passed the Restoration of South African Citizenship Act in 1986 that the black population officially regained nominal political status within the country. This brief overview of the most influential legislation affecting the political rights of black, coloured, and Indian South Africans illustrates why political transformation was imperative in early post-apartheid South Africa. Beginning with the unbanning of the ANC and Nelson Mandela’s release in 1990, South Africa’s political transition to majority-rule democratic government began in earnest. This involved a series of negotiations between the ANC and the NP leadership; the first Convention for a Democratic South Africa (CODESA) in 1991 involving a wide variety of political organisations; and CODESA 2 in 1992. The negotiated transition eventually established the Government of National Unity (GNU), which made provision for a power-sharing agreement between the ANC, the NP, and the Zulu nationalist Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) between 1994 and 1999. South Africa’s negotiated settlement, which avoided civil war in the country, was lauded by the international community. As Adam and Moodley (2013: 82) note, ‘Nowhere else in the world had a dominant ruling minority negotiated itself out of power; nowhere else had a long-oppressed majority eschewed revenge and the temptation to turn the tables’. The political settlement conferred full voting rights on every South African and the political system itself changed, too: a list-based system of proportional representation (PR) with ‘the nation forming a single electoral district for the National Assembly’ (Pottie and Hassim, 2003: 75) ensured that the first multi-party and multi-racial elections would return members of parliament who would represent the population as a whole, rather than geographically based constituencies that would inevitably be distinguished by race (Pottie and Hassim, 2003). With Nelson Mandela as its president, the ANC won 62 per cent of the vote in the historic multi-party 1994 elections. A complete majority-rule system would only become a reality following the 1999 elections (when the GNU dissolved), but it marked another step in the country’s 47
political transformation when it did eventually arrive. South Africa had, in a relatively short space of time, moved significantly towards realising the ANC’s (1996) goal of ‘replacing the Apartheid state with a democratic one’. Partial Economic Transformation and the Stalled Path to a Prosperous Society Negotiations between the ANC, NP, and IFP at the level of the state, as well as consultations with influential mid-level political organisations, led to a political settlement that enabled South Africa to move from a repressive police state to a liberal democratic one. Despite this early success, South Africa’s promised transition to a country characterised by greater prosperity and economic equality has yet to occur – South Africa’s economic transition has stalled. On coming to power, the ruling ANC revived a moribund economy and has since created a social welfare system that in 2013 supported more than 16 million people (Abedian, 2013). Admirable as these accomplishments are, detractors have nonetheless criticised the ANC’s economic policies as neoliberal, complicit with the interests of big business, and unsuited to improving the living conditions and employment opportunities for the poorest South Africans (Marais, 1998, 2011; Thompson, 2001; Bond, 2014). Economists note that although there are clear benefits to investing in a socioeconomic safety net, high and increasing welfare spending is neither sustainable nor is it sufficient to lift people out of poverty and propel them into the labour force (Abedian, 2013; Herbst and Mills, 2015). This lack of sustainability has been underscored in recent years by a poorly performing economy. Since the global crash of 2008, South Africa’s economic growth has been slow even by global standards of emerging economies (Hofmeyr, 2012). Compounding the view of a struggling economy, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) cut its 2016 growth forecast for South Africa to 0.6 per cent, while forecasting a 3 per cent growth rate in sub-Saharan Africa as a whole (Vollgraaff, 2016). This downturn in the economy is especially unsettling at a time when 15-29-year-olds constitute more than a quarter of South Africa’s population; 36.9 per cent of youth (in South Africa, this is defined as people aged 15-34) were unemployed as of mid-2015 (Statistics South Africa, 2015). With an overall unemployment rate of 26.6 per cent in mid-2016 (Statistics South Africa, 2016), poverty continues to be widespread. Furthermore, according to the IMF’s most recent calculation of South Africa’s Gini Coefficient, 48
which measures income inequality, South Africa is a more unequal society than Brazil, Russia, China, and a host of other emerging economies (Abedian, 2013). The effects of global trends on South Africa’s economic performance are undeniable. For example, commodity prices, which rose during the 2000s, dropped considerably between 2011 and 2016, with negative consequences for South Africa’s mining industry (IMF, 2015). Critics argue, though, that a jobless economy, in which sectors such as the financial industry have grown vastly without alleviating the country’s high unemployment rate (Makgetla, 2011; Bhorat, Hirsch, Kanbur, and Ncube, 2015), point to an imperfect negotiated settlement (Marais, 1998). They argue the settlement drastically reduced the possibility of achieving economic transformation in the way the ANC and its anti-apartheid allies had initially intended. I discuss these critical assertions in the following section. The political economy of the negotiated settlement The ANC won decisively in the 1994 elections, but on coming to power it made several concessions to big business and the mining industry (Adam and Moodley, 1997; Marais, 1998; Terreblanche, 2002). The ANC’s sporadic reworking of its economic policy – in the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) in 1994; the 1997 Growth, Employment and Redistribution (GEAR) strategy; the 2005 Accelerated and Shared Growth Initiative for South Africa (ASGISA); and the 2011 New Growth Path (NGP) – consistently emphasised a market-oriented approach that favours redistribution after growth. The model, popular with domestic businesses and international financial institutions such as the IMF and the World Bank, included standard neoliberal policies of deregulating the market through lowering barriers to trade and capital flow, and downsizing the public sector through privatisation of state assets (Adam, 1999; Hart, 2002). In one of the gentler assessments of the ANC’s early economic policies, Thompson (2001) describes a ‘catch-22’ situation whereby the government could not invest in poverty alleviation measures before it was able to grow the economy. ‘For this purpose’, he writes, ‘since there seemed to be no rational alternative in the globalising post-Cold War world, the ANC pursued capitalist policies’ (Thompson, 2001: 279). Thompson’s assertion of the inevitability of the capitalist pact with industry is supported by claims that ANC policy was overcome by the external power of a global 49
neoliberal movement (Peet, 2002). In contrast to these sympathetic analyses, Adam (1999: 241) concluded at the time that the government’s economic model ‘amounts to transformation indeed, but it means free-market transformation rather than the redistributive transformation popularized during the anti-apartheid struggle’. This pointed remark is emblematic of the more critical assessments of the ANC’s economic approach. For example, Hein Marais (1998: 96) stated that ‘the ANC has been assimilated into a web of institutional relations, systems and practices tailored to service the interests of (in the first instance) white privilege and (in the final instance) the capitalist class’. Patrick Bond (quoted in Guelke, 2005: 176), meanwhile, claimed that the ANC ‘made a political retreat, paved with consensus formation in cosy seminars sponsored by business-oriented think tanks’. Bond’s claim that the ANC had formed a close relationship with the business sector is supported by other scholars, including McKinley (1997) and Terreblanche (2002). One of the most unforgiving criticisms of the ANC’s alleged appeasement of business in the guise of necessary compromise is presented by Ingie Hovland. Hovland (2003) centres her argument on how apartheid-era economic principles both supported and relied upon the state-led subjugation of black South Africans. To wit, the economically important mining and agricultural sectors drew on cheap, black migrant labour from far-flung, poor homelands to drive profits for a small white business elite (Crankshaw, 1997). Bhorat, Hirsch, Kanbur, and Ncube (2015) note that the postapartheid South African government purposefully restructured the economy as part of its transformation efforts: mining revenue accounted for 5 per cent of GDP in 2012, as opposed to 11 per cent in 1994. Agriculture, similarly, has declined to less than 5 per cent as a share of GDP. Despite these changes, Hovland (2003) asserts that as a result of the ANC’s policies, big business has been given a new opportunity to thrive. Whereas corporations had begun to feel the negative effects of sanctions and international divestment policies during the final years of apartheid (Mangaliso and Mangaliso, 2013), Hovland (2003: 12) argues the ANC government gave their interests renewed legitimacy: South African capitalism may have renewed itself – and reproduced its characteristic insider/outsider division at the same time – through a new connection between neoliberal economic policies, an increasingly differentiated class structure amongst the African population, and the popular discourse of ‘reconciliation’ (rather than ‘redistribution’).
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In contrast to Peet’s argument that the external power of global economic discourses forced the ANC to change tack from a socialist to conservative economic ideology, Hovland argues that a discourse of reconciliation in post-apartheid South Africa privileged ideas of stability over change, leading to the perpetuation of the ‘old macro/micro dynamic in the new South Africa’ (Hovland, 2003: 12) and the continuation of structural violence at the macro-level of the economy. ‘Macro-level violence,’ she asserts, ‘included – and still includes – economic policies that generate wealth for a minority while perpetuating the production of poverty for the majority’ (Hovland, 2003: 6). To the extent that the ANC government liberalised the South African economy along neoliberal lines, it instituted economic changes. But these macro-economic policies did not result in the sort of structural changes necessary that would allow South Africans to benefit equally from the peace settlement. The next section describes how micro-level policies designed to repeal the entrenched exclusion of non-white South Africans from the economy have resulted in increased inequality within the black population as well as within the country overall. The flawed mechanisms of economic transformation Alongside its macro-economic policies, the ANC-led government introduced policies, such as the 1998 Employment Equity Act and the 2003 Black Empowerment Act, to encourage the de-racialisation of business ownership and redress historical employment inequities by favouring the employment of people designated as coming from previously disadvantaged backgrounds (Seekings, 2008). These policies, which allow for ‘racial discrimination in favour of non-white, and especially African [black], people’ (Seekings, 2008: 5), are part of the wider programme of transformation in postapartheid society. Partly because of these policies, race and class are no longer as closely correlated as they were under apartheid (Seekings, 2008; Seekings and Nattrass, 2002; Crankshaw, 2012). But this transition in the constitution of the middle class has come at the expense of increased inequality within the black population: even in the early, transitional years of South Africa’s democracy, ‘the lion’s share of increased national income between 1991 and 1996 accrued to a small but rich minority of African people’ (Seekings and Nattrass, 2002: 12).
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It is a situation that was repeated over the following two decades. Karlem and Mbete (2012: 4-5), for example, state that ‘skewed patterns of ownership and economic participation that were forged during apartheid’ have ensured the continuation of unequal earnings and, therefore, inequality (Karlem and Mbete, 2012: 4-5). There is perhaps no more cutting assessment of the post-apartheid situation than that put forward by Mbembe (2014). It is worth quoting in full for the way he describes the elite middle class’s economic practices as a type of social transformation, but a violent transformation that cannot bring about peace and stability. Ominously, he contends that following the downfall of apartheid, South Africa has turned from a ‘society of control’ into ‘a society of consumption’: South Africa has ... entered a new period of its history, one in which processes of accumulation are happening, once again, through dispossession – except that this time round dispossession is conducted by an increasingly predatory black ruling class in alliance with private capital, in the name of custom and tradition. Meanwhile, South African capitalism still relies for its operations on racial subsidies in the form of low skills levels, inadequate nutrition, poor health, bad housing, social instability and an increasingly authoritarian ruling elite. The exploitation of cheap black labour is still a crude fact of daily life, especially on farms and mines, where migrant wage-seekers face quasi-permanent adverse economic contingencies as they try to leverage their way out of poverty and insecurity. Mbembe vividly describes a rapacious group of well-connected individuals who benefit through ‘a culture of cronyism, clientelism, and corruption’ (Mbembe, 2008: 6) to the social and economic detriment of the country’s large pool of unskilled labour. Commenting on these sorts of practices, Abedian (2013: 18) is clear in describing the effects of elite corruption on driving poverty: ‘While the economy and society at large suffer the consequences of widespread corruption, the poor bear the brunt of its impact. ... The rising disparity in income, the growing gaps between the rich and the poor over the past decade, is due, in part, to the growing spread of corruption across all sectors and spheres of the economy’. While corruption in government cannot be attributed entirely to employment equity and Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) policies, Abedian still insists that the institutionalisation of corruption is in part linked to the abuse of these corrective measures. The effects of systemic corruption, to which employment equity and BEE policies have contributed, are undoubtedly forms of structural violence committed against the poorest people living in South Africa. 52
Considered from the point of view of conflict transformation and its emphasis on building an equal, inclusive, and enabling society, the economic aspect of South Africa’s post-apartheid transformation goals is eminently incomplete. As the following section on the provision of public goods shows, the perpetuation of unequal access to the economy has been accompanied by unequal access to services such as health, housing, and education, despite gains made in transforming these sectors. Transformation of Social Services in South Africa Societies that experience conflict typically also reveal a deterioration of social services, including healthcare, housing, and education (Hoeffler and Reynal-Queral, 2003; Justino, 2009; Levy and Sidel, 2016). This degradation of public goods presented in very particular ways in the South African instance. Instead of a generalised hollowing out of public infrastructure as seen in other civil conflict situations (Hoeffler and Reynal-Queral, 2003), the policies of the colonial and apartheid regimes effectively created tiers of service that diverged considerably in their quality depending on which racial group they served (Ntshoe, 2002; Coovadia, Jewkes, Barron, Sanders, and McIntyre, 2009; Marais, 2011). This inequality in service provision amounted to the social exclusion of non-white South Africans and directly affected their ability to flourish. From the perspective of conflict transformation theory, the rebuilding of a peaceful South African society would have to entail the restructuring of social services to make them more equal and inclusive. The following sections detail how the post-apartheid ANC government’s social policies responded to the need for drastic change in three key sectors: 1) Healthcare, 2) Land and housing, and 3) Education. Transformation of the healthcare sector As a form of supremacist governance, the apartheid system was conspicuous for the way it regulated every aspect of society. Recognising this, Max Price (1986: 158) criticised the NP’s health policy, denouncing it as ‘an instrument of the state’s twin imperatives: reproducing the conditions of capitalist accumulation and maintaining White supremacy’. Writing several years before the end of apartheid, Price (1986) emphasised how healthcare for the country’s black population was deliberately 53
fragmented. He noted how it served the black workforce in South Africa’s major cities and extended into rural areas only to the point that health services would bolster the legitimacy of the Bantustan system. Marais (2011: 309) summarises the state of affairs at the point at which the ANC took power: Skewed to favour the white minority, the mix and distribution of healthcare activities (and financing) was utterly unsuited to the society. More than 80% of resources went to hospitals (most of them in cities and towns) and only 11% of spending was on primary or preventive healthcare. One third of the 419 public hospitals and 4000 clinics were in disrepair when the ANC-led government took office in 1994. Today, South Africa has an integrated national healthcare system that extends across rural and urban areas of the country, mainly due to the expansion of clinics (Marais, 2011; Rispel, 2016). Because the development of a primary health care system – predicated on the universal availability of essential services – benefits the poorest in society, Rispel (2016: 18) asserts that South Africa’s policy implementation has been ‘revolutionary’. She also notes, however, that the South African public health service continues to face several challenges. One of the major pitfalls within the health sector relates to the continuation of a two-tier system, although this is now characterised less by race than by class, as the wealthiest South Africans generally subscribe to private medical insurance schemes and access a private health system that is subsidised by the state (Marais, 2011; Rispel, 2016). In 2012 in South Africa, public health expenditure amounted to 48 per cent of total health funding, meaning that less than half the total healthcare expenditure was directed to the public system, although it services 84 per cent of the population (Rispel, 2016). From a transformation perspective, the statistics provided above indicate a continued state of inequality in the sector: the socioeconomic elite – more diversified than under apartheid but still disproportionately constituted by white South Africans – is more easily able to access professional treatment and care than poorer segments of society. The latter group must contend with an over-burdened system in which there are just 0.7 doctors and 1.1 nurses per 1000 people (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development [OECD], 2014). This is a situation that reduces the quality of care and increases the possibility that this population group will face higher mortality and morbidity levels than South Africans who access private care (von Holdt 54
and Murphy, 2007; Rispel, 2016). The proposed National Health Insurance (NHI) scheme, which has been under official consultation since 2009, would primarily help ‘to redress … the current fragmentation between the public and private sectors’ (Gray and Vawda, 2016: 4) by pooling funds and integrating the two-tier system. However, as of 2016 the NHI was still being debated in parliament and the White Paper, which sets out a framework for legislation, is vague (Gray and Vawda, 2016). In short, the inequities of the current system are set to continue for the foreseeable future. A great number of critics of the South African health care system have identified a second issue affecting the delivery of care, namely the mismanagement of public health institutions (von Holdt and Murphy, 2007; von Holdt, 2010; Rispel, 2016). Von Holdt (2010) analyses the underperformance of the post-apartheid health care system as a case study of how the post-apartheid bureaucracy has acted as a mechanism for ‘black class formation as a form of redress of past exclusion and oppression’ (von Holdt, 2010: 247). Von Holdt does not suggest that redress or restitution for the wrongs of apartheid are incompatible with building an equitable society. However, he does assert that government commitments to employment equity and affirmative action have inadvertently encouraged a ‘culture of moving onwards and upwards within the bureaucracy’ (von Holdt, 2010: 247). The most glaring dysfunctionality of this culture is illustrated when management posts are left vacant, rather than hiring a white South African, because a suitable black candidate cannot be found (Chipkin, 2008; Mbembe, 2008; von Holdt, 2010). Analysing the various successes and failures of the modern South African health system from a conflict transformation perspective, there is evidence that changes within the sector have benefited the poorest and most vulnerable in society. Yet it is also clear that despite the expansion of primary health care facilities and the large antiretroviral programme it delivers, a two-tier health system still exists, divided between the public and private sectors. As with changes associated with the economy and business ownership, the healthcare system unfairly serves the interests of the socioeconomic elite in society. Furthermore, the faltering management structures of the health system seem to reflect the larger bureaucratic processes at play whereby the civil service functions to promote a black middle class rather than manage public affairs. It is in this sense that the changes within the healthcare system reveal the limits of transformation mechanisms that originally encouraged a more equitable society but have since helped to produce unequal and inefficient systems. 55
Land restitution and affordable housing provision Land restitution Under colonial rule and, later, during the course of apartheid, black South Africans suffered dispossession of land and property on grand scales. Two of the most consequential laws that stripped non-whites of their property were the 1913 Natives Land Act and the Group Areas Act of 1950. The first of these, which allowed white settlers to take control of more than 90 per cent of the country’s land, not only dispossessed black South Africans but also marginalised them within a social and economic system that would later be perfected under apartheid (Guelke, 2005). The large-scale appropriation of rural land and the decimation of indigenous agricultural production forced residents to migrate to cities, farms, and mines in search of employment, helping to establish the system of cheap, migrant labour (Greenberg, 2003; Hall and Ntsebeza, 2007). The Natives Land Act which was amended in 1936, also established a reserve system by setting aside less than 10 per cent of the total land mass for African occupation (Hall and Ntsebeza, 2007). The NP-controlled parliament later passed the 1970 Bantu Homelands Citizenship Act, which established ten ‘homelands’ in the same geographic zones defined by the 1913 Land Act, cementing the apartheid government’s ‘separate development’ project and consolidating the migrant labour system that sustained the country’s agricultural and mining operations (Greenberg, 2003). Just as the Land Act established a precedent of racial segregation prior to the passage of the Apartheid-era Bantu Homelands Act, so the Urban Areas Act of 1923, which allowed for forced removals of Africans from urban areas (Guelke, 2005), laid foundations for one of the most violent apartheid rulings, namely the 1950 Group Areas Act. The enforcement of the Land Act played a major role in pushing Africans to urban areas; the subsequent Group Areas Act compounded the history of dispossession when it forced approximately one million non-white urban residents out of their homes in areas the state deemed suitable for white businesses and residences only (Seekings, 2008). The forcible removal of black residents to densely populated, badly-serviced zones on the peripheries of cities not only wrenched people from their homes and neighbourhoods, but also decreased their access to social and economic opportunities (Manomano, Tanga, and Tanyi, 2016). In the Natives Land Act and 56
subsequent laws such as the Group Areas Act, we see how ‘apartheid was fundamentally a geographical project’ (Dodson, 2013: 1) that would prove very difficult to reform. On coming to power, the ANC government rapidly enacted a market-led land restitution policy that encompassed rural and urban claims. As Walker (2005: 817) notes, the 1994 Restitution of Land Rights Act was ‘the first piece of “transformation” legislation to pass in the new parliament’. Analysed from a conflict transformation perspective, the return of land to its owners would meet fundamental needs of food provision and security of tenure that would also have significant economic and cultural repercussions for the long-term peace process (Walker, 2005). Yet for all that the ANC prioritised land reform in 1994, only 8-9 per cent of farmland had been successfully transferred by mid-2016, 22 years after the ANC passed the Restitution of Land Rights Act (Cousins, 2016). Besides this slow pace of land reform, Cousins (2016) observes that the process, as with transformation in other sectors of society, ‘has been captured by the elites – a small number of “emerging” black capitalist farmers and traditional leaders, but also commercial farmers, consultants and agribusiness corporates’. Other critics of the government’s market-led restitution model, which was adopted during the constitutional negotiations in the transitional years, argue from a second perspective – that it is another facet of the post-1994 neoliberal agenda implemented under the guidance of the World Bank (Marais, 1998; Wolford, 2007). Central to the critique of market-based restitution projects is that they treat land as a commodity and individual property rights as economic incentives to work the land (Wolford, 2007). As Hall and Ntsebeza (2007: 8) observe, ‘while there may be a demand for land as an economic asset, ownership of land in South Africa also represents a source of identity and a symbol of citizenship’. Considering these critiques, the market-led model’s willing-buyer willing-seller approach seems not only to have had limited success in terms of actual restitution of land, but has also misunderstood the social and cultural meaning of restoring land that was forcibly taken. The limitations of the current approach to land restitution affect the urban life and economy of the country as much as the rural one. As Beyers (2007) has noted, agriculture and farmland have been the main focus of discussions surrounding land restitution, but the slow rate of reform in urban settings has contributed to the lack of transformation of South African cities. Schensul and Heller (2011: 78) use the term 57
‘the racialized city’ to describe the continued segregation of South African cities along apartheid lines: the former ‘white areas’ prosperous, well serviced by the state, and close to economic opportunities; former ‘black’ and ‘coloured areas’ overwhelmingly poor, lacking adequate housing and other services, and difficult to access via public transport (Schensul and Heller, 2011). One of the explanations for this lack of urban transformation is the limited success of the land restitution process, with areas such as District Six in Cape Town remaining largely unchanged since apartheid (Beyers, 2007). Chief among the reasons for the slow rate of urban land restitution has been that people either did not understand their right to claim restitution or distrusted the state’s opaque bureaucratic system (Beyers, 2007). It is also the case that many former residents of areas such as District Six in Cape Town and Sophiatown in Johannesburg accepted monetary compensation in lieu of the land itself (Beyers, 2007). Claimants’ motives are diverse but they largely stem from a perception that uprooting once again would be too expensive and/or disruptive to warrant it (Beyers, 2007). As has been pointed out, the once-off pay-out of R17,500, which is often split between family members, is unlikely to have any substantial effect on ‘reducing structural poverty or promoting development’ (Beyers, 2007: 283). Provision of affordable housing Another way the post-apartheid government tried to redefine the urban geography of the country was by providing affordable housing to low-income citizens. The 1994 housing policy stated that provision of housing would lead to ‘viable, integrated settlements where households would have convenient access to opportunities, infrastructure and services’ (Khan and Ambert, 2003, quoted in Charlton and Kihato, 2006: 255). As of 2011, the government had spent an estimated R45 billion on providing housing units to approximately 2.3 million qualifying households (Ziblim, 2013). Despite this success, the national housing backlog in 2013 was measured to be 2.1 million households (Ziblim, 2013). In addition to this, the Upgrading of Informal Settlements Programme (UISP), which the government introduced in 2004, has struggled to succeed in its goal to re-develop urban shacklands. The government had by 2011 provided housing and access to essential services to only 206 of 2,700 informal settlements nationwide (Ziblim, 2013). 58
Given that South Africa has experienced rapid urbanisation rates since the early 1990s, with a concomitant annual growth in informal settlements (Ziblim, 2013), it is perhaps expecting too much of the government to have eradicated informal settlements, as it promised to do. Provision of low-cost permanent housing has been slow, but success measured in absolute numbers will always be diminished by a rapidly growing urban population. The more substantial critiques of the post-apartheid government’s housing plan focus on policy implementation rather than targets met. In their overview of the status of housing provision in South Africa, Manomano, Tanga, and Tanyi (2016) identify two issues pertinent to the status of the post-apartheid transformation project. The first of these is the prevalence of corruption and mismanagement among government officials: the authors state that almost 2,000 civil servants were implicated in a 2010 investigation into misuse of housing subsidy funds. In other investigations, inconsistencies in tender processes amounted to misuse of an estimated R2 billion (Manomano, Tanga, and Tanyi, 2016). The second issue, poor location of housing projects, indicates a continuation of the racialised city that undermines the tenets of the Housing Plan, namely to create integrated cities that equalise access to social and economic opportunities (Manomano, Tanga, and Tanyi, 2016). The continued divisions in South African cities, which to a large extent maintain the colour lines drawn during apartheid, show how access to housing, basic services, and employment opportunities continues to resemble a two-tiered system, not unlike the healthcare sector. Transformation of the education system When Price (1986: 158) criticised the NP’s health policy as ‘an instrument of the state’s twin imperatives: reproducing the conditions of capitalist accumulation and maintaining White supremacy’, he may equally have been describing the apartheid government’s national education policy. The segregated system, based on the 1953 Bantu Education Policy Act, enforced vastly different standards of education in schools, with the idea that learners should receive education commensurate to their position in the social hierarchy (Ntshoe, 2002; Chisholm, 2004; Marais, 2011). The state baldly perpetrated cultural violence in its attempt to restructure society. On
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coming to power, the ANC could not have faced a more pressing or challenging transformational issue and it began work immediately. The changes in the early post-apartheid years were manifold and included the consolidation of the fragmented 18-department education system into one which is administered by the nine provinces created after apartheid (Chisholm, 2004; Marais, 2011). The new constitution established basic education (primary and secondary schooling) as a right for all citizens and made nine years of education a compulsory requirement, thereby ensuring a baseline education level for all learners (Fiske and Ladd, 2004). Based on principles of ‘non-racism, non-sexism, democracy, equality and redress’ (Harley and Wedekind, 2004: 196), the provinces implemented a newly designed, temporary national curriculum in 1994 which was replaced with the Curriculum 2005 (C2005) in 1997. With its basis in Freirean ideals of democratisation of the classroom, C2005 – the ‘master plan’, as Harley and Wedekind (2004: 196) refer to it – revolutionised the schooling system in South Africa. Primarily, C2005 enforced a learner-centred pedagogy, meant to empower school-goers as learners and citizens through its outcomes-based framework. It was, in Harley and Wedekind’s (2004: 198) estimation, ‘dichotomous to the “old” curriculum in every possible respect’. The political importance of the post-apartheid changes to the educational system cannot be overstated, but the high expectations that surrounded C2005 were ultimately disappointed. After little more than a decade of the new system, the national government effectively declared its failure in 2010 and has since implemented a curriculum that more closely resembles the structure of the temporary 1994 curriculum (Msibi and Mchunu, 2013). Even with this change, the South African basic education system is routinely accused of providing learners with inadequate education in maths and science. It is not unusual to periodically read headlines such as ‘SA almost dead last in maths and science education’ (Areff, 2015) or ‘SA maths, science worse than Zim’ (South African Press Association, 2014). According to scholars, two of the most prominent reasons for this underperformance can be attributed to 1) inadequate development and implementation of policy at a national level and 2) poor infrastructure and lack of resources in previously disadvantaged schools (Marais, 2011; Naicker, 2013). The first of these issues points to a common shortfall seen in the transformation process, namely mismanagement. This is what Mouton, Louw, and Strydom (2012: 1219-20) refer to when they state that ‘it is not possible to find instant solutions to the problems brought about not only by the foregoing [apartheid] history 60
but by the bumbling changes that have further disabled the education system’. An inescapable facet of the shortfalls in the transformation process is that it has often been undermined by the current, democratically-elected government or the bureaucracy that serves it. The second issue is also one that has appeared in other contexts, namely unequal access to public goods and the continued production of inequality through two-tiered systems. Marais (2011: 328) argues that ‘the wretched state of many schools; the lack of teaching facilities, material and equipment; … [and] feeble parental involvement in schooling’ combine with other factors in low-income environments to reinforce the poor quality of education in township schools. He refers to schools as ‘engines of inequality’ (Marais, 2011: 327) and points to the need for urgent change in the school system in order that old socioeconomic structures are not perpetuated in the future. The most recent and high-profile issue to arise regarding the education sector in South Africa and the slow pace of transformation within it has affected not schools but rather the national universities. In the form of the Rhodes Must Fall campaign and, subsequently, the Fees Must Fall movement, student-led campus protests in 2015 and 2016 challenged the slow pace of institutional change in higher education (Naicker, 2016). The protests, which occurred across the country in universities including the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg and the University of Cape Town, drew on the Black Consciousness theory that inspired the 1976 Soweto Uprising, a series of student-led protests which had a deep effect on South African politics at the time. In this sense, Naicker (2016: 60) asserts that the students today see their goal as ‘continuing the unfinished task of undoing the legacy of apartheid’. It speaks profoundly to the unfinished transformation process not only in the education sector but across the whole of society. Cultural Transformation in South Africa Attitudes towards transformation policies in South Africa are clearly related to identity and racial identity in particular. Mbembe (2008: 7) captures this reality well when he observes that ‘[b]ecause “transformation” ... involves both moral questions of justice and equality and pragmatic and instrumental questions of power and social engineering, it epitomises more than any other post-apartheid project the current difficulty of overcoming whiteness and blackness’. What makes it such a contentious 61
subject is that the national transformation project intersects with race, privilege, historical injustice, and reconciliation. It involves not only institutional changes but also changes in personal and collective identities. Todd (2005: 429) remarks on processes of conflict transformation that ‘it is only when institutional changes are accompanied by changing self-perceptions that new institutions begin to create new dynamics of interaction; otherwise new institutions and practices become assimilated within older meanings and oppositions’. This is an especially pertinent assertion considering Seekings’s (2008: 1) comment on racial identity in post-apartheid South Africa: South Africans continue to see themselves in the racial categories of the apartheid era, in part because these categories have become the basis for post-apartheid ‘redress’, in part because they retain cultural meaning in everyday life. South Africans continue to inhabit social worlds that are largely defined by race, and many express negative views of other racial groups (Seekings, 2008: 1). The implications of intransigent identities are manifold and relate to this chapter’s focus on inadequate progress within all aspects of the transformation process except for political transformation. This section focuses on three issues in particular to illustrate the lack of cultural transformation in South Africa. The first of these shows how the disjuncture between white South Africans’ real and self-perceived living standards perpetuates class divisions; the second issue describes how the unintended consequences of BEE policies (discussed in the section on economic transformation) have fed into an elite identity amongst black South Africans that arguably compromises the transformation process (Mbembe, 2015). Finally, this section discusses Mbembe’s (2015) argument that part of South Africa’s transformation challenge is for black South Africans to overcome their sense of powerlessness in the face of poverty and continued social exclusion. With respect to the first of the issues described above, Todd’s comment highlights how when white South Africans fail to acknowledge their relative privilege, which has largely resulted from historically unjust economic practices, there is the chance that they will hamper the social peace process of building relationships across group divides. Matthews (2010) provides evidence for this intransigent mindset, noting that many white South Africans still view socioeconomic transformation and reparations for the injustices of the apartheid regime as incompatible with interracial 62
reconciliation. Indeed, the nationally representative annual South African Reconciliation Barometer Survey conducted by the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation (IJR) regularly indicates that white South Africans are less likely than other racial groups to reconcile the need for socioeconomic transformation with reconciliation. In 2013, only 28.5 per cent of white South Africans agreed with the statement that ‘reconciliation is impossible if those who were disadvantaged under apartheid continue to be poor’, compared to 57.7 per cent of black South Africans, 54.9 per cent of Indian/Asian respondents, and 36.4 per cent of Coloured respondents (Wale, 2013: 38). The IJR reported similar results for the Reconciliation Barometer surveys in each of the previous three rounds (Lefko-Everett, Lekalake, Penfold, and Rais, 2011; Lefko-Everett, Nyoka, and Tiscornia, 2011; Lefko-Everett, 2012). Remarkably, the 2013 Reconciliation Barometer also shows that no white South Africans in the survey sample fit into the lowest five of the ten living standard measure (LSM) categories, an indicator of relative wealth (Wale, 2013). Quite the opposite, 73.3 per cent of the sample were categorised in LSM categories 9 and 10, the top two categories. In contrast, 35.4 per cent of black South Africans were in the lowest four categories, with only 16.3 per cent in the top four LSM groups. Despite this differentiation in self-reported wealth, white South Africans are least likely to be aware of their wealth relative to the rest of the country. For example, 44.2 per cent of whites in LSMs 7-10 reported that they were in the same economic position as the rest of South Africa. The Coloured demographic group showed similar figures. Meanwhile, as Wale (2013: 27) notes, ‘Black South Africans in the highest LSM groups 7-10 appear to have the greatest awareness of their relative class position’. Almost 60 per cent of that group reported that they were better off than the average South African and only 28.6 per cent thought they had the same living standards. Wale suggests that white South Africans may be making an in-group comparison – comparing themselves with other whites – instead of judging their class position relative to the whole population. Whatever the reason, their skewed self-perception might militate against creating ‘new dynamics of interaction’ (Todd, 2005: 429) between racial groups. The second issue at hand in this section relates to the emergence of an elite group of black South Africans in the post-apartheid era. I discussed this in depth in the section on the challenges facing economic transformation in the country. In that section, I quoted Mbembe (2014), who connects the BEE measures that benefit the political elite to the macro-economic framework which relies in part on the unreconstructed labour 63
practices of the mining industry. In his analysis, he refers to ‘an increasingly predatory black ruling class [that conducts dispossession] in alliance with private capital, in the name of custom and tradition’ (Mbembe, 2014). The group of black South Africans to which Mbembe refers may be said to have adopted a particular class identity in the post-apartheid period that continues to rely on a system of economic exclusion. I argue that it is in this sense an intransigent identity for the way it supports institutions that perpetuate old systems of inequality rather than promoting a transformed, equitable society. The third issue in this section deals with an intransigent identity associated with poverty rather than wealth. In his valuable discussion of racial identity and transformation in South Africa, Mbembe (2015: 14) states the following: ‘Although black South Africans are at the helm of the most powerful country in the continent, many still think and act as if they are powerless’. Pursuing this line, he later asserts that appeals to ‘political blackness’ (Mbembe, 2015: 14) as an identity deserving of measures to overturn the effects of racial domination were necessary in the early democratic years. However, he argues they now ‘reveal a profound degree of racial self-hatred and self-loathing’ (Mbembe, 2015: 15) in their display of victimhood. Cultural transformation, which is noticeable as the most difficult facet of the transformation process to address through social policy, is vital as a way to gain mutual buy-in to the peacebuilding process. All three of the issues described above will need to be addressed if South Africa is to achieve lasting peace through wide-ranging transformation. Conclusion: Politics Today and the Challenge to Post-Apartheid Transformation In Birch’s (2003) terms, quoted earlier in this chapter, South Africa achieved the first necessary step towards political transformation by establishing universal suffrage, thereby allowing every eligible citizen to elect the country’s leadership in 1994. The second step, namely ‘the establishment of accountability among the leadership chosen through democratic mechanisms’ (Birch, 2003: 4), was also taken with 1) the adoption of a rights-based constitution that protects citizens’ freedoms; 2) the institution of a robust legal system headed by the Constitutional Court; and 3) the establishment of the so-called Chapter Nine institutions, including the Public Protector, the Independent 64
Electoral Commission, the Auditor General, and the South African Human Rights Commission. The Chapter Nine institutions, established within Chapter 9 of the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, represent ‘an additional dimension of the system of checks and balances provided by the different branches of government upon each other’s power and by the Constitution itself’ (Calland and Pienaar, 2016: 67). In fact, the successful political transformation process has in recent years revealed the extent to which the national transformation project has been hobbled by an ANC-led government embroiled in a transformation of its own – away from democratic norms (Feinstein, 2010; Hart, 2013; Lodge, 2014; Johnson, 2015). As an example, the Office of the Public Protector and the Constitutional Court have been called on to make significant judgements on the conduct of President Jacob Zuma, both in terms of disputed security upgrades to his home in Nkandla (Thamm, 2016), as well as in regard to state capture by a family of businessmen close to the president (Nicolson, 2016). As members of the political elite battle for power over state structures and the accumulation of personal wealth (von Holdt, 2013), the post-apartheid dream of widely enjoyed prosperity remains elusive for many South Africans. The ANC, which has been in power for more than two decades, can certainly point to many accomplishments in rectifying the terrible damage caused by the apartheid regime and the harsh colonial domination before that. Nevertheless, it has not been able to lift the majority of South Africans out of poverty and prepare them adequately for the labour market. Unemployment is high, and where sectors such as finance have expanded, job creation has not followed. In short, the dramatic political change from minority-rule to democracy has not been accompanied by the economic changes needed to establish lasting peace. Ill-fated as the national transformation project has been, the unintended consequences still do not belie the need for change in South Africa. The discourse of transformation intersects with debates about the enduring importance of racial identity, inequality, privilege, and the viability of an equitable peace in post-apartheid South Africa. Ultimately, the transformation dilemma points to the need to solve the most pressing socioeconomic issues. Bearing in mind the continued importance of the transformation of South Africa, it is of interest to this study that although churches and Christian FBOs have adopted the discourse of transformation as a guiding idea for their development work in post-apartheid South Africa – poverty, injustice, division, 65
and restitution for past wrongs are their watchwords – very few empirical studies of these organisations exist. Of those studies, which include Bowers (2005), Kareithi, Rogers, Bowers, and Herman (2006), Ganiel, (2007), and Bowers du Toit and Nkomo, (2014), many approach the topic from a theological, developmental perspective rather than a religious peacebuilding one. Since this thesis builds on the small number of studies examining the role of Christian religious peacebuilding in the transformation process, the next chapter reviews the history and current state of Christian religious peacebuilding in South Africa during apartheid and in the current democratic period. The chapter connects the concepts introduced in the first two literature review chapters, and uses the sixcategory peacebuilding typology presented in Chapter 1 to illustrate the many and disparate instances of religious peacebuilding in the country.
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Chapter 3 Christian Religious Peacebuilding in South Africa Conflict transformation, though always based on the principle that underlying issues be identified and comprehensively dealt with, differs in practice from one situation to another. The previous chapter described the particular meaning of transformation in post-apartheid South Africa. Specifically, it emphasised how government-led changes to the political, economic, social, and cultural structures in society have tried to deal with the effects of racial oppression. The chapter argued that although the ANC-led government has succeeded in transforming some aspects of South African society, it has confronted challenges to achieving lasting change. The deeply institutional nature of apartheid, which built on colonial-era laws to maintain white minority rule, necessarily made the process long and complex. It is now widely agreed, though, that the transformation project has been made even more difficult because of a mix of selfmade challenges including bureaucratic mismanagement and government corruption. The current chapter ties together the foregoing two chapters to review the role of Christianity in peacebuilding in South Africa during apartheid and in the current democratic period. The first part of this chapter reprises Appleby’s (2000) theory of the ambivalence of the sacred to describe how Christians, and their leaders in particular, have interpreted their religious traditions to both positive and negative effect. Using the six-category peacebuilding typology presented in Chapter 1, the second part of this chapter presents examples of the peacebuilding role of Christian actors during apartheid, while the third focuses on peacebuilding examples after apartheid. This chapter argues that Christian religious peacebuilding during apartheid, which was characterised by Advocacy and Education and Formation initiatives that delegitimised the NP regime’s racist policies and undermined theologies that supported apartheid, constituted the early stages of conflict transformation in South Africa by identifying the underlying issues of the conflict. During the transition period of 1990-1994, extensive Education and Formation activities laid the foundations for post-conflict transformation, encouraging what some church leaders called ‘critical solidarity’ (Villa-Vicencio, 1992: passim) with the government and its reconstructive policies. Although the church’s focus on transformation was intense, this chapter
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contends, together with other authors (for example, see Bompani, 2013; Vellem, 2013), that by partnering too closely with the ANC-led government and focusing its efforts too narrowly on Relief and Development peacebuilding activities, the church ultimately abandoned its commitment to hold state actors to account for their actions. Importantly for this thesis, church representatives have in the past decade re-entered the public sphere, decrying political corruption and advocating lasting peace through cultural transformation. Christianity in South Africa and the Ambivalence of the Sacred For more than two centuries, religious – and especially Christian – groups have exemplified their dual capacity for divisiveness and potential to encourage peace. The missionisation of southern Africa in the 19th century provides an early example of how Christianity has been used in South Africa to justify and support social and political activities. On this point, Etherington (1996: 201) observes the ‘consensus among historians that Christianity was a two-edged sword that could undercut as well as sustain [white] domination’. For instance, early Dutch colonists, some of whom arrived with the Dutch East India Company, grounded a sense of racial superiority in the belief that God had chosen them as a nation to be saved and to succeed (Elphick, 1997). Later, British, German and other missionaries agreed on the need ‘to inculcate in Africans an appreciation for European trade goods and values, and a confidence in the beneficence of at least some forms of European rule’ (Elphick, 1997: 5). The early years of Christianity in South Africa were characterised by a close church-state relationship. Although not always comfortable with the other’s presence, each realised the value of maintaining ties with the other. In Britain in particular, the state gained moral legitimacy as an imperial presence with God-given duties that were partly carried out by clergymen; many missionaries, meanwhile, saw their spiritual duties as one aspect of growing European influence – conversion drove trade and trade, in turn, drove conversion (Elphick, 2997; Mills, 1997). Despite the close ties between church and state which militate against outspoken criticism of government policies (Brewer, Higgins, and Teeney, 2010), early missionaries in South Africa frequently clashed with white settlers, arguing against the often brutal treatment of Africans and indentured Indians. Some missionaries excited the anger of settlers and imperial officials alike when they promoted equal legal rights
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for non-whites (Mills, 1997). Of course, it cannot be overlooked that missionaries, even when some opposed the imperial state or settler population, overwhelmingly supported the political environment that would help them succeed in converting African communities, seeing in them the potential to create new societies of the faithful, untouched by ‘the ills and vices of industrial Britain’ (Mills, 1997: 339). In their paternalistic zeal to protect Africans from the evils of alcohol and prostitution, which they associated with the settler communities, missionaries forged an early path of segregationist thought: They pursued pure conversion, and opposed plans to submit African communities to colonial administration on the basis that they would be influenced by settlers’ sinful habits (Mills, 1997). This determination to separate Christian life from anything that would sully it often led missionaries to denounce early forms of African independent churches (AICs) which incorporated Christian rites and symbols into local spiritual practices (Chidester, Tobler, and Wratten, 1997). Elphick (1997: 1) has observed that the because of the long presence of Christianity in South Africa during periods of considerable change, ‘Christian doctrine, language, and sentiment are also interwoven in the social and cultural history of South Africa’. Where the ambivalence of the sacred became most striking – that is, where the clash between different strands of Christian doctrine and practice was sharpest – was during the National Party’s apartheid regime. In 1950, for example, just two years after the NP came to power, the church adopted ‘the theology of humanity as equal because of separation’ (Kinghorn, 1990: 66), although in reality it had already established a Dutch Reformed Church for black Africans in the 19th century, laying the basis for political policies of segregation (Elphick, 1997). The DRC resisted considerable pressure to reform even as the English-speaking churches, supported by the international Christian community, banded together in their opposition to institutionalised racial discrimination. Opposition churches called apartheid ‘a heresy’ (de Gruchy and Villa-Vicencio, 1983: passim). The split in the Church meant that DRC doctrine manifested in the NP’s political policies at the same time as liberation theologies helped to establish the moral legitimacy of anti-apartheid movements such as the ANC and the United Democratic Front (UDF). Indeed, the insinuation of Christianity into the political life of the country was apparent in its influence on the founding members of the ANC, such as the Rev. John Dube, and in the later political leadership of the party, including the Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Chief Albert Luthuli 69
(ANC) and Z. K. Mathews (ANC), which explains in part the ease with which the church was able to engage with anti-apartheid activists and, later, the ANC government itself (Lamola, 1996). The history of Christianity in South Africa reveals manifold differences between denominations, both in their organisational practices and their political ideologies. The apartheid era sharpened these differences in some cases but also united progressive churches, often regardless of denomination, against an easily identifiable opponent. The ‘liberationist’ wing in particular, which explicitly supported the goals of the banned liberation movements, was notably ecumenical (de Gruchy and de Gruchy, 2004). As de Gruchy and de Gruchy (2004: 223) note, ‘The tragic irony of the church struggle against apartheid was that an ideology of apartness and exclusion provided the churches in South Africa with a sense of unity and cohesion’. The next two sections use Steele’s typology to outline religious peacebuilding activities during apartheid and in the current democratic period. In concluding the chapter, I restate how religious peacebuilding initiatives in the two periods have contributed to transformation in different ways – first by supporting the anti-apartheid movement through Advocacy and Empowerment and Education and Formation activities, then through Relief and Development activities in the early and mid-democratic period, and most recently by reprising an Advocacy and Education role to ensure the socially and politically powerful pursue transformation to benefit the most vulnerable. Christian religious peacebuilding during apartheid (1948-94) 1) Conciliation and mediation Despite the centrality of religion to the apartheid system and to the opposition, the political situation was not conducive to religious involvement in mediating violent conflict between groups. The state, led by the NP government, banned opposition groups such as the ANC and the South African Communist Party (SACP), forcing their leaders into exile and weakening anti-apartheid structures. Violence between the armed wing of the ANC and the state never escalated to the same levels as that seen in the Nigerian and Mozambican civil wars, both of which ultimately benefited from religious mediation efforts. It was only later, during the late-1980s and the 1991-4
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transitional period, that one sees examples of Christian involvement in mediation between parties. As General Secretary of the South African Council of Churches (SACC), Frank Chikane mediated relations between the NP and the ANC in the lead up to Nelson Mandela’s release from prison in 1990 (Balcomb, 2004). In the tense transitional era that followed the unbanning of opposition parties, during which time South Africa experienced a threefold increase in fatalities due to conflict between political parties and their supporters (Spies, 2002), the church became heavily involved in ensuring localised violence did not expand into civil war. The 1991 ‘Cottesloe II’ Cape Town Statement, which resulted from a WCC/SACC conference, called the churches to actively participate in the peacebuilding process by monitoring violence and working holistically toward transformation of the entire South African society (Walshe, 1995). Spies (2002) notes that one of the clearest ways the church contributed to the democratic transition was by facilitating discussions between the various political parties in order to agree on the formation and implementation of the 1991 National Peace Accord (NPA). According to Spies (2002: 22), the churches’ involvement allowed for ‘the first institutionalised peacekeeping and peacemaking instrument for South Africa’. Religious actors’ mediation work continued beyond the preparatory stages of the NPA, as church leaders and lay officials led or organised National and Regional Peace structures, as well as Local Peace Committees which focused on conflict mediation between groups (Schlack, 2009). In a move that was in equal parts symbolic and pragmatic, the Anglican church at this time ordered its clergy to give up all political membership so that they could play a neutral role in mediating the conflict (de Gruchy and de Gruchy, 2004). Indeed, de Gruchy and de Gruchy (2004: 217) go so far as to say that without the churches’ actions, ‘it is doubtful whether South Africa would have been able to hold its first democratic elections’. An additional example of religious mediation work undertaken during the transition period is the case of Professor Washington Okumu, a Christian layperson and former Kenyan diplomat who knew the Zulu chief and head of the IFP Mangosuthu Buthelezi. The two had met at a White House prayer meeting more than 20 years earlier (Dowden, 1994; Schlack, 2009). With just days left before the national election, Okumu facilitated negotiations between Buthelezi, Nelson Mandela (ANC) and the incumbent president F.W. de Klerk (NP), with the eventual outcome that the IFP agreed to participate in the elections. Okumu’s successful involvement helped 71
ensure peaceful elections and lower political violence between IFP and ANC party members. It is a classic instance of ‘backchannel political communication’ (Brewer, Higgins, and Teeney, 2011: 89), something most often associated with the churches’ role in facilitating the Northern Ireland peace process. 2) Advocacy and empowerment The second peacemaking type, advocacy and empowerment, was the most prominent type of peacebuilding work in which religious actors were involved in opposition to apartheid policies. Writing before the country’s transition to full democracy, Johnston (1994: 199) asserted that ‘the struggle to abolish apartheid has been a struggle to abolish its theology. ... Absent its theological prop, apartheid will fall of its own weight’. This statement underplays the extraordinary durability of a political structure that was reinforced in the minds of citizens and the heart of the country’s mining economy. However, it does evoke Walshe’s (1991: 38) description of the Church as ‘a site of struggle’ in which advocacy-minded individuals and organisations butted heads with conservative church leaders and their congregations. In contrast to those churches who opposed attempts to resist apartheid or were apolitical in their views, the ‘liberationists’ – to use Balcomb’s (2004: 9) phrase – in the 1970s and 1980s emphasised the injustices of apartheid and advocated the empowerment of black South Africans through active resistance to the apartheid regime. During the anti-apartheid struggle, the Kairos Document, produced in 1985 and signed by black theologians from more than 20 South African denominations, gained influence when it distinguished three church doctrines, forcefully explaining the ills of two and advocating for the emancipatory potential of the third. They argued that regardless of denomination, churches in South Africa subscribed either to a ‘State Theology’, ‘Church Theology’, or ‘Prophetic Theology’. State Theology, linked to the DRC, appropriated biblical text and tradition to buttress the political status quo. The Kairos Theologians (1985), whose sympathies were firmly lodged with the disenfranchised non-white South African population, condemned State Theology, stating that it ‘blesses injustice, canonises the will of the powerful and reduces the poor to passivity, obedience and apathy’. The Kairos group also censured Church Theology – supposedly the most common response to apartheid and prevalent among ‘mainstream’ English-speaking churches – for its anodyne criticism of South African 72
politics. They argued that for those suffering the social and economic deprivations of apartheid, Church Theology’s rhetoric of reconciliation amounted to ineffectual palliation. The final theology type discussed in the document, Prophetic Theology, differed radically from the previous types. It called for a response that ‘speaks to the particular circumstances of this crisis, a response that does not give the impression of sitting on the fence but is clearly and unambiguously taking a stand’. According to Appleby (2000: 37-8), this contextual perspective unequivocally ‘adopts the perspectives of the poor and oppressed’. When the 156 Kairos signatories approved the document, they justified active measures of resistance to the violence of apartheid, noting that these measures could not be contained to non-violent action. The rise of Prophetic Theology, which accompanied the burgeoning Black Consciousness movement (for a discussion of black seminaries’ involvement with the Black Consciousness movement, see Denis, 2010), marked a turning point in the peacebuilding role of the South African churches. Though it encountered criticism at the time and from commentators in later years (for example, see Tingle, 1992), scholars agree that the prophetic turn was an important juncture in the church’s political participation (Walshe, 1995; Appleby, 2000). While the prophetic movement played a major role in the final years of apartheid and the transitional period, faith-based advocacy can be traced back as far as the 1950s, when churches rejected a 1957 law outlawing mixed race congregations in certain ‘whites only’ churches (Johnston, 1994). The 1960s and 1970s, meanwhile, were distinctive for international churches’ outspoken criticism of the regime. For instance, the World Council of Churches (WCC) initiated the Cottesloe Consultation in 1960. Johnston (1994: 190) observes that the Consultation ‘was the first ecumenical conference specifically protesting apartheid’. After coming under intense criticism from the South African government, the DRC rejected the Cottesloe resolutions, which emphasised the equal rights of all people, and subsequently left the WCC. The church once again reflected its political significance on the brink of the transitional period. The Rustenburg Declaration, released in 1990 following a national meeting of church leaders, indicated the church’s intent to continue working toward a democratic national society. Later, the 1991 ‘Cottesloe II’ Cape Town Statement advocated a just society that encompassed all aspects of race, gender, cultural differences, and economic imbalances (Walshe, 1995), recalling the spirit of the original Cottesloe resolutions and the aims of conflict transformation more generally. 73
3) Observation and witness The third religious peacebuilding type, observation of conflict and awareness building, was strongly associated during the apartheid era with the SACC and WCC. For instance, following the Sharpeville Massacre in 1960, when policemen opened fire on protesters leaving 69 dead and more wounded, the WCC initiated the 1961 Cottesloe Consultation, from which emerged several resolutions against institutionalised racism in churches and the state. In effect, the WCC used its international standing and broad membership as a platform to report on the persistent oppressiveness of the South African government. The WCC played a further role in the anti-apartheid efforts when it began the Program to Combat Racism (PCR) in 1968 which, according to Johnston (1994: 191), ‘involved an activist approach to fighting racism in the religious, political, social, and economic spheres’. Two years later, the PCR successfully lobbied the WCC to give aid and assistance to anti-apartheid groups. The Christian Institute was another organisation that played an influential observation and witness role in the anti-apartheid movement. Founded in 1963 by Beyers Naudé, a former DRC leader and member of the Afrikaner-Broederbond nationalist organisation, the Institute condemned apartheid ideologies in the church and state and established an ecumenical, cross-racial membership (Chidester, 2014[1992]). Walshe (1977: 460) notes that because of Naudé’s social and political status prior to denouncing apartheid, he was able to strike ‘at the heart of Afrikaner civil religion’. Walshe (1977: 460) asserts that the Institute ‘sought to arouse the conscience of white South Africans and divert Afrikanerdom from its discriminatory and exploitative policies’. It established its witnessing character by producing publications and holding a variety of public events including conferences and study groups (Chidester, 2014[1992]). Naudé was excommunicated from the DRC for his ideas, shunned by portions of Afrikaans society, and eventually censored by the government after it banned the Christian Institute in 1977. Following the release of Nelson Mandela in 1990 and the unbanning of opposition political groups, the nature of political violence in South Africa changed. In the words of Spies (2002: 20), ‘battles for power surfaced and political violence escalated dramatically – with a 307 per cent rise in fatalities from 1985 to 1991’. In response to this, national church leaders, together with political party leaders and the business sector, formed the 1991 National Peace Accord. The NPA focused on local 74
monitoring of conflict, its work often conducted by church leaders who played an observation role in their communities (Spies, 2002). 4) Education and formation The Education peacebuilding category has several goals. It includes the Freirean notion of the conscientisation of a population as to the full extent and implications of injustices, promoting the moral values which should govern the actions of a population, skills training in conflict transformation processes, and interventions that encourage relationship building and communal ‘healing’ (Steele, 2008: 25). In the South African context, many of the church’s peacebuilding activities involved an educational aspect. Thus the SACC’s 1968 ‘Message to the People of South Africa’, a short document supported by more than 600 church leaders, outlined how apartheid policies clashed with core tenets of Christianity. This was primarily an educational activity. But by exposing the ills of apartheid, it also advocated for change. Indeed, as Johnston (1994: 191) notes, the Prime Minister at the time responded to the SACC’s publication by warning off the people and organisations ‘who wish to disrupt the order in South Africa under the cloak of religion’. In a similar fashion, the 1985 Kairos Document had both an education role and advocacy role. It emphasised and explained how the church had played a part in maintaining and even enhancing the structural inequalities and injustices of apartheid, but it was also a call to churches to oppose the apartheid state. Although the Kairos Document was signed by many church leaders, it was closely related to churches and groups which espoused Black Theology and Black Consciousness as modes of resisting the apartheid state (Chidester, 2014[1992]). With links to Freirean ideas of conscientisation and Liberation Theology, Black Theology and Black Consciousness denounced the dehumanising character of apartheid and sought to redefine the symbolic meaning of being ‘black’: it emphasised power instead of inferiority, and self-potential instead of reliance on white liberalism (Chidester, 2014[1992]). Denis (2010: 166) notes how Black Consciousness, with Black Theology as a component part, not only influenced the theology and politics of black seminaries, but that it had ‘deep Christian roots’ itself. Indeed, the theologian Barney Pityana founded the Black Consciousness movement with Steve Biko and was a strong proponent of Black Theology; Allan Boesak, a pastor in the coloured branch of the 75
Reformed Church and a liberation theologian, become an early leader of the United Democratic Front in its resistance to apartheid (Chidester, 2014[1992]); and the Christian Institute, with Beyers Naudé as national director, aligned itself in the years before its closure with the aims and ideas of Black Theology and Black Consciousness, hosting ecumenical and inter-racial forums to foster togetherness in the church (Walshe, 1977). In 1989, just four years after the release of the Kairos Document, the government released several high-profile ANC leaders from long-term imprisonment. Nelson Mandela was released a year after that, marking the start of the arduous transition to a post-conflict society. In this context of changing political circumstances and the reinsertion of opposition politics into South African life (as opposed to the struggle politics progressive churches had supported), some Christian leaders began to call for the church to adopt a less oppositional attitude to the state. This was a matter of educating leaders and church members on the shift in politics and identifying the church’s role in building an inclusive South African society. Charles Villa-Vicencio, a theologian and transitional justice expert associated with post-conflict reconciliation and the South African TRC in particular, was notably associated with this new approach. The following quote from 1992 summarises what he understood to be the church’s renewed role: The task of the church, whose theological responsibility it is to restore justice and affirm human dignity within the context of God’s impending reign, is to join with others to ensure that the ‘new’ which emerges in those regions where renewal now seems possible, is a qualitative improvement on the ‘old’. It is to ensure that in the process of reconstruction nations are able to turn away from greed, domination and exploitation, in whatever clothes they may appear, to an age of communal sharing and personal fulfilment (Villa-Vicencio, 1992: 2). Villa-Vicencio (1992: passim) summarised the church’s new role as being in ‘critical solidarity’ with the state, to support it in its transformation work, but also to continue to favour the interests of the poorest members of society ahead of the most privileged, irrespecitive of their political background. One of the most immediate and practical ways the churches and faith organisations demonstrated their commitment to a peaceful South Africa was through their many voter education programmes which aimed to educate South Africans on the mechanics of voting and ‘prepare the way for
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free and fair elections with the maximum of informed participation’ (de Gruchy and de Gruchy, 2004). 5) Transitional justice Transitional justice initiatives constitute a form of post-conflict peacebuilding that concentrates on uncovering and prosecuting human rights abuses, recovering the truth of conflict-linked atrocities, reparations, and official apologies. These mechanisms of confronting and addressing past injustices were instituted following the 1994 elections and I therefore discuss them with respect to religious peacebuilding during the democratic period. 6) Relief and development The final religious peacebuilding category is humanitarian relief and development. According to Gerstbauer (2010), FBOs have taken a more explicit interest in peacebuilding activities in recent years, identifying peacebuilding as one aspect of their development work. However, conventional relief activities (i.e., without explicit mention of peacebuilding as a motive) have nonetheless always contributed to peacebuilding if approached from the viewpoint that combating poverty and restoring people’s dignity is directly linked to the restoration of right relationships between people, an idea incorporated into the teachings of almost all the world religions. Thus we may consider the historical work of the international NGO World Vision and the local organisation Catholic Welfare and Development (CWD) as paradigmatic of relief and development peacebuilding during the apartheid period. The former began its work in South Africa in 1965 but was most active in the 1970s when it set up nutrition, education, and clothing programmes to serve children who lacked these essentials during apartheid (World Vision, n.d.). According to CWD’s website, the organisation was started in 1972 ‘by two social workers who could not turn a blind eye to the abject poverty and injustices suffered by under-privileged people under the apartheid regime’ (Catholic Welfare and Development, n.d.). A search for academic literature in several databases at Queen’s University on the role of religion in welfare and development during the apartheid era revealed there is a dearth of historical analysis of this peacebuilding sector. Nevertheless, in a 77
relatively recent study by van Ginneken, Lewin, and Berridge (2010), the authors observe that community health worker programmes, which would serve as a precursor of the post-apartheid primary healthcare system adopted by the ANC, were often initiated by religious people or organisations to respond to the healthcare gap in township and rural communities. This is confirmed by Tollmann and Pick (2002) in their study of community-oriented primary health care before and after apartheid. van Ginneken, Lewin, and Berridge (2010) identify the Cape Town-based Empilisweni SACLA (South African Christian Leadership Association) project as a prominent health programme with Christian roots. Established in the Cross Roads township area in 1980 and run by the well-known physician and anti-apartheid activist Ivan Toms, the SACLA clinic provided basic healthcare, but also trained community health workers and initiated organisational skills development by emphasising democratic governance within its operations (van Ginneken, Lewin, and Berridge, 2010). The clinic was shut down by the apartheid government in 1986 but reopened in Cross Roads as the SACLA Health Project after the 1994 elections. Since as early as the 1940s, parts of the church in South Africa were involved in combating the segregationist policies of the National Party. As we have seen, organisations’ and individuals’ activities ranged across five of the six categories of peacebuilding – transitional justice mechanisms such as the TRC were not inaugurated until after the 1994 general elections. With the fall of apartheid, denominations once united in action went their separate ways; there was no single purpose around which churches could rally, a situation which resulted in a multiplication of views on what the focus of the church should be (Cochrane, 2000). Desmond Tutu (1995: passim) once described this as an ‘identity crisis’. With the exception of the church’s clear role in the TRC, Christian leaders and organisations have on the whole played a less overtly political role in the democratic period than during apartheid. There is nonetheless evidence that the church continues to have an impact on South African public affairs, Tracy Kuperus (2011: 279) asserting that the church’s public action is ‘far more diverse and less binary than it was during the apartheid years’. The following section describes the role of religion in post-1994 peacebuilding in South Africa. Once again, I use Steele’s typology to categorise the many instances.
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Christian religious peacebuilding in the democratic era (1994-2016) 1) Conciliation and mediation In South Africa, political reconciliation between adversaries is exemplified by the work of the TRC (1996-8), initiated under the GNU’s Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act (1995). The TRC is commonly seen as a transitional justice mechanism and I therefore discuss religious participation in its work within that peacebuilding category. As much as the TRC, led by Desmond Tutu, was the most conspicuous mechanism used to promote national reconciliation and the discourse of a ‘new’ South Africa (Moon, 2009), the cultural transformation project was pursued by Christian leaders in less official ways, too. Though the notion of reconciliation is disputed – definitions range widely in what falls within its ambit (Trimikliniotis, 2013) – Christian thought leaders who promoted the project emphasised the restorative potential held within reconciliation, a potential that might aid post-conflict healing (de Gruchy, 2002). This perspective sees the possibility for reconciliation to build meaningful, forward-looking relationships and relates this to changed group identities (cultural transformation), which lays the basis for attitudes that support an equitable and just society (Todd, 2005). It is the maximalist concept of reconciliation which Ganiel (2006, 2007) remarks on when she states that several churches in South Africa have emphasised discourses, anchored in scripture, of reconciliation and equality. Her case study of a Cape Townbased charismatic church illustrates the potential these discourses hold for social and institutional transformation. However, she also notes the ongoing challenges of putting these discourses of reconciliation and inclusiveness into practice. For example, despite the congregation’s expressed commitment to change, power differentials persisted in relationships between church members. 2) Advocacy and empowerment Just as the post-1994 state moved toward a ‘collaborative relationship’ (Habib, 2005: 680) with NGOs, including public health organisations and other non-profits funded by the government and the private sector to fill gaps in public services, so religious
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groups entered into a relationship with the state characterised by an ‘alignment and cooptation’ (Bompani, 2013: 135) of interests. The church’s transformation from outspoken critic of the state to government ally was accelerated by the departure of a number of leaders to positions in the post-apartheid government. In a reference to the Kairos Document, Vellem (2013: 130) asserts that the supposed ‘critical solidarity’ of the post-apartheid Church in fact ‘lapsed into a mode of state theology’. However, Bompani (2013) has noted how the Church has begun to be more outspoken in its criticism of the social and political situation following 20 years of democracy and ANC rule. She cites three areas in which the church has in the past few years been particularly active, namely ‘[sexual] morality, justice and xenophobia’ (Bompani, 2013: 135). For example, in 2010 the Southern African Catholic Bishops’ Conference (SACBC) criticised President Jacob Zuma for an extra-marital affair, stating, [The SACBC] expresses its strongest concern of the scandalous behaviour of leaders who shamelessly flout the norms of morality and decency, accepted and expected by the vast majority of people. While we note President Zuma’s expression of regret for engaging in ‘unprotected sex’, we are nonetheless appalled that for the second time in as many years he does not express regret or show remorse for his adultery (quoted in Bompani, 2013: 135). More than just a moral condemnation, the Catholic Church’s statement holds the head of state to account for actions which clearly spurn public health messages promoting safer sex in South Africa. In another instance in which the church entered the public sphere to hold government to account for unjust, inadequate action, Kairos Southern Africa (Kairos SA) published a document on the eve of the ANC’s centenary celebrations entitled Theological and Ethical Reflections on the 2012 Centenary Celebrations of the African National Congress. The document – a theological and political critique of the state of public affairs in South Africa – bears undeniable similarities to the 1985 Kairos Document in that it wholeheartedly announces the church’s solidarity with the poorest people living in South Africa. The following excerpt sums up the spirit of the document: Prophetic Theology is therefore about being in solidarity with and in struggle with the poorest of the poor, since that is where Jesus is to be found. … In the prophetic Spirit of Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of Love, it is the entitlement of the rich, the powerful and those who serve their
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interests that needs to be constantly challenged, since this is the dominant narrative in South Africa at the moment (Kairos Southern Africa, 2011: 11). The Kairos SA statement reflects the church’s recent focus on justice, which includes the anti-xenophobia advocacy of Bishop Paul Verryn of the South African Methodist Church. Bompani (2013: 140-1) states that Verryn, who publicly asserted in 2010 that police in central Johannesburg were failing to protect foreign nationals from violent xenophobia, has taken ‘a central, vibrant role in South Africa’s public debate [over citizenship and human rights]’. 3) Observation and witness Generally speaking, religious observers in conflicts report on the possibility or occurrence of violence and political abuses at the hands of a repressive state or other political actors. The political climate in post-apartheid South Africa is not overtly repressive, but abuses of power still exist. This is evident in the way some police officers have mistreated immigrants in South Africa, something which has been documented over several years (Landau, 2006; Bradford, Huq, Jackson, and Roberts, 2014). Responding to the need to meet immigrants’ basic rights, Paul Verryn and the Central Methodist Mission (CMM) started the Peace Action organisation in 2010 to track and report human rights abuses in the Johannesburg city centre (Kuljian, 2013). Kuljian (2013: 151) observes that ‘Peace Action monitored and intervened in cases of xenophobic tensions, illegal evictions, police harassment and arbitrary arrests’. A different and persistent issue religious leaders have responded to in an observer role has been the lack of sanitation in badly serviced areas of Cape Town. Considered through a conflict transformation lens, and factoring in the government’s transformation promises, people living in South Africa should have access to sanitation resources that meet their needs and uphold their dignity. This has not been the case, however, and in 2013 the interfaith Western Cape Religious Leaders Forum (WCRLF) responded to sanitation issues in Khayelitsha by touring the large township in order to gather first-hand information from residents (Earnest, 2013). The interfaith forum, whose membership includes representatives from more than 10 religions and denominations, subsequently delivered a report to the City of Cape Town that described unacceptable living conditions. Indeed, noting that ‘the stories of the poorest 81
are often crowded out of the public conversation’, the WCRLF identifies ‘amplifying the voices of the marginalised’ (WCRLF, n.d.) as one of their major goals in monitoring the living conditions of the poorest members of society. 4) Education and formation Education and formation activities respond to the causes and effects of conflict by fostering mutual understanding of a conflict. Educators attempt to demystify ‘the other’ and prepare for peace by transferring conflict transformation skills to groups involved in conflict situations (Steele, 2008). An example of an organisation conducting these sorts of activities in post-apartheid South Africa is the Damietta Peace Initiative in Pretoria, which is associated with the Catholic Church. Active since 2006, Damietta organised community-based Pan-African Conciliation Teams (PACTs) that operate nationwide to address intolerance between groups. Damietta developed a school programme, delivered by PACTs, that teaches learners basic conflict resolution skills based on the recognition of each person’s intrinsic worth (Clark, 2011). The PACTs view their work as empowering a portion of the population that continues to live in demeaning poverty resulting from apartheid and which has yet to be addressed by the current regime. The activity of a second organisation, Caritas Southern Africa, presents another example of education and formation peacebuilding that empowers people to respond to conflict. Like Damietta, Kwa-Zulu Natal-based Caritas runs peacebuilding programmes in schools, but with a primary focus of giving learners living in difficult social settings ‘the tools and techniques they need to deal with their feelings of anger and frustration in a constructive manner’ (Clark, 2011: 355). The two small organisations of Damietta and Caritas are evidence of the presence of education and formation initiatives in South Africa. However, a search of the Queen’s University Library Catalogue, JSTOR, SCOPUS, and other databases did not reveal any further evidence of academic literature on religious initiatives to conscientise communities on issues of injustice. Neither did the search reveal any more material on religious involvement in building conflict resolution skills in South African communities. Despite this lack of academic material, further investigation using other online resources such as Google Scholar did reveal additional examples of education peacebuilding activities. The Cape Town Interfaith Initiative is one example 82
of a relatively well-resourced organisation practising this sort of peacebuilding. According to the Initiative’s website, it conducts its interfaith work ‘[t]o support the [WCRLF] in its interaction with government and other sectors of civil society around the critical issues of our time’ (Cape Town Interfaith Initiative, n.d.). Another example of education peacebuilding work is that of the Cape Town-based FBO The Warehouse (one of the case study organisations in this thesis), which runs regular Church Unity Forum meetings. The forum meetings aim to bring together church leaders in the Greater Cape Town area to discuss issues of race, gender, class, and poverty that hinder relationship building between churches. 5) Transitional justice Archbishop Desmond Tutu, in his role as Chairman of the South African TRC, is widely cited as endowing proceedings with a Christian religious character. However, Shore (2009: 61) notes that Tutu was in fact only one part of the religious whole: religious actors disproportionately influenced proceedings, as about one-third of the 17 commissioners were either serving or former religious leaders. Indeed, Graybill (1998: 43) observed at the time that although ‘the TRC has a clear political focus, it is at its heart a deeply theological and ethical initiative’. Shore and Kline’s (2006: 323) observation that the South African churches ‘were one of the few institutions that had both the organisational capability and the infrastructure to assist in establishing and conducting a truth commission’, leads one to conclude that the TRC’s dual character – moral and political – was perhaps unavoidable from the outset. The religious composition of the TRC’s leadership undoubtedly affected the way the commission viewed its work. Meiring (2002) notes how Tutu conducted hearings in his clerical attire and insisted on opening hearings with a prayer. Furthermore, in his foreword to the TRC’s final report, the Archbishop explicitly described a nationalism born of religious ties: ‘Let us celebrate our diversity, our differences. God wants us as we are. … We are sisters and brothers in one family – God’s family, the human family’ (Tutu, 1998: 22). This religiosity prompted scholars to criticise the TRC’s overt goal of encouraging reconciliation and forgiveness, as in the case of a relative of one the so-called Craddock Four victims. Tutu (2010) himself has recounted the story, recalling how ‘the teenage daughter of one of the victims was asked: “Would
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you be able to forgive the people who did this to you and your family?” She answered, “We would like to forgive, but we would just like to know who to forgive”’. This poignant example illustrates the difficulty of taking a restorative approach to severe injustices, but Shore and Kline (2006: 316) maintain that ‘the redemptivesuffering narrative was an empowering, emancipatory discourse with both personal and political meaning’ which enabled victims to tell their stories at the hearings. Furthermore, Shore and Kline (2006: 328) assert that though the TRC’s ‘religiouspersonal version of truth-telling’ did not lead to sufficient financial reparations for victims (a weakness), the religious character of the Commission helped establish a ‘moral community’ and renewed the value of religious institutions as part of civil society. 6) Relief and development In 2003, President Thabo Mbeki stated the following: ‘Given our divided history, religious organisations have an important role to play in the reconstruction and development of our country, especially in the welfare and civil society sectors’ (quoted in Chidester, 2006: 62). And indeed, religious organisations have been involved in a range of relief and development projects during the democratic period. These have notably included treatment programmes linked to HIV/AIDS in some of the poorest areas of South Africa (Clark, 2011; Burchardt, 2013). Religious involvement in helping alleviate the effects of the HIV and AIDS pandemic was precipitated in no small part by the denialist policies of Thabo Mbeki himself and Manto TshabalalaMsimang, his health minister (Burchardt, 2013). Clark (2011: 357) also mentions how the Gauteng-based Mercy Ministries South Africa and the Cape Town-based Institute for the Healing of Memories, which run psychosocial care programmes, frequently link their counselling programmes with individual and interpersonal ‘forgiveness, healing and reconciliation’. The latter organisation holds particular significance as a religious peacebuilding organisation working in the development sector, as it was established by Father Michael Lapsley in 1998 ‘to give victims who did not testify before the TRC an opportunity to tell their stories’ (Clark, 2011: 357). An Anglican priest and activist who was exiled from South Africa after being expelled by the apartheid state, Father Lapsley famously lost both hands and was blinded in one eye
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as a result of a letter bomb arranged by the South African security forces when he was living in Lesotho in 1982. As a peacebuilding category, relief and development is broad, encompassing a range of activities. Catholic Welfare and Development, the Cape Town-based organisation started in 1972 by two social workers in response to the poverty wrought by apartheid policies, exemplifies this diversity. CWD is now one of the longestestablished NGOs in South Africa, operating out of five community development centres across the city and conducting its work through a range of programmes including 1) Community-based capacity development, 2) Early childhood services, 3) Economic empowerment, and 4) Disaster response (CWD, n.d.). The Central Methodist Mission in Johannesburg, already mentioned in this section for its work on advocacy and observation activities, has also conducted a range of educational projects and skills development programmes for displaced immigrants (Kuljian, 2011). The CMM gained prominence as a humanitarian church in 2008 when widespread attacks by South Africans on foreigners forced immigrants out of their homes. Many churches at the time provided temporary shelter to victims of the violence and gathered and distributed material resources for the displaced immigrants (Phakathi, 2010). Indeed, Phakathi (2010) notes that churches were often able to respond rapidly to victims’ needs because they had existing development programmes in townships and informal settlements. Where the CMM was conspicuous among the national response was that it sustained and grew its provision of services to refugees beyond the immediate crisis. In doing so, ‘the CMM publicly challenged local government, the police … and other observers, including its own umbrella organisation, the Methodist Church of Southern Africa’ (Bompani, 2015: 200). Under the leadership of Minister Paul Verryn, a former anti-apartheid activist who was a Bishop in the Methodist Church at the time that he established the refugee programmes, the central Johannesburg church embodied the sort of pro-poor, pro-marginalised values that had animated the liberationist antiapartheid movement in the church. Conclusion: Christian Religious Peacebuilding and Transformation, Then and Now As a way of ‘engaging with and transforming the relationships, interests, discourses and, if necessary, the very constitution of society that supports the continuation of 85
violent conflict’ (Miall, 2004: 4), conflict transformation is multi-faceted – several activities constitute the process of moving from conflict to lasting peace. This chapter has shown that religious peacebuilding during the apartheid period focused intensely on Advocacy issues and Education and Formation activities, although it did also encompass work in the Conciliation and Mediation, Observation and Witness, and Relief and Development categories. As a type of religious peacebuilding, Advocacy links to the conflict transformation agenda of building positive peace, including ‘the egalitarian distribution of power and resources’ (Galtung, 1969: 183). Education and Formation activities are also well suited to responding to conflict situations, as educators try to foster mutual understanding of a conflict, attempt to demystify ‘the other’, and conscientise people most affected by the conflict to recognise their potential to challenge the status quo. As anti-apartheid religious peacebuilding activities responded to the social and political situation of the time, they contributed to the early stages of transforming the conflict in South Africa. As the country’s politics started to change in the early 1990s with the release of ANC leaders and the start of the inter-party negotiations, a noticeably forward-looking Education and Formation activity emerged that would shape church-state relations during the post-apartheid period and Christian responses to the specific transformation needs of the country. This was namely the proposition of a theology of reconstruction linked to the idea that the church should stand in critical solidarity with the post-apartheid ruling party to support transformation. This strand of religious peacebuilding allowed the church to reimagine the conflict and encourage broad-based change (positive peace). As South Africa exited the apartheid period, the church suffered from a momentary crisis of identity, in that it lacked the certainty of its role in the antiapartheid movement. The church, as with civil society generally, began to build much closer ties to the government than at any time during the apartheid era (disregarding the DRC). In part, this complemented the notion that it should act as a partner to the democratic government to rebuild the country. In the South African post-conflict context, transformation has involved processes of political, economic, social, and cultural change, which I described in detail in the preceding chapter. The church has typically not been involved in the process of economic transformation. Political transformation was largely attained by 1994 with the help of churches in the antiapartheid struggle, but critics have observed that the church-state relationship in the 86
democratic period has been, until recently, defined less by critical solidarity than by ‘alignment and co-optation’ (Bompani, 2013: 135). Nevertheless, its advocacy work in recent years indicates a move towards greater independence from the South African government and a clearer intent to influence political and public affairs. It has been in the realms of cultural transformation and social transformation that the church has been most active in the post-apartheid era, although the literature on this ‘transformative turn’ has to date been dominated by the field of practical theology which has principally focused on types of development rather than examining the ways in which people and organisations interact to disrupt or reaffirm structural and cultural forms of violence (for example, see Erasmus, 2005; Kareithi, Rogers, Bowers, and Herman, 2006; Bowers du Toit, 2012). Only Ganiel (2006, 2007) in the social sciences has provided a study of the sociological relationship between religious peacebuilding and transformation in South Africa. This study builds on Ganiel’s work to theorise the relationship between religious peacebuilding and transformation, linking this to religious peacebuilding studies overall. The following chapter discusses the design of the research project. It also presents the research questions the project has attempted to answer, which have been derived from engagement with the literature in these first three chapters.
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Chapter 4 Research Design Introduction The previous three chapters reviewed the literature relevant to this thesis: Chapter 1 gave an overview of the religious peacebuilding literature and explained its conceptual link to conflict transformation. It also emphasised the need for theoretical and conceptual improvement in the discipline. Chapter 2 examined the particular meaning of transformation in South Africa; it noted how initiatives to engineer a peaceful and equitable society have focused primarily on rectifying the racial disparities caused by colonial and apartheid policies. The first two chapters formed the basis for Chapter 3, which presented an overview of the past 65 years of religious peacebuilding in South Africa. It concluded with a discussion of religious actors’ recent focus on transformation, which this thesis analyses as a form of post-conflict religious peacebuilding. The current chapter moves away from the literature to discuss the research design in seven sections. In what follows, I first discuss the study’s methodological approach and introduce how the research employed Michael Burawoy’s (1998a, 1998b) extended case method. In line with Burawoy’s emphasis on the imperative of reflexivity in research, I subsequently consider how my identity as a white South African man affected the research process and outcomes. Thirdly, I present the methods I used to gather data, namely semi-structured interviews and participant observation, and describe the purposive sampling procedure of selecting appropriate case study organisations and interview participants. I also reintroduce the two main case study organisations. The fourth section of this chapter outlines how I negotiated access to field sites and interview respondents, after which I explain how I analysed the research data using thematic analysis. I also provide information on the processes of transcribing and coding interviews, and discuss the management of ethics and risk in the field. I conclude by examining the methodological challenges and potential weaknesses of the research design. As with all research projects, my research questions guided the design of my study, including data collection methods and data analysis (Bryman, 2008). To set the
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foundation for the chapter, I present the research questions below. I formulated four main research questions, taking into account the need for theoretical and conceptual improvement in the religious peacebuilding field and the need to better understand religious peacebuilding in South Africa today: 1. How do two Christian organisations – The Warehouse and Fusion – help, if at all, to transform post-apartheid society so that durable peace can be achieved in South Africa? 2. What are the micro-level practices of transformation among Christian actors who either work for or interact with The Warehouse and Fusion? a. How do these actors, based in different sites of Cape Town, understand the concept of transformation in post-apartheid South Africa? b. How do these actors try to translate their understanding of transformation into individual and social action? 3. What are The Warehouse and Fusion’s organisational practices of transformation? a. How do the organisations’ understandings of the concept of transformation influence who they target and how they conduct their activities? b. What strategies do The Warehouse and Fusion employ to navigate social and economic power differentials within their organisations and when interacting with their target groups? 4. What strategic social spaces in South African civil society do The Warehouse and Fusion occupy as they conduct their religious peacebuilding activities? Denzin and Lincoln (2003: 13, emphasis in original) state that researchers undertaking qualitative work ‘seek answers to questions that stress how social experience is created and given meaning’. I emphasised the ‘how’ in formulating my research questions and did indeed take a qualitative approach to try to answer them. I used participant observation and semi-structured interview techniques, two complementary methods of data collection closely associated with qualitative research
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(Hammersley and Atkinson, 1995; Bryman, 2008). The following section elaborates on the methodological frameworks that informed the methods I used to gather the research data. Research Methodology Methodological orientations are well entrenched in our scientific ‘habitus’, guiding our imagination, framing our academic quotidian, defining our sociological persona (Burawoy 1998b: 18). Denzin and Lincoln (2003: 16) contend that one of the differences between qualitative and quantitative researchers is that the former subscribe to ‘postmodern sensibilities’, namely that there is no single, objective reality to be studied. Postmodern accounts of the social world are exemplified by studies that draw on, among others, interpretivist and social constructivist paradigms – two philosophical frameworks which in their strongest forms view social reality as constructed through language (Gorski, 2013). Considering postmodernism’s implication that researchers who conduct detailed interviews and participant observation will only ever be able to reveal partial truths (Hammersley and Atkinson, 1995; Brewer, 2000), it is unsurprising that qualitative researchers have contested the spirit of Denzin and Lincoln’s assertion. For example, Brewer (2000: 47) expresses concern that an ‘extreme postmodern’ approach to the social world is nihilistic. He emphasises the value of ‘post postmodern’ (Brewer, 2000: passim) qualitative research, citing projects that argue for a strong awareness of the continually produced nature of social life yet maintain that carefully planned studies can produce accurate accounts of social practices and interactions (Hammersley and Atkinson, 1995; Brewer, 2000; O’Reilly, 2009). Brewer (2000) lists three versions of realism that inform post postmodern research involving participant observation methods. These are subtle realism, analytical realism, and critical realism. In contrast to interpretivism and constructivism, realism posits that reality is not linguistically mediated or caused by human interaction (Gorski, 2013). My own sociological persona, to use Burawoy’s phrase, is shaped by interpretivist and constructivist convictions tempered by a belief in the existence of ‘invisible but real social processes’ (Burawoy, 1998a: 15). In this sense it bears similarities to critical realism and its focus on trying to understand the social structures that produce social reality (Bryman, 2008). However, I prefer to draw 90
on Burawoy’s (1998a: passim) notion of a ‘reflexive model of science’, which uses Giddens’s (1991) structuration theory as a guide to study the links between people (social actors) and social structures, as well as micro- and macro-processes. Burawoy (1998a: 5) explains reflexive science in the following way: Premised upon our own participation in the world we study, reflexive science deploys multiple dialogues to reach explanations of empirical phenomena. Reflexive science starts out from dialogue, virtual or real, between observer and participants, embeds such dialogue within a second dialogue between local processes and extralocal forces that in turn can only be comprehended through a third, expanding dialogue of theory with itself. The reflexive science model contrasts with what Burawoy terms the positive science model, which as its name suggests is characterised by elements of positivism and an emphasis on scientific distance – ‘a disposition of detachment’ (Burawoy, 1998a: 10). Burawoy presents participant observation as the quintessential application of reflexive science by means of the ‘extended case method’ (Burawoy, 1998a: passim). He explains that the extended case method can be used ‘to extract the general from the unique, to move from the “micro” to the “macro”, and to connect the present to the past in anticipation of the future, all by building on pre-existing theory’ (Burawoy, 1998a: 5). Methodologically, the extended case method is interpretivist in that it involves ‘observation techniques which seek to make sense of actors’ actions and language within their “natural” setting’ (Williams, 2000: 210), and it is weakly realist in that it tries to understand the social forces that produce and reproduce social processes born of social interactions. It is also constructivist in that knowledge is constructed through the interaction of the researcher and the researched, what Burawoy (1998a: passim) refers to as ‘intersubjectivity’. These are all methodological characteristics that complement this study’s research questions, which range from the interpersonal to the structural level of analysis. As a research method, the extended case method involves participant observation with the possibility of also conducting in-depth interviews. I review the details of these data collection methods with reference to my study in the Methods section below. First, however, I discuss the issue of reflexivity in my study. It is the bedrock of Burawoy’s methodology and therefore central to this study’s research design. 91
Reflexivity: The Importance of Identity in Conducting Research in South Africa In responding to postmodernism’s critique of the representation and legitimacy of data, post postmodern methodologies, including the extended case method, emphasise the importance of researcher reflexivity (Brewer, 2000). The reflexive model of science recognises that research, whether participant observation or interview-based, always encroaches on the lives of research participants. In this respect, Burawoy (1998a: 14) refers to researcher ‘interventions’ – moments which are not only unavoidable in research, but necessary to uncover ‘the hidden secrets of the participant’s world’. Consequently, researcher reflection on the context of interventions, including the power relations at play, is a precondition of qualitative research that uses participant observation and in-depth interviews as data collection methods. Burawoy (1998a: 24) refers to a ‘self-critical reflexive science’ in describing research that acknowledges the power inequalities that exist in the world as well as those that exist in conducting research and analysing data. Because of the long history of identity politics in South Africa, a researcher’s personal identity has heightened links to power relations in the field and is the natural starting point for a reflexive account. In my case, I am a white South African man, born in 1985 during the tail end of apartheid. These are all characterisations that inevitably affected my relationships with participants. In order to give a vignette of the race-power nexus at work, I reproduce a short excerpt from an interview I conducted with a middle-aged black church leader living and working in a township on the outskirts of Cape Town: Participant: And [s] my, you just lift my standards on the community. Researcher: Just because you have a? Participant: A relation with white people. Now people they trust me more. Yah, [participant’s name], they got a contact with other white people. Some of these: ‘Eh, just tell your white people to do something for us’. You see. […] Now you just lift my standard. This was the most extreme situation I encountered during my observation and interviews and captured most vividly how South Africa is still a racialised country, symbolically as well as economically. It raised an issue I had already considered during the design of my study, namely whether I was too compromised as a white South African to conduct research that involved participants from all racial groups. In the 92
South African context of continued racial inequality, Vice (2010: 340) argues, ‘For white South Africans, work on the self, done in humility and silence, might indicate the recognition that any voice in the public sphere would inevitably be tainted by the vicious feature of whiteness’. From this perspective, self-conscious acknowledgment of one’s place in society is insufficient to overcome ‘the politics of representation’ (Kobayashi, 1994: 76). Vice (2010: 338) proposes that all white South Africans are implicated in their ongoing privilege – derived from the injustices of the past – which, she concludes, ‘infects every encounter’. All that is left for them to do is turn inwards and regenerate themselves morally. This is an uncompromising and controversial stance that, like strong postmodernism with qualitative research, asserts that the only sound approach is to research the self. In contrast to this alienating worldview, the feminist researcher Kobayashi (1994: 76) acknowledges the power sensitivities in conducting research, but argues that when people focus on individual, differentiating characteristics, ‘instead of creating solidarity and communication with others, we erect barriers of difference. Difference becomes the existential condition, and distance rather than connection the geographic reality’. Whereas Kobayashi proposes that people of different race, colour, gender, and sexuality try to dwell in partial commonality, Vice promotes an existential condition of difference. In conducting my own research I acknowledge the privilege and power that whiteness carries with it in South Africa. As someone conducting research with a range of participants, some of whom were amongst the poorest demographic in the country, this power was intensified (Nama and Swartz, 2002). However, in the same way that some researchers propose a post postmodern approach as an alternative to radical postmodern sensibilities, I take a pragmatic approach to the race question. That is, I prefer to reflect critically on my privilege in South African society rather than abandon my research along with any aspirations for solidarity. Methodologically, in choosing to use the reflexive science model I explicitly disavowed a racialised ontology. What this means is that while my research participants and I might experience our lives as racially categorised people, this is due to ‘the interdependence of individual experience and the broader social, political and economic milieu’ (Samuels, 2009: 1607). Treating race not only as an issue of social identity but also as a structural force in society facilitates research that recognises that
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racial difference is not the existential condition but rather the result of socioeconomic contexts. Methods The subject of race in South Africa frequently inflames debates in politics, in news media, social media, and sometimes in the home. It is so much a part of South African cultural relations and so much on the lips of politicians that it permeates every sphere of life – public, political, and private. Given that it is ever-present, race is the opposite of a taboo subject. Yet ultimately the topic is, to use Lee’s (1993: 3) expression, ‘laden with emotion’. Race is a sensitive research topic and the methods I used were appropriate to the task of collecting sensitive data. On a broad level, researchers who have conducted sensitive research agree that qualitative methods are most suited to gathering data on topics that might cause discomfort in participants, or when participants might be reluctant to divulge personal thoughts or insights into a certain issue (Lee, 1993; Brewer, Lockhart, and Rodgers, 1998; Liamputtong, 2007; DicksonSwift, James, and Liamputtong, 2008). One of the main reasons these researchers emphasise qualitative techniques in conducting sensitive research is that methods such as participant observation and in-depth and/or semi-structured interviews enable researchers to develop a rapport with research participants. Lee (1993: 208) describes trust as having ‘an emergent character’ in the way it forms over time as the researcher and participants spend time together. He describes trust as flowing out of ‘friendship, mutual self-disclosure and reciprocity’ between the parties involved. In terms of my methodology, the weakly constructivist extended case method emphasises dialogue and interaction between the researcher and study participants. It celebrates this involvement of the researcher and lays the foundation for a study that is able to acknowledge the particular sensitivities of a topic – in this case, race and transformation in two small Christian organisations, as well as in the greater South African context. In line with common participant observation practice, I collected data through first-hand observation of the day-to-day workings of The Warehouse, a small Christian FBO based in Cape Town in the Western Cape, and its interactions with Christian organisations and churches in the city (Spradley, 2016[1980]). I also conducted participant observation at another small, Christian development organisation, Fusion, which had close ties to The Warehouse. I started my 94
approximately four-month fieldwork period in mid-August 2013 with the intent of observing ‘how actors work, act and interact in their natural environment as they go about their daily activities’ (Eberle and Maeder, 2011: 54). I provide further details of the participant observation process in the Data Collection section below. Burawoy’s (1998a, 1998b) extended case method applies specifically to participant observation, but he does make room for interviews in the reflexive model of science. He specifically mentions the psychoanalytic interview as germane to a reflexive paradigm because he believes it is ‘self-consciously intersubjective, highlights process through space and time, and locates the individual in historical and social milieus’ (Burawoy, 1998b: 16). It is unclear exactly why he chooses to distinguish between participant observation and interviews in the reflexive science model, as researchers tend to describe semi-structured and unstructured qualitative interviews within interpretative, constructivist paradigms as flexible and able to generate rich data (Bryman, 2008). By definition, too, they are intersubjective – Kvale (1996: 2) describes the qualitative interview as ‘a construction site of knowledge’ – which is why Lee (1993) and Dickson-Swift, James, and Liamputtong (2008) propose interviews as particularly appropriate for research on sensitive topics. Not only do qualitative interviews allow researchers ‘to understand the world from subjects’ points of view, to unfold the meaning of peoples’ experiences, to uncover their lived experiences, to uncover their lived world prior to scientific explanations’ (Kvale, 1996: 1), but they also provide opportunities for interviewers to relate to their respondents physically,
psychologically,
and
emotionally
(Dickson-Swift,
James,
and
Liamputtong, 2008). Considering these various characterisations of qualitative interviews, which I believe complement the extended case method, I decided to undertake semi-structured interviews with staff members of The Warehouse and Fusion as well as with representatives of organisations who had contact with the two case study organisations. I preferred semi-structured interviews to unstructured ones as the former allowed me to concentrate on certain aspects of the FBOs’ transformation work while still giving me the flexibility to pursue lines of questioning that arose unexpectedly during the course of interviews. As Bryman (2008) notes, this is a fairly typical strategy for theoretically driven studies. I also decided against conducting focus groups, as I wanted participants to feel comfortable speaking openly about the sensitive topic of race. I was aware that one of the strengths of focus groups is that they can reveal ‘the 95
ways in which individuals collectively make sense of a phenomenon and construct meanings around it’ (Bryman, 2008: 476), but was confident I would be able to observe these interactions during my participant observation research. In what follows, I describe the selection of cases and interview respondents.
Sampling of cases According to Burawoy’s reflexive science model, research designs should be guided by a theory or a research programme, with the goal of using empirical findings to develop that theory. Of the extended case method, Hennen (2004: 504) observes that ‘cases are selected specifically for their theoretical relevance, and by using a case to challenge existing theory, generalisation from a single case study becomes possible’. In designing and carrying out my research project I intended to develop the religious peacebuilding programme, which has to date been dominated by studies and theories produced in the United States. In my review of the literature on religious peacebuilding (see Chapter 1), I highlighted the need for conceptual and theoretical improvement in the discipline, calls for this having been made by a handful of scholars. In the context of religious peacebuilding in South Africa, I planned to elaborate on how Christians understand transformation and what they do to help cement peace in the country. After seeming to fall out of the public sphere during much of the postapartheid period, religious organisations have in recent years become more visible again. Within this moment of re-engaged religion, there is evidence that religious organisations and churches have incorporated certain discourses of transformation into their work on building racial unity and structural change within their own organisations, as well as encouraging it in society generally. The Warehouse, a small Christian FBO based in Cape Town, represented this trend well in the way it used the idea of transformation to guide its work on alleviating poverty, inequality, and division in Cape Town. I was aware of the work The Warehouse was doing before I began my PhD and selected it as a case study because of its relevance to my research questions and the possibility that studying it would allow me to elaborate on religious peacebuilding theory in South Africa and more generally. On my arrival in Cape Town, The Warehouse provided a vital point of contact with a network of Christian organisations, inter-faith organisations, and churches in Cape Town. Many of the church leaders within the network were based in some of the 96
most deprived areas of the city, although representatives from wealthier churches were also frequent visitors – the more affluent churches in the St John’s Parish were particularly notable in this regard, coming from the wealthy Southern Suburbs. In short, I knew The Warehouse to be a hub, a space where people from diverse economic and racial backgrounds met during coffee afternoons and workshops, among other events. While I was aware that The Warehouse’s network was diverse, I did not know until I arrived in Cape Town and spent time at Warehouse events which people or what organisations I would encounter. In sampling within my case study (The Warehouse), I always bore in mind my objective to develop the religious peacebuilding programme, especially as it relates to understanding faith-based practices of transformation in South Africa. I became aware of my second case study organisation, Fusion, early in the course of my fieldwork. It was originally a project at The Warehouse but became independent during my time in Cape Town. Fusion also used the idea of transformation as a guiding principle in its work, leading me to focus my attention on Fusion alongside The Warehouse. My early decision to incorporate Fusion into my project as a second case study illustrates how a theoretically driven project can help guide the purposive selection of cases once the researcher enters the field. In terms of interview respondents, I approached potential participants from a range of backgrounds and ‘race groups’, with the specific intention of shedding light on how Christian organisations are working to resolve post-conflict transformation issues in Cape Town. I did not impose any particular criteria on age, gender, race, or economic background, though I did try to recruit as representative a sample as the case studies allowed. Cohen and Arieli (2011) have discussed snowball sampling as an appropriate method of enlisting participants in sensitive research contexts, especially when conditions make it difficult for researchers to identify and approach potential respondents. Snowball sampling involves accessing potential research participants with the help of members of a particular social network, potentially increasing levels of researcher legitimacy and, consequently, trust between the researcher and researched (Cohen and Arieli, 2011). Considering the relative sensitivity of my topic and my reluctance to cold-call potential participants, I relied on snowball sampling in the initial stages of my participant observation period to introduce myself to potential research participants. Once I had made these links, I reverted to a more direct recruitment technique. 97
Data Collection I began my fieldwork in Cape Town in mid-August 2013 and immediately contacted The Warehouse. I soon after contacted Fusion and subsequently spent two months collecting data as a participant observer before conducting semi-structured interviews with all Warehouse and Fusion staff members. I also interviewed church leaders and members of FBOs with whom I had interacted at Warehouse events. I refer to these participants as the ‘Warehouse network’ in Table 1, which reviews my research activities. The ‘Fusion network’ includes those participants who interacted with Fusion on a regular basis but were not part of the staff. Table 1 displays the total time spent gathering observation data and the total interviews conducted with members of each organisation. Table 1. Field research tasks undertaken during August-December 2013 Organisation
Observation Time (hrs)
Number of Interviewees
Interview Time (hrs)
The Warehouse
54
15
12
Warehouse network
18.5
22
16.5
Fusion
3.5
5
6
Fusion network
1
4
3.5
77
46
38
Table 1 shows that I conducted 77 hours of participant observation. Throughout the research period I recorded detailed fieldnotes containing observation data. Table 1 also indicates that I conducted interviews with 46 participants, all of them audio recorded. This translated to 38 hours of recorded interview data. I also conducted one email interview with a participant within The Warehouse’s network who, though forced to cancel a face-to-face interview, was still interested in taking part in the study. Figure 1, below, gives a guide to the participant observation sites and interview locations across Cape Town.
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Figure 1. Map of Greater Cape Town – Summary of observation and interview sites
Of the participant observation sites, The Warehouse is based slightly to the left of centre on the map of Cape Town. It is slightly to the north of Ottery and to the east of the cluster of pin drops in the Southern Suburbs alongside Table Mountain; Fusion is located in the centre of the map, just north of Philippi. It is a distance of approximately six kilometres and a 10-minute drive from The Warehouse. I conducted interviews at each of the locations on the map, several of these in Khayelitsha, a township represented by a cluster of pin drops in the bottom-right hand corner of the map. As an indication of the scale and distance I travelled between sites, it takes approximately 30 minutes to drive between The Warehouse and Khayelitsha, a distance of just under 27 kilometres. For practical reasons I have not indicated the site of every interview, but by giving an overview of my fieldwork sites across Greater Cape Town I hope to convey a sense of distance and difference, and the extent of the network associated with The Warehouse.
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Negotiating access to field sites and interview respondents Negotiating access to research sites can be fraught, especially when the researcher is studying a sensitive topic (Lee, 1993). Fortunately, I faced relatively few challenges to entering The Warehouse as a place of research. I was familiar with The Warehouse, having visited it briefly on five occasions prior to starting my PhD, and I had also been in contact with the Director before submitting my doctoral application. I had specifically discussed with him the possibility of spending time at the organisation observing its work and interviewing staff members on issues of Christianity and postapartheid transformation in South Africa. At that early stage, I believe I was fortunate that a colleague at the research institute where I was employed at the time (the Human Sciences Research Council) knew The Warehouse director in their personal capacity. My colleague did not directly influence my chances at negotiating access to the organisation, but it is my opinion they did indirectly act as a ‘bridge’, providing me with what Lee (1993: 131) describes as ‘a link into a new social world’ by means of mutual association. Inasmuch as the director did not promise me interviews with staff members, on arriving in Cape Town to begin my research it was not certain I would succeed in all my goals. Nonetheless, having a sense of legitimacy meant that I did not anticipate facing any major challenges as a participant observer at The Warehouse. Furthermore, considering my slight familiarity with the organisation, I did not enter The Warehouse as a complete outsider. I was also familiar with the non-denominational Christian character of the organisation, having been involved in organising church events myself during 2004-5 besides being an irregular member of an Anglican congregation for several years following that. On starting my research, I found myself both ‘within’ and ‘without’, in the sense that I had at no time been a member of the organisation but was familiar with the Cape Town Christian community to which it belonged. In the months that followed, I strived to maintain what Brewer (2000: 59) refers to as ‘the balance between “insider” and “outsider” status’. Negotiating access to Fusion was a very different experience. On meeting a representative from the Manenberg-based organisation to introduce myself and my study, I was struck by the staff member’s guardedness in comparison to The Warehouse staff. She emphasised that Fusion’s days are often unstructured and seemed anxious that I did not disrupt what equilibrium did exist; she stated outright that I
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would not be able to attend closed sessions the Fusion staff held with young people from the area. Certainly, Fusion was going through a transition period of becoming an independent organisation having been run as a Warehouse project for several years, and this might have contributed to the staff member’s anxiety. It was only later that I realised Fusion’s insistence on building long-term, meaningful relationships with high-risk young people in the area partially informed this early cautiousness towards me. Participant observation Polsky (quoted in Sluka, 1990: 121) advises that researchers doing work in sensitive or dangerous areas should at first ‘keep your eyes and ears open but keep your mouth shut. At first try to ask no questions whatsoever. Before you can ask questions ... you should get the “feel” of their [participants’] world by extensive and attentive listening’. The Warehouse, where I did most of my participant observation, operates in a ‘middleground’ of sorts – a semi-industrial neighbourhood located between the affluent suburbs surrounding Table Mountain and the much poorer areas to the east of the city. The lower middle-class area is not dangerous, but the topic of race relations is sensitive. I therefore followed Polsky’s advice to hold back on asking questions directly related to race dynamics within the organisation and between Warehouse staff members and their network of church leaders who attend regular events. In contrast to The Warehouse, Fusion is located in a much poorer, gang- and drug-affected area of Cape Town. I had a much greater sense of being an outsider when I entered Fusion’s world, a world much more precarious for everyone living in it than the one The Warehouse occupies. During my early visits I kept my mouth shut, as Polsky recommends, and I did more observing than participating. I joined the team for ‘prayer walks’ around the neighbourhood but tried to get a feel for how the Fusion staff interacted with residents prior to trying to build relationships myself. The time eventually came for me to conduct interviews, which I had decided to do in the final month-and-a-half of my fieldwork, once I had familiarised myself with the research sites. Before then, however, I became involved in Warehouse events such as discussion forums on issues of church unity, training events directed at church leaders, and monthly open-house volunteer events called Justice Saturdays. Hammersley and Atkinson (1995: 127) note that ‘there are some sites where the 101
exchange of accounts among participants is particularly likely to take place; and these are often rewarding locations’. They give the example of a staff room at a school. In my case I was often rewarded by attending the daily morning prayer sessions at The Warehouse. The meetings ran between 8.30 and 9.30 each morning, giving the staff plenty of time to share stories from the previous day’s work or, in the case of Mondays, to give accounts of their weekend. I was interested in the topics raised during prayer sessions – a staff member would lead the session each morning and usually focused on a particular social issue, whether that was the Syrian conflict, child abuse in South Africa, or race relations in the country. Often, though, the interactions between staff and, sometimes, visitors were more valuable in giving me insight into the ‘ideological framework’ (Hammersley and Atkinson, 1995: 127) that informed participants’ work in The Warehouse and outside it. As I have mentioned, I started my fieldwork wanting to answer the questions of what the interpersonal and organisational transformational practices were at The Warehouse and Fusion. I also wanted to find out how people and organisations from various backgrounds, located in different parts of Cape Town, constructed commonalities in understanding despite tensions linked to race, class, and South Africa’s history. I therefore tried as far as possible to attend all events hosted at The Warehouse offices which involved non-Warehouse participants. I took part in three Justice Saturday mornings, three Church Unity Forum discussion afternoons, one Transformational Development training day, The Warehouse’s Annual General Meeting (AGM) and 10-year celebration, and a meeting convened by The Warehouse to discuss a disaster response policy with churches and other Christian organisations in Cape Town. Participants at these events often made their own jottings in notebooks, meaning I was usually able to take notes without having to be overly concerned whether I would ‘strain relations’ or make participants uncomfortable (Emerson, Fretz, and Shaw, 1995: 23). Although the periods I spent at Fusion were less regular and also less structured, mainly because the organisation’s strategy involved fewer planned events, I visited the Manenberg office frequently and attended an anti-corruption event planned by Fusion, one of the organisation’s regular prayer walks, as well as a local community meeting to discuss a truce between gangs in the area which the Fusion director had been influential in arranging. In line with popular opinion among qualitative researchers doing participant observation, I created full accounts of my days in the field as soon as possible 102
(Emerson, Fretz, and Shaw, 1995; Hammersley and Atkinson, 1995; Bryman, 2008). I typically spent two to three hours typing up full field notes on my laptop computer at the end of each day spent at The Warehouse, Fusion, or with interview respondents. I drew on jottings in my fieldwork notebook as well as on mental notes I made to describe as fully as possible the events of the day, including the people I met and interacted with, and the conversations and interactions I observed between other people (Bryman, 2008). I always preferred to make short notes during the day as a more concrete reminder of events, however on occasion it was more appropriate to make mental notes, as when I participated completely in an event and did not get a chance to write anything down. In the latter instance I followed Emerson, Fretz, and Shaw’s (1995: 24) suggestion and tried to remember ‘incidents and key phrases that [would] later trigger a fuller recollection of the event or scene’. I typically would only record conversations verbatim if I was using notes as a source; I paraphrased conversations I had observed or been part of but which I subsequently had been unable to make any record of in my notebook. I also invariably used a narrative style that allowed me to describe the events of the day in detail as a series of experiences. I recognised that my field notes were by no means fully objective, but I tried to maintain a simple style and neutral tone in expressing what had happened during the day. In summary, I conducted participant observation and recorded field notes on my experiences for a total of four months between mid-August and mid-December 2013. I had naturally formed acquaintances and cultivated friendships over that period, which made exiting the field a slightly emotional occasion. After such intensive interaction with a group of people, it is common for researchers to feel some attachment to participants and vice versa (Hammersley and Atkinson, 1995; Brewer, 2000). As a result, it is generally suggested that research designs include an ‘exit strategy’ (Brewer, 2000: 101), including plans to leave the field gradually where possible or otherwise in the least disruptive manner. In my case, I designed my fieldwork to conclude in midDecember, at the end of the working year in South Africa. I still prepared to withdraw from the field by informing participants of my plans, but leaving The Warehouse and Fusion was made easier by the way it coincided with the South African summer and people’s expectations that colleagues would leave for annual vacations.
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Semi-structured interviews My early use of snowball sampling allowed me to recruit participants who interacted with The Warehouse but whom I had not yet been able to meet in person. As my participant observation research progressed and I became more familiar with The Warehouse’s network, I met potential participants in ‘natural’ settings, including workshops and discussion forums. I enlisted each of The Warehouse staff members over the course of my participant observation period. I did the same with Fusion once I had made contact and become familiar with the staff at that organisation by accompanying them on their walks through Manenberg as they cultivated relationships with at-risk young people. Table 2 summarises details of the study’s interview participants, including age, race, gender, and organisation affiliation. (See Appendix 1 for a full list of the interviewees, along with select biographical details.) As with Table 1, the Warehouse and Fusion networks include participants who interact with the organisations on a regular basis. Table 2. Summary of interview participant details Total
Male
Female
Black
Coloured
White
Ave. age
The
15
4
11
5
2
8
46
22
14
8
10
2
10
43
Fusion staff
5
3
2
0
3
2
31
Fusion
4
3
1
0
2
2
37
46
24
22
15
9
22
39
Warehouse staff The Warehouse network
network
Table 2 shows that I conducted 46 interviews, 20 of which were with staff members at The Warehouse and Fusion. I initiated interviews with the remaining 26 participants after meeting and mingling with them at Warehouse and Fusion events, eventually introducing my study and asking whether they would consider taking part in it. Each of the participants chose the interview site, with the result that I conducted 104
the 46 interviews at a participant’s workplace, home, or, as on two occasions, at a local café. I therefore conducted all my interviews in places familiar to the respondents. Of the 46 interview respondents I managed to recruit, the youngest was 21 years old, the oldest 63, and the average age 39. As Table 2 indicates, there were 22 white respondents and 24 non-white respondents (15 black and 9 coloured); I interviewed 24 men and 22 women. According to the latest national census, which was conducted in 2011, the breakdown of the three largest demographic groups in the Cape Town population is as follows: coloured (42.4%), black (38.6%), and white (15.7%) (Statistics South Africa, n.d.). Strictly speaking, therefore, I interviewed a proportionally higher number of white participants than actually live in the Greater Cape Town area. I have already explained that I tried to recruit a representative interview cohort, with the important caveat that I was constrained by the organisational constitution of The Warehouse and Fusion, as well as the make-up of the group of people who interacted regularly with these organisations. I discuss the organisational structures of The Warehouse and Fusion in detail in my first findings chapter (Chapter 5). Suffice it to say at this point that the organisational history of The Warehouse as an offshoot of a largely white church (although it has ties to a mixed parish) has in likelihood contributed to there being more white participants in this study than one would otherwise expect. In contrast, Fusion, a small organisation based in the mainly coloured area of Manenberg, has a staff membership that closely reflects its geographical location. Reflecting its original ties to The Warehouse, however, Fusion still has two white staff members. Another notable detail in Table 2 is that there are twice the number of women staff members at The Warehouse as there are men. This is perhaps due to the emphasis The Warehouse historically placed on social work and the predominance of women in this profession in South Africa (Khunou, Pillay, and Nethononda, 2012). Fusion, meanwhile, has a staff membership that is more balanced in terms of gender representation. The latter organisation originally worked with young men at risk of joining gangs in Manenberg; at that stage, three men worked full-time on the Fusion programme. More recently, Fusion has expanded its operations to build relationships with young women in the area, with two women staff members dedicating their time to that, which helps explain the near-parity in gender.
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Prior to entering the field and conducting interviews, I prepared two interview guides.1 I planned to use the first of these to steer my interviews with Warehouse staff members and the second to direct the interviews I conducted with participants who had interacted with The Warehouse. Having elected to incorporate Fusion into my research as a second case study, I adapted the first interview guide accordingly. I used my main research questions, which I listed at the beginning of this chapter, as the starting point for formulating the list of questions for my participants. As such, each of the questions in the interview guides linked to the main research topics but was open-ended. As with all semi-structured interviews, the questions ordered the conversation but were flexible enough that the participants could lead the discussion in directions they thought were important (Bryman, 2008). A challenge I was aware of while planning my research was the fact that I only speak very basic Afrikaans and Xhosa. Along with English, these are the most widely spoken first languages in Cape Town according to statistics drawn from the 2011 national census (Statistics South Africa, n.d.). Though it would have been ideal to speak to participants in their home language, out of necessity I conducted my interviews wholly in English. From personal experience derived from undertaking research while working for two years at the Human Sciences Research Council in Cape Town, I anticipated that most participants would be sufficiently proficient in English to express their ideas fluently. This proved to be the case, although in analysing my data I kept in mind the dynamics of each interview and was sensitive to how this might have affected the data. It is worth noting, too, that the semi-structured nature of the interviews allowed me to expand on or rephrase questions if I thought the interviewee was at first unclear of their meaning. One of the advantages of using semi-structured interviews to gather data is that it enables the researcher ‘to ensure a modicum of comparability of interviewing style’ (Bryman, 2008: 439). While I did not intend to do a direct comparative analysis of interviewee’s responses, I was aware that my sample group would be heterogeneous across age, race, gender, and economic background. I therefore felt more comfortable drawing conclusions from interview data if I knew I had prompted participants to start talking about a topic from a particular point, which ultimately was theory-driven. To reiterate, I was not concerned with standardising interviews, as on many occasions I
1
See Appendices 3a, 3b, and 3c for full interview schedules.
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did not ask a question from the interview guide because in conversation the participant had already touched on it. Furthermore, I shuffled questions within the list according to the natural flow of each conversation. Some qualitative researchers believe interviewers should maintain a professional distance from participants while they conduct interviews. Fontana and Prokos (2007: 70) state, ‘The researcher should avoid getting involved in a “real” conversation in which he or she answers questions asked by the participant or provides personal opinions on the matters discussed’. However, given the sensitive nature of the topic under discussion – I often, for example, had to segue from asking about the challenges of working in a multi-racial organisation to discussing participants’ personal histories of how racial inequality had manifest in their lives – it was easier to approach some of the more uncomfortable questions by trying to empathise with participants about the difficulty of discussing race in South Africa. I tried to build rapport with participants by emphasising that though their particular experiences might be different to my own, we all continue to face challenges when talking about the politics of race in South Africa. These challenges are linked to the history of racism in South Africa and the ongoing racial tensions that attend disparities in social and economic opportunities. My attitude extended to empathising with personal issues unrelated to race, as in the following example in which a Warehouse employee described how she had experienced a faith crisis before joining The Warehouse some six years prior to my research: Participant: Well, it’s that I believe I just don’t have a faith if it’s not about, about (.) the whole picture. I just don’t buy, ‘We’re all gonna be fine when we’re in heaven’. I’ve never bought it as a fundamental of my faith, and, um, because it just seemed to point to too cruel a God [l]. And so, yah, I grew up thinking that I was probably not really a proper Christian because I just didn’t get the [p] I mean, I just couldn’t believe that salvation boiled down to whether I had a ticket into heaven. So, discovering that that didn’t have to be my whole take on the picture was a huge relief because I really didn’t want to stop being a Christian – I love Jesus and there was something very, very (.) that had really captured me about the faith. Researcher: Yah, I only really, I mean, my mom is a Christian but she never really went to church. So I never went to church. It was only when I moved here [Cape Town] in 2000 that I then met my bunch of friends, who all went to church. So then I went along with them. But, I mean, similar to you – I’ll talk to you afterwards probably, it would be interesting to chat
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to you – but similar feelings to you, I suppose. I mean, even now I’m still sort of in between, you know. I had already spent two and a half months at The Warehouse by the time I conducted this interview and had formed a good relationship with this participant, a white, 37-year-old woman. By sharing that I had, and continued to have, misgivings about my faith, I mirrored the participant’s own sentiments but also, I believe, divulged personal information that helped foster a slightly deeper relationship based on mutual experiences. Up to this point I have discussed the technical details of the methods I used to gather interview and observation data. The next stage in the life of my research project was analysis of the data for themes that would help me answer my research questions. The following section describes the steps involved in the data analysis process. Data Analysis Thematic analysis is a widely used tool in generating conceptual categories in qualitative research with the goal of producing theory (Saldaña, 2009). Braun and Clarke (2006: passim) observe that the ‘flexibility’ of thematic analysis lends itself to a diverse range of theoretical and methodological qualitative approaches. In terms of my study, thematic analysis was suitable as a way of examining interview and observation data from an interpretative, constructivist perspective. The first step of almost any qualitative research analysis is the creation of textual data (McLellan, MacQueen, and Neidig, 2003). In my case, preparation of data for thematic analysis entailed transcribing each of my interviews – my observation fieldnotes were already in textual format and did not need further preparatory work. There is now a sizeable literature on the theoretical and methodological aspects of transcription, the consensus being that the transcription process is a value-laden practice involving direct intervention by the researcher into the data (McLellan, MacQueen, and Neidig, 2003; Hammersley, 2010; Gibson, Webb, and vom Lehn, 2014). It is a creative process, which requires explanation. Because my research did not involve a rigid form of analysis such as conversation, narrative, or critical discourse analysis, all of which require high levels of detail in transcriptions, I had more freedom to choose the format I would use to
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transcribe my interviews (Braun and Clarke, 2006). I therefore followed the UK Data Archive (n.d.) guidelines on transcription formats and used a simple convention to organise the text without having to take every detail of the conversations into account. I transcribed all the audio recordings fully as I did not want to make any early assumptions as to what qualified as important or unimportant data, and made a note in-text of when interviewees were inaudible [i], when they stuttered [s], paused very briefly (.), paused [p], paused for an extended period [lp], and when they laughed [l]. In that I used these indicators, I did not transcribe the interviews verbatim. Instead, I represented the recordings as accurately and fully as possible, paying attention to the disruptions in speech but focusing primarily on clarity rather than verisimilitude. In seeking intelligibility, I did not ‘correct’ interviewees’ grammar or mispronunciations of words, as these elements of speech never impinged on the clarity of the data. Ultimately, every decision to add a comma or indicate a short pause in an interviewee’s account reminded me that I was constructing a word-processed text from an oral source (McLellan, MacQueen, and Neidig, 2003). From a methodological perspective, the reflexive science model’s emphasis on interpersonality and reflexivity meant that I could freely acknowledge my intervention in the text without giving up entirely on building a compelling account of religious peacebuilding in post-apartheid South Africa. Having collected almost 38 hours of audio recordings, I had initially thought to pay someone to transcribe all or some of the interviews for me. However, after some consideration – not least the cost of transcription services – I decided to transcribe the interviews myself. In doing so I was able to ensure the ‘quality and trustworthiness’ (Davidson, 2009: 45) of the transcriptions since I knew I was adhering to a transcription convention with which I was familiar. To be doubly sure of the quality of the transcriptions, I revisited each of the transcripts at a later stage to check whether I had made any errors, such as misconceived punctuation which might have altered the meaning of an interviewee’s response. This intensive process allowed me to familiarise myself with the contents of the interviews and helped me in the next stage of analysis, namely coding the data. The coding process, like the transcription process, is painstaking work that requires close attention to textual detail. The intensity of the coding stage is exemplified by a research team that took more than three years to develop a final coding system for their study of how university lecturers reflect on and improve their 109
teaching. They wrote of their coding procedure: ‘We used a recursive, iterative process in developing the codes and increasing our understanding of the phenomenon. We are pleased with the outcome, but the process took much longer than any of us had imagined’ (Weston, Gandell, Beauchamp, McAlpine, Wiseman, and Beauchamp, 2001: 386). My own coding experience was thankfully a much shorter exercise, but it did share a similar iterative character with that of the Weston et al. research team. Once I had finished transcribing the interviews I printed out and read each transcript thoroughly. This was the first stage in developing the coding system I would later apply to the interview data. It entailed ‘descriptive coding’, whereby I manually marked up the transcripts with ‘a word or short phrase [which summarised] the basic topic of a passage of qualitative data’ (Saldaña, 2009: 70). This exercise generated numerous codes, many of which I was able to gather under single umbrella codes. The second coding cycle involved moving from manual coding to coding using the well-known software package NVivo. The primary reason I chose to code using computer software rather than continue manually was that it allowed me to manage large quantities of coded data efficiently. I later retrieved this data in the form of coding summaries, which are well suited to analysis (Saldaña, 2009). From prior experience of using NVivo I also knew that coding electronically makes data management simpler and more easily accessible when returning to analyse the data at a later date, whether that be a matter of months or years. Having coded a transcript in NVivo using my initial codes, the iterative nature of the coding process became apparent. To wit, I noticed that the codes I had used were too detailed to relate easily to the texts. A memo I wrote to myself after the first round of NVivo coding states, ‘I've just finished coding the first of the interview transcripts – [name of participant]. It was difficult to find “the right fit” between the codes I've developed here and the text. It was akin to finding oneself in the embarrassing situation of not being able to find the right word’. I subsequently took a step back and developed a coding system using structural coding, which as Saldaña (2009: 66) observes is a method that involves ‘a contentbased or conceptual phrase representing a topic of inquiry to a segment of data that relates to a specific research question used to frame the interview’. The structural coding method complemented my theory-driven methodology and helped me identify portions of text applicable to my study. In the third coding phase, I coded these larger segments in more detail using the earlier descriptive codes. At the same time, I coded 110
‘in vivo’ for words and phrases frequently mentioned by participants which indicated something of their ‘particular culture, subculture, or microculture’ (Saldaña, 2009: 74). A final cycle made sure I coded each transcript with the full set of codes I had developed and entered into the final version of my codebook. After four cycles, I finished coding my data. Saldaña (2009) notes that codes are not yet fully fledged themes, but the coding process does help in the thematic analysis of data. Braun and Clarke (2006: 83) identify ‘inductive versus theoretical thematic analysis’ as the two main methods of generating themes in sets of data. Whereas inductive analysis is, in the authors’ words, ‘data-driven’, thematic analysis is theorydriven. My thematic analysis was both inductive and theoretical, though it leaned toward the latter because of my theory-driven methodology and subsequent emphasis on structural coding. The descriptive and in vivo codes, which complemented my structural coding method, gave my analysis its inductive quality. Braun and Clarke (2006: 89) describe ‘searching for themes’ among codes, but in the process of coding data, which links text to ideas (Saldaña, 2009), it is more accurate to speak of generating themes from codes. Even within a set of codes, themes are not self-evident; rather, they are constructed. Thus Saldaña (2009: 11, emphasis in the original) quotes Richards and Morse, who state that ‘categorising is how we get “up” from the diversity of data to the shapes of the data, the sorts of things represented. Concepts are how we get up to more general, high-level, and more abstract constructs’. To illustrate the move from codes to themes, I refer to my analysis of how participants described the role of Christian organisations in pursuing transformation in the country. Sub-codes to the main code Christian Organisations and Transformation in PostApartheid South Africa were 1) Forming One’s Identity, 2) Increasing Unity between Different Religious Groups, and 3) Reducing Racial Division. Analysing these different codes for conceptual links, I settled on the theme Transformation means Knowing Your Own Character and Forming Relationships with Others. This captured how the research participants saw transformation as interpersonal and aspirational – a continual process.
Ethics and Risk in Conducting Research in South Africa As with any contemporary sociological research, I designed my project with ethical considerations in mind. There are several ethical frameworks qualitative researchers 111
can draw on, some of them formulated by research councils and others by professional associations (Hammersley and Traianou, 2012; Wiles, 2013). In the UK context, the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) is one of the principal funders of social research projects and Bryman (2008) mentions its ethical code of conduct as influential in the social sciences. Following the ESRC’s guide on ethical research, I ensured that every potential participant understood 1) the purpose of my research; 2) that their participation was voluntary and that they could end their involvement at any time; 3) that all information provided by participants would be kept confidential and that only I would be able to access the data; and 4) that participants’ identities would remain anonymous to others throughout the research process, as well as in my thesis and all future publications. Prior to entering the field, I gained ethical approval for my project through the Compromise after Conflict research programme at the School of Social Science at the University of Aberdeen.2 With regards to ensuring participants understood the purpose of my study, I gained written consent from each interview participant.3 The informed consent form provided to interviewees described my study, stated its relation to the Compromise after Conflict research programme, and outlined interviewees’ rights as a freely participating respondent who could withdraw from the study at any time. Following good practice in maintaining participants’ confidentiality (Bryman, 2008; Hammersley and Traianou, 2012), I have stored the signed consent forms in a locked cabinet along with hard copies of my field notes and interview transcripts. The interview recordings themselves are kept on my personal computer together with electronic versions of field notes and interview transcripts. My computer is protected by a password, meaning only I can access the data. Conveying the purpose of my study during the participant observation period of my fieldwork was less straightforward than the informed consent procedure I followed before conducting interviews. Because my entry into The Warehouse and Fusion was arranged through gatekeepers at the organisations, staff members were often aware of why I was present. Since I started my research at The Warehouse and Fusion on
2
I completed the first year of my PhD programme at the University of Aberdeen. I subsequently transferred to Queen’s University of Belfast after my primary supervisor, Prof. John Brewer, who was also the P.I. of the Compromise after Conflict project, took up a new position at the Institute for the Study of Conflict Transformation and Social Justice (now The Senator George J. Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice). 3 See Appendix 2b for an example of the informed consent form.
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particular dates, the slightly ‘formal’ nature of my entry into the organisations made it easy for me to introduce myself and my research to staff members. It also gave them an opportunity to ask me questions early in the research process. However, this process was more difficult at events at which non-Warehouse or non-Fusion staff were present. Hammersley and Atkinson (1995: 266) note of researchers who conduct participant observation that ‘because [they] carry out research in natural settings their control over the research process is often limited: they simply do not have the power to ensure that all participants are fully informed and freely consent to be involved’. I often found this to be the case during events at which The Warehouse team split participants into small groups for discussion and feedback. I always introduced myself and my study to fellow members of a small group, making clear my intention to take notes of the event. However, I was unable to speak to members of other groups except if there was time to mingle once the event finished. At smaller meetings or events where participants were not split up, it was common for each person to introduce themself and their organisational affiliation. On these occasions I was easily able to explain the purpose of my research. The second, third, and fourth points contained in the ESRC’s ethical guidelines (ensuring participants understand the voluntary nature of their involvement and that their identity and information will be kept anonymous and securely stored) was straightforwardly dealt with in interview settings. It was, predictably, slightly more difficult to do this in settings that were constantly changing and out of my control. Whereas I was able to gain written consent from each of the interview respondents, I saw my efforts to convey my intentions during participant observation periods as akin to gaining verbal consent from research participants. Managing risk in the field Throughout the fieldwork process I maintained appropriate standards of behaviour in each of my research sites, abiding by the ESRC and British Sociological Association’s (BSA’s) codes of ethical practice that outline a researcher’s responsibilities. In its Statement of Ethical Practice, the BSA (2002) asserts, Sociologists have a responsibility to ensure that the physical, social and psychological well-being of research participants is not adversely affected
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by the research. They should strive to protect the rights of those they study, their interests, sensitivities and privacy, while recognising the difficulty of balancing potentially conflicting interests. I did not at any point anticipate that this research would provoke physical or psychological risks to participants and I was confident their well-being would be maintained. Nevertheless, the topic of transformation is hotly disputed, especially as it intersects with the long history of racial prejudice and ongoing tension in South Africa. I therefore followed the lead of researchers experienced at conducting sensitive research (Lee, 1993; Brewer, 2000; Dickson-Swift, James, and Liamputtong, 2008) and adopted qualitative methods suitable to the task of interrogating the subject. These included participant observation and semi-structured interviews. As I observed in the Methods section earlier in this chapter, both these methods allowed me to cultivate a rapport with participants and earn their trust. To this point I have reflected on how the research design tried to minimise risk to participants that might have arisen from their participation in the study. In addition to this focus on participants’ well-being, the research design considered literature emphasising researcher safety (Sluka, 1990; Lee, 1995; Lee-Treweek and Linkogle, 2000). I was aware at the start of my research that I would be travelling to areas of Cape Town that experience consistently high levels of theft and violent crime. Khayelitsha, a large township which lies approximately 35 kilometres east of Cape Town, was one such site where I visited several participants whom I had first met at The Warehouse. I also conducted interviews in areas such as Gugulethu and Manenberg, the latter of which was in the grip of a turf war between rival gangs at the time of my arrival in Cape Town. These areas, all of which were created by the apartheid government as non-white zones on the periphery of the city, are still typically characterised by high levels of poverty. As a researcher, I entered these areas with what Lee (1993: 10) has described as the possibility of ‘presentational’ and ‘anonymous’ danger. Presentational danger is born directly from the researcher’s presence – I did not anticipate facing these sorts of risks, as I was researching FBOs and people who were only indirectly involved in gang rivalries, mostly in peacekeeping roles. However, I knew there was a possibility I would encounter anonymous danger as a result of entering otherwise avoidable dangerous settings. Indeed Fusion is based near the border that divides the main gangs’ territories, meaning I had to drive down the road in which gang disputes periodically broke out. 114
Despite these dangers, I deemed it necessary to carry out research in these settings and therefore took precautionary measures such as those proposed by Sluka (1990) in order to avoid any threats. Sluka (1990: 123) warns against ‘growing complacent about the dangers you face’ in risky settings, cautions against trivialising dangers or treating research ‘as a game or adventure’, and asserts that one should never assume dangerous situations will pass naturally. I always made sure I contacted research participants on the day I intended to travel to their home or workplace and set a precise time at which we would meet. On two occasions, participants suggested I meet them at service stations easily accessible from a main road. From there we drove directly to their home or office. On every other occasion, I took the addresses of participants and mapped out the safest route to their homes, sticking to main roads whenever possible. I usually travelled by car in Khayelitsha, Manenberg, and Gugulethu, and if I ever walked around these areas I made sure I was with a participant who knew the area well. The ethics surrounding data collection presented challenges to conducting fieldwork and I have discussed them here. However, these were not the only issues to arise when designing my research. I discuss methodological challenges to my study’s research design below. Challenges and Weaknesses in the Research Design When compared to long-term ethnography usually linked to anthropology, researchers conducting short-term participant observation must acknowledge the methodological challenge of sacrificing breadth of knowledge for depth of knowledge (Falzon, 2009; Coleman and von Hellermann, 2011). In response to this challenge, sociologists have suggested researchers can accomplish their goals by constructing fields using theoretical hypotheses (Hannerz, 2003; Nadai and Maeder, 2005; Horst, 2009). They argue that by doing so, researchers can focus their attention on the most relevant field sites as well as the most salient issues within those sites. This focused approach resonates with Knoblauch’s (2005) notion of ‘focused ethnography’, which he asserts is relevant for short-term sociological research that employs participant observation. Knoblauch contends that the weakness of a relatively short research period can be mitigated when researchers conduct their studies in familiar spaces. Having worked and studied in Cape Town for 13 years (and lived in 115
South Africa for 24 years), I was familiar with many spaces of the city. However, there were limits to this familiarity, which influenced how I conducted my fieldwork. As a white, middle-class South African, it was difficult to enter and become comfortable in Manenberg, meaning my participant observation research was more constrained in this locale than at The Warehouse, although I was still able to gather a large amount of data using semi-structured interviews. Another methodological challenge this study faced was that some participants only spoke English as a second language, although due to my lack of familiarity with Xhosa and Afrikaans – the other main languages spoken in Cape Town – I had to conduct all interviews in English. Fortunately, this did not prove to be a major challenge, as all participants had a strong or relatively strong grasp of English and were able to answer all the interview questions. This must nonetheless be considered a weakness of the study as it would surely have been easier for participants to articulate their thoughts in their first language. I may, therefore, have forfeited some nuance in interviews, though it is impossible to define exactly how the research data was affected. Conclusion This chapter presented the methodological basis for my study – the reflexive model of science – and discussed the centrality of reflexivity to the methodology and its emphasis on the interpersonal construction of knowledge. It provided a starting point from which I was able to reflect on how my identity as a white, male South African affected the sometimes sensitive and dangerous data collection process, which included four months of participant observation and in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 46 participants. As I have noted, my ‘whiteness’ was sometimes challenging in the way it affected the decisions I made in the field. In that Burawoy’s reflexive model recognises and even celebrates researchers’ interventions, I did not consider these issues as impediments but rather as aspects of the study that enriched the thesis. Besides its reflexive focus, this chapter also described why I chose participant observation and semi-structured interviewing to collect my data. I also outlined how I collected data using these methods and how I first recorded and then managed this
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data. I followed this technical detail with a description of how I coded and then conducted a thematic analysis of the data. The next three chapters present the data and discuss the research findings produced through my analysis. Chapter 5 describes the case study organisations in more detail and presents research participants’ understanding of transformation in South Africa. Chapter 6 combines participant observation notes and interview data to examine how The Warehouse and Fusion staff members translate their understanding of transformation into practice. Chapter 7 then evaluates the organisations’ transformational practices for their potential to contribute to lasting peace in the country. It relates this to religious peacebuilding theory and provides an analysis of the changing religious peacebuilding landscape in South Africa.
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Chapter 5 Christian Understandings of Transformation as Material Change, Personal Change and Relationship Building Introduction My goal to this point has been to contextualise my research by discussing the literature on religious peacebuilding and conflict transformation (Chapter 1), transformation in post-apartheid South Africa (Chapter 2), and Christian religious peacebuilding in South Africa (Chapter 3). The chapters established the validity of analysing transformation as a form of religious peacebuilding in post-apartheid South Africa, with the country’s continued divisions and inequalities that undermine full and lasting peace. Within the research design chapter (Chapter 4), I discussed how my fieldwork entailed interviewing the staff members of two Cape Town-based Christian organisations and a range of people who interacted with them to discover how these religious organisations understood and ‘practised’ transformation. This chapter primarily uses analyses of these interviews to examine the meanings research participants attached to transformation in the country. According to the ethical practice of maintaining participants’ anonymity, I use pseudonyms to refer to research participants throughout the thesis. By interviewing participants at their places of work, I was able to follow the ‘flow of meanings’ (Hovland, 2009: 144) participants attached to transformation, from The Warehouse offices in the semi-industrial Wetton area to Fusion’s base in gangaffected Manenberg, and from The Warehouse to church leaders based in some of the poorest and also the most affluent parts of the city. An unanticipated outcome of the interviews was that despite the differences in participants’ circumstances, their accounts of transformation contained many similarities. Writing about contemporary South Africa, Adam and Moodley (2013: 197) quote a group of South Africanist scholars to state that ‘“they” – the urban poor – occupy a different universe of meaning to “us” [middle-class elites]’. Yet my research confirmed this only in part. Most participants, including those living in deprived areas, agreed that transformation entails personal change – including spiritual change – and relationship building across the racial, economic, and spatial divides in the city. Participants recognised the
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material, institutional, and structural injustices that exist in South Africa but insisted that a purely material response to social problems will not provide lasting solutions. This chapter argues that The Warehouse and Fusion’s focus on personal transformation and relational transformation is a distinctive feature of their transformation strategies which differs from the policy-based approach associated with the state (discussed in Chapter 2). The Warehouse draws on the idea of ‘transformational development’ (Myers, 2011: passim), a needs-based development theory that believes social change should be led by local churches and should not be imposed by outside NGOs, while Fusion has incorporated ‘neo-monastic’ (Greig and Freeman, 2007: passim) principles of living within a community and responding to that community’s needs with an emphasis on prayer and personalised faith. The organisations’ strategic decisions reflect the social structural and class dynamics of the areas in which they work, and in this way demonstrate that transformation is a multifaceted concept that occurs at the micro-, medium-, and macro-levels of society. Case Study 1: The Warehouse When The Warehouse opened in 2003 at its premises on Plantation Road in Wetton, Cape Town, it was associated with the Social Responsibility Committee (SRC) of the Anglican Parish of St John’s Wynberg – an economically varied parish of six churches based in the Cape Town neighbourhoods of Kenilworth, Wetton, Wynberg, Diep River, and Kirstenhof. According to interview participants, the SRC had historically been involved in welfare and anti-apartheid advocacy work. Following the forced removals during apartheid, Kenilworth and Wynberg became predominantly white and affluent. Despite this, the original congregations retained ties to their churches, something the new organisation immediately seized upon, as I describe below. The Warehouse was only a germ of a project, not yet properly formed or even named, when in 1998 the new project directors organised the six Parish churches to work together on helping families affected by the HIV and AIDS crisis in Cape Town. As one woman said in her interview with me, ‘for the first time our churches were working superbly together. It was a unified, the disease was a unifying factor’ (Ingrid Upton, Warehouse staff member, 06 December 2013). Even once The Warehouse had established itself and become independent, it still maintained close ties to the Parish. When I arrived to begin my research in 2013, nine members of staff attended a church
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within the Anglican parish, although the organisation operates as an ecumenical group. Among the rest of the employees, one woman attended a Catholic church; three staff members described themselves as evangelical Christians; one woman attended a charismatic church, although she had previously attended one of the Anglican churches in St John’s Parish; and another staff member attended an Apostolic Faith Church. The staff members, and any visitors to The Warehouse, are free to express their faith in ways that sit most comfortably with them, meaning that daily morning prayer sessions vary depending on who leads them. Overall, however, The Warehouse emphasised a wide range of scripture as the basis for group discussion and community formation; music seldom featured except to close a prayer session, at which point staff members would sing together without instruments; and although morning prayer did not adhere to a strict routine or emphasise a hierarchy of leadership, I never experienced an occasion when a staff member spontaneously started singing or praying. Finally, The Warehouse’s emphasis on issues of social or political importance during prayer sessions points to how it ‘envisages a wider social intentionality and bearing’, a feature that resonates with Avis’s (2016: 136) characterisation of Anglican worship. The Warehouse is not Anglican in name or character, but Anglicanism continues to influence its prayer and actions more than other traditions within its ranks. From the street, The Warehouse looks slightly more genteel than its neighbours. The fresh paintwork contrasts with the face-brick next door and shows up the peeling, pink exterior of the nearby panel beating shop. It is still a warehouse, though, as the corrugated iron roof and steel loading bay door attest. Wetton, where the small Christian organisation is based, is a semi-industrial part of Cape Town where light manufacturing businesses do trade across from housing developments. One of the medium-sized homes opposite The Warehouse has a small wall and a barred gate; another house’s head-high, prefabricated wall is more fortifying, making it difficult for pedestrians to see into the property. The many men and women who pass by these homes on weekdays make their way from the main road near The Warehouse, soon to arrive at their workplaces. For a few hours a day, the Plantation Road pavements become thoroughfares for workers on foot. [Figures 2 and 3 here]
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Figure 2. The Warehouse offices and storage hall
Figure 3. The Wetton neighbourhood, showing its semi-industrial character
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According to many Warehouse employees, the organisation’s location in this lower-middle class area has always been crucial to its work. The small zone is sandwiched between the affluent Southern Suburbs at the foot of Table Mountain and the severely deprived Cape Flats ‘township’ areas created during the apartheid regime. During one interview, a former staff member of The Warehouse commented of the organisation that ‘it’s the architecture of the middle ground…. It’s fairly neutral – neutral space’ (Robert Taylor, former Warehouse Staff Member, 13 November 2013). Taylor, a white man in his mid-40s, furthermore stated that ‘it’s not in this hinterland, it’s in the midst of something. But it’s not lanie [posh], because if it was too lanie the guys in Khayelitsha wouldn’t want to come’. Warehouse staff members held these ideas of centrality and neutrality in common, regardless of race or class. Thus, we see another participant, Ruth Philips, a coloured woman in her early fifties who had worked at The Warehouse for many of its 10 years, similarly describe the organisation’s centrality in the city. She depicted its proximity to an array of urban geographies by pointing to its location close to a major road running East-West through the city:
Lansdowne Road is perhaps the road, in Cape Town, the road that most shows the full range of disparity of the city. So it goes from Claremont/Kenilworth area, which is very wealthy, through Hanover Park/Lansdowne, which is less wealthy, and then right through to the most poorest areas of Khayelitsha before you get to Baden Powell Road and the sea. So it actually, so this road is actually really the fullest example of every type of housing that you can find, type of way of living. And so based here we close to, we sort of get that full Lansdowne Road effect and we close to transport (Ruth Philips, Warehouse Staff Member, 15 November 2013). Philips mentioned the ‘full Lansdowne Road effect’ as a way to describe the spatial distribution of poverty in Cape Town. She was one of many employees to state that The Warehouse’s central location enabled it to access the full range of these locations. This was true in 2013 just as it had been a decade earlier, when the original coordinators designed The Warehouse as a programme-based development organisation. At the time, it worked with churches of all denominations to address what Emma Hampton, a white, 37-year-old Warehouse employee, described as the ‘giants in society’. These ‘giants’, which had been identified by the ecumenical South African Christian Leadership Assembly in 2003, included the social effects of HIV and AIDS, 122
crime and violence, poverty, unemployment, and racism. In accordance with its development mandate, The Warehouse’s flagship programme Care for Kids started in 2004 in response to what it saw as ‘an orphan crisis’ (The Warehouse, 2013) precipitated by the government’s refusal to provide anti-retroviral drugs to people living with HIV. Five years into its life, the project was working with 11 churches across the city to provide food and hygiene packs to affected families, along with social work mentoring for volunteers in each partner church (The Warehouse, 2009). The Warehouse’s central position on Lansdowne Road made it an ideal staff base and hub from which to distribute food packs. Aside from Care for Kids, The Warehouse also ran a community development project for a time in a nearby informal settlement and a programme called Fusion, working with high-risk youth in Manenberg (Fusion would later become independent and is the second of my case studies). Travelling down Lansdowne Road, both the informal settlement and Fusion programmes operated within five kilometres of The Warehouse. Interview participants’ assessment of the importance of The Warehouse’s centrality reflects how wealth and poverty define and divide Cape Town’s urban geography. Showing how the inscription of poverty on the physical landscape is accompanied by its inscription on people’s mindsets too, staff members agreed that The Warehouse’s perceived neutrality presented a safe and comfortable space for ‘rich’ and ‘poor’ Capetonians to meet. Lauren Sanger, a 40-year-old coloured woman working at The Warehouse, suggested that being based in Wetton ‘does help’: It helps for those people who are scared of going into the black township communities. So it’s like a midway where you can just about get here and I think we still [feel] safe [to people]. … But then it’s also so quickly accessible from all communities transport-wise (Lauren Sanger, Warehouse Staff Member, 25 November 2013). Notably, staff who commented on the importance of The Warehouse’s neutrality often emphasised affluent people’s, and especially the white community’s, tendency to perceive deprived suburbs on the Cape Flats as dangerous. In contrast, interview participants frequently described how it was important for people coming from poorer areas, such as Khayelitsha, Manenberg, and Sweet Home Farm, not to be confronted with or intimidated by conspicuously well-off surroundings. This was the gist of
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Robert Taylor’s earlier remark that The Warehouse is ‘not lanie’. In running its various programmes, The Warehouse has clearly felt compelled to cater to the needs of people from a range of social and economic backgrounds. In conjunction with its early development projects, The Warehouse ran social development training courses under its Equipping and Mobilising programme, some of which were hosted at the organisation’s Wetton offices. The Warehouse also houses a relief programme called Urban Gleaning (after the Old Testament notion of giving up a portion of one’s harvest to the poor) which in 2009, for example, delivered several hundred items of clothing, food, and blankets to churches in need across the city (The Warehouse, 2009). Aside from responding to the day-to-day requirements of church communities, the programme coordinates relief efforts in the event of fires or flooding in densely populated communities vulnerable to these disasters. In addition to this, when local gangs in township areas chased foreigners from their homes in 2008, the relief programme helped coordinate the response from churches in the city. As a lowskilled, labour-intensive project, Urban Gleaning has for several years been the main point of contact for prospective volunteers and was described in The Warehouse’s 2010-11 Annual Report as providing ‘a network to people and churches who want to share their time, resources, skills and finances with others’ (The Warehouse, 2011). In summary, Urban Gleaning volunteer events, crisis relief efforts, and the development training days brought together a range of people at The Warehouse’s Wetton office, highlighting why the organisation thought it important to remain as neutral and central as possible. By early 2009, The Warehouse had been open for five years and had reached the pinnacle of its career as a conventional development organisation. Its Care for Kids programme was notably successful in creating official partnerships with churches and providing tangible outcomes for donors. As one of the managers, Ross Tawney, remarked of the project, ‘people loved us from a funding perspective, [and] churches wanted it because it looked like it worked really well’ (Ross Tawney, Warehouse Staff Member, 29 November 2013). Despite its success, though, the programme began to falter during 2009, causing The Warehouse to commission an external evaluation of its projects, ultimately with far-reaching consequences for the organisation. Tawney, a white 45-year-old, explained that the evaluation by a local university researcher, involving interviews and focus groups conducted within the organisation and with its
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partners, resulted in ‘the ongoing belief that the church can be an effective mechanism’: So our ultimate goal was fine. But, but our strategy had some things that were compromising the conversation. So one of them [s] was that when we started we could, we were very relational and worked with church leaders. And then once the programme came into play, like, they became our delivery vehicles rather than [managing work] themselves (Ross Tawney, Warehouse Staff Member, 29 November 2013). The Warehouse responded to the evaluation by slowly winding down or migrating its programmes. Care for Kids finally closed in 2013; Fusion became independent late in the same year; The Warehouse handed over its development projects to community residents; and Link, which helped school leavers access jobs or education, was incorporated into another organisation working in the city. The Urban Gleaning programme also downsized, becoming a crisis relief programme rather than a hub for regular distribution of food, clothing, and blankets. Over a period of four years, The Warehouse transitioned from a programmatic organisation to a facilitative one. Social development training, which had been contained in the Mobilising and Equipping programme, was integrated into the new organisational model and became central to the new vision. Furthermore, the organisation decided to target church leaders with a view to training them in social development practices. In this way, The Warehouse hoped that churches would no longer be ‘delivery vehicles’ for programmes but would themselves be independent forces for community development. A key aspect of The Warehouse’s transition from a programmatic development organisation to a relational, facilitative one has been its strategic emphasis on ‘transformational development’, a Christian approach to needs-based development work that identifies spiritual as well as material aspects of development. It discusses the benefits of well-known secular development theories but foregrounds the principle that ‘the work of holistic [spiritual and material] mission belongs to the church, not the development agency or the development professional’ (Myers, 2011: 191). As should be evident from the brief history I have given of The Warehouse, this approach aligns with the Cape Town organisation’s recent stress on church-initiated development and the bottom-up evaluation of need rather than the top-down imposition of programmes. The Warehouse’s commitment to the transformational development model underlies 125
its understanding of what transformation means in post-apartheid South Africa and what it would look like in practice. The following section elaborates on what transformation means to the organisation and examines how participants have incorporated elements of transformational development thinking into their personal and organisational narratives. The three elements of transformation: The material, the individual, and the relational When I started my research in 2013 The Warehouse staff comprised 15 men and women, five of them black, two coloured, and eight white. As I discovered while conducting interviews in the six weeks following the organisation’s November AGM, the multi-racial, cross-class Warehouse staff agreed that the route to a just society lay in pursuing transformation. My interview schedule included a question on participants’ understanding of transformation as it pertained to their work. However, due to The Warehouse’s strategic emphasis on transformational development, interviewees almost always introduced the topic first, making it easy for me to pursue the line of conversation and prompt them for a definition. During the course of conducting interviews with The Warehouse staff and volunteers, many participants seemed to understand transformation at least partly in light of Bryant Myers’s 2011 book Walking with the Poor, in which the author outlines the principal ideas and practices of transformational development. Myers, an American scholar and one-time programme strategist at the Evangelical Christian organisation World Vision International, observes that transformational development is ‘a holistic biblical alternative to Western modernisation’, with ‘the twin goals of transformational development as changed people and just and equal relationships’ (Myers, 2011: 16-7). The book’s emphasis on individual change through a personal relationship with God and the importance of interpersonal relationships – characteristic of evangelical theology (Emerson and Smith, 2000) – is tempered by an insistence on structural inequities that produce and reinforce poverty. This resembles a liberal evangelical tradition, which unlike conservative evangelicalism does not attribute deprivation and social division to individual sin (Emerson and Smith, 2000). On an organisational level, The Warehouse’s ecumenical framework seems to have
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allowed it to engage critically with this text to incorporate its suggestions into its own strategy. Warehouse staff members involved in strategy management were particularly inclined to refer directly to transformational development principles and Myers’s book when I asked their understanding of ‘transformation’. In doing so, they articulated The Warehouse’s organisational understanding of transformation and the corresponding development practices that have followed the FBO’s change of strategy. Akhona Ganyiwa, a black 47-year-old Warehouse staff member of several years, did exactly this when he foregrounded the transformational development model in describing The Warehouse’s work to me. He differentiated the organisation’s transformational development strategy from ‘social development’, a term he associated with development work he judged to be superficial because it does not give people the means to address root problems in their communities. In contrast, he saw transformational development as a more thorough and empowering model. Ganyiwa’s colleague on the management team, Emma Hampton, similarly discussed transformation in the context of The Warehouse’s new strategy. She referred to ‘transformational encounters’, a part of The Warehouse’s operation that included Urban Gleaning and which Hampton described as encompassing ‘training, workshops, forums [discussion afternoons]’. She mentioned Myers’s book in her explanation of transformation, recalling the author’s assertion that transformational development involves ‘changed people’: So transformation is not a destination. So, which to me, when we talk about, I think the movement in the world – we’re busy going through this book Walking with the Poor, do you know? … And so transformation is all of us, everyone in it together needing to change all the time, and all become our better selves and all make adjustments and things. So transformation in South Africa is not just the poor becoming rich (Emma Hampton, Warehouse Staff Member, 18 November 2013). Only four of 15 Warehouse employees referred directly to Myers or his book in their interview, making it difficult to ascertain exactly to what degree Walking with the Poor influenced each staff member’s personal understanding of transformation. What is certain, though, is that The Warehouse staff was busy working through Myers’s book over the course of my research period at the organisation. Transformational development also formed the basis of the Wetton-based organisation’s most recent
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strategy to cease its long-term relief programmes, making it reasonable to assume that participants did incorporate transformational development principles into their personal understanding of transformation. The conviction among Warehouse staff members that transformation encompasses both spiritual and material aspects of life seems to support the above assumption, as Myers foregrounds this same principle in his book. Anna Noel, for example, contended that ‘spiritual transformation is material transformation as well’ (Anna Noel, Warehouse Staff Member, 11 December 2013). The 36-year-old white woman spoke of ‘the stuff that the world can’t see’ to describe the spiritual reality that accompanies the ‘real hard-core measurable things in society’. Ross Tawney likewise referred to an ‘unseen realm’ undergirding structural injustices in society, while Ruth Philips asserted a holistic understanding when she stated that ‘the socio- and the spiritual go hand-in-hand, and you can’t actually separate them’. Analysis of Warehouse staff members’ comments on transformation shows that, aside from their agreement on the dual physical-spiritual nature of transformation, they also tended to classify it in three ways, namely 1) material transformation, 2) individual transformation, and 3) relational transformation. In what follows, I discuss each of the three elements of transformation with reference to staff member interviews. 1. Material transformation The Warehouse staff members anticipated that individual change and relationship building across social divides – the second and third elements of transformation – would help eliminate some of the most common material issues in South Africa. Examples given by participants included 1) the need to change an unjust economic system that maintains high poverty levels in the country, 2) the production of jobs for the unemployed and establishment of equal opportunity in the labour market, 3) the provision of better sanitation and housing for those living in the most deprived areas of Cape Town, 4) the elimination of personal and institutional corruption, and 5) the need for people and ideas to cross geographic and symbolic boundaries formed during apartheid. In general, Warehouse staff members claimed that their faith compelled them to respond to material injustices in society. One specific convergence on this point among interviewees was a concern that church leaders should not rely, in Akhona Ganyiwa’s 128
words, on a ‘theology of the future’ (Akhona Ganyiwa, Warehouse Staff Member, 29 November 2013). In saying this, Ganyiwa referred to what he saw as an attitude among leaders that they needed to convert as many people as possible instead of responding to the immediate material needs and social injustices in their communities. Ganyiwa condemned an overly spiritual theology: The pastors tend to want to bury the victims of rape or of violence, they tend to want to bury them, you know, instead of enabling the church to do something about those victims or [i] about the perpetrators. How do we help the perpetrator to stop doing what they are doing? And we keep praying about hospitals and how things need to change in hospitals to be better in the hospitals. Praying, which is good, but we don’t become advocates of saying, how can we hold a particular hospital accountable? (Akhona Ganyiwa, Warehouse Staff Member, 29 November 2013). A sense of frustration characterises Ganyiwa’s remarks. While this does not emerge in his colleague Mandla Nyathi’s account, Nyathi similarly stressed the importance of confronting material injustices. The 30-year-old black South African observed that you’ll find some churches that are not yet at a place where they hold the theology of God wanting them to work both inward and in hand – that is social and theology coming together. And so, how then we’d move them along to that place becomes a matter of relationship and engagement (Mandla Nyathi, Warehouse Staff Member, 05 December 2013). As I have mentioned, Warehouse staff members emphasised that spiritual elements accompany or undergird material issues in society. The worldview that one cannot focus solely on the physical world at the expense of the spiritual one lies at the heart of the transformational development model The Warehouse has incorporated into its operations. Participants described a disregard of the spiritual as a major shortcoming in the work of secular organisations. As such, it is notable that in Ganyiwa and Nyathi’s scrutiny of church leaders in Cape Town they reversed this criticism to stress that Christians should not fixate on the spiritual at the expense of physical problems. In this vein of critique, Emma Hampton summed up the transformational development principle that churches and their leaders should attend not only to the spiritual but also the physical needs of their community:
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I mean, it’s [transformational development is] a theological shift, it’s a deeper understanding of the theology of the whole gospel, of the whole picture of transformation, which then means that it’s not possible for you to be a church just trying to get … to heaven, operating on your own and not thinking about the wellbeing of society in which you are placed (Emma Hampton, Warehouse Staff Member, 18 November 2013). Ganyiwa, Nyathi, and Hampton’s views all converged around this need for a dual physical-spiritual development mandate. Perhaps because this dual mandate provides the theological basis of The Warehouse’s work, it emerged as the strongest motivator for the organisation’s work. It was not the only one, though, as participants’ standpoints on the need for material transformation also coalesced around a second point, namely the church’s prominent historical involvement in tackling social and political injustices in South Africa. Several Warehouse staff members alluded to the anti-apartheid activities of the Church as a source of motivation for their work, Silumko Rhadebe being a case in point. Rhadebe, a black 54-year-old Warehouse employee with Anglican theological training, linked his suggestion that churches should be socially active to the Archbishop-Emeritus Desmond Tutu’s anti-apartheid activism: You know, when Desmond Tutu started correcting the ways of the previous government, some church leaders they said that he was getting involved in politics. That’s how they saw it. But, it was not getting involved in politics, it was saying that what is happening is not just, it’s not justice. Apartheid is not justice (Silumko Rhadebe, Warehouse Staff Member, 09 December 2013). Rhadebe refers to Tutu’s actions to demonstrate his conviction that it is wrong to distinguish between social, political, and spiritual spheres and that the church should work in each of these spheres. This outlook complements The Warehouse’s transformational development programme, which is founded on the idea that the physical and spiritual are inseparable. While Rhadebe referred to a well-known anti-apartheid figure in the Anglican Church to show the need for religiously inspired social action, the two Warehouse employees Ross Tawney (white) and Ruth Philips (coloured) related how their own participation in the church-based anti-apartheid movement partly explains their current involvement in materially focused development work. Tawney claimed that his student experience of the apartheid police force’s forays onto campus ‘made me question some 130
of my assumptions about the way things worked in South Africa’ (Ross Tawney, Warehouse Staff Member, 29 November 2013). Ultimately, the confluence of his religious sensibilities and his work with refugees in neighbouring Mozambique created ‘an understanding of my faith as a place where the political life in our society does get worked out’ (Ross Tawney, Warehouse Staff Member, 29 November 2013). Philips, meanwhile, clarified the basis of her work with The Warehouse by alluding to her lifelong association with ‘church-based social action groups’ (Ruth Philips, Warehouse Staff Member, 15 November 2013). One of these, the ecumenical Social Action Group Network, linked churches across the Cape Province during apartheid: And this group used to always meet together, and we used to have workshops and talks and things, and often do (.) actions together when, when we were still working against apartheid. So we would take part in anti-apartheid actions. And, I know that era was very formative for me. And also in terms of seeing the church’s involvement in, in social action and in changing what we saw as an unjust and invalid system in the country (Ruth Philips, Warehouse Staff Member, 15 November 2013). Unlike Tawney and Philips, Barbara Anderson, a 61-year-old white woman working at The Warehouse, did not speak of any actual involvement in the antiapartheid church movement. She drew instead on her student experiences of the Anglican Church’s political involvement to portray an ideal model of a socially engaged religious institution. She also expressed disappointment that churches were less politically involved than they had been under apartheid rule. Anderson’s memory of the attentiveness of the church to the injustices of apartheid seemed to motivate her to revive a similar attitude among churches within The Warehouse’s network and led her to state that ‘I want to be part of the church re-finding its prophetic voice for change’ (Barbara Anderson, Warehouse Staff Member, 25 November 2013). Tawney, Rhadebe, Anderson, and Philips occupied different positions in South Africa’s history. Tawney, by his own account a middle-class white South African; Rhadebe, older than Tawney and, as a black South African who lived through apartheid, a target of the worst of its policies; Anderson, a white South African woman; and Philips, a coloured woman who, like Rhadebe, would have faced oppression from the apartheid government. Despite their different paths to working at The Warehouse, their common affinity to the historical identity of the church – the Anglican Church in
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particular – justified their religiously inspired intervention in issues of poverty, inequality, and division in society. Before I discuss the second element of transformation – individual transformation – it is worth reiterating that the endpoints of material transformation were, as I described above, similar to those pursued by government (detailed in Chapter 2). Mandla Nyathi and his Warehouse colleague Anna Noel noted in their separate interviews with me that transformational development focuses on bringing about positive material change in society just as secular development models do. However, the differentiating factor is how one goes about, in Nyathi’s words, ‘uplifting people’s lives’ (Mandla Nyathi, Warehouse Staff Member, 05 December 2013). In the case of transformational development, staff members saw individual transformation, which includes building a personal relationship with God, and relational transformation as central to the process. None of the three elements was divisible from the others. 2. Individual transformation South Africa’s national transformation project pursues change through the economy and social institutions (e.g., the education system), but Warehouse staff members maintained that individual change is also necessary for macro-policies to be successful. According to participants, material social problems are real, but just as people are affected by forces in society, so they can and should influence these forces, too. Before they can do this they must realise their personal power to address their circumstances, a process of self-recognition that involves spiritually inspired changes in people’s attitudes toward themselves and their place in society. Ross Tawney, a 45-year-old white, male staff member on The Warehouse management team, articulated this spiritual connection when he described the organisation’s understanding of transformation: I think in our context we would want to say there’s individual transformation – so there’s change that happens with an individual in their (.) the fullness of their life circumstances, their understanding of themselves, their capacity to generate income, their food security, their exposure to infectious diseases, their long term sustainability as an individual in a family network. … You know, the personal, spiritual transformation should lead to a kind of individual transformation that, that 132
expresses itself in the way I live in this world. You know, and both of those should lead to change in the structure as we take them on (Ross Tawney, Warehouse Staff Member, 29 November 2013). The spiritual aspect of individual transformation emerges strongly in Tawney’s explanation – he links this micro-level process to macro-level material change. His colleague, Lauren Sanger, a 40-year-old coloured woman, included similar references to this micro-macro dynamic in her remarks about gaining a better understanding of oneself personally and in relation to society: [The] part that’s standing out a lot more for me now is individual transformation is required for transformation to happen. If that makes sense? And then in the transforming of individuals, I see that, what The Warehouse calls our ‘destination journeys’, are key. … And as you find yourself transforming into whom, I think, God’s created you to be, you see the possibility for other people, but also for society and for the way in which these development programmes can happen (Lauren Sanger, Warehouse Staff Member, 25 November 2013). Sanger expresses in greater detail than Tawney the effect she expects spiritual change can have on a person and subsequently on society. She associates spiritual development with a holistic understanding of how social action is tied to Christian values of peace and justice as well as a unique purpose ordained by God. Participants described the fullness of self-understanding and action in society as one’s ‘authentic’ identity, an identity they believe enables someone to realise their potential and purpose in life. It should be noted that when I refer to participants’ ideas of ‘authentic’ or ‘true’ identity in this thesis, I am referring to the description I have just provided. A notable element of Sanger’s description is that she sees individual development as inevitably relational – it involves heightened self-awareness and an awareness of others that ultimately translates into social action. In a separate interview, The Warehouse staff employee Barbara Anderson captured the essence of this self-inthe-world when she described a ‘social person in a community hopefully being able to think transformationally because their faith has changed them’ (Barbara Anderson, Warehouse Staff Member, 25 November 2013). Anderson defined transformation of individuals in very spiritual terms but was adamant that a ‘transformed’ person would be more likely to challenge injustices affecting their local circumstances. Anderson reveals in the following excerpt how she understands transformation in action:
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It’s residents of the community who happen to, who are Christians, somehow something’s happened to their pastor, something’s happened in their church and they, they go to the pastor and say, ‘You know, we’ve got this commission [on policing in Khayelitsha], why can’t we go and have our voice heard?’ And the pastor says, ‘Well, we could go on our own, but wouldn’t it be better if we all, the pastors in Khayelitsha, went together. I belong to the Great Commission [a group of pastors in Khayelitsha], and let’s go and see [the president of the Commission], and let’s see if we can talk together and see if we can’t make a submission. We don’t think this is the way we should be living, you know.’ That is, for me, that’s community and social transformation under the banner of a church (Barbara Anderson, Warehouse Staff Member, 25 November 2013). In general terms for The Warehouse, individual transformation entails change in people that leads to action in the world. Yet further analysis of Warehouse staff members’ comments shows that individual transformation can be categorised into two sub-types: 1) realising one’s power and 2) relinquishing one’s power. Both types of individual transformation lead to social change, but while the first applies to people who suffer the effects of poverty, the second is associated with wealthier South Africans. The history of the country means that, in general, these sub-types align sharply with race – the first with black, coloured, and Indian South Africans, and the second with whites. With respect to the first sub-type, one black Warehouse employee, Akhona Ganyiwa, argued that the most durable effect of apartheid oppression on black, coloured, and Indian population groups was a psychology of powerlessness. He described how, in his personal life and professional career in the church, he had experienced the way non-white South Africans continue to denigrate themselves, believing they lack wisdom or the ability to determine their own future without direction from a white person. Ganyiwa, who was responsible for visiting church leaders across the city, referred to ‘the slavery of the mind’ (Akhona Ganyiwa, Warehouse Staff Member, 29 November 2013), a slavery which he argued persists regardless of the country’s post-1994 constitutional freedoms. He linked this directly to how deeply entrenched the apartheid regime’s policies became and asserted that to create the apartheid system in South Africa, it took time. It was planned. What happened divided. So to dismantle it, we still have to work hard. And I think many times it’s an issue of the mindset, that the mindset is the one
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that needs to be transformed and changed (Akhona Ganyiwa, Warehouse Staff Member, 29 November 2013). Ganyiwa was not alone in his assessment. Silumko Rhadebe, a black staff member in his mid-50s, asserted that black church leaders’ diminished self-appraisal weakens their ability to respond to problems afflicting local communities. He claimed that ‘one of the things that makes people feel like they powerless: the past, the way, what the apartheid has done to us [black South Africans] was to say, you are no human. You have no voice. And so you have to only take what we [whites] say’ (Silumko Rhadebe, Warehouse Staff Member, 09 December 2013). For Ganyiwa, Rhadebe and other Warehouse participants, individual transformation – that is, recognising one’s true identity in God – helped to overcome this mindset of powerlessness. The following success story of how one man came to value himself as equal to others and act on his convictions was recounted by Warehouse staff members regardless of race. It helped underpin the organisation’s collective belief in the transformational development model. When Onke Koyo, a young, black South African man, joined The Warehouse staff as a fieldworker for one of the programmes in 2008, he by all accounts had leadership potential. He was already involved in the community leadership within his neighbourhood – a small informal settlement – but a lack of confidence led him to shy away from confronting corrupt governance in the area. The staff widely agreed that over the course of five years at The Warehouse, Koyo gained considerable self-belief, to the extent that he helped to force out ‘a warlord’ in his area who for many years had intimidated residents and charged them to use various public facilities. The Warehouse staff member Silumko Rhadebe echoed the organisation’s sentiment that ‘by being here and having people listening to him, he regained his voice’: And so that alone has made him feel like, ‘Yes, I can lead’. And the people around him, us as The Warehouse, assured him of that leadership skill he has. And so he is using it (Silumko Rhadebe, Warehouse Staff Member, 09 December 2013). Since leaving The Warehouse, Koyo has returned to full-time work as a community development worker in his neighbourhood. As a representative for the informal settlement, he regularly negotiates with the City of Cape Town, lobbying 135
amongst other things for better sanitation and the installation of street lighting. He mentioned that he had also recently met with City representatives to discuss the housing needs of the community, convinced as he was that any development work should involve the input of the residents. Koyo’s emphasis on pro-active community participation led him to comment that The Warehouse had made the correct decision to cease their food programme in the small community in 2012. The Warehouse, he asserted, is a friend in times of need, not a constant giver. I use the (.) my local saying, there’s no messiah can come to tell you, like, this is injustice. It’s only you, you must think by yourself saying, enough is enough. You see, it can’t happen again to my life (Onke Koyo, Former Warehouse Staff Member, 21 November 2013). Though Koyo allows for help in times of crisis, self-determination is at the core of his philosophy. He suggested that, empowered through coming to know God and the biblical principles of justice, there is no need to view anyone as superior to oneself. Of The Warehouse, Koyo stated that ‘some of their training is to know by yourself [that] to be a leader is not something you can go to get a education, you can be a leader as long as you know what you want, what is your goal’. Koyo’s story confirmed for many Warehouse staff members that individual transformation can lead black and other previously oppressed South Africans to celebrate an empowered identity and, consequently, to consider every person equal. The second sub-type of individual transformation also emphasises equality between people, but effectively denotes the opposite of a formerly oppressed person realising their potential power or finding their voice in the public arena. It denotes relinquishing power after recognising the privileged place one holds in society because of past injustices. In this vein, Nancy Burroughs, a white 42-year-old white woman who had worked at The Warehouse for several years, insisted that in the case of the white South African community, individual transformation begins when a person realises how they benefited from historical injustices and as a result takes action to redress the past. She claimed that if this change in attitude does not occur, if white South Africans do not realise ‘that all they have is God’ (Nancy Burroughs, Warehouse Staff Member, 06 December 2013), The Warehouse would be failing in its work. According to Warehouse staff members, recognising one’s reliance on God should help affluent South Africans – white people in particular – realise the power
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they wield in development initiatives. Robert Taylor, for instance, a former Warehouse staff member who still had working ties with the organisation, suggested that equality between people would only be possible once white people, and white churches, recognise and then try to surrender their privilege in development work: If you [a white person] put your wallet down, if you put down all the tools that you can (.) which enables you to control the relationship, all the tools which enable you to manipulate development … there’s this potential for this transaction, where someone gives something up and someone fills the space with real, something real (Robert Taylor, Former Warehouse Staff Member, 13 November 2013). Taylor elaborated on his comment, explaining that this ‘something real’ refers to an equal relationship between the parties involved, in which one person does not dominate another, an issue Akhona Ganyiwa also raised in his interview. Ganyiwa, who had previously argued that the psychological effects of apartheid on black people need to be dispelled through individual transformation, claimed that a black mindset of powerlessness is often accompanied by white ‘paternalism’ (Akhona Ganyiwa, Warehouse Staff Member, 29 November 2013) in interactions between churches. Ganyiwa argued that by ignoring black people’s agency and ability to contribute to decisions regarding their lives, a paternalistic attitude reinforces power dynamics between a supposedly wise and benevolent giver and a grateful, passive taker. Both Ganyiwa’s and Taylor’s comments epitomise, from different racial perspectives, The Warehouse’s emphasis on the need for privileged, white South Africans to recognise that their social power is intimately tied to their role in the transformation project. What I have termed the two sub-types of individual transformation – 1) realising power and 2) relinquishing power – are distinctive, but they also rely on one another for meaningful social action to occur in South Africa. Ross Tawney alluded to how these sub-types overlap when he discussed The Warehouse’s conceptualisation of transformation, saying it ‘is something that happens to both, there isn’t a transformer and a transformed. We’re all transform-ing, and that is transformative’. At heart, both individual transformation sub-types involve self-recognition that stems from realising one’s ‘authentic identity’ in God – what The Warehouse terms a person’s ‘destination journey’. I quoted Lauren Sanger and Barbara Anderson to illustrate The Warehouse’s belief that this faith-based process of personal empowerment or deliberate disempowerment accompanies heightened self-awareness and an awareness of others that 137
ultimately translates into social action. This is what I have referred to as self-in-theworld. The third and final transformational element – relational transformation – emphasises that it is only through building relationships with people and churches across the racial and economic divides in Cape Town that this self-in-the-word is fully realised. 3. Relational transformation In making their claim for relational transformation, the staff claimed that racial and class divisions are major hindrances to building an equitable society and that relationship building is central to overcoming these barriers. It is why, for example, we find Ross Tawney declaring in his speech at The Warehouse’s 2013 AGM that ‘the biggest fortress that confronts us as South Africans today is our continued inability to find each other, our continued inability to connect, our continued inability to hear each other and really cross those boundaries’ (Ross Tawney, Warehouse Staff Member, 02 November 2013). Interpersonal relational transformation A portion of The Warehouse staff directly linked relationship building to a spiritually based belief in a fundamentally relational way of life. They considered the very existence of divisions between people to be a form of injustice. Emma Hampton, for example, a white, 37-year-old woman and Warehouse employee of many years, expressed this conviction when she described how each person can only live a fulfilled life if others are able to do the same: There’s the sense that, kind of, for the freedom of the whole of society, we all need to do this together. We’re not free, none of us are free if you’re not, you know, if you’re still under the yoke of injustice. And so, so my involvement with you if I’m, I come in with a power dynamic that is, I’m wealthier than you materially, but yet I’m just as needy as you are for everything to be (.) for shalom to take place (Emma Hampton, Warehouse Staff Member, 18 November 2013).
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Her former colleague Robert Taylor, a white man who continued to be involved with The Warehouse, maintained a similar belief that alienation within society, a lack of relation between people or between groups, is an unjust state of being: I don’t believe in islands, I don’t believe in communities making (.) doing everything for themselves and not having to rely on everyone else. I don’t believe in that at all – we live in a divisive, divided, broken, fractured city. So part of justice needs to look about (.) it has to be about bridging thresholds, crossing thresholds (Robert Taylor, Former Warehouse Staff Member, 13 November 2013). Akhona Ganyiwa was even more explicit than his associates in making the connection between his Christian beliefs and the need for people to respect and relate to others unlike themselves. Referring to Christians, he stated that ‘unity is implied by the first (.) the fact that we are in Christ, being born again and knowing Christ as the saviour who empowers you’. For Ganyiwa, unity should be the base state, the fundamental way of being, but he noted that ‘even though the walls of hostility, the various walls are destroyed by Christ, there are a lot of things in people or in churches or in the world that keep erode that implied unity’ (Akhona Ganyiwa, Warehouse Staff Member, 29 November 2013). The Warehouse staff’s conceptualisation of relational transformation resonates with Achille Mbembe’s (2008: 7) assessment that transformation in South Africa ‘epitomises more than any other post-apartheid project the current difficulty of overcoming whiteness and blackness’. In that individual transformation’s emphasis on self-recognition and empowerment or disempowerment is inherently relational, it provides the basis for reciprocal recognition and relational equality between people. Onke Koyo, the former Warehouse staff member whose apparent flourishing partly justified the organisation’s transformational development strategy, gave his understanding of how individual and relational transformation intersect: Oh, yah, transformation for me, yah, is to understand yourself first before you engage with other people. You must understand yourself, like who you are, who you are. And once you know that you can be able to open your hands for other people, saying, like, yah, there is my brother. Yah, you know. Yah, transformation, yah, to make sure, like, yah, the people they are equal (Onke Koyo, Former Warehouse Staff Member, 21 November 2013).
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For Koyo, knowing one’s authentic identity means knowing that you are equal to every other person. Individual transformation is the first step in the process of recognising others as similar and ‘related’ to you – as a brother, for example. His comment captures both the process of overcoming power differentials in South Africa as well as the relational way of life to which many Warehouse staff members referred. Relational transformation among organisations Thus far I have outlined details of interpersonal relational transformation, especially as it relates to race and power in South Africa. The organisational aspect of relational transformation was another issue that emerged in interviews and shed light on The Warehouse’s decision to adopt a facilitative development strategy. From an organisational and development perspective, participants stated that uneven access to resources contributed to relational inequality in development projects. Warehouse staff members cited a critique voiced by one of their former colleagues so frequently that it became part of the collective Warehouse narrative. The critique came in the form of an analogy, in which participants described how when one party overrode another in the context of a development initiative it was akin to a person entering a community with a guitar and playing an unfamiliar tune. Though the host community may never have heard the song before, the guitarist nevertheless expects them to dance and censures the community if they do so incorrectly. In his AGM address, Ross Tawney used the guitar analogy to explain why The Warehouse chose to shut down its programmes, which the organisation had begun to see as perpetuating power relations between organisations with access to resources and those that did not. The following declaration by Tawney shows how The Warehouse came to believe that inattentiveness to the power one yields in relationships can discourage transformation and the equal treatment of others: The work of transformation that requires and yearns to see communities owning the fullness of their own transformation is something that is complex and takes time, and takes people time on the ground with others. … And if we’re trying to do that [quickly] then we’re playing the guitar very strongly. Then we’re doing things that ultimately bring about dependency, and lack of transformation and broken relationships (Ross Tawney, Warehouse Staff Member, 02 November 2013).
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The substance of the guitar analogy is that lopsided relationships deny people’s inherent equality. This same concern about unequal power relations prompted Akhona Ganyiwa to try to align The Warehouse’s facilitative strategy with the principle of relational transformation: It doesn’t work well when you say ‘mentor’. Because the idea of a mentor, or someone who’s a mentor, it implies power. … And I think one of the ways we’ve tried to deal with it was that we journey. We journey with leaders. There’s a lot of stuff I can learn from other leaders, there are other stuff the leaders can learn with me, but it’s almost like we need to come to a level ground (Akhona Ganyiwa, Warehouse Staff Member, 29 November 2013). Ganyiwa, like his colleagues, perceives an ever-present danger that a person or organisation, in spite of their intentions and even despite its racial make-up, might allow social privilege or access to resources to damage a relationship. According to Warehouse participants’ accounts, relationships can be precarious – one person might dominate another and replicate a colonial process of domination – but they always contain the possibility that South Africans working together might bridge divides, enacting relational transformation and enabling personal and material change to occur. In referring to the national transformation project in South Africa, Achille Mbembe (2008: 7) describes ‘the set of policies designed by the government and the private sector to redress past racial discriminations and to redistribute wealth and income to previously disadvantaged groups’. He furthermore asserts that the project ‘involves both moral questions of justice and equality and pragmatic and instrumental questions of power and social engineering’. From what I have presented of The Warehouse’s transformational development strategy, it is clear the Cape Town organisation’s idea of transformation contains similar awareness of the issues of ‘justice’, ‘equality’, and ‘power’. Where it differs, however, is in its tripartite conceptualisation – the material, individual, and relational elements, which interlink with one another, together make up transformation and inform its practices. Figure 4, below, depicts The Warehouse’s model of transformation according to my analysis thus far. [Figure 4 here]
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MATERIAL TRANSFORMATION
SPIRITUAL CHANGE
Social Development Structural Change
INDIVIDUAL TRANSFORMATION Changed Mindset Realising Power / Relinquishing Power
RELATIONAL TRANSFORMATION Relationship Building Interdependence
TRANSFORMATION IN SOUTH AFRICA
Figure 4. Warehouse participants’ understanding of transformation in South Africa
Figure 4 displays the consensus idea of the meaning of transformation among Warehouse staff members. The degree of agreement was striking, but there were nevertheless moments when participants voiced alternative, and sometimes dissenting, views of the transformational development model. These opinions were in the minority, but they did highlight some of the difficulties The Warehouse confronts as it pursues transformation. Tension at the coalface: The difficulty of doing transformation work in Cape Town In describing The Warehouse’s understanding of transformation I outlined three different elements, this after I had analysed staff members’ interviews by transcribing, coding, and thematising the content. This qualitative analysis described points of convergence in participants’ accounts – The Warehouse staff expressed their answers differently but agreed on material, individual, and relational elements of transformation. In fact, in my interviews with Warehouse staff members, only one
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participant questioned the decision to place transformation at the centre of the organisation’s strategy. She said the following: You see, they [The Warehouse] talk about transformation – what are you transforming from and where are you going to? That’s not clear yet. And how you going to do that, okay. And how you going to encourage them [church leaders] to drive it themselves – that’s not clear, okay (Francis Shaw, Warehouse Staff Member, 05 December 2013). Francis Shaw was the only staff member to question The Warehouse’s new strategy. She was eminently practically minded and highlighted the need for measurable outcomes, especially in terms of being able to attract funding, but she also conceded that The Warehouse’s programmes were no longer suitable to the country’s context. Her criticism, therefore, was not that change was unnecessary, but rather that the strategy was flawed: If you going to, whatever you do, there has to be a framework. You can try it and find it doesn’t work and tweak it, but there is no framework right now. And that for me is their greatest weakness. So a lot of what is going on now is quite a lot of hot air (Francis Shaw, Warehouse Staff Member, 05 December 2013). Shaw’s comments contain similar reservations to those voiced elsewhere in the literature on transformation in South Africa. In the religious sphere, Ganiel (2006, 2007) has observed how a charismatic church’s transformation and integration strategy was criticised as largely symbolic discourse by some members of the congregation who believed change was too slow in coming. And while The Warehouse, like Ganiel’s church, is undoubtedly sincere in its intentions, Shaw foresees the possibility of harm rather than good. Even though only one staff member spoke negatively of The Warehouse’s new approach to development, their criticism resonates strongly enough with concerns voiced elsewhere that it is reasonable to assert that one challenge to ‘doing’ transformation work in Cape Town is establishing conceptual coherence. The second challenge does not rest so much on strategic clarity as much as it does on practical difficulties of implementing and measuring the outcomes of a transformational model of development. The Warehouse seeks to help churches deal with ‘poverty, injustice, and division’ in their communities, issues that are complex and entrenched in many
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parts of South African society. Mandla Nyathi articulated the difficulty of doing this work when he said that ‘what we here at The Warehouse are asking churches to do is not an easy thing, particularly in our [South African] context. There’s a lot of (.) there’s a lot of walls that churches have to climb over to get to where they want to get’. He compared the prospects for churches in different socioeconomic circumstances that are trying to put the principles of transformational development into practice: For a church that is somewhere in Khayelitsha or Sweet Home Farm, who every year when there is a fire their building, shack building is destroyed in the fire, you know, you have to do a lot to get to seeing your community to being transformed. Because you struggling just with your own church and just with your own building. So that’s why I’m saying there’s a lot of somersaults you have to do to even get there because you have to get that. Unlike if you take Christ Church Kenilworth – they have no problems with land or anything (Mandla Nyathi, Warehouse Staff Member, 05 December 2013). Referring to a church he had been involved in which was based in a deprived area of Cape Town, he said: ‘I mean [the] church is only about one and a half years old [l], so it’s quite young and we experimenting with a number of things but, I mean, there’s a lot of somersaults’. Nyathi is a staff member who is in the position of promoting transformational development as a model for churches to follow while also being personally aware of the challenges associated with implementing it. The situation described by Nyathi, in which a person or community takes on the burden of effecting social change, recalls commentators’ criticism of any focus on micro-level change as ill-conceived and harmful to the post-apartheid transformation project (Hovland, 2003). But Nyathi’s account revealed that in spite of almost certain setbacks, he still believed that transformational development was the best route to material change in communities. He tries to resolve the difficulties of local, churchled transformation by drawing on the possibilities presented by relational transformation: We not saying, bam, here’s a project. But we saying let’s walk this journey together and see what comes up. Perhaps maybe that pastor needs to be connected to other people who can be able to buy into his vision and, you know, build relationships, you know (Mandla Nyathi, Warehouse Staff Member, 05 December 2013).
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Forming diverse relationships in the city fulfils one element of transformational development, which is that it presents opportunities to share resources. Yet as I discussed earlier, relational transformation is beset by various challenges, including power relations brought to bear by the legacy of apartheid. The difficulty of actually crossing racial and economic divides (part of the transformation goal in post-apartheid South Africa) is illustrated by some of The Warehouse’s previous attempts to promote relationship building in Cape Town. The Warehouse staff member Emma Hampton used the example of a camp organised to bring together two youth groups, one from an affluent church and another from a much poorer area of the city, to demonstrate the obstacles to success: What happens if two teenagers exchange telephone numbers and want to go and watch a movie together? … Is the, a parent of a Kenilworth teenager going to drive to Sweet Home Farm to fetch a friend? Are they gonna go to Gugulethu Mall to go shopping? In our city, how is it actually going to happen? (Emma Hampton, Warehouse Staff Member, 18 November 2013). Hampton mentions three distinctive areas of Cape Town to highlight the practical challenges of relational transformation. Kenilworth, a middle-class area home to a St John’s Parish church, is part of the affluent Southern Suburbs, while Sweet Home Farm and Gugulethu, two township areas, are located on the Cape Flats. Major roads stretch between these areas and act as physical and psychological barriers, segmenting the city. Robert Taylor, the former Warehouse staff member, described quite bluntly the state of affairs, asserting that Capetonians ‘live in a divisive, divided, broken, fractured city’ (Robert Taylor, Former Warehouse Staff Member, 13 November 2013). The pressing need, in Taylor’s view, is to ‘rely on everyone else’ rather than live isolated lives, but as Hampton’s words demonstrate, Cape Town’s suburbs are so discretely marked in the geography of the city and the minds of its residents that even when churches take the first step to overcome division, the path forward is by no means clear. Natasha Smith, a white Warehouse staff member in her early twenties, captured the durability of the divisions in Cape Town and South Africa in her evocative statement that ‘once you start to cross bridges there’s so many bridges to cross’ (Natasha Smith, Warehouse Staff Member, 04 November 2013). For The Warehouse, with its focus on building and bringing together a diverse network of churches across the city, these bridges upon bridges represent the challenges 145
surrounding, but also the necessity of pursuing, individual, relational, and material transformation initiatives. The overall sense of The Warehouse is that, in dealing with a variety of churches and religious groups across Cape Town, it faces a set of challenges to its work. These issues include the socioeconomic power relations that attend race and class, as well as the geographic and psychological obstacles that sustain historical divisions in the city. The Warehouse made a deliberate decision to establish its offices in a centrally located light industrial zone within the city in the belief that this would provide a relatively neutral meeting place and training base for black and white, poor and affluent churches. From participants’ interviews, this strategy seems to have provided possibilities for The Warehouse to encourage interaction across divides, but the evidence from interview data is that the organisation still needs to confront some of the most resilient issues that affect post-apartheid South Africa. In contrast to this middle-ground approach, Fusion, the second case study in this thesis, works with a more homogeneous community in a neighbourhood on the outskirts of the city. Fusion’s organisational mentality provides a counterpoint to The Warehouse – its idea of transformation, while not radically different to that of The Warehouse, reflects its different location and strategic goals. The challenges Fusion faces are also particular to its context and provide additional insight into the limits and possibilities of pursuing transformation in post-apartheid South Africa. Case Study 2: Fusion Fusion has its offices in the heart of Manenberg, a small, predominantly coloured neighbourhood born in the late 1960s of apartheid separatist policies. The Manenberg People’s Centre, where Fusion is based, is a three-storey face-brick building with a steel-gated front entrance and metal cages protecting the ground- and first-storey windows. These safety precautions are reminders of Manenberg’s reputation as a community affected by gangs, crime, and a violent drug trade. At the time I arrived in Cape Town to begin my fieldwork, the small neighbourhood of approximately 61,500 people (City of Cape Town, 2013) was in the grip of a gang turf war. I did not begin participant observation in the area until after the gangs had agreed on a truce and did not witness any gang violence during my visits to Fusion. However, in an interview three months following a ceasefire, Michelle Kirchner, a staff member, mentioned to 146
me that Fusion is based ‘in an absolute hotspot’ (Michelle Kirchner, Fusion Staff Member, 10 December 2013) of gang activity. Kirchner, a white 28-year-old woman in her late-twenties, explained that two of the most notorious gangs – the Americans and the Hard Livings – operate in the vicinity of the organisation’s offices and that the road running past its entrance acts as a boundary between them. It is noticeable that whereas The Warehouse values what it perceives is its neutral location, Fusion has its office in an area that epitomises the insecurity of living in South Africa’s townships. Figure 5. The Manenberg People’s Centre
Despite existing as a Warehouse programme since 2004, Fusion only moved into its premises in Manenberg in early 2012. Just as Warehouse staff members agreed that being based in Wetton was crucial to the success of the organisation’s work, so members of the Fusion team described the importance of being headquartered in Manenberg. Where The Warehouse has designed its offices to be neutral, Fusion has tried to integrate into the area. One staff member, Ayesha Green, noted that ‘everyone knows we here. You know, like, when someone has a problem in Manenberg which don’t have money, they, like, “Oh, Fusion, they are people that can help me”’ (Ayesha Green, Fusion Staff Member, 27 November 2013). Green, a 30-year-old coloured
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woman, was making the point that the location in Manenberg was convenient to people living there – they did not have to travel far or spend money on taxi fare to reach Fusion, as would have been the case if they were still based in Wetton. Green’s colleague Michelle Kirchner also commented on the merits of being based in the community but focused on Fusion’s ‘hotspot’ location to remark on why the staff found it invaluable to be in close proximity to some the worst aspects of Manenberg life: So, like, so now that we work in the community, when there’s a gang fight we experience gang fight with the rest of the community. Like, we hear the shooting, we see people shooting, we see people running, we have to dodge where we drive. You know, like, and while that’s not fun, it helps, it helps us understand what our, like what our guys are actually facing (Michelle Kirchner, Fusion Staff Member, 10 December 2013). Kirchner’s comments articulate the organisation’s belief that being part of the community is the best way for the staff to conduct its work with young people who are at risk of falling into the local gang and drug scene. Many of the Fusion team members are originally from Manenberg and understand the daily pressures that accompany life in the neighbourhood. Kirchner, who isn’t, maintained that as an organisation ‘it helps for us to be surrounded by what’s happening in the [community] and you, you experience the, like, you feel the tension rise and you feel the relaxation and you see the party in and you see the drugs happen to your face’. Fusion was not unique in valuing lived experience as a means to achieve its goals – The Warehouse staff members mentioned that confronting their own difficulties of working as a multi-racial organisation helped them to guide churches along the path of transformational development. However, Fusion’s deeply experiential strategy – wanting to embed itself in the life of the community and in particular the lives of high-risk young people – departed from The Warehouse’s more calculated, neutral, and church-oriented approach. The two teams employed differing strategies to accomplish their transformation goals, which ultimately became the source of tensions between the groups.
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Fusion’s religious character: A neo-monastic community The height of the friction between The Warehouse and Fusion existed during The Warehouse’s transition from a programme-led organisation to one based on facilitation. Originally founded in 2004 as a Warehouse programme, Fusion had always struggled to accomplish its dual goals of 1) establishing ties with Manenberg churches in order to 2) work with high-risk youth in the area. Writing in The Warehouse’s 2009-10 Annual Report, Fusion founder Grant Stewart conceded, ‘Our greatest challenge continues to be in finding the best way to reach [high-risk youth] alongside the local churches in Manenberg’ (The Warehouse, 2010: 10). Although the organisation had limited success in partnering with churches in the area over subsequent years, by the time I arrived in Manenberg in 2013 frustration was the overriding sentiment. The following comment from Steve Davies, a staff member, exemplifies the feeling within the small FBO: I think, because Fusion is based in Manenberg there’s a frustration with the Manenberg church, for sure. Because there’s such a discrepancy, I think, between what we feel the church should be and how we see it responding to what [is] the most prevalent issue in the community, which is gangsterism and drugs. And so there is, I think, a disillusionment, we have to be honest about that, with specifically the Manenberg Church (Steve Davies, Fusion Staff Member, 27 November 2013). Davies, a 28-year-old white man, also mentioned the organisation’s exasperation with the churches’ insistence that ‘you have to wear a suit, you have to take your Bible, you have to be clean, you have to be sober’. In an environment as precarious as Manenberg, Davies viewed these requirements as barriers to young people joining churches, they were checklists that could never be met. In contrast to the strict rules imposed by local churches, Fusion envisioned an approach based on building relationships with young people. As one staff member, Charles Duminy, described it, ‘we walk alongside broken young people. If they mess up then it’s okay that they mess up, but because we need to walk with them’ (Charles Duminy, Fusion Staff Member, 10 December 2013). Duminy, a coloured man in his mid-thirties, stressed that Fusion did not cut ties with young people who lapsed into drug-use or gang-related activities. Other participants, like Michelle Kirchner, described these relationships as akin to family ties – they could not be severed.
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Fusion’s emphasis on relationship contrasts sharply with the local churches but does not seem to be incompatible with The Warehouse’s new strategy. Its forthright avowal of community at all costs proved to be at odds with certain aspects of The Warehouse’s programmatic approach until 2013, however. As Duminy noted, ‘in terms of organisational settings, and because of there’s different pockets within The Warehouse … certain people [were] not getting Fusion’ (Charles Duminy, Fusion Staff Member, 10 December 2013). One interview in particular revealed this lack of strategical cohesion, as the Warehouse staff member asserted that Fusion’s focus on building relationships led to a situation in which the organisation was unaccountable and ‘badly managed’. For their part, several Fusion staff members referred to how they felt their relational approach had been misunderstood, as if they were ‘rebellious’ or recalcitrant ‘teenagers, youngsters’. By the time I arrived to conduct my research in August 2013, The Warehouse had completed its strategic transition and Fusion, as a result of the changes, was on the verge of becoming independent. Sebastian Davids, a 35-year-old coloured man, articulated how Fusion staff members finally felt that they were able to fulfil their goals: And so, you know, so now we can freely say that Fusion’s a praying community that seeks to build meaningful relationships with broken young people in whatever form. And even though we love the Church and we will engage with the Church, that’s not our primary target, you know. Our primary target is broken young people, whereas The Warehouse’s target is the Church, you know (Sebastian Davids, Fusion Staff Member, 27 November 2013). Davids’s statement indicates the importance of prayer to Fusion’s strategy. Ayesha Green also described Fusion as ‘a praying community’ (Ayesha Green, Fusion Staff Member, 27 November 2013), and Michelle Kirchner noted that while other Christian organisations pray regularly as a matter of principle, ‘I believe that the prayer is one strand of our strategy. … Like, it’s actually part of what we build into our strategic plan in terms of NGO stuff’ (Michelle Kirchner, Fusion Staff Member, 10 December 2013). This centrality of prayer links to Fusion’s distinctive perception of itself as a ‘Boiler Room’ community, a term used by Duminy as well as his colleague Andre de Villiers, a 41-year-old white South African man. In Duminy’s words, a Boiler Room strategy involves ‘setting up praying communities inside a bigger
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community. It’s a community of people coming together praying. So, in living life different to, yah’ (Charles Duminy, Fusion Staff Member, 10 December 2013). Boiler Rooms have been promoted internationally by authors such as Greig and Freeman (2007) as evangelistic (though not Evangelical) strategies of living within communities and responding to that community’s specific needs. Advocates of Boiler Rooms model themselves on ancient Celtic monastic lifestyles of personal prayer and participation in local communities as a permanent member rather than a visitor who leaves after accomplishing certain tasks. According to authors such as Greig and Freeman, Boiler Room communities provide a different way to do church, namely by living out Christian values of love, compassion, and tolerance rather than expecting people to attend church services. Neo-monasticism, of which the Boiler Room strategy provides an example, specifically responds to ‘post-modern culture’ (Greig and Freeman, 2007: passim) which practitioners believe has rendered many Christian traditions irrelevant, including requirements to cleave to liturgies or the insistence on hierarchies within prayer or teaching that characterises Anglican, Catholic, and evangelical Protestant traditions. de Villiers, the Fusion staff member, stressed the local, participatory character of neo-monasticism by noting that the Celtic monasteries on which Boiler Rooms model themselves were not neutral spaces. They were small groups deeply invested in the larger, surrounding community: They weren’t kind of this place that was removed from society. They were actually in the midst of society and they were places of education, they were places of hospitality, they were places of healing, they were places of prayer. And so, I look there and go, actually, you know what, we can reform that in the worst of community (Andre de Villiers, Fusion Staff Member, 04 December 2013). With its newfound ‘freedom’ from The Warehouse’s church-oriented goals, Fusion was able to pursue more fully its ambition to be a monastic-style organisation, with implications for the kind of transformation it pursued. As a small community modelling a different way of life within a larger community, its view of transformation was more local than the sort pursued by The Warehouse. The three elements of transformation – material, individual, and relational – were still evident in the analysis of the Fusion interviews, but the staff members described a more intensely personal
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type of transformation that reflected their setting in a small community beset by specific and entrenched social problems. The three elements of transformation revisited: The view from Manenberg The distinguishing feature of The Warehouse’s transformation model is its incorporation of transformational development principles into its work. These principles fed into the job descriptions of several Warehouse employees, with the result that on many occasions I had only to prompt staff members to explain what they meant by transformation after they had already raised the topic. In contrast, I interviewed five Fusion employees and four members of their network, only one of whom spontaneously introduced the idea of transformation into discussion. Fusion describes itself online and in its literature as an organisation that is ‘cultivating a Transformational Community of young people formerly involved in lifestyles of destruction in order to help them choose an alternative way of life’ (Fusion, n.d.). When I raised it with Michelle Kirchner, however, she mentioned that ‘we’re not particularly intentional in using that kind of language’ (Michelle Kirchner, Fusion Staff Member, 10 December 2013). The 29-year-old staff member initially gave me a short organisational definition, namely that transformation is ‘of the full person: spirit, body, mind, soul’, but contrasted what she portrayed as Fusion’s action-oriented work with the apparently less intimate, more intellectual work of The Warehouse. Kirchner stated that Fusion employees ‘value learning and … growing in knowledge in what we’re working in’, but she also expressed frustration when training substituted for or did not translate into action. This action-oriented approach was consistent with the organisational drive to experience and respond directly to the needs of young people in Manenberg, but Kirchner’s seeming ambivalence towards conceptualising transformation belies a more nuanced organisational attitude to the topic. For instance, Sebastian Davids, a fellow member of the Fusion staff, noted that ‘we [have been] playing around with that word for a while’ (Sebastian Davids, Fusion Staff Member, 27 November 2013). Davids, a coloured man who had been part of Fusion for several years, noted how the organisational understanding of transformation had ‘evolved over six years’:
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You know … in the beginning we thought, Oh, we just need to arrange meetings where we just meet up, you know. … And it didn’t happen because, you know, we were, we believed God was calling us to it, but we tried too hard to make it happen. And communities form, you know, you can’t make a community – it just forms, you know, organically (Sebastian Davids, Fusion Staff Member, 27 November 2013). The colleagues’ comments seem slightly contradictory, but in fact this is less the case than at first seems apparent. Davids definitely appears more interested in exploring how the idea of transformation informs Fusion’s work. Like Kirchner, though, he highlights the inadequacy of thought without action. Davids’s experience was that trying to plan a strategy around a definition of transformation is bound to fail. It was only in the act of meeting young people and establishing relationships with them while they were at their lowest points that a transformational community began to form. Davids’s comment shows that even though the idea of transformation was less well-defined in the context of Fusion’s work than for The Warehouse, it was not absent from its strategy. Fusion participants were still able to explain their understanding of transformation to me in the context of their work, and after analysing the interview transcripts for themes it was clear that much of the content related to the same elements of transformation discussed earlier, namely material, individual, and relational transformation. Given the differences in the organisations’ strategies, which incorporated their geographic location and target group, it is not surprising that Fusion’s idea of what was entailed in these three transformational elements sometimes diverged from The Warehouse’s understanding. The most striking difference, as I discuss immediately below, is that The Warehouse had a more expansive understanding of material transformation and saw their role as facilitating city-wide, and even national, structural changes. Fusion participants, meanwhile, tended to focus on the needs of the Manenberg community. They saw themselves as deeply and emotionally invested in bringing about these changes. 1. Material transformation Fusion’s focus on the needs of the Manenberg community and the injustices it faces informed their understanding of the material manifestations of transformation. Participants described the effects on the community of prolonged exposure to gang 153
warfare, drug addiction, unemployment, and poverty. For instance, Sebastian Davids, a long-time Fusion staff member, described Manenberg as ‘broken by gangs and … broken by drug addiction’ (Sebastian Davids, Fusion Staff Member, 27 November 2013). One way this ‘brokenness’ seems to play out in the lives of residents is in the poor state of education in local schools. Davids made particular note of this, observing that ‘we had a school last year [2012] with a pass rate of 1 per cent in Matric [Grade 12] – 1 per cent, the lowest in the South, in the whole South Africa in Manenberg last year’. Another interview participant, Annette Prince, a coloured woman who volunteered at Fusion and The Warehouse, explicitly linked the presence of gangs to the failing school system in Manenberg. She stated that ‘when the gang wars were raging, literally they [children] had to walk to school when guns were shooting around them. Or not go to school at all. So the injustice there is if there’s a gang war I don’t get educated’ (Annette Prince, Fusion and Warehouse Volunteer, 19 November 2013). Both these comments describe young people’s powerlessness within an education system that struggles to function because of deep-rooted and disruptive violence. Davids expressed his frustration that despite Manenberg schools’ clear need for assistance, the Western Cape Premier had diverted much-needed funds from the Province’s Education budget to the Metro Police during the latest eruption of gang violence in Manenberg: It’s like, so we had a problem with education last year, you take away from that resource, you know. Don’t the City have security budget, you know, that, like, you need to, you need to know when, when one of its biggest issues is gangs, that you need to have an extra budget for these type of things. And yet, they took away six million – and six million’s a lot of money, you know, especially for this community (Sebastian Davids, Fusion Staff Member, 27 November 2013). Victor Swanepoel, a local church minister in the area who had worked with Fusion in the past, described Manenberg as ‘a unique community’ (Victor Swanepoel, Fusion Associate, 12 December 2013). A coloured man in his mid-50s, Swanepoel discerned in Manenberg ‘a particular feel and culture and style of doing things that you don’t find in another community …. And also because of the gangs – it has the most gangs’. The excerpt from my interview with Davids evokes this same sense that Manenberg is unique, a place that politicians do not understand or even plan for
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sufficiently. The area seems effectively to be a place apart, where the apparatuses of state and province are ineffective and laws are seen to be enforced haphazardly by police. In Charles Duminy’s words, the law ‘plays no role in this community’ and the justice system ‘continues to imprison our people’ as it provides little in the way of rehabilitation and even less of a safety net once inmates are released. He described a recent case where a man had come out on parole but would almost certainly be rearrested as ‘he’s been put out by his mom, so he’s back on the streets’. The generalised lack of trust in the state among Fusion staff members might explain why none of them proposed that macro-economic or structural changes should form part of their transformation work. In this, the Fusion employees differed from The Warehouse staff. It is important to note that even though Fusion staff members did not suggest the problems in Manenberg could be effectively dealt with through state action – for example, by changing economic or governance structures – this was not because participants failed to perceive structural issues in the country. On the contrary, five of the seven Fusion staff members identified material effects of historical injustices linked to Manenberg’s creation as an apartheid-era neighbourhood for non-whites. Steve Davies, the 28-year-old Fusion employee, insisted that apartheid policies of forced removals continue to have legacy effects on the living conditions and life choices of young people growing up in Manenberg today: Yah, you know, poverty, housing, it’s no coincidence for me that in a community that shouldn’t exist because it was built by racists, when everyone’s houses wherever were smashed and bulldozed and people were thrown here, it’s no surprise to me that the community is now known for this territoriality. If the reason you’re in this community is because someone smashed all your turf, as it were, down before, what are you going to do? You’re gonna join a gang, you’re gonna stake out a turf, and you’re gonna defend it with your life. So that’s (.) and so the biggest injustice, I think, is these guys not being seen as victims of the past but being seen as perpetrators of the present crime statistics in Man- (.) in Cape Town (Steve Davies, Fusion Staff Member, 27 November 2013). Davies’s analysis resonates with other participants’ views that Manenberg and its residents are affected by forces beyond their control. In this particular instance, Davies argues that young people are alienated by the state and South African society when they unavoidably fall into a criminal lifestyle. Charles Duminy, Davies’s
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colleague, shares this perception of the inevitability of violent crime in his description of Manenberg as brutalising in its crowdedness: So, with the housing structures that’s been – if you go around here they are revamping some of the structures, they revamping the flats right now – but the density of the houses and how it’s been set up, it’s been set up as a, as a place where people would (.) they will end up killing one another (Charles Duminy, Fusion Staff Member, 10 December 2013). A predominant theme in the interviews with Fusion participants, therefore, is that the historical injustices of apartheid continue to affect the lives of Manenberg residents. To sum up participants’ views, these injustices manifest in gang formation as a way to secure territory in an area in which the residents continue to feel alienated and dispossessed. Due to low levels of education and corresponding exclusion from the labour market, young men in particular join gangs and become involved in the local drug trade to earn an income, gain social security, and a sense of family and community. The very geography of the area – densely populated in poorly constructed flats – lays the basis for violent criminality, especially among the high-risk youths with whom Fusion work. Yet the prevailing view among participants was that the state was ineffective at dealing with these problems and at times even exacerbated them. Ayesha Green captured the sentiment in the broader community when she stated that ‘the decisions they [politicians] making and changing stuff is not right. Especially for people like us in Manenberg. So I don’t think I would have a conversation about government with people on the streets’ (Ayesha Green, Fusion Staff Member, 27 November 2013). They would ‘freak’, she said. A second prominent theme in the interviews is that the ‘brokenness’ physically apparent in the dilapidated buildings and systemically evident in young people’s schooling affected individual people – the material conditions resulted in emotionally traumatised young people. Sebastian Davids observed that this is ‘the hardest type of young person in the community which no one really want to work with’ (Sebastian Davids, Fusion Staff Member, 27 November 2013); Steve Davies similarly described how this group is ‘doubly marginalised’ – they are ‘marginalised within a marginalised community’ (Steve Davies, Fusion Staff Member, 27 November 2013), as residents see them as worthless. There was a consensus among participants that Fusion was
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filling a gap by working with high-risk youth in Manenberg because, as Davids declared, ‘if you come to the community there’s that age gap or that particular type of young person that no one touches’. Participants emphasised that Fusion, recently accredited by the City of Cape Town as an official organisation, was the only FBO or NGO working with youth in the area. Charles Duminy noted that ‘there’s no … soccer, sports foundation, there’s no other organisation at the moment recognised as working within the youth development sector’. Ayesha Green, Duminy’s colleague, recalled how an FBO had worked with young children in the area several years prior to Fusion starting up, but noted that even that organisation had left the community. This sense of overwhelming individual need in a neglected group of people formed the basis of Fusion participants’ understanding of the social challenges in Manenberg. It led them to suggest that transformation needs primarily to occur in the young people with whom they work if the material issues are to be addressed. 2. Individual transformation We have seen earlier in this chapter that The Warehouse staff typically envisioned individual transformation as a personal, spiritual process that led to a realisation of how one could and should respond to the issues of poverty, injustice, inequality, and division in Cape Town. The Fusion staff articulated a similar process of individual change leading to social change, but whereas The Warehouse aimed to promote a socially aware mindset among church leaders, Fusion arguably had a much more complex goal in promoting changed attitudes in high-risk youth. Annual Reports from past years’ work correspond with interviewees accounts of the problems young people contend with in Manenberg, namely inadequate education, unpredictable or poor family relationships, and an inability to manage their emotions. Fusion recognised and responded to these issues by trying to meet the emotional and physical needs of young people affected by sexual violence or drug addiction. Once these needs had been met in what they saw as the family environment of the Fusion community, staff members envisaged these young people would help address the social problems afflicting Manenberg. In the words of the former staff member Andre de Villiers, ‘transformation happens when the ones who are breaking the community are the ones restoring the community. … And so that’s the model of transformation – the ones
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broken will restore’. De Villiers drew on an Old Testament verse as the basis for Fusion’s transformation model. He stated that I was especially interested in Isaiah 51:4, the beginning part, that (.) they are, so the ones who were broken are the ones who then go and rebuild the broken wall. So I think it’s Isaiah 41:4, it says, and they will rebuild the broken walls of the city (Andre de Villiers, Fusion Staff Member, 04 December 2013). His former colleague Sebastian Davids mentioned the same verse, though he paraphrased it slightly differently. He referred to the young people with whom Fusion try to build relationships, saying that once their needs were met and hopefully came to know God, ‘so they will go back and rebuild ancient ruins, you know, that has been long devastated. They will be called oaks of righteousness’ (Sebastian Davids, Fusion Staff Member, 27 November 2013). The men focused on how personal change in highrisk youth would affect the young people’s surroundings, a person-to-community process of positive change. Staff members characterised this process as inwardoutward change in a person. Charles Duminy, for example, referred to ‘people that work inwardly out’ (Charles Duminy, Fusion Staff Member, 10 December 2013); his colleague Steve Davies referred to healing within that leads to lasting change in the environment. Staff members at Fusion recognised young people’s dire need for employment in Manenberg. As Davies noted, young people themselves hoped above all ‘to have a house, have a family, and have a job’ (Steve Davies, Fusion Staff Member, 27 November 2013), even though many of them do not have the professional acumen or life skills (the basic ability to wake up in the morning and arrive at work on time, for example) to accomplish their dream. At the time of my research, Fusion was trying to purchase a property to start a bakery in the community to employ and train young people, but the organisation still did not see employment as the most important goal of their work. Davies clearly states in the interview excerpt above that the staff’s ultimate desire was that young people in Manenberg would form a relationship with God. Fusion is an explicitly Christian organisation and it is motivated to form an alternative community within Manenberg that reflects their Christian values. Like The Warehouse, Fusion believed that forming a relationship with God enables a person to understand their ‘authentic’ identity and the implications of that for personal action in
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the community. Thus Davids mentioned that Fusion wants to ‘call you out for who you, who God has called you to be’ (Sebastian Davids, Fusion Staff Member, 27 November 2013); Michelle Kirchner, meanwhile, observed how ‘we wanna see them meet Jesus and the change that comes with that’: Like, the renewing of your mind, the change in how you view your identity, what that means for how you live out love in the community, what it means to serve, what it, you know, like, all those values (Michelle Kirchner, Fusion Staff Member, 08 November 2013). It is discernible in both Davids’s and Kirchner’s comments that they believe forming a relationship with God leads to the very personal process of self-realisation, and also that this ultimately should entail a commitment to working in Manenberg to better the community. This self-in-community reflects the very basis of Fusion’s Boiler Room strategy, which is to form a small community within a larger one and influence society by living differently to the norm. This is what the Fusion staff have committed to and what they hope their work with high-risk young people will result in. Davids in particular observed the lack of positive role-models in the community for young people, saying that although some former Manenberg residents have gone on to lead lives as international footballers, doctors, and lawyers, ‘the only person that now is successful in the community is the drug dealers’ (Sebastian Davids, Fusion Staff Member, 27 November 2013). He lamented that ‘once you’ve become successful, the message that you send out is that, you know, once you successful you need to go, you need to leave’. In contrast, he and other Fusion staff members expressed their own desire to stay and live in Manenberg; they hoped that young people emerging successfully from troubled pasts would use their experiences to help regenerate the community from within. The challenge Fusion faces in accomplishing its goals is that, unlike The Warehouse, which conducts its work within the Church, Fusion works outside of it, with implications for how it pursues its work. To be sure, both organisations favour a facilitative, supportive approach that emphasises purposive relationship building. However, Fusion staff noted that the particularities of the organisation’s work with disaffected young people, many of whom have little or no structure to their lives, means that the process of encouraging personal transformation requires more intensive and intimate relationships than those with which The Warehouse are familiar. As we
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have seen, the original friction between the two organisations centred on Fusion’s insistence that their work was driven by relationships and non-measurable outcomes. Even though The Warehouse has since become more relationship-focused, its strategy still entails neutral facilitation rather than the radically relational worldview espoused by Fusion characterised by immersion in their environment. I noted earlier that in the case of The Warehouse, the three elements of transformation were not discrete from one another. This is even more evident in Fusion’s situation, as the organisation’s strategic emphasis on relationship building results in overlap between the individual and relational elements of transformation. In particular, participants agreed that individual transformation cannot occur outside of relational transformation. 3. Relational transformation From the time of its foundation, Fusion tried to approach youth differently to the churches based in Manenberg. Andre de Villiers, who was involved in Fusion’s early years at The Warehouse, recalled how in the mid-2000s large proportions of young people were vulnerable to falling into gang life in Manenberg – he could not remember the exact number but estimated that ‘30 or 40 per cent of young people were joining gangs’ (Andre de Villiers, Fusion Staff Member, 04 December 2013). He described how, in response to this, the churches ‘would do street crusades and stuff like that’. He noted that it was ‘very, kind of, bring out a coffin and have a coffin – if you don’t turn to Jesus this where you gonna be’. In response to this, Fusion aimed to form a small community within a larger one that emphasised relationship building with young people, offering unconditional belonging and support. Fusion’s relationship-oriented approach, which most participants described as family-formation rather than community-formation, differed consciously from gang structures in Manenberg. Whereas churches seemed to barricade themselves from struggling young people by setting high standards of behaviour for their congregations, gangs offered an easy sense of belonging, support, and economic opportunity, albeit within the drug trade. Having lived in Manenberg and worked at Fusion for a number of years, Steve Davies stated that ‘there’s no community closer than a Hard Living gang in Manenberg. I don’t know a church community that comes close to the brotherhood and the mutuality and the fun that the Hard Livings gang members have’ (Steve Davies, Fusion Staff Member, 27 November 2013). And while he observed this 160
was ‘a huge injustice’, he and others conceded that the perception of prestige and power accompanying gang membership appealed to Manenberg youth, both male and female. Faced with this reality, Fusion staff observed that the organisation needed to meet the needs young people expressed when they made the decision to join a gang in the area. Kirchner stated that ‘we need to (.) trump that [sense of belonging] with a different kind of community’ (Michelle Kirchner, Fusion Staff Member, 08 November 2013). In contrast to gang life, the family-community that Kirchner and others envisioned provided stable relationships that did not rest on territorial allegiances. Rather, Fusion associated their family-community with the basis of transformation in young people’s lives. In Kirchner’s opinion, by resorting to drugs and membership in gangs, young people were treating the ‘symptoms’ of their own estrangement. Thus she asserted that for a lot of people, either because of their drugs or before their drugs, there’s rejection, there’s something that’s blocked them from family. And so, so the community aspect for me is almost bigger than the seeing people come off drugs bit (Michelle Kirchner, Fusion Staff Member, 08 November 2013). The Fusion staff member was by no means underplaying the destructive properties of drugs or the consequences of addiction; instead, she was asserting her opinion that ‘anyone can go to rehab and come off drugs and nothing else changes’. Fundamental shifts in behaviour could only occur ‘within family (.) of sorts. It has to happen within a place where you’re belonging’. Fusion believed that in a broken environment in which young people might never have had a relationship with God or their family, the first step to individual transformation – which should lead to material transformation – should occur in what Sebastian Davids described as ‘a community where young people have equal space, where they find rhythm, where people, you know, where they know even though I mess up, I won’t be kicked out’ (Sebastian Davids, Fusion Staff Member, 27 November 2013). Fusion staff members expected young people to ‘mess up’, either by relapsing into drug use or returning to a gang. But instead of taking a punitive approach to young people’s misdemeanours like the Manenberg churches and in absolute opposition to the retributive violence regularly meted out by gangs, Fusion staff members insisted
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that the family-community they strived to build offered young people room to make mistakes. This was precisely because, in Kirchner’s words, ‘my brother’s always gonna be a brother, even when we’re fighting’ (Michelle Kirchner, Fusion Staff Member, 08 November 2013). This comment contrasts with the vignette her colleague Steve Davies recounted of a Hard Livings gang member who killed his brother because he had belonged to the rival Americans gang. In a neighbourhood in which, to quote the church leader Victor Swanepoel who described the uniqueness of Manenberg, ‘life … is so cheap’ (Victor Swanepoel, Fusion Associate, 12 December 2013), Fusion sees the only possibility for change occurring at the base level of an alternative community – a family living according to the Christian principle of unconditional love. As Sebastian Davids noted, ‘when we look at the way God has loved us and we, when scripture says that he loves us unconditionally, you know, with no boundaries, then he doesn’t take his love away when we sin or when we turn away from him. And so, therefore, then he calls us to do the same, you know, to love unconditionally and not to hold back’ (Sebastian Davids, Fusion Staff Member, 27 November 2013). As I have mentioned, during the course of my fieldwork in Cape Town, Fusion gained its independence from The Warehouse and the opportunity to pursue its neomonastic strategy based as it is on building a family-community that holds conspicuously different values to gangs and even churches surrounding it. Its expressed unconditional approach reflects a radical relational strategy that differs to The Warehouse even though the latter organisation had by late-2013 moved away from its early programmatic style of providing relief and development. In its newly established ‘freedom’, Fusion staff members unanimously agreed on their strategy and viewed it as a coming-of-age – no longer the rebellious teenager, Fusion could pursue its plans in spite of the difficulties it would inevitably face in the process. The main difference now is that where parts of The Warehouse had seen fatal flaws, Fusion acknowledges significant but not insurmountable challenges. I discuss the most notable of these below. Challenges of a radically relational approach to transformation in Manenberg In The Warehouse’s 2009/10 Annual Report, at the point at which the organisation was beginning to question its programmatic strategy, a Fusion staff member described the difficulty of working with high-risk youth in Manenberg. They stated that ‘over 162
the year whenever we have taken steps forward it has been followed by steps backwards – drug relapses, constant lying, manipulation and stealing, as well as temporary disappearances’ (The Warehouse, 2010). It was an honest evaluation of the difficulties of working with a group of people living on the margins of society. Three years on, I encountered a very similar assessment of Fusion’s work when I interviewed Steve Davies: We’re about trying to do life and help heal and re-parent a bunch of (.) a demographic of people that everyone else has given up on. So what does it look like? Ah, hard to say, hard to say. I think it looks messy, I think it will look tiring, I think it will look [p] disappointing, but I also think it will look, I suppose I think it will be high highs and low lows. I think when we see a guy leave a gang or someone come off heroin for good or someone pin down a job or become a community leader who was previously shooting in a gang war, that’s gonna be a high high. But equally when we see half our stuff stolen or get mugged at gun point or whatever, that’s pretty low lows, yah (Steve Davies, Fusion Staff Member, 27 November 2013). One of The Warehouse staff members most opposed to Fusion’s highly relational strategy cited the complex nature of the organisation’s work in her critique. She was sympathetic to the Fusion staff’s intentions but claimed they were ill-trained to meet the needs of high-risk youth: ‘You dealing with addictions, you dealing with criminality, you dealing with dysfunctional families, you dealing with dysfunctional people, you dealing with mental illness. A host of things. And you have no knowledge of what you dealing with!’ Fusion recognises the array of problems young people face and also acknowledges the need for appropriately trained professionals to address these problems. However, because of the organisation’s strategy, a challenge presents itself in actually linking Fusion’s youth to counsellors or psychologists. Without a large pool of funds, Fusion cannot afford to pay the fees many medical professionals demand for their time. In having to resort to counsellors or students who give freely of their time, Fusion must countenance the prospect that these volunteers could leave after spending relatively short spells working with the organisation. Fusion’s main concern, as Michelle Kirchner voices in the following interview excerpt, is that any short-term involvement undermines the organisation’s relational ethos: 'Cause the [young] people that we’re working with have dealt with so much rejection that you don’t wanna start a relationship that lasts two months. 163
… So it’s trying to find, [s] so, like, the idea is to outsource but it’s difficult to find people who are willing to walk a long road with people for not a million rand (Michelle Kirchner, Fusion Staff Member, 08 November 2013). One clear way to alleviate the problem of being able to pay for counselling services would be for Fusion to secure long-term funding from a donor, but as several staff members argued, their relational model of engaging with youth in Manenberg militates against any donor-led, outcome-oriented mindset. The Fusion staff tended to define their work in opposition to programmatic ways of working, which led them to approach funding in the same way they conduct their work – relationally. Staff members admitted that their funding strategy constrained them but were adamant that any deviation from their relational goal would inevitably lead to a top-down rather than bottom-up approach. Several Fusion participants observed that because Manenberg has a unique character and displays such an intensive version of South Africa’s social problems, the neighbourhood has historically attracted interest from international NGOs. From Sebastian Davids’s point of view, one of the most insidious characteristics of these external interventions has been that people have ‘received millions and millions of rand to do stuff in Manenberg, and none of that money has come to Manenberg’ (Sebastian Davids, Fusion Staff Member, 27 November 2013). He vehemently stressed that Manenberg has ‘always been exploited in that way, always been exploited’. His words tell of historically unequal relationships and help explain the organisation’s reluctance to rely on external funding and its desire to avoid at all costs having to appease donors rather than meet the needs of Manenberg youth. Having taken this approach, though, Fusion may have imposed constraints on its operations and ability to resolve young people’s complex emotional problems. Perhaps the most considerable challenge to conducting work based on Fusion’s strict relational ethic is that young people have great economic needs alongside any desire they have for secure relationships. Victor Swanepoel, the Fusion associate and church leader in the area, expressed particular concern in this regard, specifically that religious groups, whether Christian or otherwise, ‘can do a lot in terms of our teaching, our conscientisation, our programmes that we run with young people, getting into their minds, but that’s about all’ (Victor Swanepoel, Fusion Associate, 12 December 2013). He summarised the situation, asserting, ‘We cannot create work. We can’t provide
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jobs. And we can’t eradicate the poverty. … Where do you start, how do you deal with it?’ This is an especially important question when considering that economic imperatives can drive young people into involvement with gangs and the drug trade. Fusion’s pragmatic response to the question was to acknowledge, as Steve Davies put it, that as a small organisation with limited resources, ‘we’re not going to save Manenberg’ (Steve Davies, Fusion Staff Member, 27 November 2013). Staff members nevertheless had great hopes that they could meet the challenge, while not fully overcoming it, by urgently trying to start a bakery that would serve the twofold purpose of creating jobs with a small income for high-risk youth, as well as providing a safe place for professional and life skills training within a supportive, relational environment. By mid-2015 – about 18 months after I finished my research in Cape Town – the small organisation had realised its goal and established a coffee shop and bakery in the area, which The Warehouse, among other groups, helped advertise through their networks. In many ways, the bakery epitomises Fusion’s understanding of transformation. It is a local project that serves the needs of a particular group of people – high-risk youth in Manenberg. In the face of widespread unemployment, poverty, and deep inequality in South Africa, a locally based micro-enterprise such as Fusion’s bakery will only ever benefit a small target group. According to how Fusion participants understood their organisational strategy, however, this is sufficient. It was consistently evident in participants’ comments that Fusion staff members believed they were filling a gap by working locally and integrating as a community into the lives of a group of young people with whom no one else wanted to associate. While they asserted that their strategy allowed them to work towards genuine and lasting change in the area, it is still apparent that they face significant challenges to realising their goals and, possibly, criticism that they pay insufficient attention to overarching solutions to Manenberg’s problems. Conclusion: The Meaning of Transformation in Different Sites and Its Implication for Christian Religious Peacebuilding This chapter has shown that participants from two Christian FBOs doing relief and development work in Cape Town, South Africa hold very particular understandings of the idea of transformation in post-apartheid society. These understandings are
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embedded in their religious frameworks and also reflect the social structural and class dynamics of the areas in which they work. The organisations’ understandings and strategic decisions display how transformation in South Africa is a multi-dimensional process. In this way, it reflects the conceptualisation within conflict transformation literature (see Chapter 1) that a durable peace process must work at the micro-, medium-, and macro- levels of society to establish a holistic response to the causes and effects of conflict (Paffenholz, 2009; Lederach, 2012). Thematic analysis of participants’ interview transcripts showed that staff members from the first of my two case studies, The Warehouse, described transformation in terms of its material, individual, and relational elements. Although conceptually distinct, these three transformational elements were not entirely discrete from one another in practice, as material transformation was seen to be dependent on individual and relational change. In turn, individual transformation stimulated relationship building across the racial, social, and economic divides in the city. The Warehouse’s understanding of transformation, which had links to the Christian concept of transformational development, influenced its long-term strategy of how it worked with churches to deal with poverty, inequality, and division in postapartheid Cape Town. Transformational development principles insist that churches, not development agencies, should drive change in their communities and that this change should encompass transformation in individuals, in relationships, and in material structures or institutions, with a basis in the Christian ideal of being in relationship with God. The Warehouse incorporated these principles into its working strategy when it jettisoned programmatic development and embraced facilitative, relational work instead, shutting down its projects in the process. One of the projects to migrate away from The Warehouse during this period was Fusion, my second case study. Participants from the small Manenberg-based organisation asserted that Fusion’s strategy had always differed slightly from that of The Warehouse, particularly in the way it favoured a strong relational approach to its work with high-risk youth in the area. Even though The Warehouse has in recent years adopted a relationship-based approach to its work with local church leaders, the Fusion staff still subscribed to a transformational strategy that was more radically relational than its former parent organisation. Fusion had not adopted transformational development principles and had a looser working understanding of transformation than The Warehouse, but the organisation did view itself as a transformational community. 166
When asked their understanding of transformation, the Fusion staff outlined the same three inter-related facets of transformation that the Warehouse staff had mentioned. These are what I have referred to as material, individual, and relational transformation. Since it gained independence from The Warehouse in 2013, Fusion was able to implement its relational approach more fully, pursuing its neo-monastic principles of establishing an alternative community within the larger community with which it worked. Its relationship-based approach highlighted inward-outward transformation as a way in which changed people would help to change their environment, role modelling an alternative way of life within the gang-affected community. I have noted in this chapter and earlier ones that the post-apartheid transformation process seeks to restructure society so that race is not the predetermining characteristic of South Africans’ life opportunities. With this in mind, this chapter problematised each of the case study organisation’s understandings of how to undertake transformation in South Africa. With respect to The Warehouse, this chapter noted that the organisation made a deliberate decision to establish its offices in a light industrial zone within the city in the belief that this would provide a relatively neutral meeting place and training base for black and white, poor and affluent churches. From participants’ interviews, this strategy seems to have provided possibilities for The Warehouse to encourage interaction across divides, but the evidence from interview data is that the organisation still needs to confront some of the most resilient issues that affect post-apartheid South Africa. The socioeconomic and racial power relations that have frustrated transformation at the national level, as well as the geographic and psychological obstacles that sustain historical divisions in the city, hinder The Warehouse’s efforts to bring about lasting peace even as the organisation tries to overcome them. It was consistently evident in participants’ comments that Fusion staff members believed that they were filling a gap by working locally and integrating as a community into the lives of a group of young people with whom no one else wanted to associate. They differentiated their neo-monastic lifestyle, which they associated with old Celtic monastic traditions of integrating into communities while providing an example of an alternative way of living, from the local church in Manenberg. A key feature of Fusion’s religious framework and peacebuilding work is their belief that they are transforming the most marginalised parts of society. While they asserted that their strategy allowed them to work towards lasting change in the area, it is apparent that 167
they face significant challenges to realising their goals. Perhaps the most considerable challenge to conducting work based on Fusion’s strict relational ethic is that young people have great economic needs alongside any desires they have for stable relationships. As with The Warehouse, Fusion’s understanding of transformation in South Africa overlaps with conflict transformation’s focus on changed people but faces difficulties in overcoming the structural limitations to change working within Manenberg. The following chapter extends the examination of the relationship between Christian religious peacebuilding and transformation in South Africa by discussing how staff members at The Warehouse and Fusion implemented their ideas of transformation in their development work. This is what I refer to as their transformational practices.
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Chapter 6 Material, Individual, and Relational Transformational Practices: Two Case Studies of Faith-Based Transformation Work Introduction In the last chapter I discussed how staff members at The Warehouse and Fusion understand the idea of transformation. I thematised interview responses by describing the three elements of transformation to which many participants referred. The first of these, material transformation, focused on alleviating the immediate effects and structural determinants of poverty in deprived areas of the city. The second and third elements entailed individual and relational transformation. The faith-based character of the organisations was reflected in how participants associated individual transformation with personal formation through coming to know one’s ‘authentic’ identity in a relationship with God. Participants described this process of selfrecognition as a realisation of one’s potential and purpose in life, according to how ‘God’s created you to be’ (Lauren Sanger, Warehouse Staff Member, 25 November 2013). The organisations’ emphasis on relationship building across racial and class divides also drew on Biblical tenets stipulating the need for respectful relationships between people. Whereas the aim of the previous chapter was to present and discuss the meanings The Warehouse and Fusion attach to transformation, this chapter extends the examination of the relationship between Christian religious peacebuilding and transformation in South Africa by describing and analysing the organisations in action – that is, how they translate their ideas of transformation into practice. In presenting this information, I refer to interview data and participant observation notes. This chapter focuses firstly on The Warehouse, secondly on Fusion, and concludes by briefly comparing the organisations’ transformational practices for their similarities and differences. This chapter observes that both organisations adopt transformation as a lifestyle, in which the individual is the primary site of transformation, but asserts that The Warehouse, with its structured training, meetings and emphasis on city-wide social change, tries to model an alternative version of South African society that is highly race- and class-sensitive. A Warehouse staff member’s lifestyle of transformation is characterised by continually reflecting on their actions in a multi169
racial society and ‘unlearning’ (Lauren Sanger, Warehouse Staff Member, 25 November 2013) their racialised behaviours. In contrast, Fusion follows a less structured strategy that involves walking the streets of Manenberg to integrate themselves into the community, which forms the basis of its localised transformation activities. Fusion staff members direct their intentionality towards building intimate, family-type relationships with at-risk youth in the area, believing this responds best to the young people’s needs and shows an alternative way of life to that offered by gangs in the area. The Warehouse: The Airport Space At issue in this chapter is how The Warehouse currently responds to the need – clearly recognised by the staff – for material transformation while believing in the simultaneous imperatives of individual and relational transformation. According to one participant who sat on the management committee at The Warehouse, the organisation’s strategy is made up of three core strands: 1) visiting church leaders in the Greater Cape Town area; 2) facilitating ‘transformational encounters’, including training events and discussion forums; and 3) preparing and making available ‘transformational resources’ such as training notes and podcasts of sermons delivered by Warehouse staff members. The first of these strands reflects The Warehouse’s new focus on church leaders as a source of transformation. It involves, as Emma Hampton stated, ‘working with them one on one, mentoring them, coaching them, [and] supporting them’ (Emma Hampton, Warehouse Staff Member, 18 November 2013) as they respond to the local needs of their communities. Hampton continued, describing this as a ‘relational, coffee drinking, visiting ministry’ – it encapsulates The Warehouse’s strategic vision of itself as an organisation that can help church leaders firstly evaluate the particular needs in their community and, secondly, respond to those needs themselves with guidance from The Warehouse. Due to the limited time I had to conduct fieldwork, I was unable to accompany Warehouse staff members on their visits to church leaders in Khayelitsha, Gugulethu, and elsewhere in the city. Instead, I attended The Warehouse’s transformational encounter events as a way to meet church leaders and participate in the FBO’s planned activities. The next two sections illustrate examples of training initiatives and discussion forums, two aspects of The Warehouse’s transformational encounters. 170
1. Training initiatives The Warehouse’s day-to-day work typically entails some of the staff members leaving the Wetton office to meet with church leaders in Khayelitsha, Gugulethu, Sweet Home Farm, and elsewhere to try to facilitate local development initiatives. This mobile work recalls one of the reasons staff members gave for the geographic location of the organisation’s offices, namely the importance of being centrally placed in the city to provide access to Cape Town’s neighbourhoods. Lauren Sanger, a coloured woman who had been involved at The Warehouse for a number of years, evoked the hub-like nature of the organisation when she called it an ‘airport space’: We’ve always been an airport. … Everybody comes in and goes out. So whether or not you [are] staff, you come in, you engage with what’s happening here, and you take away with you wherever you go what’s happening here. … So people need to come in so that they are able to go out again (Lauren Sanger, Warehouse Staff Member, 25 November 2013). The transformational encounters, which include training days, discussion forums, and volunteer events, make up an aspect of The Warehouse’s strategy that entails short but intensive interactions between the organisation, church leaders, and affiliates of other Christian development groups. Although The Warehouse has since 2003 always conducted some sort of development training, until 2009 the organisation simply considered it one part of its many projects. Following its transition from a programmatic strategy to a facilitative one, training has become central to The Warehouse’s work. Ruth Philips, an employee who has been involved with training at The Warehouse since it began, described how in the past training ‘was very much theory and practice of social transformation’ (Ruth Philips, Warehouse Staff Leader, 15 November 2013). Discussing The Warehouse’s training now compared to previous years, Philips said: The main difference is the focus on church leaders. 'Cause what we found then was that although the people involved in the work were being trained, they often didn’t have the support from church leadership. And they would have all the knowledge and excitement and so on, but church leadership would be still stuck in the same way of thinking. And therefore the whole programme didn’t get support (Ruth Philips, Warehouse Staff Leader, 15 November 2013).
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The Warehouse’s current training still contains an overview of development theory, but this is tailored to reflect the model of transformational development that emphasises self-recognition and one’s power to respond to local needs. Figure 6, a flyer advertising training days to be held at The Warehouse over my fieldwork period, gives an outline of two six-hour events. [Figure 6 here] The first meeting, which I attended in early September 2013, focused primarily on church attitudes to responding to poverty and other social challenges in Cape Town. Split into four sessions, beginning with morning prayer, the small group of about 15 people, myself among them, gathered for the first of these in the main hall at The Warehouse offices. Over the course of the morning and into the afternoon, people joined and left the training group, meaning that it was never constant. Despite this flux, I noted that women tended to outnumber men 3:2 and that the group was generally split evenly across black-white demographics. An introductory ice-breaker also revealed that most of the participants were there on behalf of their church – development ministry leaders if not church leaders themselves – though there were exceptions, such as myself and another man who worked for a secular social housing agency based in the city centre. White and in his 40s, he later mentioned to me in an interview that he had been aware of The Warehouse for several years and was interested in his personal capacity to reacquaint himself with their work. Session 1 dealt with ‘Listening and discernment’, the topic listed second on the flyer. The format, as would become familiar over the course of the day, involved a short presentation by a Warehouse staff member based on a biblical story, followed by a facilitated discussion amongst the group. The thrust of the presentation was that, just as the biblical character Esther had misjudged her response to a severe crisis, so churches and their congregations often misread the types of injustices that exist in the city and respond inappropriately or entirely inadequately. The Warehouse staff member suggested that on many occasions this results in easy charity – especially by donating clothing – rather than attempting to find and deal with the root problem.
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Figure 6. Flyer advertising transformational development training days at The Warehouse
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Having discussed why Esther, a Jewish Queen in the eponymous book in the Old Testament, gave clothing instead of reacting differently to a directive from the king that Jews should be killed, one of the dominant responses from the group was that the Queen, though well-intentioned, was ignorant as to how to respond to the crisis. As I recorded in my observation notes, One of the conclusions the group agreed on was that Esther was to some degree ignorant of the situation – she lived in a palace and responded from a distance. Because of this distance she showed a lack of involvement in the lived experience of the people affected by the crisis (Observation Notes, 10 September 2013). Though no one made a direct comparison between the biblical Esther and the white community in South Africa, one participant – a white woman in her late-30s – declared wryly that giving clothes in response to entrenched poverty and joblessness is often a show of action by affluent people rather than action itself. In the Cape Town context and in South Africa at large, the racial dynamics of poverty ensure that this sort of charity is often associated with historically ‘white’ churches. The Warehouse staff members ended the first session by speaking briefly on the topics of ‘discerning’, ‘planning’, and ‘implementing’ initiatives to help people inside and outside the church. Each of these emphasised how church leaders and anyone else working on development initiatives in the community should continually review their assessment of the needs within the local situation, especially by asking God through prayer to confirm their decisions or otherwise. This latter concentration on God and prayer signalled a move towards a much more spiritually focused part of the training event, as another Warehouse employee – Emma Hampton – took on the responsibility in the second session of discussing ‘God’s call on the church for community transformation’. Using biblical references, the Warehouse staff member used a series of hand-outs to stress that the church and its members are ‘called and equipped to be God’s Kingdom change agents’, as the heading on one page declared. In short, Hampton asserted the spiritual basis for Christians’ material obligations towards the most vulnerable in South African society. The Warehouse staff’s efforts in Sessions 1 and 2 to conscientise the training participants on the development role of Christian leaders in society continued into the next segment of the day. A third Warehouse employee, a black man who had some
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experience as a church leader, presented on what the flyer had termed ‘Moving from Relief to Transformation’. This was the session most directly related to the transformational development model and reinforced issues already discussed, such as the need for church leaders to realise their obligation and potential to respond to the needs of their local community. The staff member used a small, transportable white board to stick up five headings – black writing on green cardboard rectangles – that represented what he referred to in a hand-out as ‘The Journey of the Church in Response to Poverty, Injustice and Division’: CRISIS – RELIEF –REHABILITATION–DEVELOPMENT–TRANSFORMATION
He explained how in the first stage of a flood, fire or a comparable crisis, a person requires urgent relief in the form of shelter, food, and clean clothing. The staff member observed that though many of these basic needs are likely to be met by local government or NGOs based outside of the community, it is essential that those giving aid do not just provide charity. In the long term, it is essential that they enable the affected group of people to rebuild their own lives and community. The notion that development should be led by the affected community lies at the heart of the transformational development model espoused by The Warehouse and speaks to the idea of individual transformation – realising one’s potential to effect change in society. The Warehouse staff member leading the presentation referred explicitly to Dambisa Moyo’s well-known book Dead Aid to make the point that any development initiative that focuses on giving/receiving with no provision for selfempowerment is misguided and bound to smother local initiative, ultimately perpetuating poverty. Few people in the audience would have been familiar with the Zambian economist’s 2009 book, but the message from The Warehouse was simple and directed to church leaders from all backgrounds: if you lead a poor congregation, it is misguided to rely on donations for prosperity; if you head a wealthy church, it is an injustice to maintain a stream of aid to a community without combining that with a way to empower people to take steps to address the challenges they face. Once again, this is an issue that resonates with transformational development principles of being aware of power differentials in relationships. As with the previous two sessions, the Warehouse staff member who had presented the topic also facilitated a discussion period. I wrote in my observation notes 175
that this had been ‘the most educational’ type of session in terms of the character of the presentation, as well as ‘the liveliest’ in terms of the discussion afterwards. I also noted that church leaders based in poorer areas of Cape Town were particularly active in contributing their ideas and experiences, more so than in the previous sessions. As I reflected in my notes at the end of the day, this may have been because pastors based in flood- or fire-prone areas of the city could better relate to the discussion than a relatively affluent, white South African who had not experienced or lived through crises such as these. The final session, which took place after lunch, was a much more subdued affair. The Warehouse staff member leading it intended it to be a more ‘prayerful’, introspective time that centred on a verse from scripture. A much shorter period than the preceding three sessions, it provided a chance for participants to reflect and/or pray in silence before sharing their thoughts with a partner and praying together. The day ended officially at 3.30 in the afternoon. Early in the first session, when the group had been debating why churches’ first response to poverty is to give clothing, one of The Warehouse staff members had echoed the ‘airport space’ mentality and declared that the facilitators wanted participants to take the points of discussion on listening to the community back to their churches. The event, which had involved consciousness-raising rather than step-bystep development tips, fit The Warehouse’s strategy of bringing church leaders together from different backgrounds to encourage them to interact with each other and also to try to inspire individual transformation in church leaders. I was unable to attend the second training event, held in October, and relied on interviewees’ descriptions of the second training session and copies of the days’ hand-outs which The Warehouse team reserved for me. According to these and in line with the topics originally advertised on the flyer, the second session was more focused than the first on transformational development principles, outlining practical ways for churches from all backgrounds to assess how they can contribute to development initiatives that, when done in relationship with other groups, encourage equal relationships. 2. Discussion forums In addition to its training events, The Warehouse ran Unity in the Church discussion forums, these being part of the organisation’s ‘transformational encounters’. The 176
Wetton-based organisation held three Unity in the Church events during my research period in 2013. I attended each of these. While the training events were geared towards encouraging individual transformation, the Unity in the Church forums, as the name suggests, focused on relational transformation and the need to bring people together in one place – in The Warehouse’s estimation, the neutral and central space of their offices. One of The Warehouse staff members, Ross Tawney, claimed that the organisation had been inspired by a woman working in post-civil war El Salvador who had used her church to stage a Bible study attended by aggressors from both sides of the war. Tawney, who was on the management team at The Warehouse, observed that the Bible study had ‘a profound effect’ (Ross Tawney, Warehouse Staff Member, 29 November 2013) in El Salvador. The Warehouse hoped to emulate it in the South African context, especially given that the 2009 external review of The Warehouse had, he stated, revealed that church leaders in Cape Town ‘need a place to get in conversation with others’: [The Warehouse] spent some time talking with her about what that looked like. And a lot of it was, like, just get people in a room and get them talking about stuff that they care about, that they don’t have to take a position on right out the bat, you know. And, and help and trust, and in a sense create those spaces where people can start doing it. So those ones that you’ve been to have been a very explicit thing (Ross Tawney, Warehouse Staff Member, 29 November 2013). Tawney’s emphasis on creating a place and space for conversation to happen across the divides in the city once again recalls how so many Warehouse participants described the importance of the organisation’s geographic place in the city, which it connects to the type of work it does. In relation to the forums, Tawney described how, in a city that lacks common spaces, The Warehouse hopes to provide the opportunity and place where, in Tawney’s words, ‘we can be together’. Although the discussion events were described alternatively as forums and more relaxed coffee afternoons, all three conversations were in reality carefully planned. The Warehouse staff decided beforehand on a topic and derived questions that would lead discussion on the day. In line with The Warehouse’s strategic intention to address division in Cape Town, the questions pushed participants to identify the main issues that continue to divide churches in South Africa and, following that, to encourage them to find concrete ways in which churches and their leaders could work better together
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to attend to local needs. The questions that led discussion in the three forums follow below: 1. First Forum: To what extent do race, theology, gender and class affect church unity? 2. Second Forum: How do we better build authentic interdependence across racial and economic boundaries? 3. Third Forum: Discuss how one issue your community faces can be addressed with a united church response. As with the training days, many of the people gathered at The Warehouse were church leaders from various parts of the city, though some lay men and women were present on behalf of their church or organisation, too. The following participant observation data from the second forum illustrate the types of interactions that occurred between participants over the two-hour discussion session. The second forum was divided equally between considering divisions in society and possibilities to overcome these, making it the most useful event to analyse for the purposes of this study. A regular feature of the forums at The Warehouse was how staff members would split the participants into groups that resembled the diversity of the city. Thus, at the second forum, which took place on a Tuesday afternoon in early October 2013, I found myself placed at a table with four others, including one woman who worked with homeless people in a relatively poor area on the outskirts of the city, and a Khayelitshabased church leader. Both the man and woman were black, and both were in their late 40s or early 50s. Two Warehouse staff members – a black man and a coloured woman – completed the group. [Figure 7 here] One of the Warehouse staff at my table opened the first session of the afternoon by recounting the story of a white Afrikaans pastor who had shared that although he on occasion invites his black friends to braais (barbeques), none of them had ever reciprocated the invitation. He didn’t understand why this was the case. Before rejoining our table, the staff member asked the groups to discuss the story, drawing on 178
Figure 7. The second Unity in the Church Forum during one of the group discussion periods
personal experiences, with the aim of providing ways to overcome the obstacles to cross-race/-culture interaction. I wasn’t sure whether the two other men at the table had actually glanced across at me, but as the only white person I felt as if, to quote my notes, ‘I should start the conversation, perhaps as someone who could appreciate the “white man” story we’d just heard’. And indeed, I found that I could sympathise with the white Afrikaner pastor. I told a very similar story, of how I had invited black or coloured acquaintances of mine to several social events but that they often did not take up these offers. I assured the group that I realised there may be many reasons for why this had been the case but that it was nonetheless disappointing as I intentionally tried to broaden my friendship circle. Reflecting on the event later that day, I noted that I had felt slightly uneasy confronting the issue of race so openly in the company of a group of people I had only recently met. In fact, this sense of uneasiness in the face of a difficult topic characterised the event as a whole.
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After about 15 minutes of conversation within the groups, one of the prevailing sentiments around our table and at others seemed to be that black or coloured South Africans still feel as if they are unable to offer the same sorts of venues, meals, safety or refreshments as might be found at an event hosted by a white acquaintance. As a number of participants based in Khayelitsha affirmed during the feedback session, this kind of response indicates a continued sense of inferiority among the often poorer, black community in South Africa, specifically when it comes to interacting with white people or churches. Despite the Warehouse employees’ repeated pleas for the groups to provide solutions, no one in fact suggested any ways to overcome the difficulties in forming cross-racial friendships. The second session of the day, which specifically focused on ‘interdependence’, was more successful in this regard. Standing at the white board at the front of the room, a second Warehouse employee introduced the idea of ‘interdependence’ as an alternative to ‘partnership’. The first, he explained, was a deeper kind of relationship – a way whereby churches and Christian organisations could work in unity. In contrast, he described a partnership as inevitably being characterised by unequal power relations. The man, who was black and 30 years old, wrote the question ‘How do we better build authentic interdependence across racial and economic boundaries?’ on the small whiteboard behind him. Responding to this encouragement to build interdependence, where each party contributes to a relationship, the pastor at my table suggested a cooperative involving land owned by a Khayelitsha church and workers from the area, seed capital from an affluent church, and revenue from the produce being split between the people or churches involved. It was a practical response to the statements I have listed below, which Warehouse staff had printed out and distributed around the room. The first two statements illustrate the unequal power relations that The Warehouse sees occurring between affluent churches and poor churches and ‘white’ churches and ‘black’ churches. I recognised the third statement as a quote from a black church leader who had attended a previous Unity in the Church forum about two months earlier. 1. I cannot do this without their help. I can receive something for nothing. 2. They cannot do this without my help – I’m good because I’m helping others.
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3. We find ourselves going to a meeting in Wynberg, but will you [white people] come to a meeting in Khayelitsha, or will you come to something we are providing or only think that you need to provide us with something? If we recall Ross Tawney’s words that The Warehouse created the Unity in the Church forums as a way for people from different backgrounds to interact and talk about their needs or discuss their grievances, then it seems that this did occur at the second discussion forum. Tawney also described how The Warehouse wanted to provide a common space for people from every racial group to participate in the discussion. He referred to this shared space as a ‘redemptive space’ in which people with a similar faith but different backgrounds could ‘be together’ and engage with one another’s realities (Ross Tawney, Warehouse Staff Member, 29 November 2013). The extent to which The Warehouse succeeded in doing this in their three forums was mixed, as I learnt in the ten interviews I carried out at later dates with forum participants. The prevailing view amongst these interviewees was that the forums had the potential to encourage positive discussion between participants. Where participants mainly differed in their views was on whether The Warehouse was the correct location or environment for the discussions. Some, like Nathi Mzansi, a black 46-year-old Khayelitsha-based pastor who attended one of the forums and had interacted with The Warehouse in the past, stated that he found it helpful to meet with a variety of people away from the area in Khayelitsha where he conducts most of his work: The Warehouse is good just because you learn more things and then you talk more things with the group of the people in the different race, you see. … I go to The Warehouse I clean out my mind, you see. Just because I will meet new people (Nathi Mzansi, Warehouse Associate, 28 November 2013). Mzansi was not the only participant to comment that The Warehouse represented a space in which church leaders could expect to encounter different people, different ideas, and gain some relief from the pressures of working in an environment as challenging as Khayelitsha, with the many problems its residents face on a daily basis. For instance, Thomas Mda, another church leader in Khayelitsha, described how he found The Warehouse a refreshing, neutral place to visit:
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In terms of you feel you are away from home, away from your own baggage or whatever. At least you are given an opportunity to, you know, to be in a different space, see different faces, talk different language. You know, different space, in that sense, it’s quite ideal (Thomas Mda, Warehouse Associate, 22 November 2013). The two men, along with other forum participants, were not unconditionally in favour of The Warehouse’s strategy. Mda in particular critiqued the organisation’s policy of providing refreshments at discussion and training events as possibly detrimental to the meetings. He claimed that people ‘will go looking for the incentive other than the core business’ and stated that this could undermine The Warehouse’s intentions. These evaluations nevertheless did not suggest that the Wetton-based FBO’s work was fatally flawed. In contrast, Dumisani Dlamini, a representative of a church in a township bordering Khayelitsha, felt that The Warehouse, despite its location in a relative middle-ground, was wholly removed from the realities of township life. Dlamini asserted that The Warehouse staff members ‘have no experience of what we are talking about’ (Dumisani Dlamini, Warehouse Associate, 20 November 2013). Furthermore, he associated the organisation’s work with meetings in other circumstances which he criticised as being dominated by ‘white people’; this despite The Warehouse’s multi-racial make-up. In making his point he recollected a conference he had attended on poverty in South Africa that had been held in a wealthy part of Durban, a major city on the country’s east coast: All you can hear is white people address something that doesn’t even affect them. They cannot come (.) they cannot come to Gugulethu and hold a conference in Gugulethu, and let the people of Gugulethu speak for themselves, and let the people who are affected by poverty tell them what it means to be in poverty. It is because of the stigma in our townships (Dumisani Dlamini, Warehouse Associate, 20 November 2013). Although Dlamini was the only research participant who accused The Warehouse of complicity in the lack of meaningful action against poverty in South Africa, I have quoted him at length because his concerns resonate with general critiques of the lack of change in South Africa (see Chapter 2 on South African transformation). Ironically, though, as I have demonstrated with interview data in Chapter 5, a large portion of the Warehouse staff showed awareness of racial power relations in the country. The Warehouse’s transformational strategy, which favours
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relationship building instead of programme-based development work, specifically seeks to encourage new, more equal relationships between churches and development organisations. The Warehouse’s understanding of relational transformation – the formation of equal and respectful relationships between people and groups – itself seems to run counter to Dlamini’s criticism. In addition to their worldview, the Warehouse staff member Emma Hampton described to me how in the months prior to my arrival The Warehouse had held two training sessions away from Wetton – in Heideveld, near to Manenberg, and another in Khayelitsha – partly so that people from wealthier areas in Cape Town would learn about transformational development at ‘a church [that is] based right in the middle of the community that is doing things to address what’s happening in their community’ (Emma Hampton, Warehouse Staff Member, 18 November 2013). Hampton stated that another reason for hosting the training sessions in Khayelitsha and Heideveld was so that it would be easier for church leaders from those communities and ones nearby to travel to the event. She noted, however, that while the Warehouse met the first aim – to draw more affluent church and ministry leaders to a church dealing with the effects of poverty on a regular basis – fewer pastors based in Khayelitsha and the surrounds attended the event than was the case at several other Wetton-based occasions. In summary, a large portion of the people I interviewed who had interacted with The Warehouse expressed positive opinions of the organisation’s work. In so far as a small number of participants criticised The Warehouse, this indicates how in South Africa poverty continues to be complex and racialised. Dumisani Dlamini showed a particular sensitivity to the racial dimensions of development work and the power differentials he believes continue to characterise Christian reactions to poverty. The Warehouse seems to be acutely aware of these issues. Even so, Dlamini’s criticism shows how challenging the task is of helping churches from all backgrounds address poverty, inequality and division in Cape Town, as The Warehouse hopes to do. The Warehouse’s training days and discussion forums show a degree of success in, but also the difficulties of, encouraging individual and relational transformation among the people who attend these events. One of the notable characteristics of The Warehouse is that it recognises within its own ranks the difficulty of building and sustaining relationships across the divides of race and class, two very closely related social categories in South Africa. An overwhelming proportion of Warehouse staff members highlighted in their interviews 183
how the organisation continually tries to transform itself to model the kind of society it wishes to see. This involves individual and relational transformation and is a distinct organisational practice, on which I elaborate in the following section. 3. The Warehouse as a lifestyle group As you walk into The Warehouse, one of the first things you notice is a large map of the world hanging in the reception room. Africa is centred, but the tip of Argentina is the northern-most point and Canada’s Arctic islands fall off the bottom of the page. The same map showing a world turned on its head hangs in the modest coffee space towards the back of the storage area in one of the two halls. There is no accompanying message to the maps, but the meaning is clear: there is no naturally established order of things. The map challenges its viewer to scrutinise their preconceptions, including the one that seems most natural. [Figure 8 here] The Warehouse sees itself as different and conscientiously prompts its staff and visitors to deal with poverty and inequality in post-apartheid South Africa by challenging their preconceptions of society. One of the most common ways Warehouse staff members differentiated the organisation from other development groups – either religious or secular – was their assertion that every aspect of their work was intentional. Barbara Anderson summed this up when she stated that The Warehouse staff members were ‘inching towards each other, like everybody in South Africa, but we are, we are trying to do it intentionally here’ (Barbara Anderson, Warehouse Staff Member, 25 November 2013). She later emphasised what she saw as the uniqueness of The Warehouse when she said that their intentional approach ‘breaks new ground a lot of the time because most churches do not step outside of their own, um, focus groups [membership]. … So we are deliberately stepping out of our comfort zone. That’s what makes it so hard to work here. There’s not many comfortable corners here’. The attitude of intentionality that the staff described linked closely to ideas of self-awareness and awareness of the aspects of South Africa’s history that perpetuate poverty, inequality, and division in Cape Town. Staff members insisted, in line with their transformational development strategy, that without constant, intentional work 184
Figure 8. ‘The World’ at The Warehouse
on changing oneself and one’s relationships with others, the country would not experience lasting change. One staff member, Anna Noel, noted that since The Warehouse encourages transformation in others, staff members needed to fulfil those goals themselves: So on the internal [organisational] thing, what I love about, I would say we are a reconciling community. We purposefully are trying to model what a multi-racial, multi-denominational, multi-cultural, -gender community could look like. We’re saying, if we’re calling churches to reconcile over the divides of all sorts, we can’t do that unless we’re doing it ourselves (Anna Noel, Warehouse Staff Member, 11 December 2013). Noel, who had worked at The Warehouse for several years before 2013, used an example of how the organisation had for a number of years ensured that every staff
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member was given 20 minutes to tell their life story in detail. Noel noted that it was a ‘very deliberate process’ that allowed the group to learn about each other’s backgrounds, but also prompted what many Warehouse employees described as ‘difficult conversations’ around race and South Africa’s past. Noel stated that the commonalities in the group were ‘knowing Jesus’ and ‘being committed to transformation’, but observed that the diversity in the organisation meant that people had ‘completely different stories’ of how they came to be working together. She reiterated the intentionality of confronting differences within the staff: But that was a very deliberate process of saying, ‘We all come from different backgrounds, we all have injustices in our past that, you know, that we need to actually share and be vulnerable with each other around to understand what the greater narrative of South Africa is, is about, you know (Anna Noel, Warehouse Staff Member, 11 December 2013). The Warehouse’s emphasis on intentionally confronting the divisions in South Africa, which they believe inevitably affect their own multi-racial organisation, contrasted with other views from within their network of churches. For example, Richard Bone, a leader of an Anglican church with historical ties to the organisation through St John’s Parish, acknowledged the need for relationship building across the country’s divides but stated that ‘unity arises more naturally around, around something else, as opposed to seeking unity for its own sake’ (Richard Bone, Warehouse Associate, 31 December 2013). In fact, the minister, who led a multi-racial congregation that included a range of age groups and a variety of nationalities, seemed to have shown a distinctly deliberate approach in his services to discussing the injustices of apartheid and trying to transform the racial composition of the church’s leadership. However, when he gave an example of successful relationship building, he referred to his involvement with different denominations in the Fresh Expressions movement, which looks at alternative ways of ‘doing’ church in modern society: I think the justice issues, the reconciliation, should come up as you discuss things like that. As we deliver the material on Fresh Expressions we’re trying to contextualise it and then we bump up against issues of, ‘What does this look like in the New South Africa?’ Etcetera. And that’s interesting. But I think it means there’s less tension, there’s less nervousness around it because we’ve united round the need to reinvent church (Richard Bone, Warehouse Associate, 31 December 2013).
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Another Warehouse associate, James Burger, a 25-year-old white man who had helped in an anti-corruption campaign run out of The Warehouse during 2013, expressed a similar sentiment around building unity in the church and country when he stated that ‘having a common cause’ allows people to work together, helping relationships ‘happen naturally’ (James Burger, Warehouse Associate, 21 December 2013). Both Bone and Burger seem to want to avoid possible discomfort and favoured relationship building that emerges out of other, shared activities. This attitude contrasts directly with The Warehouse staff’s view that real change emerges out of moments and processes of emotional discomfort. Their repeated reference to ‘hard conversations’ between staff members from different racial groups epitomises the attitude held by the organisation. Lauren Sanger, a coloured woman in her early 40s, contended that the history of racial segregation in South Africa led communities to cling unconsciously to old ‘value systems’ that differed from each other and stated that ‘we all racist in our thinking anyway, because we can’t take ourselves out of our context’ (Lauren Sanger, Warehouse Staff Member, 25 November 2013). Other Warehouse participants described how this siloed thinking, inadvertent though it may be, caused them to act in ways that created tension in relationships. Barbara Anderson, a white woman, referred to unequal racial power relations in the country, observing that ‘being white, I have hurt people’. She explained the substance of a hard conversation: I hurt black people here by the way I behave. And I don’t think I’m doing it but they, we have to be in enough of a relationship here for them to come and say, you’ve hurt me, or you’ve humiliated me, and for me to understand it and apologise about it. Um, yah, and that’s ongoing – it happens here. And we, and we’ve got to work it out here first and understand it here first before as a Warehouse we can work with it outside (Barbara Anderson, Warehouse Staff Member, 25 November 2013). The Warehouse’s stress on having conversations about racial issues fed into the idea of individual transformation. Mandla Nyathi, one of Sanger and Anderson’s black colleagues, explained that ‘though we might seek to have churches that address division, we constantly reflect on our own areas of division’. He continued: I think the first step in any of this has to be talking about it and recognising that it’s there, and being able to acknowledge not just that so and so has a problem that’s dividing us, but also to say, where am I being divided from 187
or causing division? (Mandla Nyathi, Warehouse Staff Member, 05 December 2013). Coming to know whether and how one contributes to racial divisions, and learning ways to avoid repeating these mistakes by talking to people of different racial groups, forms part of individual and relational transformation. For The Warehouse, this is a process of becoming self-aware and continually reflecting on one’s actions in a multi-racial society. Lauren Sanger referred to this as ‘unlearning’ one’s racialised value system. Like Sanger, many of The Warehouse participants referred to the organisational practice of telling one’s life story. It reinforced self-awareness, as staff members contextualised their own lives in South Africa’s history, presenting their life story and assessing it in relation to their colleagues’ stories. The individual transformation process of learning about other groups and their stories, contextualising one’s own life, and learning a shared, Christian value system intertwined with the relational process of interdependence. The Warehouse referred to interdependence in training events and discussion forums as a more egalitarian mode of inter-group collaboration than partnership. Considering participants’ insistence that the organisation tries to enact the transformation it endorses, it is unsurprising that, in the words of one Warehouse employee, ‘interdependence is a huge word here’. Natasha Smith, a white woman in her early 20s, elaborated on her comment and described the meaning and implications of the word: So, the root of it is vulnerability. And vulnerability’s where intimacy is. And so we talk about it as in churches, like, ‘Hey, we actually need you and you need us’. Only, it’s between churches. And, then, here, let’s say if somebody’s going to borrow money, there’s a vulnerability in that. And, or let’s say somebody who needs to cry on somebody else’s shoulder, there’s a vulnerability in that (Natasha Smith, Warehouse Staff Member, 04 November 2013). Smith explained that interdependence should lead people to ‘share each other’s lives and burdens so much more interconnectedly’. This insistence on living a shared life with other Warehouse staff members displays the organisation’s drive to build relationships across divides in the city and recalls Emma Hampton’s comment, which I quoted earlier, that a vision of shared need and reliance on one another is tied to a fundamental, relational way of life:
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There’s this sense that, kind of, for the freedom of the whole of society, we all need to do this together. We’re not free, none of us is free if you’re not, you know, if you’re still under the yoke of injustice. And so, so my involvement with you if I’m, I come in with a power dynamic that is, I’m wealthier than you materially, but yet I’m just as needy as you are for everything to be (.) for shalom to take place (Emma Hampton, Warehouse Staff Member, 04 November 2013). Hampton’s colleague Ruth Philips, a coloured woman with many years’ experience at The Warehouse, described a similarly egalitarian sort of interdependence in which ‘each realises what they do have and what they don’t have’ (Ruth Philips, Warehouse Staff Leader, 15 November 2013). She continued, saying ‘they can support each other’ once each party finds the role they need to play in relationship with each other. The idea of interdependence in The Warehouse encapsulates the three transformational elements – individual, relational, and material – in the way that staff members come to understand themselves in relation to their co-workers, finally relying on them for the day-to-day aspects of their lives. Some Warehouse participants mentioned interdependence directly, while others referred to related processes of relying on each other and learning from other’s life experiences. As an ideal, interdependence represents how South Africans can overcome unequal power relations associated with race and class and form relationships across seemingly impassable divides. In striving to reach the ideal, The Warehouse tried to model a society whose members recognise one another as equals. As we have seen, the staff sees this as a slow, tough process that requires intentionality and perseverance through difficult and emotional discussions. The staff members celebrated their successes, but they also readily acknowledged that the road to interdependence is difficult. Natasha Smith, for example, noted how, despite the organisation’s awareness of racial divides, the staff sometimes fell into old habits of comfort. Using an example to make her point, she critiqued the lunch period at the organisation, noting that ‘the trend in lunches is to be pretty actually ended up segregated in language or, or [p] race or economic’ (Natasha Smith, Warehouse Staff Member, 04 November 2013). Barbara Anderson, Smith’s colleague, summed up the overall situation, stating: ‘It’s, it’s, it’s a work in progress. It’s a machine that’s being built as we go’ (Barbara Anderson, Warehouse Staff Member, 25 November 2013).
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The Warehouse’s own transformation efforts as a multi-racial community, involving continual self-appraisal and self-improvement, highlight how its development work to transform society is a long-term process. Illustrating this, Emma Hampton, whom I quoted in the previous chapter, declared that ‘transformation is all of us, everyone in it together needing to change all the time, and all become our better selves and all make adjustments’. It is, in short, not just a changed lifestyle but a lifestyle of change. Fusion, the second case study in this research project, presents a similar example of a multi-racial, economically diverse group of people trying to model an alternative way of interacting in post-apartheid South Africa. However, its emphasis on residing and conducting its work in Manenberg, a small area on the outskirts of Cape Town, presents a slightly different approach to enacting transformation. The following section uses interview data and participant observation notes to show how staff members translate their understanding of transformation into their day-to-day work routines. Fusion: The Outdoor Office After any day spent at The Warehouse, I was struck by how many meetings the staff attended. With regular transformational development training events, discussion forums, and outings to church leaders around the city, The Warehouse spent a lot of time planning. Visiting the smaller Fusion offices, on the other hand, was a different experience entirely. There is the obvious fact that Fusion’s base on the second floor of the Manenberg People’s Centre consists of two small rooms instead of two warehouse halls. It did not take much for the simple furnishings – two couches, a handful of chairs, and a couple of desks – to fill the main meeting room-cum-Director’s office. More striking than the physical space, though, was the calm and informality at Fusion. It seemed somehow unusual after the activity, action, movement, and meeting I noted at The Warehouse. For instance, on my second visit to Fusion I found one staff member perched on a couch with a laptop on their knees; another was at a small table on her own computer; a third worked on his lap while sitting on a chair in the centre of the room. The make-do attitude was partly due to what the organisation could afford with very limited funds, but it also reflected their working style. The office was little more than a base, with one ‘utility’ room in addition to the main office space. During one of 190
my visits I found the small room had been converted into a prayer room to be used during an anti-corruption campaign run out of The Warehouse. My first meeting with a Fusion staff member highlighted how the organisation viewed its offices. On my arrival at Fusion at noon, a coloured man in his mid-30s emerged from his semi-detached office and immediately suggested we go for a walk to discuss my research. I did not feel the street was the best setting for a discussion, but he explained that he had not walked through the area recently and wanted to show his presence in the community. It was my first interaction with Fusion, but the walk through the area, which took about 45 minutes, would prove to be very similar to the everyday work of the organisation. The following excerpt from my observation notes illustrates how Fusion staff members seem to have integrated well into the community: As we walked, Sebastian Davids [Fusion staff member] explained that a lot of what Fusion does is just be in the community. Be a community worker, so to speak, to walk around, chat to people – to anyone, though the focus is on young people. … Many children and younger people would approach Sebastian before he approached them. Some younger kids, children, climbed all over him. He said hi but didn’t really stop, and this was his approach to the whole walk, and the way he sees Fusion running, which is really just being – being in Manenberg, being on the streets, encountering people, talking to them (Observation Notes, 26 September 2013). During his interview with me nine weeks later, Davids emphasised once again how Fusion’s work mainly consists of walking and talking with Manenberg residents. He observed wryly that visitors to Fusion ‘believe that we don’t work – because they [staff members] never here, they out on the streets, you know’ (Sebastian Davids, Fusion Staff Member, 27 November 2013). As I mentioned in the previous chapter, although Fusion staff members conceptualise transformation in a similar fashion to The Warehouse, the organisation itself has not incorporated a highly-developed definition of transformation into its development work. The staff emphasised their intentionality in identifying and ‘walking with’ high risk youth as they seek to come off drugs or leave a gang, but in cultivating relationships with these young people, they adopted a less systematised approach than The Warehouse. There were no training events, discussion forums, or volunteer days to attend, but my participant observation activities captured the core component of Fusion’s strategy: relationship building. In what follows I describe 1) an example of Fusion’s regular prayer walks and 2) their
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efforts to form a diverse ‘family-community’. I relate these to how the organisation understands the material, individual, and relational elements of transformation in the Manenberg context. 1. Prayer walks [Figure 9 here] Although prayer walks have become associated with evangelical charismatic practices of worship and a particular theology of spiritual warfare (Megoran, 2015), Fusion staff members never described their own prayer walks in these terms. Nor did they describe them in terms of healing or establishing a Christian territory, as Goh (2016) mentions of American Pentecostal prayer walking practices. Instead, Fusion primarily emphasised the relational value of their prayer walks. Fusion’s resolve on working closely with individual young people in Manenberg meant that much of their core work was one-on-one interaction that I was not able to observe. In comparative terms, Fusion staff members’ work with young people, attending to their emotional needs and coaching them on basic life skills, was similar to The Warehouse’s relational work with individual church leaders across Cape Town. Before they could get to that intimate stage, however, Fusion staff members had to meet and build relationships with young people, a task their regular prayer walks enabled them to accomplish. After arranging a date with a Fusion staff member, I joined the team on one of their walks around the neighbourhood. We left just after midday on a hot October spring day, a small group of five that included myself, three Fusion staff members (one white man, one white woman, and one coloured woman), and a regular volunteer, a white middle-aged woman from a St John’s Parish church. Having left the office behind, it was soon evident that the group regularly took moments to stop and pray with people or for a particular area, as with a man holding his newly born nephew, whom the group prayed for. However, it was clear that the purpose was as much to be on the streets, seeing and being seen, greeting and being greeted, as much as it was to be praying. At the time of my research he was looking to buy a property in the area and relocate back there. Continuing on our route, Davies recognised a man in his 20s who wore a shirt that showed off his muscular build. 192
Figure 9. Two of many council-owned flats in Manenberg, opposite Fusion’s office
Davies later explained that the young man was a gunman for the Hard Livings gang in the area and had several bullet scars to prove it, but he said the man was looking good at the time. Indeed, Davies seemed to measure each person’s wellbeing on the walk by appraising them and quizzing them on how they had been keeping busy. This used to be his area, and you could tell he knew people – he didn’t just recognise them, he knew them. We had travelled along the paved roads for the first part of the walk but it was not long before we stepped off it and passed between two rundown buildings. We eventually came to a small shelter in the empty space made between several buildings backing onto each other. A couple of steps from the door was a burnt out, black municipal rubbish bin. It was wrangled now and of no use to anyone. After knocking 193
and identifying himself in Afrikaans as ‘Steve, the white man’, a slight man of average height opened the door to reveal a dark interior. From outside you couldn’t see much of what was in the makeshift house. The two men seemed familiar with each other, and from the conversation between them it became clear that the Manenberg resident, a coloured man, was implicated in the gang activity in the area. We moved on after several minutes, Davies promising to return in about half an hour to pray with the man. At one point in the walk, after Davies had returned as promised to pray with the man we had called on earlier, the two remaining Fusion staff members – Ayesha Green and Michelle Kirchner – spotted a young man a few roads across from us. Calling to him, he soon came over. Green spoke to him in Afrikaans, suggesting he should tell his story, his testament, to the group he was with. Although he had apparently spent time the previous night with the Fusion team, the two Fusion staff members seemed concerned that he might be straying back into drugs. As we left him to return to the People’s Centre, Green agreed that the young man’s eyes had looked slightly glassy, but suggested this was probably due to lack of sleep rather than anything sinister. The route back to the Fusion offices was typical of the area as a whole. Small, tightly packed houses lined the streets, their walls onto the road made of sheets of corrugated iron. With little private space to air one’s laundry, clothing had been strung between the many small, two-storey flats once painted but now mostly stripped bare. Throughout the walk I had felt conspicuous walking with the group, partly because I was unfamiliar with prayer walks but also because I was a white, middle-class South African man in an otherwise ‘coloured’ area of the city. Referring to me as ‘whitey’, several residents heightened my sense of being an outsider in a relatively closed part of the city. Strikingly, though, none of my fellow prayer walkers were called out for being white, confirming my impression that people were familiar with them and their presence on the streets. The 45-minute walk also demonstrated the Fusion staff’s description of their work. Ayesha Green, a lifelong resident of Manenberg, had told me in an interview that she was ‘a community worker [with Fusion] where I build relationships on the street. So that’s where I am most of the time – building relationships with high-risk children’. She claimed, slightly self-consciously, that she often felt like ‘a little Jesus’ in the way she, in line with Fusion’s ethic, approached people, sat with them, and spoke ‘about regular stuff: “How’s your kids? Do you have kids?” Talk about myself” (Ayesha Green, Fusion Staff Member, 27 November 2013). She distinguished this 194
attitude from one held by churches and church-goers in the area, saying that whereas ‘Christians are scared of drug addicts and, you know, and alcoholics and that, totally scared of them’, Fusion’s response was to establish a connection with them, inviting them to join their community once they were ready to do so: ‘You know, just get them lekker [super] comfortable, and start building a relationship, like a friendship relationship, like, you know, and for them to trust me’. This emphasis on what the organisation saw as building non-judgemental relationships with Manenberg residents, and high-risk youth in particular, lay at the heart of its conception of itself not only as an alternative community within a larger one, but as a family of ‘brothers’ and ‘sisters’. 2. The Fusion family If The Warehouse staff’s watchword was ‘interdependence’ – the term that captured the organisation’s ideal of relationships between equals – then Fusion’s was ‘family’. The Manenberg organisation conducted its work on a smaller scale to its former parent organisation, focusing not only on one small part of Cape Town but also on a marginalised group within that area, namely young people vulnerable to joining gangs or slipping into long-term drug use. On one level, ‘family’ captures the intimacy of Fusion’s work, but participants used the term more deliberately to distinguish their relational work from local churches and from The Warehouse itself. Both Fusion and The Warehouse staff described individual and relational transformation as important aspects of their strategies. However, whereas the latter organisation considered themselves a multi-racial community modelling the type of society they envisioned for a just and peaceful South Africa, Fusion labelled itself a community with the characteristics of a family, displaying an alternative way of life in Manenberg specifically. For the sake of simplicity, I term this Fusion’s ‘familycommunity’ ideal. Both organisations’ goals required continual work on the self, but in keeping with their localised action, Fusion staff envisaged a strategy of intimacy that responded to the needs of high-risk youth. This required a relationship of a different sort, where staff members lived and worked in Manenberg in order to live their lives similarly to the people, including gang members and bosses, with whom they worked and interacted on a daily basis. They tried to experience life in Manenberg directly, rather than through others’ life stories or discussion sessions, as at The Warehouse. 195
Fusion staff members tended to describe their relationships with each other as more meaningful than either the types encountered at The Warehouse or within gangs in Manenberg. One Fusion staff member, Michelle Kirchner, used a vignette of gang life to emphasise Fusion’s commitment to their Manenberg ‘family’. On hearing that a young man whom Fusion knew had been stabbed during a gang fight and was in a Cape Town hospital for his wounds, Kirchner and her colleagues split up to track him down. She eventually found the young man at a public hospital in the city centre, a 20minute drive from Manenberg. No one else had visited him even though he had been admitted the night before. Just like his time in prison when he had been left without bail money, his gang members had, Kirchner stated, deserted him. And it’s, like, he, so he knew, like, at the moment he’s choosing gang life because it’s more glamorous for him or whatever. But he knows that when stuff goes wrong his Fusion family will be the ones that show up. And when he’s ready, which we pray is sometime, he will come to us and say, I’m good to go. 'Cause he knows that this is a place where he finds home (Michelle Kirchner, Fusion Staff Member, 08 November 2013). With her description of Fusion’s involvement with the gritty fallout of gang life, Kirchner wished to show the organisation’s steadfast and genuine commitment to a difficult relationship. Unlike what she called the ‘false’ brotherhood of a gang, Kirchner said that Fusion’s family mentality meant they ‘pursue people’ and would never give up on them. In an area of Cape Town that is alienated from local and national government, in which churches create barriers to membership through exacting standards, and where gangs draw young people in only to cast them aside in times of need, the Fusion staff believed their deliberate, unconditional attitude to relationships represented an alternative model of living in Manenberg. They hoped their relational approach to becoming a transformational community would enable young people to realise their potential to produce change in their community. Kirchner’s colleague, Sebastian Davids, described this as creating ‘an intentional community’ where young people could ‘be part of something different, where we deliberately, you know, call you out for who you are, who God has called you to be’ (Sebastian Davids, Fusion Staff Member, 27 November 2013). Fusion anticipated that personal change in high-risk youth would affect young people’s attitudes to their surroundings, leading them to take action in the community. Staff members described this process as inward-outward change in a person, and 196
linked it to the organisation’s strategy of ‘doing’ church rather than attending church. Having witnessed what they believed was the failure of church institutions in the area, and the institutions of state and civil society, Fusion have adopted an approach to their own faith that emphasises the change that can occur within family-community relations rather than a church model that emphasises spiritual and behavioural norms. As Steve Davies mentioned, ‘I think what we did is, we tried to exist within the existing church paradigm, but actually we’re much more excited by the idea of a new, as I say, church paradigm that really is living this stuff before it’s trying to, you know, get people into buildings’. He continued: So basically it’s saying that church is not based on denominations or shouldn’t be based on attendance once a week, but the best or a good definition of church is a family of families. And one can mean that worldwide, international, national, local. And so it’s saying that we believe that we should try and be church rather than go to church, and that’s gonna bring change as people see [s] like a community of people living differently. It’s gonna be a sort of evangelism by fascination rather than by, what’s the word, preaching, condemnation (Steve Davies, Fusion Staff Member, 27 November 2013). Davies describes a model of church that is intentional, individual, and relational. In this, it fits with Fusion participants’ ideas of individual and relational transformation that hopefully lead to material transformation. It also resembles The Warehouse’s lifestyle approach to transformation, which highlights continual personal change in relationship with others that ultimately produces a prefigurative community. That is, a community that models in miniature the type of society it hopes for. Fusion’s strategy furthermore bears similarities to The Warehouse staff members’ interactions with each other. Just as The Warehouse valued ‘hard conversations’, so Fusion schedules regular ‘Burning Issues’ sessions. Ayesha Green mentioned how these sessions allow staff members to raise concerns or work through any internal disputes, to deliberate, in short, on the ‘ups and downs’ within the group. Michelle Kirchner elaborated on the dynamics within the organisation, echoing Green’s mention of disagreements and emphasising how intentionality and ‘hard work’ lie at the heart of building a multiracial family-community: You have to, you choose that [diversity] and then you explore it. And all the stuff that comes with it. Because there is stuff that comes with it, it’s
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not just, we’re not just this, like, this happy clappy little community that pretend like there’s nothing wrong. And we argue and we fight, and we disagree and we pray together and we pray for each other, and we love each other, and we disagree and we have unity. And so, so, like, as a team, as a community we’ve chosen to try and remain unoffendable (Michelle Kirchner, Fusion Staff Member, 08 November 2013). Kirchner’s description of how Fusion approaches relational difficulties recalls The Warehouse’s continual process of personal and community formation. Both organisations stressed the need for active choices, intentionality, and a deliberate approach to transformation. However, unlike The Warehouse, which treated difficult interactions as evidence that the staff was confronting issues of race and class others would typically avoid, Fusion participants presented disagreements within the organisation as naturally occurring within their family relationship. One member explicitly distinguished the types of relationships within each of the FBOs. I quote them in full below: I think, seeing a certain depth of community amongst The Warehouse was good, but also realising where it didn’t work at all actually. And, for example, one of the things [person’s name] and I talked about a lot was that if a white person sat and said something at The Warehouse, people would be, like, ‘Yah, sure’. But if a black person said exactly the same thing, everyone would be, like, ‘Wow, that’s so profound. Shoh, man! Yah, you’re, you know’. And we were, like, okay, so you can go too far. And so there is [s] and not apologising for being white or black or coloured or whatever, I think that was something that we began to struggle with at Fusion was trying to find Fusion’s own voice where actually, what am I trying to say? I think Fusion started … how we relate to each other across nationalities and colour is a lot more natural, honestly, than what happens at The Warehouse. Because I think at Fusion we’re friends who [p] kind of do similar work, and at The Warehouse I kind of feel it’s colleagues who are friendly towards each other (Fusion Staff Member, November 2013). This critical description of The Warehouse was conspicuous among the Manenberg organisation’s staff members. Most Fusion participants viewed their time with The Warehouse positively even though they acknowledged the working relationship between the groups was at times fraught. The above participant, whom I have only referred to indirectly due to the nature of their comment, did not claim their view as representative of Fusion as a whole. Their opinion is compelling, though, because it captures succinctly how the two organisations diverged in their attitudes to
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doing transformation. In judging that relationships across social barriers in Fusion are ‘a lot more natural’ than in The Warehouse, they categorise the Wetton-based organisation among other communities against which it has defined itself. Whereas The Warehouse’s intentionality is focused on confronting race and class issues as a primary spoke in its strategic wheel, Fusion directs its intentionality towards forming family-type relationships that present an example to the Manenberg community with specific attention to high-risk youth. These are distinctive approaches that show the different ways people and organisations in different areas of Cape Town translate their understandings of transformation into transformational practices.
Conclusion: The Warehouse and Fusion’s Translation of Understanding into Action I have asserted in this thesis, following Achille Mbembe’s analysis, that the South African transformation project centrally involves overcoming power differentials created by colonial, and especially apartheid, policies. Race relations show most clearly how power continues to be concentrated among white South Africans, especially because of their unequal access to economic resources. This chapter has shown that The Warehouse has adopted an approach to addressing unequal power relations in society that entails 1) realising one’s ability to effect change as an equal member of society and 2) translating this into relationship building across social divides with the aim of meeting local, material needs. It is a thoroughly intentional process and involves continual discomfort as members of different race groups confront each other and themselves about how their actions and attitudes uphold barriers to social change. The organisation has translated its understanding of transformation, including individual, relational, and material transformation, into a highly structured strategy of working with church leaders in Cape Town – across denominations but notably within church structures – that involves transformational development training events and discussion forums. The Warehouse staff also emphasised that a major part of their job is doing the transformation work they espouse and teach in training. Their lifestyle approach shows how individual staff members try to construct commonalities in understanding by constantly confronting their differences and the inequalities born of historical, racist government policies. In doing
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so, they foreground intentionality and aim to model a version of South African society they aspire to see, and which they believe they will realise through their work. In contrast to The Warehouse’s project of self-realisation and its hypersensitivity to race and class relations, Fusion has taken a deliberate approach to forming a family-community in Manenberg. This reflects their localised understanding of transformation and the way they strive to embed themselves in Manenberg society. Though they face similar tensions to The Warehouse staff, their intentionality lies in ‘being church’ and building ‘a family of families’ so that they model an alternative way of living in gang-affected, alienated Manenberg. Their focus on family indicates their intention to respond to the needs of high-risk youth, a portion of society the organisation perceives has been shunned by the community and society at large. Fusion’s focus on the larger divisions in post-apartheid South Africa is not absent, but it is subsumed into its locally based relational project. For example, one Fusion staff member, Steve Davies, observed how important it is that ‘[affluent] people living in Newlands or Constantia or Town or whatever recognise that the health of their city and essentially their life is interlinked with the health of Manenberg as a community’ (Steve Davies, Fusion Staff Member, 27 November 2013). Fusion’s actions can be defined as unity through a common goal, namely responding to high-risk youths’ needs by building lasting relationships, which in turn drives more widespread social action. Both this chapter and the previous one have primarily analysed the empirical data that was gathered through interviews and participant observation. The following chapter, Chapter 7, builds on this analysis to review the implications of transformation as individual change and relationship building for Christian religious peacebuilding in South Africa. It uses the analytical framework of strategic social spaces to argue that the case study organisations, with their partially individualised religious characteristics, are able to fill particular institutional and intellectual spaces in the post-apartheid cultural transformation process. It also responds to the important question of whether the individualised nature of the case study organisations’ transformation work has the potential to challenge power structures in society, as they hope, or whether in reality they run the risk of unwittingly perpetuating injustices.
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Chapter 7 The Potential and Limitations of Partially Individualised Religious Peacebuilding in Post-Apartheid South Africa Introduction The previous two chapters presented analyses of the interview and observation data collected during an approximately four-month research period in Cape Town, South Africa. Chapter 5 described how participants from two case study organisations and their affiliates understand the idea of transformation. Chapter 6 then illustrated how these participants translated their understandings of transformation into social action, which I have termed their ‘transformational practices’. Comparing the two case studies’ transformational practices made it possible to distinguish the different ways in which the idea of transformation is understood and enacted across the main research sites. The current chapter draws on the previous two in order to contextualise the organisations’ work with reference to the religious peacebuilding typology presented in Chapter 1. In categorising the Cape Town organisations’ initiatives, I compare their religious peacebuilding activities to those practised by other religious organisations in South Africa before and after apartheid, which I first described in Chapter 3 of this thesis. This is a first-level comparative step in which I argue that the organisations’ education and formation and relief and development activities contribute to what I term a post post-apartheid religious peacebuilding model that critiques government’s stalled transformation activities and promotes justice and equality in life opportunities. The second section of this chapter examines the organisations’ lifestyle approach to pursuing transformation. The Warehouse and Fusion treat the individual as a site of transformation, believing that self-realisation and intentional community formation (as an alternative way of life) leads to wider social change. Indeed, participants took personal responsibility to deconstruct the barriers to lasting peace in South Africa. They pursued transformation by challenging their own preconceptions of society and intentionally confronting issues of race and privilege, even though they knew this would be uncomfortable.
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Following Michael Burawoy’s (1998a: 5) reflexive science paradigm, which forms the methodological basis of this thesis, the third section of this chapter assesses how the ‘local processes’ of transformation at the research sites interact with the ‘extralocal forces’ that structure post-apartheid South African society. To do this, this chapter uses Brewer, Higgins, and Teeney’s (2011) analytical framework of strategic social spaces to examine the possibilities and limitations of the work done by the two case study organisations. I use my analysis of Fusion and The Warehouse’s work in strategic social spaces to respond to calls from within the field of religious peacebuilding to improve the theoretical and conceptual basis of the discipline (Brewer, Higgins, and Teeney, 2010, 2011; Omer, 2012; Brewer, Mitchell, and Leavey, 2013). At this point, I turn to Beck’s (2010) theory of the individualisation of religion and Ganiel’s (2016) concept of extra-institutional religion to explain how the case study organisations’ way-of-life peacebuilding work allows them to fill strategic institutional spaces that mainline churches cannot. This chapter argues that Fusion, with its desire to distinguish itself from the church and practise its faith in personalised ways outside of the Manenberg church, leads the organisation to operate in marginal institutional spaces similar to those occupied by Emerging Christians, a loosely coordinated group of individuals who prioritise individualised faith practices and often link these practices to social justice imperatives (Marti and Ganiel, 2014). Like Fusion, The Warehouse believes it operates differently to the mainstream church and emphasises an individualised response to transformation in South Africa. Rather than abandoning church norms, however, it conducts its work at a distance from, but together with, a network of churches, providing an example of extra-institutional religion in South Africa. This chapter observes that as social structures of race and class constrain the FBOs’ anti-institutional and extra-institutional practices, Beck’s concept of individualisation must be seen as partially applicable to the South African context, but remains an important analytical lens. Transformational Practices in Context: Categorising The Warehouse and Fusion’s Religious Peacebuilding Work in Post-Apartheid South Africa In Chapter 1 I presented a typology of religious peacebuilding adapted from Sampson’s (1997) frequently cited classification system (for example, see Bouta, Kadayifici-Orellana, and Abu-Nimer, 2005; Steele, 2008). The typology, which
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consists of six categories, comprises 1) Conciliation and mediation, 2) Advocacy and empowerment, 3) Observation and witness, 4) Education and formation, 5) Transitional justice, and 6) Relief and development. Table 3, below, summarises what each of these peacebuilding types entails. Table 3. Categories of religious peacebuilding
1
Type
Description
Examples
Conciliation
Stimulate communication
Backchannel political dialogue
and mediation
between adversaries/parties to
through Northern Ireland
end conflict.
churches; Quaker intervention in the 1967-70 Nigerian civil war.
2
Advocacy
Encourage peaceful relationships;
Cambodian Buddhist support of
and
Promote a just and equal society.
UN-sponsored elections; Catholic
empowerment
Church support of the Polish anti-communist movement.
3
Observation
Monitor conflict/post-conflict
Monitoring of political conflicts
and witness
societies; Report on intergroup
in the Middle East and Central
tensions.
America by Christian Peacemaker Teams (Mennonite).
4
Education
Foster mutual understanding of a
Interfaith dialogues in the United
and formation
conflict and its injustices;
States, Israel, and Nigeria.
Demystify ‘the other’. 5
6
Transitional
Instate democratic rule; Uncover
South African TRC chaired by
justice
human rights abuses; Provide
Archbishop Tutu; Guatemalan
platform for
memory recovery project
reparations/apologies.
instituted by the Catholic Church.
Relief and
Alleviate economic, material, and
International work conducted by
development
psychosocial needs after conflict.
World Vision and Catholic Relief Services, among others.
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With South Africa already more than 19 years into the democratic era when I began my fieldwork in August 2013, political transformation had long been achieved. Unsurprisingly, then, the principal transformation work conducted by The Warehouse and Fusion in post-conflict South Africa did not involve conciliation or mediation efforts, it did not monitor intergroup tensions in an observation and witness capacity, nor was it part of any transitional justice mechanisms. Compared to the example of Northern Ireland, for instance, in which churches crucially facilitated unofficial dialogue between protagonists of the conflict (Brewer, Higgins, and Teeney, 2011), South African churches historically played a more limited role in mediating the country’s political peace process. They nonetheless did intervene occasionally in dialogue between the main political parties, both in the lead-up to Nelson Mandela’s release from prison (Balcomb, 2004) and in formulating the 1991 National Peace Accord (Spies, 2002), meaning we can distinguish the case study organisations’ work from these earlier, political religious peacebuilding activities. In the volatile and often violent period that preceded the National Peace Accord and continued after it was signed, church leaders also helped to organise grassroots structures – Local Peace Committees – that monitored violent conflict between factions loyal to different political parties (Spies, 2002). This is a feature of the transitional period that, unlike the transformation work of The Warehouse and Fusion, was directly focused on mediating conflict and deterring violence. Whereas mediation, observation, and transitional justice have primarily been associated with South Africa’s apartheid and transitional periods, advocacy and empowerment initiatives have been a consistent feature of religious peacebuilding in South Africa across the years. The churches’ strong voice in the public sphere influenced each of the conflict and transition phases and, more recently, the postconflict period as well. South African churches and other international religious institutions were involved in advocacy and empowerment work from very early in apartheid. South African churches, for instance, rejected a 1958 law outlawing mixedrace congregations (Johnston, 1994), and the WCC denounced the apartheid regime in 1960 for its racist policies, insisting on every person’s right to justice and equality (Johnston, 1994). A smaller group of church leaders within South Africa also advocated for the enfranchisement of oppressed South Africans when it released the Kairos Document in 1985 which appealed to churches to take an unequivocal and active stand against the apartheid authorities (Kairos Theologians, 1985). Following a 204
period of acquiescence in the post-1994 era, Bompani (2013) has observed that churches in South Africa have finally recaptured their critical voice and are once again pressing the state to respond to social injustices. The Kairos Southern Africa group, named after the Kairos Document, illustrated this well when it issued a communiqué in 2011 condemning state corruption and calling on government to promote the interests of the poor, not the powerful (Kairos Southern Africa, 2011). In the active relationships it has with other religious organisations, The Warehouse and Fusion reflect the upsurge in religious advocacy and empowerment work in South Africa. For example, the director of The Warehouse represents the Anglican Archbishop on the Western Cape Religious Leaders Forum, which has advocated for better security and living conditions in the most deprived areas of the city. The WCRLF, an interfaith group, promoted and participated in at least one demonstration during my research period in Cape Town and campaigned actively against corruption in government having also released a handbook on faith perspectives on the issue. The Warehouse’s connection to Micah International, a global Christian pressure group promoting the Millennium Development Goals, also encouraged its involvement in the 2013 Exposed Campaign, which focused on corruption as a source of poverty, inequality, and exclusion in society. The small South African chapter of the Micah International campaign was based at The Warehouse offices and drew on its network to publicise its campaign. The final event was partly coordinated by Fusion staff members and held in the Manenberg People’s Centre, the community building in which Fusion has its office. As much as these actions contribute to the religious peacebuilding landscape in South Africa, they nevertheless do not constitute the organisations’ core transformation work, which does not bear the same characteristics as advocacy interventions. Education and formation: Individual and relational transformation in two Cape Town locales The Warehouse and Fusion’s transformation activities do not resemble conciliation and mediation efforts, observation and witness, or the transitional justice mechanism of the TRC. As I have discussed above, some of their activities relate to advocacy and empowerment, though these are not their main focus. We can, however, clearly distinguish aspects of the organisations’ work in the two remaining religious 205
peacebuilding categories, namely education and formation and relief and development. One facet of education and formation deals with relationship building between conflicting groups by demystifying the other through communication (Steele, 2008). Interfaith dialogue epitomises this drive to foster mutual understanding of a conflict and is a hallmark of religious peacebuilding in the United States (Smock and Huda, 2009). Ecumenism, one of the main religious peacebuilding strategies to overcome the sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland, has also been promoted by practitioners and researchers for the same reason that successful events can help develop empathy and change attitudes among different group members (Brewer, Higgins, and Teeny, 2011). Referring to ecumenism in Northern Ireland, Brewer, Higgins, and Teeney (2011: 48) state that ‘relationship-building was always at its heart, giving participants a form of “cat flap” into another person’s world’. This is an evocative description of how inter-group events can allow a person to dip into someone else’s reality – and then to return to one’s own, hopefully having developed a degree of empathy in the process. The Warehouse and Fusion do not facilitate interfaith gatherings and are not concerned with tensions between religious groups per se. However, The Warehouse in particular does host inter-denominational, inter-racial discussions. These are part of the organisation’s focus on relational transformation and are designed to encourage mutual understanding and enable participants to recognise the need for ‘interdependence’ across the racial, class, and theological divides in Cape Town. The Warehouse has, to return to Brewer, Higgins, and Teeney’s comment, relationship building at its heart and can confidently be classified as conducting education and formation religious peacebuilding work. This sets The Warehouse apart in the religious peacebuilding literature on South Africa, as there is almost no analysis of churches or Christian FBOs conducting work to encourage inter-racial dialogue (even though these activities may have existed). An important exception to this observation is Ganiel’s 2006 study of a single Cape Town church, Jubilee Community Church. Ganiel reports that Jubilee, a Charismatic congregation, used discourses of ‘unity in diversity’ and ‘restitution’ (Ganiel, 2008: 271) with the professed aim of moving from a mainly white congregation to a multi-racial that one would better reflect post-apartheid South African values. The lack of work conducted on church involvement in relationship formation stands in stark contrast to considerable research on the Northern Ireland conflict which has emphasised, and often celebrated, the ecumenical focus of some 206
churches. Whereas Brewer, Higgins, and Teeney (2011: 42) assert that ‘[m]ost people begin with ecumenism when thinking of religious peacework in Northern Ireland’, this is not the case in the South African instance. The Warehouse’s relational transformation work gains significance in this regard. Relationship building forms a substantial part of education and formation peacebuilding, but according to Steele (2008) the category also includes actions that promote understanding in the population of the full extent and implications of injustices that arise as a result of conflict. This education aspect had particular significance in the churches’ involvement in the anti-apartheid movement, as many of the joint documents and declarations released by church leaders served both advocacy as well as education goals. For example, with the backing of more than 600 church leaders, the SACC released its Message to the People of South Africa in 1968. The short document explained how apartheid policies were fundamentally at odds with the justice imperatives of all Christian denominations (Johnston, 1994). By denouncing the politics of apartheid, the churches pressed for political change. But they played an influential educational role too by clarifying the injustices of the regime. Similarly, the 1985 Kairos Document, an advocacy tool, was educational in the way it systematically debunked the apartheid ideology and laid bare the injustices of theologies that supported (State Theology) or did not challenge (Church Theology) oppressive state structures. Many of the most well-known resolutions against apartheid, including the Rustenburg Declaration, emerged from interdenominational conferences hosted by national or international forums such as the SACC and WCC. The Warehouse’s transformation work, which seeks to raise awareness among leaders of churches and other religious institutions of power differentials within development interventions and within the country as a whole, presents a different sort of education and formation model to what has previously characterised this peacebuilding category in South Africa. On the one hand, as a small NGO working in a single South African city, The Warehouse does not have the same media profile as national forums. Indeed, one longtime staff member described in an interview that the organisation has for many years operated in ‘the grey spaces of the city’, purposefully facilitating meetings and activities but trying not to be ‘domineering’ (Ross Tawney, Warehouse Staff Member, 29 November 2013). The staff member did acknowledge that the organisation’s
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involvement in several relief initiatives has recently given The Warehouse a more prominent profile in the city. A second differentiating factor of The Warehouse’s work is that it conducts its post-conflict education activities on an interpersonal scale. Instead of high-level interventions, The Warehouse works with small groups of church leaders, trying to ‘conscientise’ (Steele, 2008: 25) pastors based throughout the city regarding the barriers to social change. However, the organisation also emphasises the potential church leaders hold to overcome these challenges at a local level. It is a form of spiritual and identity formation associated with The Warehouse’s individual transformation strategy (I have discussed this in depth in Chapters 3 and 4). It encourages social action to respond to the material needs of local communities but also to expand these to address structural and political injustices. The type of transformation pursued by The Warehouse is reflected in the way it has positioned itself in the city. It is based in Wetton, a ‘grey’ space in the city that is not characterised by excess wealth or poverty and is not associated with any specific race group. This has allowed The Warehouse to pursue its peacebuilding goals in the way it characterises itself as a middle-ground and meeting place for a diverse group of people and ideas. Fusion’s strategy stands in contrast to this, as it has established its office in Manenberg, its place of work, and has tried to integrate into the daily life of the community. Fusion’s education and formation activities do not target a diverse group of people but rather focuses intently on a single group, namely young people at risk of falling in with gangs and the drug scene. Fusion characterises itself as a community modelling an alternative way of living in Manenberg and sees its relationship building activities as providing a stable basis for young people to realise their potential to change their lives and, eventually, their neighbourhood. This is the crux of its religious peacebuilding work, as its relational transformation work imagines a post-apartheid society in which the most marginalised members of a marginalised community gain the ability to develop the life skills and self-confidence to meet their economic needs, and eventually help to change the character of Manenberg itself. Fusion’s education and formation work can be compared to similar activities conducted by Caritas and the Damietta Peace Initiative in South Africa, which teach learners about universal dignity and how to deal with personal anger and frustration, respectively (Clark, 2011). Like The Warehouse, Fusion is distinctive in the South
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African religious peacebuilding field for the way its transformation work is conducted as a lifestyle rather than an activity. Relief and development: The Warehouse and Fusion as facilitators of material transformation through individual and relational transformation The last religious peacebuilding category relevant to the work of the case study organisations’ work is relief and development. Since the 1990s, international faithbased relief and development organisations such as World Vision, the Mennonite Central Committee, and Catholic Relief Services began to make the explicit connection between their development work and building just and peaceful societies that have experienced conflict (Gerstbauer, 2010). Humanitarian work conducted in response to oppression has a long history in South Africa, with World Vision and Catholic Welfare and Development active in the country during the apartheid period, as well as local health organisations (van Ginneken, Lewin, and Berridge, 2010). Following the transition to democracy in 1994, this humanitarian faith-based tradition has continued, most noticeably in response to the HIV and AIDS crisis that still affects the country (Burchardt, 2013; Burchardt, Patterson, and Rasmussen, 2013), but also with respect to issues such as xenophobic attacks that regularly force people from their homes and possessions (Phakathi, 2010; Bompani, 2013). Before its move away from programmatic development, The Warehouse’s most successful project dealt with orphans whose parents had died of AIDS-complicated diseases. It also started to become well-known in the city when it coordinated the Cape Town churches’ reaction to the nationwide xenophobic attacks against foreigners in 2008. The Warehouse’s various projects, which included Fusion at one time and spanned healthcare, disaster relief work through its Urban Gleaning programme, and community development in a nearby informal settlement, do not immediately resemble post-conflict peacebuilding activities. However, as in the rest of world, it is poor people in South Africa who are most affected by social crises, and while the ANC government bears some of the blame for the country’s slow rate of transformation, the structural legacy of hundreds of years of colonial rule cannot be dismissed. The Warehouse and Fusion both highlighted how they believe their work counteracts the enduring effects of apartheid. The organisations use the idea of transformation in communities as their guiding principle, encompassing individual transformation,
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relational transformation, and material transformation. Whereas the national transformation project promoted by the government focuses on policy-based institutional change, the case study organisations’ conceptualisation of transformation led them to take a more holistic approach to their work. They believe that change at all three levels is needed for full and lasting transformation, and therefore peace, to occur. Emphasising how they believed they were filling a gap in the development field, The Warehouse and Fusion distinguished their work from secular development organisations by citing their focus on spiritual and identity formation in church leaders and high-risk youth. Even Francis Shaw, the only employee to voice doubts about the viability of a transformation-based strategy, still agreed with her colleagues about the novelty of the approach: This is world new stuff, okay. I don’t dispute that. There isn’t much, if it is being done it’s not being written about, okay, okay. That tells me it hasn’t got into the realms of the theoretical frameworks yet, if that makes any sense, okay (Francis Shaw, Warehouse Staff Member, 05 December 2013). Shaw was only partly correct in her assessment. For example, The Warehouse staff were reading Bryant Myers’s (2011) book Walking with the Poor: Principles and Practices of Transformational Development at the time I conducted my research. Myers’s work deals directly with the Christian model of development, even though he does not provide any examples of it in practice. Where Shaw’s impression was correct was with respect to the South African context, as the model is primarily associated with the Christian organisation World Vision International – there is no sociological literature of South African-based examples of transformational development. In this sense, The Warehouse and Fusion’s transformation-based work, which treats the issues of poverty, inequality, and conflict-driven division in society as interlinked, presents examples of new and innovative relief and development work in the South African religious peacebuilding field, underpinned by education and formation initiatives. The post post-apartheid religious peacebuilding model
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Locating The Warehouse and Fusion’s work in the six-category typology of religious peacebuilding allows us to contextualise the organisations within the wider field and also expands the corpus of case studies. It furthermore helps us to better understand how the religious sector is responding to issues affecting people in South Africa’s postapartheid period. During the apartheid era, religious institutions were heavily involved in advocacy and empowerment work, with some involvement in conciliation and mediation as the country moved toward and entered the transitional stage (Walshe, 1995; Spies, 2002). For the sake of analysis, I refer to this as the ‘anti-apartheid South African religious peacebuilding model’. In the years immediately following the 1994 elections, religious leaders connected with the church and other faith traditions were most closely associated with the TRC and the national reconciliation project, what I refer to as the ‘transitional South African model’. Finally, as religion largely withdrew from the public sphere in the post-TRC years, churches and Christian FBOs became most visible in the development sector, especially in its response to the HIV and AIDS crisis (the ‘post-apartheid South African model’). Although relief and development work can be an influential form of post-conflict religious peacebuilding, religious organisations’ ‘co-optation’ (Bompani, 2013: 135) by government made it difficult to challenge structures of injustice in society and the state (Mueller-Hirth, 2009). More recently, there is evidence that churches are once again taking a critical interest in issues of justice, even setting themselves in opposition to the state or state policies. Bompani (2013) cites the Central Methodist Church’s relief and advocacy work with refugees in Johannesburg as an example of this. The 2011 document released by Kairos Southern Africa provides another example of members of the church distinguishing themselves from the state. The document, whose almost 1,000 signatories include the former Methodist minister and TRC commissioner Alex Boraine as well as the well-known anti-apartheid activist Fr Michael Lapsley, calls for a return to solidarity ‘with the poorest of the poor and the marginalised in society’ (Kairos Southern Africa, 2011: 11). It also critiques what it calls the ‘State Theology’ (Kairos Southern Africa, 2011: 10) of alignment with the ANC government post-1994. Addressed to the ruling ANC, the document identifies nine points of concern regarding the future of the country, including ‘economic justice’, ‘corruption’, ‘social cohesion in the country’, and the ‘relatively poor standards of education for the vast majority of the poor in our land’ (Kairos Southern Africa, 2011: 13-4). While these examples do not represent a trend as much as indications of change, we may tentatively call this the 211
‘post post-apartheid’ South African model of religious peacebuilding. Its focus is on the slow pace of social and economic transformation, the racial tension in the country as agitation rises over massive inequality, and the perception that government inaction is perpetuating and even exacerbating injustices (Earnest, 2013; Hunter and Mataboge, 2014). This critical attention to transformation in the country – not supporting the state but instead advocating for it to do more – stands in stark contrast to a Christian church which commentators in the past have argued has done little to aid the national project (Balcomb, 2004; Anderson, 2005; Ganiel, 2008). With their emphasis on issues of transformation in Cape Town, The Warehouse and Fusion bear similarities to the post post-apartheid model’s focus on the need for social and structural change in the country. Yet they also diverge from this model in that they do not direct calls for change toward the state itself. I have already explained that the case studies’ core transformation work does not involve advocacy, a key component of recent critiques of the state of the nation. In a post-conflict society, the work of The Warehouse and Fusion lies firmly in the transformation of society that involves ‘reconciliation between erstwhile protagonists, social relationship-building and repair across the communal divide, and replacement of brokenness by the development (or restoration) of people’s feeling of wholeness’ (Brewer, Higgins and Teeney, 2011: 5). Brewer, Higgins and Teeny observe that this constitutes positive peacemaking in that it pursues avenues that contribute to transformation, in which a more just and equal society emerges from conflict rather than one which perpetuates the status quo, albeit without the violence wrought by fists and guns. Galtung (2011), who in the peacebuilding field is prominently associated with conflict transformation studies, states that peace would be a strange concept if it did not include relations between genders, races, classes, and families, and did not also include absence of structural violence, the non-intended slow, massive suffering caused by economic and political structures of exploitation and repression …; and if it excluded the absence of the cultural violence that legitimises direct and/or structural violence. As I demonstrated in the way participants understand the idea of transformation (Chapter 5) and in how The Warehouse and Fusion performed this transformation in their work (Chapter 6), the two Cape Town organisations highlighted structural issues linked to the country’s history of racism and colonial oppression. They viewed 212
corruption – individual and institutional – as one of the main injustices of the postapartheid period. In their divergent ways, The Warehouse and Fusion also both aim to empower the groups of people they work with. In the case of the former organisation, this involves black South African church leaders realising their equality with whites and their potential to affect their social surroundings. This can also be described as peacebuilding that attempts to redress the cultural violence of race and the power differentials that characterise it. Fusion, meanwhile, focuses on helping high-risk youth in Manenberg realise an alternative way of life in relationship with others. The organisation believes this helps young people realise their ability to affect their personal situation and, following that, to repair the marginalised community of Manenberg. In their study of religious peacebuilding in Northern Ireland, Brewer, Higgins, and Teeney (2011: 31) distinguish between passive peacebuilding, which ‘involves commitment to or affirmation of peace as an ideal without actively practising it’, and active peacebuilding, which ‘lives out the commitment to peace as a social practice’. Active peacebuilding might come in the form of political mediation, public advocacy, or emergency relief to areas affected by conflict – the typology with which I have been working is a typology of active peacebuilding whose principles relate closely to conflict transformation ideals. In relation to The Warehouse and Fusion’s work, however, the idea of ‘living out’ peace takes on a second layer of significance that adds to our understanding of religious peacebuilding in South Africa today. This is the lifestyle approach that both organisations have adopted, a continual process of individual and collective identity formation that The Warehouse and Fusion believe will lead to social change and a more equal and peaceful society. By analysing this religiously motivated lifestyle work in more detail, it is possible to contextualise the organisations’ work further and extend our understanding of their religious peacebuilding practices. The Way-of-Life Approach to Religious Peacebuilding in South Africa: Two Models of Performing Transformation The previous chapter (Chapter 6), which examined the case study organisations’ transformational practices, discussed how The Warehouse adopts transformation as a way of life. The staff members try to live out the ideals of individual and relational
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transformation, bearing in mind and trying to address the racial power dynamics that exist within the organisation itself, as personal histories and current circumstances differentiate colleagues’ lived experiences. One staff member described this process as a ‘work in progress’ (Barbara Anderson, Warehouse Staff Member, 25 November 2013), while several other participants agreed that The Warehouse is intentionally modelling an alternative South Africa; they evaluate and re-evaluate their progress as they confront their own and others’ mistakes and repeatedly refine their thinking and behaviour. Fusion presents a variant of this lifestyle approach, believing that its staff members can conduct their activities best if they live and also work in Manenberg. Their experiential mode of conducting development is aimed at empathising with the community and especially with high-risk youth, their target group. By modelling an alternative community – a family-community – the organisation hopes to influence the way other people live. The Fusion staff partly describe this model of religiously inspired development in a relic community of apartheid as being the church rather than going to church. This sort of lifestyle work is not widely reported in the religious peacebuilding literature. However, there is precedent for it. Marti and Ganiel’s (2014) work on the Emerging Church Movement (ECM) – including their analysis of the Belfast-based group Zero28’s social activism for a non-sectarian society – and Ganiel’s (2016) study of extra-institutional religion are most instructive in this regard. Zero28, which was active between 1999 and 2007, was an evangelical, politically focused group that encouraged a lifestyle of activism that involved living out their anti-sectarian, faithbased convictions. The Zero28 members’ pledge ‘To live the change I want to see through nonviolent action to achieve peace and social justice in Northern Ireland’ (Marti and Ganiel, 2014: 145) captures the way-of-life approach of the small organisation and resonates with The Warehouse and Fusion’s organisational character. The Belfast organisation engaged directly with the peace process in Northern Ireland, organising discussion events and meetings with prominent politicians, something Marti and Ganiel (2014: 134) describe as ‘a shift from orthodoxy (right belief) to orthopraxis (right practice)’. Throughout Chapters 5 and 6 in this thesis there are examples of how staff members at The Warehouse and Fusion describe how they try to live out their spiritual convictions in their work and private lives, in the belief that their way of life, together with others in their group, will effect change in society. The organisations emphasise this same philosophy in the development work they do with 214
their respective networks, spreading the message that individual spiritual change should lead to social action, with material results. Marti and Ganiel (2014: 162, emphasis in the original) describe Zero28 as an example of the ECM, which they argue presents ‘a distinctive approach to religious individualisation’, an individualisation that is ‘supported by congregations that facilitate a cooperative egoism’. In saying this, they draw on Beck’s individualisation thesis of a modern world in which traditional social structures of class, religion, and the family have broken down, leaving individuals to define their own lives without guidelines or boundaries to determine their actions or identity. ‘The normal biography,’ Beck and Beck-Gernsheim (2002: 3) state, ‘thus becomes the “elective biography”, the “do-it-yourself biography”’. Along these lines, Marti and Ganiel (2014: 27) argue that the ECM is a ‘de-institutionalised’ form of church, in which individuals craft their own version of Christianity that may bear similarities to mainline Western denominations, such as the Church of England, but is often defined in opposition to them. Meanwhile, they describe how cooperative egoism ‘involves the management and assertion of one’s individuated self yet simultaneously involves connection, empathy, and love for others’ (Marti and Ganiel, 2014: 166), a definition that links to the ECM’s characteristic emphasis on social activism as exemplified by Zero28’s peacebuilding work in Northern Ireland. In trying to clarify The Warehouse and Fusion’s model of religious peacebuilding in contemporary South Africa, it is useful to note their organisational similarities to Zero28 and the broader ECM movement. Most noticeably, the case studies resemble the socially aware living out of one’s identity, something that characterises the common practices of the ECM. They also bear similarities to the cooperative egoism of the ECM, which Marti and Ganiel (2014: 1) describe as a ‘fiercely relational ethic’ that also emphasises freedom of individual belief. Examples of the ECM ‘are distinct in promoting individualism while at the same time providing a basis for community around shared experiences and relationships’ (Marti and Ganiel, 2014: 35). To an extent, this characterises The Warehouse and Fusion’s organisational approach to transformation: The Cape Town organisations pursue individual, relational, and material transformation, all the while striving to model an alternative sort of society. They prize relationship building across traditional divides in postapartheid South Africa, but value diversity in their staff. However, there are also limits to the extent one can compare the South African case studies to the de-institutionalised 215
church movement which Marti and Ganiel describe. The following two sections describe the different types of individualisation presented by the case study organisations. Fusion and the Emerging Church Movement: A South African example of the individualisation of religion Beck’s theory of religious individualisation supposes that religion, like other social categories such as class and the family, has become a ‘zombie category’ (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 2002: 204) that no longer defines people’s place in society. The authors assert that old rules, restrictions, and guiding norms associated with established religions have lost their power to order society. With respect to religion, Beck (2010: 87) argues that as the ‘dismantling of tradition’ proceeds, individuals are forced to imagine and enact new religiosities – sometimes connected to old symbols but always divorced from their original context: Nowadays individuals write their own faith narratives with the aid of words and symbols which have abandoned their fixed ‘orbit’ in the institutionalised coordinates of sovereign world religions in which a particular tradition had held them fast for centuries (Beck, 2010: 87). This is the basis for the Emerging Church Movement, a motley collection of parachurches and anti-churches based in pubs, coffee shops, and other non-traditional settings. As a ‘movement’, it does not coordinate or mobilise in the style of state-focused political pressure groups (Haenfler, Johnson, and Jones, 2012). Instead, it is connected through ECM groups’ diffuse collectivity based on their defiance of tradition and emphasis on living out one’s personal, spiritual convictions. In many cases, this translation of belief into practice targets social justice issues (Marti and Ganiel, 2014). One of the main findings in this study is that The Warehouse and Fusion both exhibit elements of individualised religion, as they propose a personal, lifestyle approach to respond to the challenges of poverty, inequality and injustice. At the same time, and similarly to some of the examples that Marti and Ganiel (2014) supply in their work on the ECM, both The Warehouse and Fusion are driven by a relationship imperative. However, Fusion most closely evinces characteristics of the ECM, as it defines itself in opposition to the churches in Manenberg, arguing that their traditional customs and
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conventions are ineffective in Manenberg’s precarious environment. Participants insisted that in the place of rules, judgement and condemnation, love, trust and shared experience should bind people in a family-community. One of the Fusion participants stated that ‘I’m in love with the church and I have a passion to see the church respond [to poverty and injustice], but I’ve seen the church tally in their response to broken young people’ (Sebastian Davids, Fusion Staff Member, 27 November 2013). The Fusion staff repeatedly observed that the Manenberg churches were unable to respond to the daily problems young people face. As Marti and Ganiel (2014: 174) state, Emerging Christians have tried to subvert mainstream systems, such as capitalism, ‘by living “outside the system” in neo-monastic communities, or creating Temporary Autonomous Zones (TAZs) and “suspended spaces” that can contribute to transformation in social, economic, or political life’. Steve Davies, a staff member at Fusion, captured this sense of ‘in the world but not of it’ when he stated that ‘we believe that we should try and be church rather than go to church’ (Steve Davies, Fusion Staff Member, 27 November 2013, emphasis in the original), an individual process of inward-outward change that he stated would alter relationships in Manenberg. It resonates with Marti and Ganiel’s (2014: 193) observation that the ‘ECM’s apparent informality in so many settings can be seen as an attempt to create slack in rule-following, and a space for experimentation, thus engaging the tensions of pluralism’. By being the church and not going to it, by subverting the institutional rules of cleanliness and sobriety, Fusion created room to allow young people in Manenberg to falter on their path to realising their ‘authentic’ identity in God. The Warehouse and extra-institutional religion In her study of contemporary forms of Christianity on the island of Ireland, Ganiel (2016) argues that Catholicism has lost its influence as an organising institution of Irish society. She draws on Beck’s theory of individualisation in reflexive modernity, and the individualisation of religion in particular, to describe how many Christians still practise their faith but do so in opposition to, or in addition to, Catholic church doctrine. Ganiel (2016: passim) ultimately uses her observations of a ‘post-Catholic’ Ireland to build on Beck’s theory, suggesting that certain expressions of Christianity are best described as subtle forms of individualised religion, namely extra-institutional religion. She states the following: 217
Extra-institutional religion is individualized in that people are taking responsibility for their own faith, and it is de-institutionalized in that people are growing ever more wary of institutional religions – even if they maintain some sort of relationship with them’ (Ganiel, 2016: 231). According to Ganiel, people who practise forms of extra-institutional Christianity are not completely ‘free-floating’ individuals; but neither are they constrained by particular theological traditions. This is what differentiates her concept from Beck’s and what makes it useful for describing how The Warehouse performs its particular brand of transformation. Unlike Fusion, which defines itself in opposition to the church in Manenberg and operates as a neo-monastic community, The Warehouse maintains strong ties to the mainstream churches in Cape Town. The Warehouse explicitly targets church leaders as agents of transformation in South Africa and so cannot be described as completely dis-embedded from the church, as Beck’s individualisation thesis would have it. Nevertheless, in promoting its transformational development principles, The Warehouse does operate in tension with theological traditions that emphasise the spiritual world at the expense of the material world and conversion ahead of social and political change. Staff members did not name specific churches or Christian traditions in their interviews, but agreed that a ‘theology of the future’ (Akhona Ganyiwa, Warehouse Staff Member, 29 November 2013) was detrimental to holistic transformation in South Africa. The Warehouse’s way-of-life approach to transformation illustrates its extrainstitutional religious character. The Warehouse characterises itself as an organisation which thinks and acts differently to churches and other FBOs in the country by selfconsciously modelling an alternative version of post-apartheid South Africa. A core aspect of its identity is its transformation lifestyle, in which individuals are responsible for a process of continual change and self-recognition that helps each person acknowledge others who are different to themselves. By realising what I have termed their ‘self-in-the-world’, staff members described how they were able to understand their potential to confront the material and relational divisions in society. This was firstly a spiritual process of finding one’s ‘authentic’ identity through a relationship with God. The Warehouse did not prescribe how this relationship should be formed but emphasised it was a self-conscious, iterative process: in short, the organisation emphasised the self-reflexive individual as a site of transformation, which resonates
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with Beck’s theory that it ‘is the individual’s responsibility to craft a different world (loosely connected to others doing likewise) rather than solely the domain of the state or even traditional social movements’ (Haenfler, Johnson, and Jones, 2012: 15). A careful comparison of The Warehouse and Fusion’s work with the ECM and Ganiel’s concept of extra-institutional religion allows us to enrich the observation I have made of the two organisations’ way-of-life approach to religious peacebuilding. Fusion foregrounded its willingness to accept and embrace young people, despite their failings, to differentiate itself from other institutions, most obviously churches in Manenberg but also the state, which participants felt had not only spurned Manenberg politically but also readily re-imprisoned residents who were unable to meet stringent parole requirements. Marti and Ganiel (2014: 174) describe this inclusive character as ‘sharing a religious orientation, rather than a single, fixed religious identity [based on community norms]’. It is a feature of the ECM that recalls Beck’s (2010: 74) contention that one of the consequences of globalisation is ‘cosmopolitisation’, or the breakdown of clear boundaries from the national level to the local and even personal level. In A God of One’s Own, Beck (2010) argues that religion’s potential for peace lies in this development of the cosmopolitan society. To the degree that ‘cosmopolitisation operates … deeply within human beings, in their relations to God, the world and themselves’ (Beck, 2010: 75), I suggest the examples of Fusion and The Warehouse, of which the latter interacts with churches of all denominations in Cape Town, exemplify this cosmopolitan turn associated with individualisation and cooperative egoism. Having situated the case studies in the religious peacebuilding framework and established how it relates to the post post-apartheid religious peacebuilding model, I now assess how the ‘local processes’ (Burawoy, 1998a: 5) of transformation at the research sites interact with the ‘extralocal forces’ (Burawoy, 1998a: 5) that structure post-apartheid South African society. To do this, I evaluate the possibilities and limitations of the work done by the Christian organisations to address issues of material need, structural inequality, and social institutional barriers to realising change in South Africa.
Individual, relational, and material transformation under the spotlight Before The Warehouse transitioned from a programmatic development organisation to a facilitative one, it was clearly located in what Brewer, Higgins, and Teeney (2011: 219
passim) refer to as ‘market spaces’ of civil society. The following excerpt describes what the authors mean by this term: When religious groups focus less on themselves as institutions … in order to work amongst the poor, dispossessed, and victims of communal violence, they occupy market spaces in which their resources get devoted to peace; they are called market spaces because they are spaces for resource allocation (Brewer, Higgins, and Teeney, 2011: 142). Pre-2009, The Warehouse partnered with local churches to provide food and hygiene packs for young children orphaned when their parents died of AIDS-related illnesses; provided social care mentoring to church volunteers helping to look after HIV/AIDS orphans; helped run an HIV support group and youth project in a nearby informal settlement, as well as providing emergency relief when needed; helped school leavers access further education and jobs; in the form of Fusion, responded to the emotional and psychosocial needs of high-risk youth in Manenberg; and ran regular social development training courses for churches and other small development organisations. These projects can be related to relief and development religious peacebuilding, in that The Warehouse used their material resources to promote wellbeing and a route out of poverty in areas of Cape Town worst affected by the apartheid regime. Brewer, Higgins, and Teeney propose that religious organisations that become involved in market spaces are well placed to pursue conflict transformation. They furthermore suggest that becoming involved in market spaces ‘facilitates a wider engagement with the issue of peacemaking and the deployment of resources to help its materialisation’ as there ‘often comes the realisation that allocating resources alone’ does not necessarily address the root issues of a conflict (Brewer, Higgins, and Teeney, 2011: 142-3). Indeed, we observe exactly such a realisation in The Warehouse when the organisation decided after an external review of its programmes that a top-down mode of development, which staff members associated with simple charity, was entrenching power relations between those with and those without resources. They perceived, moreover, that this entrenchment of power dynamics encouraged further racial division, as churches with resources were often majority white congregations and churches without often had large black or coloured memberships.
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The Warehouse’s adoption of the transformational development strategy and its move to a facilitative mode of development was motivated by a concern with power relations within society which they believed were reproducing similar material and relational aspects of apartheid life. The organisation judged that for lasting material transformation to occur in South Africa and to address the social power imbalances that still exist, ‘transformation from within’ (Hovland, 2003: 15) was absolutely necessary. The Warehouse’s ‘wider engagement with the issue of peacemaking’ (Brewer, Higgins, and Teeney, 2011: 142) in South Africa was to look inward but also, crucially, to look outward. In this way, they moved toward cultural transformation in society by encouraging changed group identities, but also individual ones (Mbembe, 2015). If we follow Brewer, Higgins, and Teeney’s (2011) conceptualisation of strategic spaces in civil society within which religious organisations can act, The Warehouse’s strategic shift from direct relief to transformational development can be distinguished as a partial move out of market spaces and into other socially strategic spaces. Brewer, Higgins, and Teeney (2011) emphasise that the four conceptual spaces – intellectual, institutional, market, and political – are not hermetically sealed and that ‘religious groups [are] able to merge them and work in several spaces simultaneously’ (Brewer, Higgins, and Teeney, 2011: 148). In the same way, The Warehouse first began to occupy intellectual spaces when it announced the reasons for its strategic switch and published these in its 2008/09 Annual Report. The organisation has also regularly explained its ideas in its monthly electronic newsletter. Along with the newsletters, Warehouse staff members are frequently invited to give sermons on issues of injustice at churches and Christian conferences around Cape Town. The organisation also conducts information sessions at its monthly volunteer days, called Justice Saturdays. Together, these have become key outlets for spreading the organisation’s ideas on the role of the church in addressing issues of poverty, injustice, and division in Cape Town. We see in this what Brewer, Higgins, and Teeney (2011: 133) describe as the church becoming involved in intellectual spaces of civil society, which as the term suggests are spaces for the airing of ideas: Civil society groups can help to rethink the terms of the conflict so that it becomes easier to intellectually contemplate its transcendence or ending, and through their championing of alternative visions come to identify the range of issues that need to be articulated. 221
In The Warehouse’s case, their alternative idea of creating a more equitable society was based on the tenets of transformational development and the elements of individual, relational, and material transformation. As I have demonstrated in previous chapters, this involves overcoming the power dynamics associated with race and development, namely what The Warehouse sees as the false perception among black pastors based in poor areas of the city that they cannot contribute to the development of their own communities. On the other hand, affluent churches and their mainly white congregations need to realise both the privilege they inherited and social power they wield in development relationships. Ultimately, the empowerment and humility that should result from these personal changes should lead to more equitable relationships and what The Warehouse terms ‘interdependence’. The Warehouse’s strategy of hosting discussion events and training days offers examples of how the small organisation occupied intellectual spaces. With its continued emphasis on development, albeit reconceptualised as a process of mutual recognition and interdependence on one another’s resources, The Warehouse simultaneously occupied market space. They no longer transferred resources directly to communities in need, but instead provided the space for interactions they hoped would lead to eventual transfer of resources between churches in the city. The third and final strategic space The Warehouse occupied after adopting a facilitative strategy was institutional space. As it started to gain its independence from its parent organisation, Fusion also began to occupy institutional space in Cape Town. Work done in this social space, as Brewer, Higgins, and Teeney (2011: 142) explain, allows alternative ‘behaviours, policies, and beliefs’ to be put into practice: Institutional spaces act as learning fields in which peace is put into practice first within the confines and remit of the organisation and practised from places connected to it, allowing practitioners to remain within familiar territory and on grounds where they feel secure. On adopting its transformational development strategy, The Warehouse also took the decision to intentionally practise the individual and relational aspects of transformation as a way of putting into practice the ideas they promote in training and discussion events. As with Fusion’s efforts to build a unique family-community in the midst of Manenberg, The Warehouse perceived its actions as modelling an alternative
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way of living in a country still divided by race and class, reflected in Cape Town’s geographical divides. In this, the organisations embody Brewer, Higgins, and Teeney’s (2011: 133) assessment that becoming involved in institutional spaces can enable religious organisations to become ‘role models and drivers of the process of transformation’. Thus far I have analysed The Warehouse and Fusion’s activities with reference to the six-category typology of religious peacebuilding, as well as Brewer, Higgins, and Teeney’s conceptualisation of the four strategic spaces in civil society. By first categorising the case studies’ work I was able to delineate their activities and compare them to religious peacebuilding work in other contexts, including the South African one. This is a first-level comparative step that adds to the discipline’s corpus of case studies. While this enriches our understanding of the trajectory of peacebuilding activities in different post-conflict contexts, the second-level comparative step of analysing the case study organisations’ work within socially strategic spaces allows us to make a more critical assessment of work done by The Warehouse and Fusion. As Brewer, Higgins, and Teeney (2011: 126) note, analysing religious peacebuilding work within the broader civil sphere allows one to situate otherwise ‘inchoate and haphazard activities’ within the broader relationship between the state and civil society and ‘identify further opportunities and constraints’ relevant to religious organisations. Post post-apartheid religious peacebuilding in South Africa One of the most striking aspects of The Warehouse’s early work was that it was firmly placed in social market spaces, its relief and development work providing material resources directly to communities in need – local churches were little more than conduits of these resources. In adopting this strategy, the organisation reflected what I have termed the post-apartheid religious peacebuilding model in South Africa. No longer the vocal voice of justice, churches and other religious organisations tended to constrain their work to the important, but quite politically harmless, role of social providers. In this regard, religious organisations typified the wider state-civil society relationship that followed democratisation in South Africa, as the neoliberal policies of the ANC government resulted in structural changes in society that required action from non-governmental agencies (Habib, 2005).
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Habib (2005: 685) argues that the post-apartheid social changes resulted in the division of civil society into three blocs – ‘NGOs, survivalist agencies, and social movements’. He characterises survivalist agencies as small organisations unconnected to the state which exist to respond to social emergencies; in contrast, he suggests that civil society organisations (which include NGOs and FBOs) exist in a ‘subcontractual role’ (Habib, 2005: 685) with the state, while social movements have an adversarial relationship to government institutions. Whether official or not, relationships with the state became more collegial as they delivered services to large proportions of the population, services the government itself would otherwise have been required to provide. Where NGOs receive funding directly from the state, Habib questions whether they can at all be considered accountable to the marginalised sector of society. Other commentators have voiced similar concerns about the independence of NGOs, as summed up by Mueller-Hirth’s (2009: 423) comment that ‘the tendency for NGOs to be drawn into partnerships with government bodies and corporate sponsors casts doubt on their ability to open up spaces for critical public debate’. In short, a civil society with close ties to the state is unlikely to critique the political or economic system that sustains it. During its time as a programmatic development organisation, The Warehouse exemplified the state-civil society relationship Habib describes, as it received funding from the Western Cape provincial government for its work with HIV/AIDS orphans through its flagship Care for Kids project. One Warehouse staff member referred to Care for Kids as the organisation’s ‘cash cow’ (Francis Shaw, Warehouse Staff Member, 05 December 2013), by which they meant that it enabled the existence of some programmes that were less attractive to donors, including Fusion. Crucially for our understanding of The Warehouse’s later religious peacebuilding work, the organisation switched strategies after becoming concerned that its outcomes-based interaction with donors, including the state, was compromising its relationship with local churches and church leaders. Specifically, the staff felt that the top-down development strategy was perpetuating power relationships that encouraged ‘charity’ as opposed to lasting transformation. Situated in the market space of civil society, Warehouse participants explained that they were involved in a one-way transfer of material resources instead of helping churches already established in communities respond to local needs. With its shift to a facilitative transformation-based strategy, The Warehouse moved away from the market space and towards intellectual and 224
institutional spaces, boosting its ability to encourage a lasting peace process in South Africa. In promoting the transformational development model, The Warehouse has reimagined religion’s role in relief and development in post-apartheid South Africa. It has stepped away from what it terms the ‘charity’ model of a top-down transfer of resources from the affluent to the poor, a model that it believes reinforces old divisions and power structures in the new South Africa. It now preaches – at the pulpit as well as at training events – a type of transformation of the self that accompanies and inspires relationship building and material development. Warehouse participants claimed in interviews that material transformation, including community development and structural change, should occur through individual action (such as church leaders inspiring their congregations to realise or relinquish their social power), and through relationship building and interdependence across the class and racial divides in the city. The Warehouse staff ultimately promoted a way of life in which continual work on the self, in relationship with others, led to changes in wider society. With the exception of one staff member, the Wetton-based organisation did not doubt that its strategy would have an impact on macro-issues such as the structure of the economy, even though the organisation was not directly involved in socially strategic political spaces in society. By modelling an alternative way of working and living with each other, they believed they would be able to influence the way other religious organisations and their affiliates would approach their work and private lives. Using her single case study of an historically white Cape Town church that attempted to construct an integrated racial identity, Ganiel (2007: 9) notes that ‘[as] institutions, Christian congregations lend themselves to the production and dissemination of discourses’. Drawing on wider, mainly US-based literature on the ability of churches to resolve racial tensions in societies such as the United States and South Africa, Ganiel (2008: 281) concludes that ‘evidence of a lack of engagement with social structures raises doubts about the optimistic claims of the American researchers that multiracial congregations can provide an “answer” to the problem of race’. She nevertheless asserts that her case study of a Charismatic church in Cape Town ‘provides an example of how a congregation is recognising, naming and addressing the problem of race at a structural level’ (Ganiel, 2008: 281), and suggests that this could add to a national discussion about race and structure. However, Ganiel’s cautiously positive assessment of the potential for churches to influence wider debates 225
lies in her focus on the power of discourses rather than the strength of action, a position she supports with mention of new social movements and their activation of discourses to achieve their goals (Ganiel, 2007). She acknowledges that ‘people who left Jubilee argue that its engagement with social structures is superficial, unsystematic and divorced from politics and the public sphere’ (Ganiel, 2008: 281). While The Warehouse and Fusion bear similarities to Ganiel’s case study – most notably in their espousal of inclusive, overarching identities that transcend racial divisions in the city – there are also two important differences that suggest the organisations are better able to contribute to transformation in South Africa. The first of these differences relates to how The Warehouse and Fusion both advocate a wayof-life, or lifestyle, transformation tactic. They go beyond framing alternative discourses and pursue active transformational practices. This is not to say that the organisations do not produce or reproduce particular discourses, but rather that they emphasise putting these ideas into practice. This is the difference between remaining in the intellectual space of reimagining post-apartheid South Africa and moving into the institutional space of practising their convictions. A second differentiating factor between The Warehouse and Ganiel’s case study is that the former organisation conducts its work with a large network of churches across Cape Town. Situated in Wetton, arguably a middle-ground in the city, Warehouse participants suggested they were well placed to provide a physical space for people from many different social and economic backgrounds to meet and attend transformational development training days. As a past project of The Warehouse, Fusion still considers itself part of The Warehouse ‘family’ and maintains ties to its erstwhile parent organisation. Although it concentrates its work in Manenberg and distinguishes its family-community goal from The Warehouse’s less intensive relational approach to transformation, Fusion still benefits from its historical links to people and churches who have interacted and volunteered with the Wetton-based group. From interview data, it is evident that in general terms, The Warehouse’s idea of transformation entails individual change that leads to action in the world. But in terms of The Warehouse’s specific goals, transformation involves church leaders realising their spiritual as well as social role and using their leadership position in the community to respond to local needs. In his interview, Akhona Ganyiwa reasoned that church leaders are ‘the ones who can do (.) if they’re transformed themselves, they can 226
transform their own churches and the members. And the members, in turn, will make an impact or transform society in every area of their lives’ (Akhona Ganyiwa, Warehouse Staff Member, 29 November 2013). It is clear from Ganyiwa’s comment that The Warehouse’s strategy of leader-led change presumes that pastors command respect and authority in the communities in which they work. This is a common view in religious peacebuilding literature (Appleby, 2000; Little, 2007; Hertog, 2010) and, in light of South Africans’ consistently high levels of trust in religious institutions compared to politicians, political parties, and the police (Lefko-Everett, Lekalake, Penfold, and Rais, 2011; Wale, 2014), a view that The Warehouse may be correct to hold. Despite the promise these statistics hold for the success of The Warehouse’s strategy, however, the organisation as yet does not have many examples of positive material change resulting from its own work with church leaders across Cape Town. Warehouse staff members gave similar responses to any question regarding the success of their new work with church leaders, which was that it was too soon to tell having only recently adopted their new strategy. Akhona Ganyiwa, for instance, stated that ‘I think the journey’s still long. I mean, I think the aim really is to (.) it’s relational, working hopefully one-on-one with the pastors, just to see where are they at. What is their mindset like?’ (Akhona Ganyiwa, Warehouse Staff Member, 29 November 2013). In a similar vein, Mandla Nyathi stated: I think one of the things we will have to recognise [is] that much of the work that we’re doing now won’t be measured within the next 10 years or so [l]. And some of its fruits we probably won’t see, you understand what I mean? Because it’s relational. But in terms of input that we give, there’s been a lot of feedback and it’s helped shift people’s minds and thinking around church and issues (Mandla Nyathi, Warehouse Staff Member, 05 December 2013). In Chapter 5 I presented interview excerpts from Warehouse participants which revealed the difficulty of taking a transformational approach to development. Nyathi himself mentioned how the unequal access to resources among churches in the city can affect a church leader’s ability to encourage transformation in their community. He spoke of how there are ‘a lot of walls that churches have to climb over to get to where they want to get’ (Mandla Nyathi, Warehouse Staff Member, 05 December 2013). It is an indication of how, in trying to address material need and begin to dismantle structures of poverty from the grassroots level, the same macro-level issues
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The Warehouse wishes to address are defying their efforts to help local churches on the road to transformation. It is easier for affluent, well-resourced churches (usually with largely white congregations and based in historically white suburbs) to change their material circumstances than it is for churches based in deprived areas of Cape Town. The early evidence of The Warehouse’s work therefore reveals the challenges the small organisation faces in trying to help churches effect social change. From Ganyiwa and Nyathi’s comments, however, it is apparent that The Warehouse always understood that their aspirations for material change would take a long time to realise, especially as they are also seeking to change individual and relational aspects of society. The Fusion staff demonstrated similar awareness of the challenges they would face in Manenberg. One of the staff members, Steve Davies, summed up the organisation’s attitude in his comment that ‘I think we need to be realistic to realise that we’re not going to save Manenberg, nor are we gonna try’ (Steve Davies, Fusion Staff Member, 27 November 2013). Along the same lines, the Manenberg church minister and Fusion associate, Victor Swanepoel, conceded the limits of what religious organisations can do to affect people’s material reality: The religious sector, we can’t, we can do a lot in terms of our teaching, our conscientisation, our programmes that we run with young people, getting into their minds, but that’s about all. We cannot create work. We can’t provide jobs. And we can’t eradicate the poverty. We can help alleviate the poverty but we can’t eradicate it (Victor Swanepoel, Fusion Associate, 12 December 2013). Swanepoel mentioned how, with police complicity in the Manenberg drug trade, the area’s dire economic situation was unlikely to change for the better, increasing the possibility that young people would get drawn into gangs. Exasperated, he asked rhetorically, ‘Where do you start, how do you deal with it?’ From the point of view of commentators such as Hovland (2003), who argue vehemently that any social action that does not confront macro-issues directly is likely to fail or even perpetuate injustices, The Warehouse and Fusion might seem compromised. However, there are early signs that The Warehouse and Fusion are putting their ideas of social change into practice and avoiding the trap Hovland describes, i.e. that discourses of change can be anodyne (for example, see Ganiel’s case study analysis, 2007, 2008) or harmful.
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For example, when Onke Koyo, a young, black South African man, joined The Warehouse staff in 2008, he was already involved in the community leadership within his neighbourhood – a small informal settlement – but lacked the confidence to confront corruption in the area. The Warehouse staff widely agreed that over the course of five years at The Warehouse, Koyo gained considerable self-belief through a process of individual transformation. Having left The Warehouse in 2013 to return to full-time work as a community development worker in his neighbourhood, he now regularly negotiates with the City of Cape Town, lobbying successfully for better sanitation and the installation of street lighting, amongst other things. Koyo explained his pro-active community participation by saying that ‘some of [The Warehouse’s] training is to know [that] to be a leader is not something you can go to get a education, you can be a leader as long as you know what you want, what is your goal’. Koyo’s story confirmed for many Warehouse staff members that individual transformation can lead black and other previously oppressed South Africans to celebrate an empowered identity and, consequently, to consider every person equal. By mid-2015 – about 18 months after I finished my research in Cape Town – Fusion had also shown its ability to impact their local community. Notably, the organisation established a coffee shop and bakery in Manenberg which The Warehouse, among other groups, has helped advertise. Ove the space of two years, the bakery, which also provides catering services, has helped create jobs with a small income for high-risk youth, as well as provide a safe space for professional training and life skills development within a supportive, relational environment. The local enterprise benefits from the expertise of one its staff members who worked for a number of years in the hospitality industry prior to joining Fusion. Conclusion Throughout this thesis I have explained how The Warehouse and Fusion try to empower their target groups and address the power imbalances that exist in South African society. In this chapter I have discussed how their work has traversed different strategic social spaces and concluded that they currently inhabit three of these spaces, namely intellectual, institutional, and market spaces. I suggest their position in different intellectual and institutional spaces takes the organisations beyond the postapartheid model of peacebuilding primarily associated with market spaces. It presents 229
different opportunities for and limitations to their role in the transformation process and the extent to which they can affect macro-level social issues. Ganiel’s (2016) work on extra-institutional religion, and her work with Marti (2014) on the Emerging Church Movement, is instructive in suggesting that religious organisations with these characteristics might be well-placed to conduct individual and relational transformation work within strategic institutional spaces. In terms of the ECM, Marti and Ganiel (2014: 161) state: Embracing more amorphous social concerns that cannot be captured in programmed ministry initiatives and deeply associating with others outside their congregations are important for Emerging Christians. These activities and concerns provide multiple, necessary opportunities for experimenting and implementing a newly individuated religious self. As I have mentioned earlier in this chapter, Fusion, with its emphasis on being the church rather than going to church and its frustration with the Manenberg churches’ strategies of trying to incorporate high-risk youth into existing church structures, most resembles the ECM. The organisation’s individualised character allows it to occupy gaps in institutional spaces of civil society that other religious organisations would not consider filling. It is no coincidence that Fusion’s own marginal position in institutional spaces mirrors the way it works to build a family-community with members of one of the most marginalised groups of young people in society. Its individualised approach to religion allows it to respond to social problems that institutions of state, religion, and even family seem either to misunderstand or shun completely. We see that Fusion participants’ understanding of transformation as individual, highly relational, and materially oriented in the local community to which they have committed themselves is tied to their belief that this approach is ‘more fitting, more substantive, and more satisfying to whatever must be “true” to a genuine representation of Christianity’ (Marti and Ganiel, 2014: 161). The Warehouse, with the characteristics it bears of extra-institutional religion, similarly fills a niche in strategic institutional spaces. It exhibits a degree of individualisation in the way it encourages its staff and the church leaders with whom it interacts to adopt a lifestyle approach to transformation. This is an individualised approach to bringing about social change, in which ‘individuals feel both responsible for and empowered in dealing with social problems’ (Haenfler, Johnson, and Jones,
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2012: 15). This approach is nevertheless tempered by its enduring connection to the traditional institution of the church. The Warehouse and Fusion’s practice of living out the changes they wish to see in society shows characteristics of prefigurative politics, which Haenfler, Johnson, and Jones (2012: 4) describe as ‘activists’ attempts to create on a small scale the type of world they envision’. The authors also observe that such practices can ‘provide the cultural foundations for broader social change’. I argue that The Warehouse’s transformational practices in institutional spaces of civil society could have a cascading effect on its multi-denominational network of churches. Bearing in mind South Africans’ high trust in religious institutions compared to political ones, The Warehouse is in a strong position to make cultural and symbolic gains to promote transformation in South Africa. In light of the evidence from this study, the cases of Fusion and The Warehouse seem to substantiate Beck’s claims of a new social order in which traditional institutions lose their significance and individuals are forced to fend for themselves. However, I have argued that the case studies in this research show only partial individualisation. The basis for this claim is that participants at both The Warehouse and Fusion continue to experience the effects of social institutions or social categories that structure South African society. Issues of race and class, which intersect with one another in postapartheid South Africa, dominated Warehouse participants’ understandings of transformation and their experience of life. Indeed The Warehouse designed its transformational practices to address poverty, inequality, and division in Cape Town, seeing the institutional church as the starting point for social change. Debates over whether Beck is correct to state that class has lost its sociological significance have dominated discussions on the real applicability of the individualisation thesis. Mythen (2005), Atkinson (2007), and Curran (2013) all argue that class has become more, not less, important as a sociological category in reflexive modernity. Exasperatingly for this study, and for others which similarly use empirical research to engage with the individualisation thesis (for example, de Beer, 2007; Achterberg, 2013; Botterill, 2014; Bak and Larsen, 2015), Beck (2007: 681) simply maintains that individualisation cannot be proved or repudiated by considering individuals’ preferences or decisions, as ‘individualisation really is imposed on the individual by modern institutions’. Perhaps the best attitude to adopt in the face of such an assertion is the one Bak and Larsen (2015: 18) take when they state that they wish to examine ‘the explanatory power’ of several theories of poverty, one of which was Beck’s individualisation thesis. 231
This approach sits well with the overarching methodology of the reflexive science model, which states that observed micro-processes can be used to extend theory. In the case of this thesis, the religious peacebuilding practices of The Warehouse and Fusion revealed that the transformation efforts of the organisations to address entrenched poverty and inequality were constrained by issues of race and class that have their roots in the structures of colonialism and apartheid. Thus, they exhibited elements of individualisation but their religious peacebuilding work was also limited by the social forces associated with class. South Africa’s economically stratified society is characterised by a resource-rich middle class, a resource-poor working class, and a severely deprived, unemployed segment of the population. Seekings (2008: 7) refers to this as ‘the almost entirely African [black] poor, the mostly African working class, and the multi-racial middle classes and elites’. Though he observes that black, coloured, and Indian South Africans enjoy more and better economic opportunities than they did under apartheid and asserts that race is no longer directly related to class, he nonetheless describes a society in which race overwhelmingly structures society: South Africans continue to see themselves in the racial categories of the apartheid era, in part because these categories have become the basis for post-apartheid ‘redress’, in part because they retain cultural meaning in everyday life. South Africans continue to inhabit social worlds that are largely defined by race, and many express negative views of other racial groups (Seekings, 2008: 1). This thesis has highlighted how The Warehouse in particular reacted against the ever-present and defining issue of race. Their individualised attitude towards transformation in the country, though reminiscent of the individualised society Beck envisages, was constantly frustrated by the assorted effects of race, most notably the social power that accompanies whiteness and access to resources. Fusion, with its emphasis on incorporating itself into Manenberg, itself a legacy area of apartheid whose population is predominantly coloured, responded to the racialised dynamics of gang life in Cape Town, associated as they are with deprived areas of the city with large black and coloured populations. Seekings, in the above quote, describes the ever-presence of race in South African life. The lifestyle politics of The Warehouse and Fusion epitomised the sociologist’s words. In the following chapter, which is the conclusion to this thesis, I elaborate on how the case study organisations’ alternative model of transformation adds to the body 232
of religious peacebuilding literature that focuses on locally inspired peace initiatives. By using Brewer, Higgins, and Teeney’s conceptual framework of strategic social spaces, this thesis has not only been able to describe in detail the case studies’ distinctive understandings of transformation but has also evaluated its justice potential by discussing its strategic place in civil society. That is, it has responded to calls from within the religious peacebuilding field for studies to critically assess whether initiatives might unintentionally perpetuate structural or cultural problems in already fragile post-conflict environments. The conclusion also comments on how The Warehouse and Fusion’s partially individualised transformation work contributes to our understanding of the state and nature of religious peacebuilding in South Africa. It contextualises this within, and critiques, Beck and Beck-Gernsheim’s (2002) argument that society in late modernity is experiencing an inevitable individualisation process wrought by the disintegration of social institutions of class, family, and religion.
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Conclusion Summary of Findings and Theoretical Implications for the Field of Religious Peacebuilding Introduction This thesis has examined the relationship between religious peacebuilding and postconflict transformation to answer the principal question of how, if at all, religious actors are meeting local needs in post-apartheid South Africa with an eye to establishing lasting peace in the country. Methodologically, the study used Michael Burawoy’s extended case method, combining semi-structured interviews with participant observation to gather data at two case study organisations in Cape Town. This thesis has compared how people and organisations working in disparate parts of the city understand and perform transformation differently and in ways they feel are appropriate to their target groups. Its main argument is that the two case study organisations show features of religious individualisation in the way they situate the individual as a site of transformation, although this individualisation is still constrained by social structures that include race and class. Because of these social structural constraints, this thesis uses the term ‘partial individualisation’ to describe the organisations’ character, and furthermore argues that The Warehouse is an example of extra-institutional religion, rather than full religious individualisation, due to its continued ties to a large church network. Ultimately, The Warehouse and Fusion’s partial individualisation allows them to pursue peacebuilding in marginal strategic social spaces which many other Christian organisations would not be able to fill. This chapter includes four sections and is structured in the following way: 1) A summary of the study’s findings; 2) Theoretical implications for religious peacebuilding in South Africa and the field of religious peacebuilding generally; 3) Policy recommendations for the case study organisations; and 4) Limitations of the study and suggestions for further research. I end with concluding remarks to the thesis.
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Summary of Findings: The Relationship between Religious Peacebuilding and Transformation in South Africa Considering the substantially theological character of existing literature on religion and transformation in post-apartheid South Africa (Erasmus, 2005; Kareithi, Rogers, Bowers, and Herman, 2006; Bowers du Toit, 2012), this thesis is distinctive for its sociological approach. It links the micro-processes of transformation to the macro-level issues associated with social structural change in the country. Exemplifying this macromicro analytical process, I first outlined how the case study participants understand the contentious idea of transformation in post-apartheid South Africa. I summarise these findings in the first subsection. The second subsection summarises how the case study organisations put their ideas into practice, while the third gives an overview of whether their activities are viable as a solution to some of the country’s most pressing social problems.
Christian understandings of transformation in South Africa A central finding in this thesis is that the case study organisations conceptualise transformation differently to how the South African government employs the idea. Thematic analysis of participants’ comments shows that they identified three elements of transformation: 1) material transformation (social development and structural change of institutions); 2) individual transformation (the process of realising one’s ‘God-given’ identity, which results in the recognition of one’s power to respond to material needs and injustices in Cape Town); and 3) relational transformation (relationship building across the racial and class divides in Cape Town, resulting in ‘interdependence’). According to participants, there is also a spiritual basis to the three elements of transformation. At the heart of The Warehouse’s transformational development model is the notion that churches and not external development agencies should direct local development initiatives. Consequently, The Warehouse hoped to empower church leaders by training them on transformational development principles. This involved more than transferring particular skills, though, as the Wetton-based organisation believed that one of the reasons black church leaders tended to rely on external help was that they were still trapped in a mindset of powerlessness resulting from the oppressive
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politics of the past. Warehouse staff participants suggested that a process of finding one’s ‘authentic’ identity through a relationship with God would lead to self-recognition and self-determination. The Warehouse believed that this process of empowerment, on the one hand, should be accompanied by a relinquishing of power on the other: The staff suggested that in realising ‘that all they have is God’, white people and white churches should take action to surrender their privilege in development work. The individual transformation envisioned by The Warehouse relates to what they see as the continuing salience of race and racial dynamics of power in South Africa. Staff members suggested that The Warehouse’s location in the semi-industrial, lower-middle class neighbourhood of Wetton provided a central and neutral space for the organisation to conduct its facilitative work with a wide range of people and organisations in Cape Town. Its middle-ground status means its ambitions for transformation range from the local to the national. In contrast, Fusion has more localised aspirations in encouraging individual transformation. Embedded in Manenberg, Fusion staff members committed themselves to helping young people live differently in their home community. Like The Warehouse, Fusion maintained that forming a relationship with God enables a person to understand their ‘authentic’ identity. Participants described this process of self-recognition as a realisation of one’s potential and purpose in life, according to how, as one participant put it, ‘God’s created you to be’. In the Manenberg context, the Fusion staff explained that self-realisation would lead to action in the community, especially by advocating different values and living these out. In addition to material and individual transformation, staff members at The Warehouse and Fusion described how relational transformation was necessary for lasting social change in South Africa. The Warehouse’s transformational development strategy underlined the fundamental importance of equal and respectful relationships between people for the health and prosperity of society. Extending this to development work, the Wetton organisation emphasised the importance of ‘interdependence’, a twoway process in which parties give what resources they have – material, cultural or symbolic – and receive something in return. This is not purely transactional but is more importantly the recognition between parties that their lives and wellbeing are interconnected. From Fusion participants’ comments, it was evident that they viewed their strategy as more radically relational than the one held by The Warehouse. Whereas the Wetton236
based organisation proposed interdependence as a way of bridging divides in Cape Town, Fusion staff members described themselves as a family. They considered their goal to be building and modelling an alternative, family community within Manenberg and often spoke of each other as ‘brother’ and ‘sister’ rather than as friends or colleagues. Fusion participants acknowledged the importance of eventually promoting integration and interaction across divides in the city, but their immediate focus was on developing long-term relationships of trust with young people who were often estranged from their immediate family. As much as the two organisations believed that the transformational development model (The Warehouse) and neo-monastic principles of embedding oneself in a community (Fusion) provide the best possibility for transformation, they did recognise the challenges involved in pursuing these strategies. The Warehouse’s efforts to empower churches to take the initiative in addressing injustices in their area met with the resilience of the very structures of poverty and inequality it wishes to dismantle. Fusion faced a separate set of challenges linked to its understanding of transformation and strategy of establishing itself deeply in the Manenberg community. Most noticeably, the organisation’s insistence that transformation should occur in and through local residents could constrain it from accessing much-needed funding and appropriate resources to respond to the needs of high-risk youth. Even though they were aware of this, they asserted that a bottom-up development programme based on building a familycommunity was the only way to overcome the issues prevalent in the area.
Material, individual, and relational transformational practices: The case studies of The Warehouse and Fusion The first aspect of The Warehouse’s current strategy involves visiting church leaders in the Greater Cape Town area. Staff members encourage and provide guidance for church leaders to take action where social change is needed but not forthcoming. According to Warehouse participants, their work with individual church leaders is relational in that they try to form equal relationships in which each side contributes to the development discussion. This encompasses the relational transformation aspect of their work. They believed that the invaluable process of building relationships and encouraging changes in attitude and mindset among church leaders (individual transformation) would lead to
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material change in society (material transformation), although they stated that the process would be lengthy. ‘Transformational encounters’, encompassing training, discussion forms, and volunteer events, is the second feature of The Warehouse’s strategy. Participant observation data from the training event I attended showed that staff members dedicated a large portion of the day to raising consciousness in church leaders of their ability to initiate development in their communities. This focus on changing psychological and spiritual attitudes among participants, rather than simply transferring development skills, revealed The Warehouse’s focus on inspiring individual transformation. In contrast, The Warehouse’s regular Unity in the Church discussion forums explicitly encouraged relational transformation along with individual transformation. The participant observation data presented in Chapter 6 showed that The Warehouse successfully created a space at their Wetton office for church leaders to raise their needs and discuss their grievances with members of different racial groups. In trying to move participants towards discussing the notion of interdependence, The Warehouse confronted the sensitive and challenging transformation imperative in South Africa of, in Achille Mbembe’s (2008: 7) words, ‘overcoming whiteness and blackness’. Interdependence encapsulated The Warehouse’s relational transformation goal of encouraging the conscious creation of equal relationships across race and class divides. The Warehouse’s strategy to encourage material, individual, and relational transformation in Cape Town is highly structured. In trying to model a transformed South African society, The Warehouse staff emphasised self-awareness and commented that they continually evaluate their actions by reflecting on how they might be perpetuating racial power dynamics or creating other race-related divisions. The individual transformation process of self-realisation accompanied the organisation’s emphasis on staff members becoming interdependent on one another, fulfilling the relational transformation changes they espouse. Just as The Warehouse faced challenges in conducting their training events and discussion forums, so they acknowledged that their efforts to model a small version of a transformed South Africa often falter. One staff member assessed the situation, saying The Warehouse is ‘a machine that’s being built as we go’ (Barbara Anderson, Warehouse Staff Member, 25 November 2013). Fusion’s organisational character differed from that of The Warehouse in part because its environment was not conducive to systematically managing every aspect of its strategy – it could not be anything like a machine. Fusion deliberately targeted high238
risk youth and encouraged individual transformation in their target group, hoping that young people would realise their potential to change their neighbourhood by forming a relationship with God. Whereas The Warehouse used planned events as the starting point for their transformation work, one Fusion participant stated from experience that forming relationships in Manenberg is more likely to succeed by simply being present and available in the community. This was the basis for Fusion’s highly relational approach to conducting its work, epitomised by the organisation’s regular prayer walks in the area. The participant observation notes from my attendance at one of the prayer walks demonstrate that the Fusion staff members seem to be well-known in Manenberg. Some of the team have always been resident in the area; others have moved into Manenberg with the purpose of insinuating themselves into the life of the area and the people who live there. Conversations between Fusion team members and the people they met often showed familiarity with issues people had recently faced and revealed a desire among the staff members to be a part of people’s lives. In contrast to The Warehouse’s focus on confronting race in relationships as a facet of transformation, Fusion has taken a deliberate approach to forming a familycommunity in Manenberg. In a similar fashion to The Warehouse, Fusion staff emphasised the ‘hard work’ involved in forming a multi-racial community. However, whereas The Warehouse saw its internal tensions as emblematic of South African society at large, Fusion approached their organisational challenges to forming a familycommunity within the context of Manenberg’s particular trials, including the estrangement of many high-risk youth from their families. The small organisation actively pursued a project of building ‘a family of families’ within Manenberg, but outside of the inflexible structures of the local church. They tried to model a different way of living based on the Christian value of unconditional love, which they believed challenged the loyalty-based brotherhood of gang life.
Understanding transformation work through the lens of religious peacebuilding theory Chapter 7 made a conceptual link between the case study organisations’ strategies and conflict transformation’s emphasis on active peacebuilding that builds a positive (and lasting) peace. Brewer, Higgins, and Teeney (2011) state that active peacebuilding involves putting ideas of peace into practice, establishing norms in the process. In the
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cases of The Warehouse and Fusion, this living out of peace entails more than occasional action: it is a way of life. The Warehouse’s emphasis on modelling in one’s own life the changes that need to occur in wider society is a lifestyle approach to social change and peace production. Similarly, Fusion insisted that its staff members should live out the basic values of Christianity in their personal lives and as a family-community with highrisk youth. For both The Warehouse and Fusion, the individual is a site of practice – the starting point in an agenda for social change. In promoting a lifestyle-based transformational model, The Warehouse reimagined religion’s role in relief and development in post-apartheid South Africa. Alongside market spaces, the Wetton organisation and Manenberg-based Fusion began to occupy intellectual spaces of civil society, as the two organisations advocated living out transformational ideals in one’s spiritual life and in one’s relationships with others. This action-oriented aspect of the organisations’ work ensured that they did not confine themselves to intellectual spaces. Indeed, the intentionality shown by The Warehouse and Fusion led them to occupy a third strategic social space, namely institutional spaces. Brewer, Higgins, and Teeney (2011: 133) argue that the strength of institutional spaces in responding to post-conflict situations is that organisations can become ‘role models and drivers of the process of transformation’. The Warehouse and Fusion did just this as they conducted training events, discussion forums, took to the streets of Manenberg for regular prayer walks, and tried to model alternative communities within Cape Town. One of the main challenges facing The Warehouse and Fusion is the issue of how, or even whether, the micro-processes of the organisations’ transformational practices can influence the macro-level structures that continue to produce poverty and inequality in the country. Warehouse participants insisted that their transformational development model has the potential to encourage macro-changes but remarked that due to the bottom-up, relational nature of their work, this change would be gradual. For its part, Fusion acknowledged that it was unlikely to have an immediate effect on the presence of gangs in the community; one of its associates in the area, a local minister, stated frankly that religious groups could not single-handedly provide jobs or repeal poverty in the area. He did, however, note that the religious sector ‘can do a lot in terms of our teaching, our conscientisation, … getting into [young people’s] minds’ (Victor Swanepoel, Fusion Associate, 12 December 2013). This was one of the foundations of Fusion’s work, as the staff members tried to build relationships with high-risk youth in order to help them change their mindset of powerlessness in the midst of gang wars and 240
the absence of any sustained government initiatives. The Fusion staff argued that a long process of transformation would enable young people in Manenberg to choose a different life to gang life and commit to reshaping Manenberg in line with the Christian values and ideals that Fusion has embraced. Ultimately, it is The Warehouse and Fusion’s actions as religious organisations within strategically significant social spaces – mainly intellectual and institutional – that gives them the potential to realise their goals of individual, relational, and material change. Ganiel’s (2016) work on extra-institutional religion, as well as her work with Marti on the Emerging Church Movement (Marti and Ganiel, 2014), is instructive in suggesting that religious organisations with individualised characteristics might be well placed to conduct individual and relational transformation work outside of mainstream institutional spaces. On the back of Ganiel’s (2016) work, this thesis has argued that The Warehouse’s transformational practices in extra-institutional spaces of civil society could influence its wider network of churches within Cape Town and the country at large. Fusion, meanwhile, with its emphasis on being the church rather than going to church and its frustration with the church in Manenberg, displays anti-institutional characteristics that might help it to respond to social problems that the institutions of state, religion, and even family seem either to misunderstand or shun completely. Theoretical Implications of the Research Michael Burawoy’s reflexive science model describes a theoretically driven research process that uses empirical findings from case studies to feed back into and elaborate on existing theory. This dissertation is rooted in religious peacebuilding literature and therefore has theoretical and policy implications applicable to religious peacebuilding researchers and practitioners in South Africa and further afield. In this section I first present the contributions this study makes to the religious peacebuilding field in South Africa; secondly, I discuss how the research has responded to scholars’ calls for theoretical and conceptual improvement in the religious peacebuilding field generally. I end with policy recommendations for the two case study organisations and also present the limitations of this thesis and possibilities for future research.
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Contributions to the field of South African religious peacebuilding This thesis has responded to the gap in the religious peacebuilding literature that examines religious actors’ role in promoting transformation in South Africa. At a time when the country’s political landscape is changing, religious groups are revitalising their role in the public sphere, for example by calling for citizens to march together with the Unite Against Corruption alliance to demand higher standards from the country’s leaders (Nicolson, 2015; Petersen, 2015). These sorts of calls to action have characterised religious leaders’ public interjections in recent years, as church-state relations have become less collegiate in the face of extensive dissatisfaction with the Zuma regime (Bompani, 2013). This thesis has described religion’s current, more combative stance toward the state as feeding into a ‘post post-apartheid’ model of religious peacebuilding in South Africa. In contrast to years of ‘alignment and co-optation’ (Bompani, 2013: 135), there is now a critical distance between parts of the religious establishment and the post-apartheid state. This has enabled religious groups and leaders to contribute to the national debate over corruption in government and the dire need for transformation in society and the economy. Whereas some parts of the religious sector have chosen to advocate for social and political change through public interventions, this research has focused on two case study organisations which are confronting the stalled national transformation project by developing their own models of transformation. At a time of widespread disillusionment with the ANC government and with the public perception that ‘systematic corruption, sporadic corruption, political corruption, grand corruption, petty corruption and legal and moral corruption’ (Thamm, 2015) is hampering state action, The Warehouse and Fusion have proffered alternative modes of transformation. This study traced the meaning of transformation across different parts of Cape Town, revealing how different people and organisations working with the same concept initiated transformational practices that suited their specific circumstances. The three elements of material, individual, and relational transformation were prominent in both case study organisations, but how these were put into practice differed for The Warehouse, based in Wetton, and for Fusion, located in Manenberg. By using Sampson’s well-known typology of religious peacebuilding activities, I presented examples of different types of Christian peacebuilding initiatives in the apartheid and post-apartheid periods. This has not been done before and allowed me
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to compare peacebuilding trends in the country over time, situating the work of The Warehouse and Fusion within them. I classified The Warehouse and Fusion’s work as primarily related to education and formation and relief and development religious peacebuilding. I also argued that their activities could best be analysed using Brewer, Higgins, and Teeney’s (2011) framework of analysis for religious peacebuilding activities. This thesis proposed that the organisations are responding to poverty, inequality, and division by occupying market, intellectual, and institutional social spaces in society. By drawing on Brewer, Higgins, and Teeney’s conceptual framework, I was able to explain how the organisations are conducting their work in relation to broader relations between religious institutions and the state. Moving away from the market spaces associated with relief and development work allowed The Warehouse to establish some distance between itself and the provincial government in the Western Cape. In part, this enabled the organisation to reimagine religion’s role in relief and development in post-apartheid South Africa and also to begin putting these alternative ideas into practice. After leaving The Warehouse in 2012, Fusion was able to implement its own ideas in Manenberg, occupying a strategic institutional space on the margins of the social landscape. This dissertation has proposed that it is useful to view The Warehouse and Fusion as examples of extra-institutional religion, particularly as it allows us to conceptualise how it acts within strategic social spaces to conduct its religious peacebuilding work. The Warehouse maintains its ties to the church as a means of realising transformation in the country, meaning that it is not entirely de-institutionalised. Fusion, with its neomonastic strategy and highly individualised idea of how to do church, bears a closer resemblance to the ECM and individualised religion. However it, along with its former parent organisation The Warehouse, recognises the limitations it has to effect change in society, given that it is constantly confronted by the social effects associated with institutions such as class and race. With their individualised, lifestyle approaches to transformation and religious peacebuilding in Cape Town, The Warehouse and Fusion operate at a distance from, but not free of, social structural institutions of race and class. Both the case studies promoted a way-of-life response to the issues of poverty, inequality, and racial tensions that continue to confront South Africans. By examining the strategic social spaces occupied by the case studies, this research concluded that the FBOs’ religiously inspired 243
transformation activities have the ability to challenge cultural and symbolic structures of power. Considering South Africa’s still-racialised society and the issues of power that attend race relations, I argue that The Warehouse and Fusion have a valuable contribution to make to cultural transformation in South Africa, which is a facet of the national transformation project that has received little attention from Christian organisations in the post-apartheid period, at least in terms of its representation in the literature. Contributions to wider religious peacebuilding theory This thesis has taken seriously the assertions made by some scholars that there is a need for theoretical and conceptual improvement in the religious peacebuilding field (see Brewer, Higgins, and Teeney, 2010; Hertog, 2010; Omer, 2012). Brewer, Higgins, and Teeney (2010: 1021), for example, argue that religion is often treated as the ‘independent variable’, whereby it is celebrated as the determining factor of success and not examined for how the social and political environment mediates it. The consequence for this study was that it had to provide more than an outline of the social utility of religious organisations doing work based on principles of transformation – it had to inquire into how participants working at and with the case study organisations understood transformation and acted upon this in their professional and private lives. The main finding from the analysis of interview and observation data was that participants from the case study FBOs and their associates hold a unique understanding of transformation in South Africa. Their spiritually grounded, tripartite model of transformation, which included material, individual, and relational transformation, differed from the strictly material, policy-oriented version of transformation which has been pursued by the ANC government. In her study of grassroots peacebuilding in Colombia, Sandra Rios Oyola (2014: 249) describes how a local Catholic church at the site of a massacre initiated ‘alternative paths toward peacebuilding’. This study provides an example of alternative models of transformation, which in turn contribute to the transformation process in South Africa. Similarly, where Rios Oyola (2015: 178) states that ‘measures of transitional justice implemented from above clash against the interests and needs of victims at the grassroots’, participants in this research asserted that the model of transformation pursued by the state is not sufficient for lasting social and economic change to occur. Participants argued that top-down development initiatives 244
can inadvertently disadvantage communities unless they are empowered to take control of their circumstances. The Warehouse, which promoted the principles of transformational development, a model associated with the Christian organisation World Vision International, emphasised the need for individual empowerment through conscientisation. They also proposed that local churches rather than outside agencies should control development initiatives in their communities, although this does not preclude interaction with others. The organisation identified the racial power structures in society as a primary barrier to social change and suggested that interdependence, a two-way process of giving and taking resources, would help lead to material transformation as well as building respectful relationships across divides in the city. Rios Oyola (2015: passim) frames her case study of a small Colombian church’s peacebuilding strategy as ‘emancipatory peacebuilding’. She, along with authors such as Richmond (2007) and Thiessen (2011), sees emancipatory peacebuilding as a model that prioritises the needs of local communities affected by conflict and provides space for local actors to become involved in the planning process of post-conflict activities. This, the authors claim, contrasts with the top-down initiatives associated with liberal models of peacebuilding that focus on the establishment of institutions of governance and law. Contributing to this theoretical line of enquiry, the case studies in this thesis reveal the positive potential that transformation as a form of bottom-up peacebuilding has within local, marginalised areas of Cape Town. In the case of South Africa, the majority of work on how religion can or should contribute to transformation in the country has largely been confined to theological inquiries. This study is therefore valuable as a sociological contribution to the topic. In his book Peace Processes: A Sociological Approach, Brewer (2010) argues for the value of sociology in understanding peace processes and what is needed to make these successful. He notes that whereas sociology has contributed substantially to war studies, aside from the limited collection of research he lists (for reconciliation, see Lederach, 1997; for conflict resolution techniques, see Brown Childs, 2003; for transitional justice, see Elster, 2004), the sociology of peace has been neglected. With its focus on social structures, structural divisions, and the light it can shed on interpersonal and inter-group interactions, sociology has the particular potential to provide a ‘holistic account of peace processes’ (Brewer, 2010: 207). Just as with the larger field of peace studies, the contribution of sociology to religious peacebuilding has been minimal, overshadowed by international relations, political science, theology, and even anthropology. As an 245
indication of this trend, the recently published Oxford Handbook of Religion, Conflict, and Peacebuilding (2015) contains chapters from 26 contributors, only two of whom have a background in sociology. Theology and religious studies scholars (10) dominate the contributions, while the handbook contains chapters from seven scholars engaged in international affairs, with the remainder constituted by anthropologists (3) and interdisciplinary scholars (4). As Brewer (2010) notes, sociology does not necessarily offer more than other disciplines to understanding the nature of peace processes. It does, however, offer particular views on peace processes, naturally focusing more on the social aspects than the political. As a sociological piece of work, this thesis has moved beyond describing the theological basis for transformation as religiously inspired development work (for example see Bowers, 2005; Swart, 2008). It has focused on how the case studies’ understanding and practice of transformation interact with social structures in South Africa. Moreover, the analysis in this thesis feeds into an issue of wider sociological importance, namely the question of ‘institutionalised individualism’ (Parsons, 1978: 321), which Beck (1992, 2009, 2010, 2013) elaborated on with his idea of ‘individualisation’. I referred to Beck’s individualisation thesis in Chapter 1 and the discussion of findings in Chapter 7, specifically in relation to religious individualisation and the characteristics displayed by the case studies. I have contended that the case studies showed elements of the individualisation of religion. Fusion’s ‘do-it-yourself’ (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 2002: 3) style of being church rather than going to church was particularly striking in this regard. However, this analysis of the case studies was not straightforward, as their actions were constantly constrained by structural challenges associated with race and class, the latter a social category that Beck and Beck-Gernsheim (2002) contend has lost significance in reflexive modernity. The analysis from this thesis suggests that to the extent that we can diagnose individualisation as a character of modern South African life, this individualisation is only partial, especially considering how the social categories of race and class presented considerable challenges to the case study organisations’ work. Despite what seems to be the limited applicability of the individualisation thesis in the South African context, as a heuristic, using the idea of partial individualisation is useful as it facilitates comparison between the case studies of The Warehouse and Fusion with Ganiel’s work on extra-institutional religion (2016). Ganiel explicitly enters into a dialogue with Beck’s individualisation thesis and investigates its relation to religion in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. In 246
that this thesis has employed Ganiel’s recently developed theory in the South African context, it has been able to establish its applicability outside of Ireland and add to the conceptual basis of the religious peacebuilding discipline in the process. Policy Recommendations for The Warehouse and Fusion Sociology and the social sciences in general cannot, and should not, be self-referential, focused only on theory production with little concern for its practical application (Burawoy, 2011; Brewer, 2013; Brewer, 2014). In this spirit of ‘the public value of the social sciences’ (Brewer, 2013: passim), I draw on my conclusions from this research to present policy recommendations for The Warehouse and Fusion, starting with the possibilities that extra-institutional religion provides for doing religiously inspired transformation work. Ganiel (2016) notes in her work on extra-institutional religion that this type of partially individualised religion allows people to conceive of and pursue less traditional spiritual ideas and practices. In earlier comparative studies of congregations in Harare, Zimbabwe and the Ikon community in Belfast, Northern Ireland, Ganiel (2010: passim) describes how religious organisations can contribute to peacebuilding by creating ‘havens’. She describes these as ‘safe spaces’ (Ganiel, 2010: 116) within religious institutions that allow people to draw on spiritual resources to reimagine a conflict environment. She reprises this idea of ‘safe spaces’ in suggesting that extra-institutional religion can fill gaps in strategic institutional spaces of society to perform peacebuilding practices that are not suited to traditional religious or secular organisations. As this thesis has shown in detail, The Warehouse and Fusion have deliberately created spaces for relationship building that are designed to suit their strategies: the neutral halls of The Warehouse, based in the middle-ground neighbourhood of Wetton; the familycommunity of Fusion, embedded in Manenberg. Ganiel (2016) nevertheless warns that the possibilities for extra-institutional religion to affect wider society can be constrained if organisations dwell in their spaces of safety. Considering The Warehouse works with a large network of churches and religious organisations, including local interfaith initiatives and international pressure groups, it is unlikely to become isolated. It is also becoming increasingly well-known in Cape Town’s religious and political spheres, partly due to its role in coordinating the churches’ response to xenophobic attacks in 2008 and its activities in organising churches’ 247
emergency relief efforts in the city. Despite these bulwarks against isolation, there are nevertheless opportunities for The Warehouse to broaden its impact without undermining the transformational development model it has implemented. For example, during my fieldwork period, the government invited The Warehouse, along with several other religious organisations, to a workshop to discuss the role of religion in realising the goals of the National Development Plan (NDP). The NDP’s stated aim is to reduce poverty and inequality by 2030. Even if The Warehouse declined to work with government, preferring its independence instead, the organisation could take the opportunity to engage more directly with the state and its development plans. The Warehouse’s individualised approach to transformation already engages with sources of cultural and symbolic power; engaging with policies such as the NDP shows how The Warehouse might engage with political sources of power. Indeed, one Warehouse participant mentioned that the staff had already held an internal workshop on the NDP but had not incorporated any of the material into its regular training events. Taking this next step would help to repudiate critics’ (for example, see Maniates, 2001; Hovland, 2003; Szasz, 2007) claims that individualised, lifestyle-based social action does not engage with important social and political institutions. Fusion runs more of a risk of isolating itself, as its neo-monastic, highly relational strategy has embedded it in a marginalised community. Consequently, it does not have the same access to resources that The Warehouse enjoys. Moreover, its emphasis on building long-term relationships with donors could constrain its local activities. Even if the organisation does not aspire to affect city- or country-wide social change (as The Warehouse does), it must nevertheless expect to interact with people and organisations outside of Manenberg for its transformational strategy to be successful. It therefore needs to find a way to reconcile its relational ideals with pragmatic issues of funding and access to resources, including the professional resources of trauma counsellors. This may involve some compromise on their relational strategy, difficult as this may be. Bearing in mind the importance of the transformation project in South Africa and the widespread disillusionment in the country that exists surrounding its implementation, this dissertation purposefully dedicated a chapter (Chapter 5) to evaluating the transformation work of two case studies. The chapter noted that The Warehouse was not yet able to provide examples of tangible, material effects of the transformational development model. The Warehouse was also unable to provide an example of interdependence between churches working on a development project. The holistic 248
nature of transformational development – individual, relational, as well as material – suggests it is reasonable to expect that this project will take time to reach fruition. The Warehouse was also in its early stages of implementing its new model of development when fieldwork was carried out, suggesting it was too early to detect material changes in churches with whom The Warehouse interacted. The second policy recommendation, therefore, is that The Warehouse leadership should authorise an external review that evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of its facilitative development strategy. I hesitate to suggest an exact date by which this should be done, although early feedback would be useful to allow the organisation to refine its model and transformational practices. Since The Warehouse is no stranger to external reviews, it is unlikely that there would be any organisational resistance to such an undertaking. Considering its antipathy to outcomes-based development strategies, Fusion might show some resistance to a similar suggestion that they conduct a review of their activities. The staff might also consider that their intimate strategy of building relationships with young people allows them to monitor their progress on a continual basis. However, having become independent from The Warehouse in 2013 and having subsequently expanded its operations in Manenberg to include a refuge house and coffee shop that employs high-risk young people, Fusion would undoubtedly benefit from an external review of its activities. Limitations of the Thesis and Suggestions for Further Research This thesis has highlighted the continued economic, social, and cultural significance of race in South Africa. My identity as a white, male researcher undoubtedly impinged on the research process, as the privilege associated with whiteness inevitably compounds the power the researcher has relative to research participants. I was also forced to conduct interviews in English as I am not fluent in Afrikaans or Xhosa, though these may have been the first languages of many participants. It is difficult to pinpoint exactly what effect my identity as a white man had on this research. However, an advantage of conducting participant observation prior to interviewing participants was that I was able to cultivate a degree of familiarity with staff members at The Warehouse and Fusion. This did not eliminate the power relations at play, but did encourage less hierarchical interactions. A second factor that helped me to build trust with participants, including case study staff members as well as people who interacted with the organisations, was that I entered the field with the approval of 249
gatekeepers at The Warehouse and Fusion. While it was more difficult to mitigate the challenges of conducting interviews in some participants’ second language, all participants were able to understand and answer the interview questions. Any future research into the work done by The Warehouse with its network of churches across the city would nevertheless benefit from a research team fluent in Afrikaans, Xhosa, and English. Another limitation of this study is that its qualitative, case study approach constrained the conclusions I was able to draw from the research. Having adopted Michael Burawoy’s extended case method, I used the data I gathered at The Warehouse and Fusion to improve the theoretical and conceptual basis of the religious peacebuilding field. I also used evidence from the case study research to critique the explanatory power of Beck and Beck-Gernsheim’s individualisation thesis in the South African context. This scaling-up from empirical observation to theory expansion, valuable as it was, was nevertheless a ‘snapshot’ of the transformational practices of two small FBOs. The findings and theoretical implications could be refined by further research that evaluates the long-term effects of The Warehouse and Fusion’s approach to transformation as a mode of religious peacebuilding, focusing both on the case studies as well as the network of churches with which it interacts. Ideally, any further research would be combined with empirical studies of the transformation work of Christian networks and churches in other parts of South Africa to gain a better national understanding of current Christian religious peacebuilding in South Africa. This study’s conclusion that The Warehouse and Fusion represent examples of ‘partial’ individualisation or extra-institutional religion suggests that further research should also explore this phenomenon in South Africa. This is especially the case since the study of the Emerging Church Movement, the individualisation of religion, and extra-institutional religion has largely been confined to North America, the United Kingdom, and the Republic of Ireland. Concluding Remarks This qualitative, comparative study focused on two Cape Town-based Christian development organisations, The Warehouse and Fusion, both of which use the idea of transformation as a guiding principle for their work. Using participant observation and semi-structured interviews, the thesis examined how staff members understood the idea 250
of transformation and also considered how they translated these understandings into practice. I termed these activities ‘transformational practices’ to emphasise how the organisations implemented their development strategies with the intention to create a set of social norms by which churches should respond to the issues of poverty, inequality, and division in Cape Town. Notably, this study found that research participants at the case study organisations defined transformation differently to the state, namely in terms of three elements: material transformation, individual transformation, and relational transformation. Participants described how each of these aspects needed to occur together in order for lasting social change to occur. They also emphasised that a spiritual reality undergirded material, individual, and relational transformation. This spiritual dimension further distinguished the organisations’ work from development initiatives that did not take this ‘unseen’ realm into account. Analysis of participant observation data revealed that the organisations’ development practices, or transformational practices, corresponded with their particular understandings of transformation. The research data also showed that the microprocesses of the transformational practices often face challenges associated with divisions linked to class and race. These are two social categories which I have argued continue to affect people’s personal lives as well as their interactions with others. Despite these challenges, The Warehouse and Fusion showed that they have the potential to disrupt cultural and symbolic structures of power in South Africa by operating within particular institutional spaces of society. In this respect, the organisations’ extrainstitutional character – they show partial, or incomplete, individualisation – means that they are less strictly bound by longstanding church norms and have room to move in terms of developing new religious practices. This thesis engaged with several bodies of literature. It used the extended case method to draw on empirical data collected over a four-month period to elaborate on existing theories within these fields. Most notably, it has extended our understanding of the nature of religious peacebuilding in contemporary South Africa and it has added to the conceptual basis of the wider religious peacebuilding field. The sociological character of the study was key to this, as I was able to evaluate the effectiveness of the organisations using the concept of strategic social spaces and the distinctly sociological methodology of the extended case method, which entailed analysing the interaction between the micro-processes captured by the empirical research and the macro-forces acting on the participants. Finally, this thesis advanced our understanding of the 251
explanatory power of the individualisation thesis in the South African context, another sociological avenue of research that deserves more attention in South Africa and other non-Western parts of the world.
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Appendix 1. Summary of Research Participants
Pseudonym
Sex
Age
Race
Affiliation
Location
Interview place
Akhona Ganyiwa
M
47
Black
Warehouse staff
Wetton
Warehouse offices
Andiswa Ngubani
F
46
Black
Warehouse staff
Wetton
Warehouse offices
Andre de Villiers
M
41
White
Fusion network
Kenilworth
Coffee shop
Anna Noel
F
36
White
Warehouse staff
Wetton
Warehouse offices
Annette Prince
F
35-40
Coloured
Warehouse network
Kenilworth
Coffee shop
Ayesha Green
F
30
Coloured
Fusion staff
Manenberg
Fusion offices
Barbara Anderson
F
61
White
Warehouse staff
Wetton
Warehouse offices
Charles Duminy
M
35
Coloured
Fusion staff
Manenberg
Fusion offices
Dumisani Dlamini
M
30
Black
Warehouse network
Gugulethu
Respondent’s church
Emma Hampton
F
37
White
Warehouse staff
Wetton
Warehouse offices
Francis Shaw
F
63
White
Warehouse staff
Wetton
Warehouse offices
Ingrid Upton
F
52
White
Warehouse staff
Wetton
Warehouse offices
James Burger
M
25
White
Micah Challenge SA network
Wynberg
Respondent’s church
Lauren Sanger
F
40
Coloured
Warehouse staff
Wetton
Warehouse offices
292
Mandla Nyathi
M
30
Black
Warehouse staff
Wetton
Warehouse offices
Michelle Kirchner
F
29
White
Fusion staff
Manenberg
Fusion offices
Nancy Burroughs
F
42
White
Warehouse staff
Wetton
Warehouse offices
Natasha Smith
F
21
White
Warehouse staff / intern
Wetton
Warehouse offices
Nombeko Buku
F
46
Black
Warehouse staff
Wetton
Warehouse offices
Onke Koyo
M
35
Black
Warehouse network
Lansdowne Road
Respondent’s office
Richard Bone
M
40-45
White
Warehouse network
Rondebosch
Respondent’s home
Robert Taylor
M
36
White
Warehouse network
Diep River
Respondent’s office
Ross Tawney
M
45
White
Warehouse staff
Wetton
Warehouse offices
Ruth Philips
F
45-50
Coloured
Warehouse staff
Wetton
Warehouse offices
Sebastian Davids
M
35
Coloured
Fusion staff
Manenberg
Fusion offices
Silumko Rhadebe
F
54
Black
Warehouse staff
Wetton
Warehouse offices
Steve Davies
M
28
White
Fusion staff
Manenberg
Fusion offices
Thomas Mda
M
35-40
Black
Warehouse network
Khayelitsha
Respondent’s office
Victor Swanepoel
M
45-50
Coloured
Fusion network
Manenberg
Respondent’s church
Zakes Ndungane
M
44
Black
Warehouse network
Khayelitsha
Respondent’s home
293
Participants not quoted in the text Participant 1
M
32
White
Common Good Foundation
Rondebosch
Common Ground Café
Participant 2
M
4550
Coloured
Kairos SA
-
Email interview
Participant 3
F
31
White
Micah Challenge SA
Wetton
Warehouse offices
Participant 4
M
4550
Black
Warehouse network
Du Noon
Respondent’s church
Participant 5
F
53
White
Warehouse network
Kenilworth
Respondent’s church
Participant 6
M
62
White
Warehouse network
Rosebank
Respondent’s home
Participant 7
F
29
White
Warehouse network
Kenilworth
Respondent’s church
Participant 8
M
57
Black
Warehouse network
Khayelitsha
Respondent’s church
Participant 9
F
28
White
Warehouse network
Rondebosch
Common Ground Café
Participant 10
M
43
White
Warehouse network
Town
Respondent’s office
Participant 11
F
63
Black
Warehouse network
Gugulethu
Respondent’s church
Participant 12
F
39
Black
Warehouse network
Sweet Home Farm
HIV/AIDS support group office
Participant 13
F
50
Black
Warehouse network
Khayelitsha
Respondent’s home
Participant 14
M
46
Black
Warehouse network
Khayelitsha
Respondent’s home
Participant 15
F
36
White
Warehouse volunteer
Wetton
Warehouse offices
294
Participant 16
F
65
White
Warehouse volunteer
Rondebosch
Researcher’s home
Participant 17
M
69
White
Warehouse volunteer
Wetton
Warehouse offices
Participant 18
F
60
White
Warehouse volunteer
Kenilworth
Respondent’s home
Participant 19
M
54
Coloured
Western Cape Religious Leader's Forum
Claremont
Respondent’s mosque
295
Appendix 2a: Cover Letter Cover Letter University of Aberdeen/Queen’s University Belfast Title of Project: The relationship between religion and social transformation in South Africa Investigator: Duncan Scott What I am doing: I am conducting research on the potential of religion to assist in relationship-building and social transformation in post-apartheid South Africa. How do religious people and organisations understand social transformation? And how do they contribute to reconciliation and pursue a more just and equal post-conflict society? The research forms part of my PhD project at Queen’s University Belfast in the UK, which I will complete in September 2015.
296
Appendix 2b: Informed Consent Form Informed Consent Form University of Aberdeen/Queen’s University Belfast Title of Project: Compromise After Conflict Principal Investigator: Professor John D Brewer Other Investigators: Professor Bernadette C Hayes; Dr Francis Teeney; Dr Katrin Dudgeon; Dr Natascha Mueller-Hirth; Laura Fowler; Dave Magee; Clare Magill; Sandra Rios; Rachel Anderson; Aimee Smith, Duncan Scott Participant’s Name: We invite you to take part in a research study on the development of compromise amongst victims/survivors of communal conflict. Taking part in this study is entirely voluntary. If you decide to participate it is very important that you sign this form to show that you are willing to take part and that we have your permission to use anonymized extracts from the interview. There are no known risks associated with the research. The benefits are that we will understand better the needs of victims/survivors and the potential for reconciliation and healing. We will keep your participation in this research study confidential to the full extent provided under law and your identity will remain completely anonymous. If you choose to participate, you are free to withdraw from the interview at any time and to withdraw your permission for the use of the interview data. The University of Aberdeen and the investigators are receiving a grant from a charity, the Leverhulme Trust, to support this research. Your identity will not be disclosed to them. If you have questions regarding your rights as a research participant or you have concerns or general questions about the research, they can be addressed by the interviewer at the time or by the research team (on any of the following numbers +44(0)2894454650/+44(0)2890668050/+44(0)1224 273128). Further details of the research can be found at: http://www.qub.ac.uk/researchcentres/CompromiseAfterConflict/ Participant: By signing this consent form, you indicate that you are voluntarily choosing to take part in this research and allowing us to use edited and anonymized extracts from the interview.
___________________________ Signature of Participant
_______________________ Date
297
Appendix 3a: Interview schedule: Warehouse staff members 1. Details of participant a) How long have you worked at The Warehouse? b) What’s your role here? c) What is your background prior to working at The Warehouse? 2. Relationship with The Warehouse’s work a) What’s your view on the role of religion in advancing community development in South Africa? And in Cape Town specifically? b) In terms of transformation, do you think religious organisations have any benefits over secular ones? c) How do you understand The Warehouse’s role in this bigger picture? d) Linked to the above question, how does your involvement here fit with The Warehouse’s vision for Cape Town? (Probe. If they do not mention transformation, ask.) e) How does The Warehouse’s ethos fit with your own worldview? f) Could you explain how being involved here has changed you? (If it has at all.) 3. Religion and transformation a) How would you explain transformation? That is, how do you understand it? (Probe. Do they mention reconciliation at all? If not, ask whether this is part of transformation in South Africa.) b) How does The Warehouse understand it? (Probe. Are there any differences between the two? If so, why?) c) How do you think the transition in The Warehouse structures reflected the organisation’s vision of transformation? d) i) How does The Warehouse fit into religious spaces? ii) How does it relate with the rest of the city?
298
Appendix 3b: Interview schedule: Fusion staff members 1. Details of participant a) How long have you worked at Fusion? b) What’s your role here? c) What is your background prior to working at Fusion? 2. Relationship with Fusion’s work a) What’s your view on the role of religion in advancing community development in South Africa? And in Cape Town specifically? b) In terms of transformation, do you think religious organisations have any benefits over secular ones? c) How do you understand Fusion’s role in this bigger picture? d) Linked to the above question, how does your involvement here fit with Fusion’s vision for Cape Town? (Probe. If they do not mention social/community transformation, ask.) e) How does Fusion’s ethos fit with your own worldview? f) Could you explain how being involved here has changed you? (If it has at all.) 3. Religion and Transformation a) How would you explain transformation? That is, how do you understand it? (Probe. Do they mention reconciliation at all? If not, ask whether this is part of transformation in South Africa.) b) How does Fusion understand it? (Probe. Are there any differences between the two? If so, why?) c) How do you think the transition in Fusion structures reflected the organisation’s vision of transformation? d) i) How does Fusion fit into religious spaces? ii) How does it relate with the rest of the city?
299
Appendix 3c: Interview schedule: Warehouse associates 1. Details of participant a) Who do you work for? b) What exactly does that involve? c) How long have you been doing it for? 2. The participant’s link to The Warehouse a) How long have you known about The Warehouse? (Probe. If they have been aware of The Warehouse’s work, what how long have they been actively involved with The Warehouse? Can you explain the relationship or partnership – what did it involve?) b) What did you think about the Unity in the Church Forum and/or the Transformational Development (A Transforming Church – A Transformed Community) workshop sessions? i) Did you like anything in particular?, ii) What did you think could have made it better? c) Are there any ways the workshop changed the way you do things? (Probe. Has it had an impact on the way you do your work?) d) Have you interacted with other churches or organisations by going to Warehouse events such as workshops, forums, AGMs. (Probe. If so, Where? When? What was it like? If no, why not?) e) How does The Warehouse’s ethos fit with your own worldview, if at all? 3. Understanding of transformation a) How would you explain transformation in South Africa? b) Have you been involved in any other way that you think links with this transformation goal? c) What does it mean for churches to be unified in South Africa? d) What stops churches from being unified? (Probe. Do they mention poverty, injustice, history?) e) Finally. In terms of Cape Town, how would you describe the existing levels of transformation? And reconciliation? 300
