One of the participants at the recent community conversation in Leandra, Mpumalanga, speaks out
February 25, 2010 – The small town of Leandra in Mpumalanga, South Africa, stands at a crossroads.
Down one path lies a community divided by nationality, race, gender, colour, religion and language; a community where, fuelled by poor service delivery, poverty and a host of other challenges, tensions explode in xenophobic violence. Down the other path, maintaining a community united in its commitment to address the challenges it faces and create a better future for its members.
To address this, the Nelson Mandela Foundation is holding a series of community conversations, started in early 2009 following the xenophobic outbreaks in 2008, to help the Mpumalanga community of Leandra build social cohesion.
At present, the South African residents of Leandra exemplify a community that is striving to bridge the gap of mistrust of anything foreign.
Distrust of foreigners from inhabitants in surrounding locations has had some impact on non-nationals living in Leandra, making them wary and cautious about the future.
“In certain quarters, our attempts to send out messages about this community conversation were treated with suspicion by some migrants, who were concerned that this was a ploy by the South African nationals to lure them into a building and attack them,” said Community Capacity Enhancement (CCE) Master Trainer Ken Mutuma.
While Leandra’s enjoys a fairly high level of service delivery, the same cannot be said of the surrounding locations, creating tension in those communities. Furthermore, tensions in neighbouring communities have been exacerbated by unscrupulous leaders who point to outsiders as the reason for poor service delivery.
The tendency of non-nationals to ostracise themselves through low levels of participation in community activities, partly caused by a language barrier – community meetings are predominantly conducted in Zulu – also contributes to their “othering”.
“A lot of the non-nationals lack of confidence in their ability to express themselves,” said Foundation Facilitator Magan Dahir.
“Not everyone in the community is a bad person, but some of the youngsters victimise the foreigners. This results in foreigners further ostracising themselves.”
However, the Leandra community may present some positive lessons for the surrounding communities. Participants during the conversation felt that the high degree of tolerance for foreigners in Leandra could be traced to the history of migration and its impact on local attitudes to migrants.
Due to the presence of migrants from as recently as 50 years ago, the community is used to living with foreign nationals. Intermarriage between races and nationalities in Leandra meant that it has been easy for the community to accommodate and integrate foreign nationals.
But the community has realised that corrupt politicians are trying to turn the community on itself.
“The community here sees the trap and has the capacity to help itself,” said Mutuma.
It is against this backdrop that the Foundation, along with local stakeholders, staged the first community conversation this year on Tuesday, February 23, with plans in place to hold another conversation in March.
“To some extent, this conversation is a prophylactic measure,” said Mutuma. “With intra-community tensions leading to incidents of xenophobic violence in the surrounding areas, it’s important to ensure that this community does not resort to the same behaviour. We hope that this community, if given the right tools, will become an example to the surrounding communities in Balfour, Delmas, Standerton and Secunda, where there have been significant outbreaks of service delivery protests, which often spill over into xenophobic violence.
“Foreigners in the area are terrified and often refer to talk that after 2010, South Africans will chase out all the foreigners. So the efforts we are making at this stage are critical towards stemming extreme attitudes and building peaceful co-existence.”
Using the tools of the CCE methodology, Mutuma and the Foundation-appointed facilitators break down the walls between the factions in the community and create a safe space for all members of the community to engage in productive dialogue.
To facilitate building relationships among the community, participants were invited to share their origins in a “family tree” exercise. The participants trace a route back through their ancestors – for three to five generations – to show that quite often locals have foreign backgrounds. The participants start to relate and to engage in conversation. They find that the reasons foreigners have moved here are often similar to the reasons their forebears moved here.
Through this exercise, participants not only learn about each other’s uniqueness, explained Mutuma, but they also come to recognise and embrace the common factors, such as scarcity of resources, wars, marriage, etc., that cause people to migrate.
More importantly, through this exercise the participants began to see their common heritage.
“You may be surprised to find, if you keep going down this family tree, that you came from Zimbabwe or even Somalia,” one participant said after the exercise.
“Some of us have intermarried and continue to intermarry ... We are all brothers and sisters.”
The community then engaged in a social-cultural dynamic exercise. The exercise aims to help the community reflect upon the various traits present among them. These included the strengths that promote unity in diversity, as well as the weaknesses, the presence of which could lead to social disintegration and xenophobia.
“Leandra will always stand out for its ability to accommodate people coming into this area,” said one of the participants at the conversation. “You can see it by the relationships among us. We have even had white guys living in the township with their girlfriends and they have not been troubled.”
Clearly, this is a strength the community believes has contributed to the peaceful relationships within it.
However, participants at the community conversation believe that they need to use organisations, such as the Leandra Advice Office, and churches and local authorities, to ensure that the community continues to get along.
“We must use these organisations, but at the same time we must also ask how we can make our individual contributions to them. It’s not always right to say, ‘the government must do this or we will protest’,” one participant said.
While some argued that a lack of service delivery and poverty justified criminal behaviour, others were vehemently opposed to this.
Others argued that expecting government to solve all the problems facing the community meant absolving themselves of responsibility to improve their community and their own lives.
“The attitude here is that if the government doesn’t provide, we are allowed to take the law into our own hands, but the structures for us to provide for ourselves are there,” said one of the participants. “If you want an ID book to get a job, you go to Home Affairs. We must take responsibility for our actions. We have the tools in this community to better our own lives.”
One of the Zimbabwean nationals at the dialogue added to this challenge, calling on South Africans to take ownership of their future, saying: “I don’t know of any country where the government provides everything.”
However, not everyone agreed. One woman said her daughter, as a result of South Africa’s turbulent history, has found herself in a position where she has no choice but to prostitute herself to make ends meet.
The response from other members of the community was that we can’t hide in history forever.
The reason foreign nationals appear to succeed, explained one Zimbabwean participant, is because they realise that the choice to succeed is in their own hands.
“The moment you realise that the only person who can change your life is you, you will be amazed at what you can do,” the participant said.
At different stages of the conversation, participants engaged in breathers aimed at strengthening the overall theme of social cohesion. One such breather was the shoe exercise, where participants, after randomly exchanging shoes, race in a circle.
“It’s a case of literally being in someone else’s shoes,” said Mutuma. “When we start the exercise, they don’t know that they’re going to swap shoes, so it puts everyone on the back foot and members of the community begin to empathise with each other.”
For Papa Tsibela, Chairperson of the Leandra Community Centre, the conversation was an important way of ensuring that underlying tensions within the community were aired and acknowledged.
“There are a number of issues in this community,” said Tsibela. “There have been violent attacks against foreigners on the border of Leandra and it’s very important to address these issues as a community; to come together to discuss the issues.
“We’re hoping that through these conversations, we will address these issues before they flare up.”
By providing a safe space for people to speak about the challenges they faced, the community conversation unearthed a number of issues that community members felt strongly about.
For Elie Nkosi, a Foundation Facilitator and Assistant Co-ordinator of the Leandra Community Centre, the conversation was a success: “It went very well. At first, non-nationals were reluctant to come to this conversation, but they came through. Eventually we had 82 people here today.”
Mutuma acknowledges that the facilitation team and the Leandra community have a long way to go.
“These conversations are a process-driven programme and require a high level of co-ordination from top to bottom,” said Mutuma. “It’s almost like you’re starting a social movement. You need a lot of buy-in from everyone, in particular, government.
“It’s so hard to undermine the status quo and getting people and societies to change is very challenging.”