Not Yet "Beyond Trauma" - Genocide Travels

I'm in Kigali for the second time in a year. I'm going to use my blog as a kind of journal to keep me reflecting and communicating because I'm on a 2 - week course entitled "Genocide and Mass Atrocities: Actors, Causes and Responses to Violence." It's run by the Aegis Trust who not only set up the Genocide Museum here but who are now in the archive, busy digitizing the evidence of the gacaca courts - 25 million of handwritten pages! and something which has never been done before. We were sent readings for the course about 2 months ago and were told to read everything before we came. It has been a steep learning curve and I've loved it! I'm not quite done yet - a few more papers to go! Today was the first day - there are about 45 - 50 of us here sitting in a big U - shape.
A large Rwandan contingent - academics from faculties of Law and Education, government employees, people involved with local governance, heads of small NGOs concerned with community mental health, marginalized  Batwa - the small indigenous people of Rwanda - and Rwandan culture. There are people from Kenya and Uganda, from a Genocide Studies Department in Amsterdam, a group of Swiss anthropology students, a British guy from the Royal Commonwealth Society and me. I have found out that quite a few of the Rwandans have studied short courses in South Africa. We have a deal with Rwanda that their students pay the same rate as South Africans so guys have studied governance at the University of Pretoria and the assistant head of the Law School studied in "Potch" - his abbreviation!
There is lots of discussion; many different viewpoints. Phil Clark, the Australian course leader from SOAS is very encouraging and validating of comments and questions so we are seeing an open space being created. We touched on the sore point of whether we would be allowed to say ANYthing i.e. talking about who is Tutsi or Hutu or that there was not a genocide? Our Rwandan lecturer put it as a question: Is genocide denial a hate crime or part of freedom of speech? In Rwanda denying that there was genocide in 1994 is a criminal offense and chargeable in court. You cannot deny, minimize or trivialize the genocide. This is also the case in some European countries with regard to the Holocaust but not in the USA. There it is considered part of freedom of speech. With regard to definitions - whether mass violence is genocide, a crime against humanity or a war crime - these should not be seen as describing a hierarchy of suffering. "Rather" he asked, "can you talk about these in a neutral way without being biased by the experience you have gone through?" This seems to be the difficulty the Rwandan refugees that I have met in the dialogue groups at the Cape Town Holocaust Centre seem to experience. They are not able to do this.

Rhodes Had To Rise in Order to "Fall"

Photograph by Tony Carr

In an ironic twist the Rhodes statue which was finally removed from the grounds of the University of Cape Town (UCT) this week - 9th April 2015 - had to be "lifted" in order to "fall". But it could have fallen :
 the occupiers of "Azania House" (the administration building) could easily have arranged it if vandalism was their intention. It clearly wasn't. There was much more at stake - the conscientizing of the whole academic community - not only at the University of Cape Town but nationwide. I think all those critics I have just read on the news24 website who were disgusted by the students' behaviour yesterday should realize this.

Furthermore, I watched on video as one young man bashed at Rhodes' carved face with a wooden plank, while another tied a bucket with red paint round his head and I wondered what was happening for them. It was as if they wanted to  destroy forever the greedy colonialist vision that his gaze over the Cape flats symbolized - the installation of white hegemony from Cape to Cairo. It's scary for many people to see this. But actually it's human to feel rage at centuries of injustice and at present humiliations. Its just that so few of us have ever been allowed to express this kind of rage, we get scared by it. I once saw some enlightened parents give their angry little boy a plastic baseball-bat to go hit against a tree. What was so different last Thursday afternoon? Its not just children who feel rage - we all do. By the time we are adults it's usually suppressed and our bodies pay the price. So if a couple of young men expressed their violent rage by bashing at Rhodes' head, I for one, am grateful to them - no-one was hurt in the process - they got to feel empowered and it was the perfect moment to savor their victory.

Photograph by Tony Carr

 Every young person should have that feeling at some point in their lives! I doubt they will ever forget what they did and what was achieved by the Rhodes Must Fall campaign.

Many of the occupiers of Azania House slept in the conference room named belatedly to honour Archie Mafeje. Having known Archie, who wrote from experience about white liberal hegemony at the universities of Southern Africa, I think he would've been pleased to have played a role in this first big step to effect a change, but he would in no way be satisfied with it....

The Quiet Demise of Zonnebloem

Sometime earlier this year, I arranged a meeting at St Marks District Six and when I gave people directions I told them to follow the signs to Zonnebloem. I was a bit surprised therefore when on my way there, I saw the sign had been changed to District Six. This was the original 1867 name of the area close to the Cape Town Central Business District (CBD) which for over a century housed a mixed community and then was declared to be for whites only in 1966.

It gave me a bit of a lift - Wow! the City had given the area back its rightful name - or so I thought.....

A few weeks later, I am walking around the Cape Town Art Fair and I chance upon a video made by Haroon Gunn-Salie. And what is it about? It is a film of 2 hoodies going out at night with ladders and rolls of wide tape replacing all the Zonnebloem signs. I am rather amazed to see this evidence of what actually had transpired. Far from this being a decision taken by the City Fathers (or in Cape Town's case, the Mothers) it turns out to be a "site-specific installation" by a young artist and his friends. And do you know? Its been up since August 2013 and not a single one has been removed! and I guarantee none will be. In addition it is probably illegal to do what Gunn-Salie did, but you will never hear of a court case about it. A terrible wrong - the apartheid government's forced removals in 1968 of thousands of people from a vibrant community - which was then euphemized by calling the area Zonnebloem (Sunflower) - was quietly addressed by a brilliant artist who sensed the time was right for a return to the place-name - "District Six". No-one has been offended or excluded by his action. In fact his works on the forced removals of District Six have won him great acclaim.

The University of Cape Town students currently protesting about the statue of Rhodes (Southern Africa's arch-colonialist) so prominently placed on campus, or even Max Price, the beleaguered Vice-Chancellor, could do a lot worse than consult with Haroon Gunn-Salie about what to do with the Rhodes statue and what to put in its place!

Andre Brink - an appreciation

When I was living in England in the 1970's and 80's, there were two major reactions to my being a white South African:
1) Taxi-drivers and the white middle- and owning- classes would suddenly feel free to express racist ideas and opinions, assuming that I would be in agreement with them or
2) I was ostracized by the social activists and left-wingers whose company I sought in the Women's Movement and in the other organisations I joined. I didn't always realize this. People would just turn away from me when they heard my accent. It wasn't violent - just isolating. And of-course, it led to feelings of self-hate and guilt. And I blamed and despised the Afrikaners who had devised apartheid and the racism it symbolized.

I don't know when I first discovered the books of Andre Brink - it was probably in the late 70's. Maybe it was when the English translations were published? They were a revelation. Here was a terrific writer - a white Afrikaner - writing great stories about the tense world I knew - full of the racial complexities with which I was familiar. I felt understood, validated, intrigued and informed by them. They made an enormous difference to how I perceived myself and other white South Africans. He was writing in very difficult circumstances but he did it anyway. Reading his books: Rumours of Rain, Looking on Darkness, A Dry White Season and An Instant in the Wind - gave me courage. I could overcome the guilt, I could tackle the racism that I carried, I could maybe even love myself. He was a white South African of whom I was immensely proud and I recommended his books to anyone who showed an interest beyond the usual stereotyping. Ricky Sherover-Marcuse, from California, who in the early 80's had begun to run workshops for white people on Unlearning Racism, was one such person.

Andre Brink died last Friday at the age of 79. The obituaries and articles this week are very matter of fact - although starting to improve: for instance, click on the link to see one in the UK Guardian. He was considered a great writer and was highly honored and decorated. Somehow no-one was writing why. Novels engage our emotions - he did that in so many different ways exposing the pain inherent in the relationships we had and still have in our country, and he was especially great at revealing and recreating the danger and tensions that existed when ordinary human behaviour was forbidden and might be discovered and punished.

I know I am not alone in thanking him for what he gave to the world. Hamba Kahle Andre Brink!

An Intriguing Coincidence - World War One and the Rosetta Mission

In an almost perfect synchronization of events, the 96th Armistice Day marking the end of World War One which is always commemorated at the 11th hour on the 11th day of the 11th month was last year - the 100th anniversary of the start of the war in 1914 - followed on the next day by an extraordinary European collaboration. European scientists from those previously warring countries came together 10 years ago to send a spacecraft to explore a comet - Churyumov-Gerasimenko - 310 million miles from us and on the 12th November 1914, the small lander separated from the orbiting Rosetta, came in to land, bounced twice and was finally stable, sitting on very rocky terrain on 67P (the shortened name of the comet). Scientists waited with bated breath in an auditorium for a blip on a screen signalling the Philae landing and the place erupted in cheers and hugs.

It was heartening to see that the spirit of human comradeship which was present within the respective armies could almost a century later which included yet another World War, cross national boundaries for such an historic occasion. Maybe even the Middle East could succumb to peace and collaborative endeavors in 100 years time?

Now, a couple of months later, not many reprises of the year 2014 include the Philae landing - a testament to the fickleness and national chauvinism of the global media.

Where Is My Tree?

Everyone knew it was a crap present. Barmitzvah boys all over the country probably silently groaned when they opened the envelope and saw the certificate. Oh no! Not another tree in Israel! (Sometimes if the donor was flush, it was six trees in Israel!) But you couldn't say anything negative. How could we not be delighted and honored to help the Halutziot (the Pioneers) who were taming the land and making the desert bloom? The taboo against saying how you felt about this non-present was as heavy as speaking ill of the dead.

A parent's voice would change - become almost reverential - "How thoughtful!" You had been honored in some mysterious way. Thus generations of South African Jewish children were cajoled and persuaded into writing 'Thank You' letters to the people who gave us, as presents, trees in our name in Israel. These were usually older relatives or our parents' friends - people with - dare I say it - no imagination. If the aim was to make of us Zionists or at least supporters of Israel, it eventually did weave a kind of mysterious magic.

How could a tree be in my name? Did someone carve my name in the bark or were there plaques attached to each tree like in the botanical gardens? If I had been given a lot of trees, did they plant them in the shape of my name so that if I flew over in a helicopter I could see my name written in trees? If I went to Israel could I find my tree?

The Psychologist Adventurer

Maps Mapoyane and Gail Womersley

Earlier this year Gail Womersley gave a talk to the Cape Town Self-psychology group (CTPSPG) about her 2 years working with Medecins sans Frontieres (MSF). It turned out that we were extremely fortunate to hear this plucky young clinical psychologist. MSF, recognising her qualities - she is creative, culturally sensitive, eloquent and charismatic - had sent her on an event-packed fund-raising tour to raise money for their projects in the war-torn Central African Republic.

It seems that self-psychology still provides something of an emotional and theoretical touchstone for Gail. With MSF, she had moved far into the field of trauma response in a very short space of time and probably felt the need for recognition and understanding from her former colleagues and mentors. I think she got that - we were spellbound. She had raised the question of whether the kind of short-term work she was doing was ethically acceptable from the viewpoint of promoting the kind of changes to which long-term therapy aspires. A question I felt plagued by myself at the Trauma Centre where I often felt that I was dispensing plasters for wounds that were never going to heal. I don't think many of us were too concerned about addressing, let alone answering such a question - it was the riveting adventure of it all that was so gripping.