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Groundhog Day: seeing shadows

February 2, 2010 By BC, Being, Stories, Travel One Comment

And then just like that, you hop a plane from Johannesburg, stop after 8 hours in Dakar for refuelling.   Take another 9 hours to arrive in New York, take a cab into the city with a great driver who hails from Guinea and is going back there to work on the democratic elections this spring, and you get dropped in front of a small boutique hotel on Madison Avenue.   The air is cold and crisp and the city seems to be in a good mood.

The woman at the check in counter at The MAve Hotel directs me to Penelope, a great little breakfast place at E 30th and Lexington Ave, where I have just downed a great tasting egg and pesto sandwich on a croissant, surrounded by people talking about real estate deals, high blodd pressure medication and book promotion tours.

It’s a huge difference in some ways and just another city in other ways.   I am reminded how much I love being in New York City, and how much I love eastern North American cities in general in the winter – New York, Boston, Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa.   All places I have some lingering presence in, some impression left on me from the dark and blustery days of winter, the days when, as a young man, I crept away to late night coffee shops to read and write poetry, or out to hear jazz and blues muted behind closed doors and windows dripping with condensation.

Just as languishing over the weekend in the leafy northern suburbs of Johannesburg brought me to my childhood growing up in Toronto – and to my partner’s childhood in South Africa – being here in new York this morning evokes a kind of nostalgia and a kind of energy for exploration.   I feel like a young man again, half my age, a free day in New York, bracing air and bright eyed people.   Somehow cleansed from my trip.   Clear eyed.

It’s Groundhog Day in the United States, a strange holiday.   The day in which one solitary animal in Pennsylvania awakes from his winter hibernation, takes a look out of his burrow and gauges what he sees.   If he sees his shadow, it’s six more weeks of winter.

Somehow this captures what it is like to have arrived here in the United States from Africa.   Today is a good day to wake up and see our shadows.   Can we see the connection between the the crime and poverty and disparity of wealth and the apartheid-by-another-name of South Africa and daily life on the streets of midtown Manhattan?   A cab driver dreams of returning to Africa to work for a democratic solution to the turmoil in Guinea, a country that hasn’t known the ethnic conflicts and civil wars of its neighbours. he worries that unless people get to work, that might change and Guinea could descend into bloodshed because the bigger powers in the world, some of them in the office buildings above us, may decide to act ruthlessly for the oil and resources that the country is endowed with.

North America and Europe has a nearly trillion dollar arms industry, much of which, in the form of small arms, ends up in Africa.   the hands of despotic leaders, paramilitary death squads, gang leaders and petty criminals are filled with this deadly engineering that generates huge amounts of wealth for the North.   The oil and precious metals that power our economies are extracted from the coastal platforms of Senegal, the forests of the Democratic Republic of Congo and the diamond mines of Kimberly.   Whatever we want in North America we can have.   Cross some palms with dollars and ammunition and turn away from the shadow.   A bright day dawns.

Our shadows are all around us, and to see them this clearly means two things.   First, it means more winter – that the hard times are not yet done that weeks complicated and mindful living still lie between now and the promise and ease of spring.   Second, it means that the sun is shining, something is warming my back, throwing my silhouette on the ground.   And that the winter continues.

What a complicated world!   What an untidy conclusion!   What a way to try and capture the truth of this strange trip I’ve been on!

On the way into Manhattan today my cab driver, Bubu, asked me what my impression of Africa was.   I admitted that it was limited – I had only spent a week there, most of it in a middle class suburb or on a safari ranch and all of it in the company of middle class people.   But I said that the overwhelming impression was that Africa differed from North America in a key way: in Africa, the truth is valued above everything else.   Here in North America we are quick to sacrifice truth at the alter of a happy ending but African stories would never do that.   To do so is the ultimate betrayal of promise.   To tell the story of South Africa as a successful miracle of transition to democracy would be to betray the promise of what the struggle was all about.   It was about truth. Clear, shiny, complicated, messy, dark truth.

Bubu, my driver, smiled widely.   “Exactly,” he said.

Random thoughts about South Africa

January 30, 2010 By BC, Travel, Uncategorized One Comment

Been here nearly a week now and I’m starting to get a very limited sense of this incredible place.  I have a few random thoughts and notes, offered up as they come to mind.

***

I visited The Apartheid Museum today.  The museum sits next to a small amusement park with roller coasters and helicopter rides.  The screams from the roller coaster and the thwapping of the helicopters could be heard at the museum and had the unnerving effect of recreating the soundscape from the late 1980s when the state of emergency was in effect here and helicopters and screams were a part of daily life in many parts of Johannesburg and the surrounding townships.

The museum really traces the history of apartheid from 1948 until the Constitution was completed in 1996, with a post script about the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and modern day South Africa.  I was struck by the section on the 1940s and how there was one huge wall full of all of the laws that went into setting the legal framework for apartheid.  Many of them are echoed in Canada’s Indian Act of the time, including laws about everything from owning land, to pass laws to drinking liquour and entering into contracts.

The museum pulls no punches.  There are hours of video presentations with brutal violence perpetrated against both blacks and whites, with scenes of police brutality, torture, right-wing white terrorism, necklacing and murder.  One room, devoted to the legacy of execution of political prisoners contains dozens of nooses hanging from the ceiling, one for each person who was killed by the state.  There is a whol gallery focused on the violence of the early 1990s that almost took South Africa to the point of no return. If you had any illusions that the legacy of apartheid can just be wished away, they are dispelled in this place.  It makes the subsequent work of constitution, nation building and reconcilliation seem miraculous.

I spent a great deal of the morning in tears, and when I emerged from the museum after three hours of intense learning, I sat quietly in the garden and sobbed.  When I was a young man in the 1980s I was active in anti-apartheid support groups in Canada, calling for sanctions and insisting that my Church, the United Church of Canada divest itself from the country.  Today I was reminded of the conviction I felt back then and it came back in waves of anger, grief and astonishment.  What a place.

***

The Apartheid Museum is interesting in another way too.  It doesn’t have a typical story arc: peace – crises – resolution.  There is no happy ending here, just the ongoing struggle for balance, justice and peace.  And no one is under any illusions in this country that that struggle has ended.  Over the past week I have noticed that South Africans do not tell stories with happy endings.  Instead they tell stries with a much more real structure, stories that live in the cyclical nature of time, of events repeating themselves, of small choices taken with large implications at every turn.  I have been inquiring a little about this as a particular African form of storytelling.  In North America we like the Hollywood ending.  Here, they smell bullshit a mile away.

***

The other day my friends Busi Dlamini and Vanessa Sayers and I were having dinner which included ostrich neck stew by the pool where the zebras were drinking and we were talking about unusual foods.  I was sharing some of the North American standbys like oolichan grease and fermented seal meat and they were returning the favour with fried grubs and goat hoofs, they told me about a special dish that is made from the head and feet of a chicken.  The dish is called “walkie-talkie.”

***

There is a brilliant film that I saw on the way here called Jerusalema about a gangster/community organizer in Hillbrow, the roughest part of Johannesburg.  At one point as he is flirting with a life of crime he gest out only to run into his former boss at a gas station.  The boss says “crime is the fastest growing industry in the new South Africa” to which our hero replies that actually private security is.

There is no doubt that this is a dangerous city, although I have been staying in affluent suburbs and have perhaps a false sense of security about the place.  On these suburbs, the sidewalks are lined with walls which in turn are topped with either razor wire, spikes, barbed wire or, increasingly, high voltage electrical fencing.  The walls have doors in them that lead to courtyards and gardens, but the streetscape looks like a corridor, covered over with trees.  Occasionally instead of walls you see “palisades” – tall fences topped with three or seven spikes and sometimes with razor wire on top.  Most streets have a roaming security guard whose job it is to immediately report suspicious behaviour which is met with “armed response.”  The largest security firms are ADT and the curiously named “NYPD.”  In the public parking lot across from the “Wollies” where we have been buying food, there are three or four car guards patrolling the lot.  The take note as you park and  presumably  also call for armed responses if someone else leaves in your car.  All of these security folks are really nice.  They chat and say “howsit” as you pass by and they are friendly.  But these guys are on the low rungs.  The armed security guys around are tough looking and aloof.

***

Everything is privatized here, not just the police.  The public transportation system is terrible, largely due to the fact that there is a huge fleet of “minicabs” private vans that run on largely predetermined routes.  The minicab lobby is so strong that any attempts to build new public infrastructure are met with threats and actual strikes from the minicab operators and the whole city comes to a halt.  Minicab trf wars break out frequently, wth shooting and murder and maiming a part of business, rendering the services effective on the one hand but insanely dangerous on the other.

Participatory Leadership in South Africa

January 30, 2010 By Art of Harvesting, BC, Collaboration, Facilitation, Leadership

I’m back in Johannesburg after three days on the veld west of the city running an Art of Participatory Leadership workshop with my friend from REOS Social Innovation.  The weather here has been crazy – constant rain showers and thunderstorms for the whole time we were away, and there is flooding locally here.  Driving back into the city we went fender deep through many intersections; major  thoroughfares  were rendered into fords, water coloured with deep red soil flowing everywhere.

Usually its easy for me to write about these kinds of workshops, but I have to say that South Africa is an overwhelming context.  It does not at all lend itself to a simple set of observations.  In many ways it is the quintessential study in contrasts: squatter camps next to luxury suburban malls, torrential rains in Joburg and 30 minutes away, lovely summer weather on the safari. Somehow these things have much in common.  You are always taken by surprise by the contrast while at the same time struck by how normal it all seems.

REOS Partners is working with two major teams right now, both of which are present at this training.  One is Kago Ya Bana (Building together for our children), which is a program that works in the municipality of Midvaal, aimed at ensuring that every child is cared for.  The other is a team of people who work with distance learning at the University of South Africa (UNISA).  On the face of it, these tow teams have nothing really in common, but in mixing together over the past three days they discovered much in common about moving towards a culture of participatory leadership with stakeholders, funders, learners, parents and children.  One project even got started that uses KYB leadership with some support from UNISA folks to build it and see it off.

I think South Africa is a country that exists only because of partnerships and particiption.  But much like Estonia, two dynamics are at play.  First of all, with the struggle against apartheid now over, a creeping complacency has set in.  There has long been extraordinary expectations on the ANC government, but what is catching people by surprise is the decreasing impulse for people to take charge in their communities.  I heard this often over the course of the workshop – that there is a hunger for the kind of community leadership that was present in the struggle days, but which has seemed to have waned in the past 15 years.  And secondly, like Estonia, South Africa is an emerging country and as such it is trying to perform well on the world stage.  To do this, it makes a point of meeting the world’s expectations of it, trying to prove that things are going well and that progress is being made, and I notice that some people re reaching the breaking point in encountering the culture of management by measurement.  This was another frustration spoken by many.

Participatory leadership is simply the application of what we have learned from hosting participatory meetings to bigger and bigger contexts.  It asks the question what if we applied these principles to ongoing team, organizational and social contexts.  To that end participatory leadership offers some relevant antidotes to groups that are suffering from the apathy of a surfeit of chaos or control.  This week we found that out in spades I think.  People are just quite open and interested in a way of doing things that involves others, that engages that somehow returns humanity to work.

In our work we shared models of hosting participatory meetings, described maps and practices that help us stay grounded and open, and explored ways of harvesting that were inclusive and holistic.  In the end, several people stepped forward to crack open and lead projects within their workplaces to make work more inclusive, to work more with clients and learners, and to explore ways to apply some of these ideas and skills.  One thing that I love about this work is how REOS is offering it as a part of an ongoing capacity building initiative with their clients.  In doing that it continues a shift of seeing in ways that one participant described as “Changing the way change works.”  With an ongoing relationship, coaching, and real work at hand, those that take up the practices and explore them in their own contexts will embark on a cool learning journey together, and my sense is that people will begin seeing the results they are looking for as their projects become more inclusive and co-owned by the people with whom they are working.   And that is the whole point.

LIstening loudly

January 28, 2010 By BC, Conversation

So far my favourite expression here at the Art of Participatory Leadership is “listen loudly.”  People use it to describe a quality of attention where your ears are filled with sound and meaning, even if the person you are listening to is whispering.

Into Africa

January 25, 2010 By Travel 2 Comments

For the first time since 1978 I stepped today onto a new continent.

I have never been to Africa before, not even close.  Today after travelling thirty hours from almost exactly half way around the world, I arrived in Johannesburg, on a hazy and warm summer morning.  It is a strange thing to fly over Africa at night.  As we winged south and east from New York a little more than half way into our flight we skirted the west coast of Senegal, The Gambia and Guinea-Bissau.  I looked out the window and could see nothing save a little high cloud in front of the stars.   Our flight path took us back out over the ocean for several hours until we crossed over land again on the northern Namibian coast line just as the light was returning to the sky.  The whole of the Namimbian coast line is protected as park, but it was still too dark to see it.  I kept straining for glances of the continent below as we headed inland over  the Kalahari desert in Botswana and still the land was obscured by low cloud and ground fog.  From time to time I could see snatches of savannah, keenly aware that I was flying 39,000 feet above the spot where my oldest ancestors spent a million years before they decided to move north and east.  It is an indescribable feeling to be flying over the ancient cradle of humanity especially having just left Hawai’i, a place where some of the land itself was younger than I am.  This journey, this experience,  has only been possible in the last few years.

We landed at 8:30am, well into the summer morning, and parked a short bus ride from the terminal, so my first encounter with the South African air was walking down a ramp and on to the tarmac at Johannesburg International Airport.  The air smelled sweet, like it does in Hawai’i and it strongly reminded me of my South African born wife who always invokes the African air when she first inhales a breath in Hawai’i.

Joburg is a big city and one that is just alive on more edges than it can manage.  It would be fair to say that it consists of a jumble of humanity, tumbling together in a unique country in a unique place.  In the airport, there were fundamentalist Muslims arriving from the subcontinent, orthodox Jews coming with me from New York, a huge gang of young black police constables being led around by an older dour white sergeant.  Driving through the city to the middle class neighbourhood where I am staying is a trip through residential areas that consist of a road, a sidewalk and a continuous wall that runs the length of the block, differing by the style that each owner has chosen to build and the type of razor wire/spike combination on the top.  There is a default level of paranoia and private security here that most statesbound rightwing Americans only dream of.   It makes the paranoia of the west seem so trivial in comparison.

I’m staying with my friend Marianne and her family including two older women from Kufunda who are helping Marianne and Paul with their twins.  The REOS office is located in the garden of this old home, and we had some design meetings this afternoon on the deck, with weavers and doves all around, and the sun beating down.  So right here, it’s peaceful and quiet and lovely, and I have no desire to leave this compound today.  This is not a city to wander in, and so it is one that embodies everything one expects of African life: an lovely extended family, a warm bird filled garden, a brooding and dangerous city, and a mixed multicultural landscape that would make even the most liberal Canadian heads spin.