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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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.
The vacation in Hawaii has ended for me and I’m now somewhere over the middle of the United States on the third leg of a four leg journey that sees me flying from Hilo to Honolulu to Los Angeles to New York to Johannesburg. I arrive in South Africa Monday morning in time to recover and help design and deliver and Art of Participatory Leadership workshop with friends from REOS Social Innovation. It’s exciting to be heading to South Africa, the birthplace of my wife, and therefore one of the ancestral homelands of my kids. Exciting to be working with Marianne Knuth and her team as well, and I’m interested in how the Art of Participatory Leadership and the art of harvesting unfolds in a multicultural African context. Expecting lots of learning as usual and I’ll blog and harvest as is possible.
So, inflight wireless, homeopathic letlag remedies and movies keep me going. Interested to see what recovery from a 12 hour time change will be like!
Today, the new moon rises, a time of aupicious beginnings, especially coming so close to the winter solstice. These are important moments in Nuu-Cha-Nulth culture, and the times are important in Nuu-Chah-Nulth history. Last month, five Nuu-Chah-Nulth tribes won a landmark court case that gave them the right to sell the fish that they catch. Not on an industrial scale mind you, but on a scale big enough to create small local commercially viable fisheries for communities that desperately need both the work and the reconnection to the sea. Moreover, the courta case declared this as an Aboriginal right, a significant ruling for coastal First Nations in general but for the Nuu-Chah-Nulth in particular.
All of this leads to a time when participatory leadership is needed to seize the opportunity of building culture and community back and doing real, powerful and grounded marine use planning. So today was a good day to get to work.
We begun with 20 minutes of Warrior of the Heart practice, introducing the concept of irime, entering in, joining energies with an attacker and helping them lead a situation to peace. This check in this morning was a powerful reminder to some about the way their work as hosts needs to change, to be able to stand in the fire of aggressive energy and work with it. Fisheries and marine use planning is full of passion and the work these folks will be doing will not be easy. But the passion that drives the aggressive fight for rights and allocations can be used also to build and heal community, and if we enter into that space well, grounded and ready and knowing a little bit, we can do something with that energy.
So today we heard a little about the court case and then we spent some time learning about the seven helpers with this harvest as a result:
From this morning’s sessionshort piece on designing meetings: Four groups of questions to ask before conducting any meeting, to help you choose a good way to get what you need:
BE PRESENT* How will we bring people together in a way that invites them to be present? * How do we make people comfortable to share from their heart and listen together for wisdom and learning?
KNOW YOUR HARVEST * What do we want to take away from this meeting? In what form? (notes? graphics? photos? video? audio?) * How will we use what we gather from the meeting?
HAVE A GOOD QUESTION * What question(s) could we ask that would invite contributions from everyone?
LISTENING PIECE * What is a listening tool that helps us have enough time for people to make their contributions and hear each other? * What kinds of activities and exercises can we use for people to explore content together and provide their own thoughts on our question?
If you use this checklist as a way of organizing your thoughts before a meeting, it will help you to stay focused and to ensure that everything you do is tied to the purpose of the meeting.
Nice…a basic set of planning guidelines for any conversation that keeps us focused on the harvest, and keeps us conscious about process.
After lunch we took the advice of our Elder Levi and the participants went out on the land to think about their work going into the community. This was the time to do a little oosumich, connecting with themselves and presencing the future that starts next week when they return to their communities. When they returned, we went into a really beautiful World Cafe around two questions that Laura and Norinne cracked. The first question was an appreciative question about a time when community was truly engaged. The second question, which we did two rounds on, was on question we could ask to bring community together around marine use planning.
The harvest from this was great, a real set of tools and ideas for them to use when they go home to start the conversation.
And sweet practice this evening. Bruce Lucas put on a potlatch DVD and some of us played Scrabble while Nuu-chah-Nulth tunes echoed through our dining space. Two or three kids played while we feasted on chicken, salmon and some great vegetable dishes prepared by our local caterer. This groups is really gelling, and becoming fast friends. They are tooling up on facebook and Skype to stay together as they move into this work seperately.
Tonight I can hear some geese flying overhead, moving south on the warm winds that have come in. The rain has stopped and the surf still pounds, the ever present sound of sae and land meeting, creating one another out of their shared conversation.
Tsawalk indeed.
Writing from Tofino, on the west coast of Vancouver Island which is about as far west as you can go without leaving North America. I’m here this week to run an Art of Hosting training with a number of community coordinators for 14 Nuu-Chah-Nulth communities around Clayoquot, Barkley and Kyuquot Sounds. We’re going to be learning together about methods for community engagement and participatory leadership and all of it based very deeply in the concept of Tsawalk (from the Nuu-Chah-Nulth principle of “heshook ish tsawalk” meaning “everything is one.”)
Last night I drove out here across the spine of Vancouver Island, from Departure Bay on the east side, through Port Alberni and along the shore of Sproat Lake, through the pass and down to the west coast. It’s a landscape of high mountains, big trees, big clearcuts and huge beaches. Everything is scaled so big that you can’t help feel small and humbled in this landscape. And to beat it all, last night I chased the sun across the island and it beat me to the open Pacific. By the time I made the turn for Tofino it was pitch dark and the sky was ablaze with stars and the Geminid meteor showers littered the heavens with fireballs and frequent streaks of light.
The first time I ever cam to BC, in 1989, I came here, or more precisely, I stayed a week in Heshquiaht, on the north edge of Clayoquot Sound, visiting with my friend Sennen Charleson and his family. Sennen died a few years ago in a road accident in northern BC, and I can feel his presence here in land from which he spent many years in exile, but which always called him strongly. There is a riotous complexity to the rainforests of the west coast, and a presence unlike anywhere else on earth. Everything is quiet, knowing that you cannot make more noise than a storm from the ocean or the clatter of rain through the canopy. Human noises disappear here, like a the ripples from a pebble tossed into surf.
I’m excited to be designing a three day learning experience here with some apprenticing mates, Norinne Messer and Laura Loucks. We are using the framework of tsawalk for our work together, a concept that is deeply rooted in the Nuu-Cha-Nulth worldview and that influences everything from resource management to spiritual ceremony to the role of community. It is forming the basis of a unique partnership that will produce a marine use plan for Clayoquot and Barkley Sounds, and over the next few days, we will look at how tsawalk informs our work with communities, influences design choices for community engagement and self-development.
One of the processes we will be using is based on the Nuu-Cha-Nulth spiritual practice of “oosumich” which is a form of prayer and self-knowledge that helps us to access knowledge from the interior worlds of spiritual source, individual persoanlity and community. It is a form of investigative methodology that is complimentary to science, which examines and makes sense of the external world. Working together with these methods, we can come to a holistic understanding of the world, a practical expression of tsawalk. Oosumich is a spiritual practice, intended to connect with the spiritual aspects of the world that we can also understand materially. Oosumich itself is a secret and a scared practice, but what we know of it can be used to work in leadership learning and process design.
Some of the basic values that are involved in the expression of tsawalk are aphey (kindness), isaak (respect) and he-xwa (balance). As I sit here designing today, I am thinking very carefully about how these three basic show up in hosting work. Some of my preliminary thoughts are:
aphey
- being helpful for the common good (“hupee-ee-aulth”)
- paying attention to good relations and increasing more of them (an appreciative approach to growing community)
- ask for what you need, offer what you can (PeerSpirit Circle principles that apply to Nuu-Chah-Nulth life from the way in which people help each other with work, food gathering and preparation and ceremony)
isaak
- every voice has it’s place. When we hear a voice of dissent or confusion, it is not out place to judge it, but rather to figure out how it is related to the whole. If tsawalk is the principles, there can be nothing outside of that, and so all voices have a place.
- all creation has common origin and we pay respect to that common origin by acknowledging the relationships that are present in the world.
he-xwa
- balance comes from having a core, which can be a purpose or a solid centre or a ground
- the world is a constant balance between energies that create and those that destroy. Balance is not a static point in time, but a dynamic practice. We have to learn to be sensitive to imbalances both in the external world and in the internal world. Where there is too much red tide, people notice, and they know it means something is out of balance with the marine environment. When there is too much chaos in a meeting, it means that people are confused and more order and clarity has to be found.
All of these ideas form the basis for some teaching, for some play and learning. I’m thrilled to be here.