Building a New South Africa: One Conversation at a Time

By David Thelen and Karie L. Morgan

Once a thriving, multiracial community, the Sophiatown suburb of Johannesburg was home to many famous artists, musicians, and poets. It was also a place where residential apartheid was first put into practice with forced removals, buildings bulldozed, and the construction of new, cheap housing for white public employees. David Thelen and Karie L. Morgan facilitate conversations among today's Sophiatown residents about how they share spaces, experiences, and values to raise and educate their children, earn a living, overcome crime, and shape their community for the good of all. As residents reflect on the past and the challenges they face in the future, they begin to work together to create a rich, diverse, safe, and welcoming post-Mandela South Africa.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Release date: Jun 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9780253017901

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meetings.

Introduction to the US Edition

by David Thelen and Karie L. Morgan

In 1996 the American magazine Newsweek asked noted South African writer Andre Brink to explain a bizarre paradox that South Africa seemed to present to the outside world. The occasion was the opening of public hearings by the new Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), at which perpetrators and victims of human rights abuses gave often-nightmarish accounts of their experiences in the struggle that ended in the country’s first democratic elections in 1994. The hearings encapsulated the paradox. On the one hand, witnesses testified to scenes of incredible brutality and to the oppression that led the rest of the world to boycott South Africa as a pariah state, calling its apartheid policy a crime against humanity. The oppressors were so impervious to reason and outside pleas that it was inconceivable to most observers that the two sides could ever make or accept peace. Yet on the other hand, witnesses were testifying before a commission that embodied the most dramatic commitment to reconciliation ever made by a nation wanting to come to terms with legacies of a conflicted past. Remarkably, the struggle for liberation seemed to have ended in a commitment to reconciliation. It made no sense. So the peaceful transfer of power accompanied by widespread official encouragement of reconciliation was widely hailed both within and outside the country as the South African miracle.

The commitment to reconciliation, most observers said, was inseparable from two extraordinary men, both Nobel Peace Prize winners, who had shaped the transition from apartheid to democracy, Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu. At Mandela’s death, Zoe Wicomb reminded the New Yorker’s readers he was nothing less than an icon of reconciliation.¹ His greatest achievement, concluded Richard Stengel in Time, is surely the creation of a democratic, nonracial South Africa and preventing that beautiful country from falling vinto a terrible, bloody civil war, which most people expected.² Tutu preached and embodied the gospel of reconciliation in opposition to ‘normal’ human impulses toward revenge, summed up the New Yorker’s Tina Rosenberg.³ The explanation for the paradox was that South Africa was blessed by two remarkable leaders. Andre Brink saw the paradox quite differently. What was remarkable to him, as he told Newsweek’s readers, was not the undeniable fact that two extraordinary individuals did unusual things. The remarkable thing was that, as they waited in long lines to vote in 1994, millions of ordinary South Africans embraced the ordinary everyday activity of talking casually with strangers about things that were important in their daily lives, their children, their families. Talking casually with strangers might seem to have nothing to do with miracles, wrote Brink, yet the experience was miraculous. For the first time in our history, our common experiences as South Africans became more important than the rifts and divisions in our society, as we discovered that an ordinary, everyday life was indeed possible in a community that had never known the meaning of normality. With this, South Africans demonstrated that they were able to turn the banal itself into a site of magic, the everyday into the miraculous.⁴

Though we are uncomfortable with hyperbole and even the very notion of miracles, and though many South Africans approached these everyday interactions cautiously, we hope this book illustrates something of the nature and consequences of everyday talk that Brink described as it unfolded in one South African community. This book explores how ordinary activities had extraordinary consequences, how through everyday talk and small gestures of neighborliness, strangers brought a community into being and in the process became actors in imagining and striving to make a new future for their country.

Sophiatown Project Community Meeting, 23 October 2010

Reconciliation, so prominently presented at the national level by leaders like Mandela and Tutu and structures like the TRC, took quite different shapes at the local level – often as an unplanned consequence – as people went about the everyday activity of getting to know and live with neighbors. To enable readers to explore for themselves how ordinary talk had extraordinary consequences, we structured this book around transcriptions of conversations among residents of the Johannesburg neighborhood of Sophiatown between 2009 and 2012. The conversations were part of an open-ended collaboration between Sophiatown residents and University of Johannesburg facilitators that began as an initiative for residents to explore what they liked and disliked about life in the community and how they could make it better respond to their needs. This introduction is not the place to describe the different kinds of challenges the project encountered, to narrate a history of methodological trial and error, or to reflect on our roles as facilitators. Suffice it here to say that it was only after scores of conversations that some residents and facilitators concluded that the give and take of open-ended conversation, not the formal topics conversations ostensibly began with, had been the most exciting – and mysterious – feature in bringing a community and a new history into being.

That conclusion had been so rewarding, so unexpected, that residents and facilitators decided to share it with other South Africans by making a book around the theme of how conversation brought new values to life. These transcripts are an ideal vehicle for turning the frequent call for multiple perspectives into a living reality.

The Look and Legacies of Sophiatown

We selected Sophiatown as the site for a community engagement project because of both its apparent ordinariness as a suburb that might be found in any metropolitan area of South Africa and its unique significance to the formation and content of South African racial identities.

First-time visitors to Sophiatown are usually struck by how quiet, ordinary, and suburban it feels considering it is only three miles northwest of downtown Johannesburg. Driving around the paved roads of this mile-square community they often notice the high pastel-colored concrete walls (sometimes capped with electric wires) that separate the mostly ranch-style homes from the street and from neighbors. Visitors on foot can mark their progress along a street as a swelling chorus of barking dogs alerts their owners that danger may be approaching. Behind the walls, many houses have the lawn, the garden, the patio, and even the modest swimming pool typical of people who enjoy living outdoors in this moderate climate, but visitors rarely see the residents except in the evening when they return from work, open the gate and pull into the carport, close the gate, and disappear into the house. In this middle-class community, people generally keep to themselves in ways they discuss in this book.

Seeing Sophiatown today, it is hard to imagine that this ordinary-looking community is the same storied place whose history most South Africans know well.

Sophiatown became world famous in the 1940s and 1950s as a multiracial community that gave birth to arts like poetry and jazz as well as to protest politics. Indeed, it was perhaps the most perfect experiment in non-racial community living ever, asserted Sophiatown writer Bloke Modisane, even as he recounted the poverty and violence, the feverish intensity of Sophiatown life.⁵ It was a place where myths overshadowed realities so strongly that nobody can write the real story of Sophiatown . . . the magic and wonderment of the place, recalled another local writer, Don Matera.⁶ Its appearance to outsiders as a slum and its reputation for multiracial vibrancy made Sophiatown an obvious target in the late 1950s and early 1960s for the National Party to first put into practice its new policy of residential apartheid. By bulldozing Sophiatown’s structures to the ground, forcibly removing its 65,000 residents to new locations that were segregated by race, building new housing exclusively for lower-middle-class white workers, and renaming the place Triomf to proclaim the triumph of its ideology and practice of white supremacy and racial segregation, the National Party turned Sophiatown into a place that epitomized apartheid.

Finally, in the 1990s, the new democratic government desegregated Triomf and restored its evocative original name. Indeed, some writers presented the remembered Sophiatown of the 1940s and 1950s as the model for what a new nonracial South Africa would look like. To American readers of the Nation, Mark Gevisser explained that the craving for reconciliation in the new South Africa "is manifest in the success of the revival at Johannesburg’s legendary Market Theatre, of the play Sophiatown, timed to coincide with the [first democratic] election. . . . The play is set in the Johannesburg neighborhood of Sophiatown in the 1950s, a much-mythologized place and time of racial harmony."⁷

But there are only faint traces today of this legendary place of the past. There is a small city plaque on Toby Street to mark where an African National Congress (ANC) president lived in the 1940s and one on Ray Street where an Anglican priest led a fight against forced removals and apartheid. With vivid paintings on a fence on Edward Street, the Trevor Huddleston Memorial Centre has tried to evoke the vibrant days of the original Sophiatown as well as the tragedy of the forced removals. On Victoria Street, the community’s public school is named for General Christiaan De Wet, the popular Boer commander in the South African War. Its name was proudly bestowed by Afrikaners in the Triomf days and retained by an ANC regime that envisioned De Wet as a kindred spirit who had also led a fight against [British] colonialism and imperialism. But these are traces of pasts most Sophiatown residents either know and care little about or would rather forget.

Imagining New Ways of Living

With desegregation in the 1990s, Coloureds, Blacks, and Indians, along with migrants from such diverse places as Zimbabwe and Australia, moved into previously all-white Triomf.⁸ Attracted by its central location, moderate housing prices, and relative quietness and safety from crime, residents found themselves living next to people from different racial and ethnic backgrounds. Indeed, Sophiatown soon became one of the most diverse communities in the country.

From the project’s start, however, most residents made clear that they were less interested in stories about what happened on Sophiatown’s (or Triomf’s) streets in the past than in the challenges they were facing in the neighborhood today. Instead of building from the community’s past, current residents – wherever they came from and however long they had lived here – constructed a fresh perspective on the place grounded in their experiences in the present. They made that new framework around everyday challenges of creating spaces in which they would feel free to reveal their personal experiences and observations in the presence of strangers and at the same time be comfortable enough to engage neighbors in shaping individual expressions into a shared framework to build a better community or new nation. To facilitate this process we adapted the block meeting format from the field of community organizing.⁹ In meetings that embodied the give-and-take of everyday conversation, residents began to get to know each other and imagine how they could relate more fully to their neighbors and in the process generate a more responsive sense of community.

As residents talked about what they liked and disliked about living in Sophiatown, they were often surprised to discover that individuals from different backgrounds shared their conclusion that isolation posed a more pressing everyday challenge than race – or at least an easier one to address. Regardless of background, they all talked about how they retreated behind barriers that kept people apart. These were not just the legal barriers of apartheid or high walls, electrified fences, and snarling dogs but also fears, of muggers and crime, to be sure, but also of people who looked different and who they feared might be judging their behavior. These suspicions were grounded in past conflicts and left them feeling as if they were walking on pins and needles, as one put it. Isolation is what has crippled us people of Sophiatown, Desmond Sheik concluded: People in Sophiatown are thirsty for conversation and for social connections (171, 172).

What encouraged them most was to learn that neighbors from all backgrounds contrasted their present sense of isolation unfavorably with memories of growing up in apartheid-era communities in which, regardless of race, they remembered that people knew and cared for each other. Until these conversations began, they discovered, apartheid had prevented them from knowing that basically all communities valued the same things in their neighbors. All participants wanted to turn strangers into neighbors and isolation into community, where once again people knew and cared for each other

Regardless of skin color, they further concluded that government did not hear or understand or address these needs. As a result, they concluded: [Change] starts with us. We live here, as Jackey explained: If we want to make this a better place (148). What could they do to create a place where people of all backgrounds cared for each other, where they could turn strangers into neighbors who could help them meet needs?

It was only over time that both residents and facilitators came to see how, in deciding to greet a stranger on the street, to ask to borrow a cup of sugar or a lawn-mower, to invite neighbors to a barbecue or ask them to keep an eye on their homes when they went on vacation, they were advancing reconciliation, building a new South Africa. That was the extraordinary consequence of ordinary acts of conversation. They learned to turn strangers into neighbors one encounter at a time. What drove the vision onward was precisely the recognition of difficulties in the way of making this a new way of everyday life.

Individual Acts Make a New South Africa

As they turned yearning to overcome a personal sense of isolation into a shared desire to get to know their neighbors as individuals, many residents began to feel that the stakes of getting to better know their neighbors were nothing less than a responsibility to facilitate the making of a new South Africa. They saw themselves as a particular kind of historical actor for whom the stakes of small acts of greeting and sharing – what they had talked about in block meetings – made them part of a larger thrust toward reconciliation among groups apartheid had literally kept apart.

The actual label of history maker may have been hard for them (or us) to recognize because history often felt somehow removed from everyday life. In Making History, Richard Flacks had introduced this dichotomy: On the one hand, there is action directed at sustaining of everyday life; on the other, there is action directed at the making of history.¹⁰ The collective struggle for the power to make a different national future – what Flacks and most understood as history – imposed tremendous demands that often forced individuals to abandon or even betray people or things they valued in their daily lives. Indeed, those who had fought to overthrow apartheid and create a more just society, for example, saw themselves as making history in a collective struggle that imposed harsh choices that often led them to pay a heavy price in their personal life and opportunities for personal fulfillment, wrote Raymond Suttner: The struggle made demands that ensure that what is called ‘normal life’ was seldom possible.¹¹

For Sophiatown residents, by contrast, the role of historical actor emerged from how they had together come to experience and want to enrich everyday normal life and relationships with people around them. Now that we do know each other, said Judi Bennett at a Good Street meeting, we need to take responsibility for our own area, be a bit more proactive (4). What made residents’ conversations in this project so explosive, what made them such creative historical actors, was that in the give-and-take across cultural lines, they constructed a way of thinking and acting – getting to know their neighbors – and that by enriching relations with individual neighbors, they profoundly advanced the inner experience of reconciliation. They were relieved to feel and discover from others that even in segregated apartheid communities, people had developed similar ideas of what it meant to be a good neighbor and that people from different backgrounds yearned to recover that earlier experience of community. Their active and creative contribution to making history grew from their desire to build strong relations with neighbors. They became creative history makers when they imagined greeting one another, helping a neighbor raise a child or halt a crime, or borrowing food or lending a tool or keeping an eye on a neighbor’s home.

Reflecting on how everyday interactions were part of making a new history and a new South Africa, Willie van der Sandt may have best expressed how this new history needed to differ from the old. The new history would not be the old apartheid reality in which there was my history and your history. The new history would need to be our history, what they were making in block meetings as they tried to recognize and meet each other as neighbors. Focusing on what was ordinary in their daily lives, as the writer Njabulo Ndebele had anticipated, enabled them to humanize each other and thereby to recognize what they shared, how they could combine their different experiences into a single history.¹²

Conversation Makes Community

The project unexpectedly centered on everyday conversation that, as human beings, we easily recognized but whose capacity to transform the ordinary into the extraordinary we had trouble specifying as scholars. How, we wondered, could conversation itself bring community and history, to say nothing of a miracle, into being? And why did conversation work in this way at this time and place?

Stepping back, it was clear that in the 1970s and 1980s, developments in many disciplines simultaneously sought to shift the line of sight on core processes of culture and history from institutions, structures, and master narratives to how individuals experienced their lives and made relationships. From this new perspective, individuals made their own worlds in the interplay between larger processes and their individual actions. In place of stable and coherent developments analyzed by detached observers and presented in a single authorial voice, the new perspectives depicted realities as open-ended, contested, fluid, and experienced from multiple perspectives and conveyed by diverse voices. Finally, and most relevantly for this project, these developments paralleled the emergence in social psychology and literary criticism of conversation studies to explore how conversation could transform individuals from isolated individuals into active participants who could, by engaging others in conversation, recreate social structures and reshape communities. The conversations reproduced in this book present multiple voices engaged in open-ended discussion and, better still, reproduce the flow as they negotiated what they shared and disagreed about.

Conversation, scholars observed, begins with the challenge that whereas individuals may experience the world privately and thus construct personal definitions, their social interaction forces them to accommodate to a public and shared frame of reference, as Ionna Dimitracopoulou wrote.¹³ As if characterizing the conversations in this book, Benjamin R. Barber argued that conversation is essential for making a strong democracy precisely because of its very creativity, its variety, its openness and flexibility, its subtlety and complexity, its eloquence, its potential for empathy and affective expression, and its deeply paradoxical (some would say dialectical) character that displays man’s full nature as a purposive, interdependent, and active being.¹⁴ Instead of an opportunity for each individual to present, in turn, a fully worked-out narrative of personal experience or statement of opinion, residents created in these conversations a process that affirmed Mikhail Bakhtin’s vision that to live means to engage in dialogue, to question, to listen, to answer, to agree because the living word by its very nature wants to be heard, understood, and answered.¹⁵ Janet illustrated this expectation of a response, the open-ended, ongoing rhythm of conversation, when she addressed other participants at a meeting: If I tell you a story about my experience it might stimulate your ideas (59).

The Sophiatown conversations followed what Martin Malone characterized as an emergent quality which develops through a tentative, sometimes extremely subtle, probing interchange among actors [that] can reshape the form and content of the interaction. Specifically, after one person speaks, a second speaker’s utterance displays an analysis of the prior speaker’s turn and thus permits the first speaker to determine whether (or how) he or she was understood. . . . Conversations, then, allow an immediate display of understanding, or correction in the case of misunderstanding, upon which ‘joint action’ is built. Participants attended closely to how others responded to their observations and adapted those responses to their reading of that person It is conversational talk that directly or indirectly tells others who we are, how we see the situation we are in, and how we want to be treated. . . . It is in these routines of ‘just talking’ that selves are created, maintained, negotiated, and changed. A central feature of their conversations was, as Erving Goffman observed about face-to-face relationships more broadly, a vulnerability to physical and psychic assault, and an awareness of risks and potentialities in treatment of and by others.¹⁶

Through this dynamic, unfolding process participants in Sophiatown conversations came to construct a role and context they shared with others. "Genuine dialogue is a turning together in conversation to create a social space – a betweenness – in which personal opinion and ideologies are suspended and wherein persons conjoin in community to search for new meaning and understanding," explained Bela Banathy and Patrick M. Jenlink.¹⁷ Put another way, conversation enabled individuals to engage different experiences and perspectives in such a way as to prevent difference from leading to conflict and violence. Through give and take they created a single whole in a process Michel de Certeau explained: Verbal productions in which the interlacing of speaking positions weaves an oral fabric without individual owners, creations of a communication that belongs to no one.¹⁸ Or, as John Dewey put it in less open-ended terms, communication is a process of sharing experience till it becomes a common possession.¹⁹

By bringing a community into being conversation could generate glimpses that enable a transcendence of existing social systems.²⁰ In their give-and-take, individuals might imagine new ways of relating to each other, but the potential of everyday talk to be transformative, to say nothing of miraculous, was shaped at least in part by exposure of many participants to larger events, contexts, and discourses. Live televised and radio coverage of TRC testimonies by and conversations among victims and perpetrators of gross human rights violations between 1996 and 2000 attracted the largest television audiences in South African history and in response generated conversations in homes, offices, bars – wherever South Africans gathered. Suddenly the South Africans were talking to one another, observed novelist Ivan Vladislavic: They wouldn’t shut up.²¹ The striking thing about these conversations, observed Antjie Krog, the South African Broadcasting Corporation anchor of this live coverage on radio, was that most of the feelings, ideas and perceptions that prompted the carving of a South African space where truth could be told and heard, and reconciliation helped along, never went beyond the small groups – the many two- and threesomes and intimate gatherings – that discussed the Truth Commission.²² It was precisely in these intimate spaces, observed TRC psychologist Paul Haupt, that South Africans weighed the TRC’s challenge to reconciliation, where they carried on conversations (such as the ones in this book) about the everyday challenges of working out how people from different groups could live together.²³

But for individuals to be comfortable carrying conversation with family and friends into small group meetings with strangers, those conversations needed to feel like what made everyday talk so inviting and natural. Because everyday talk is so familiar, flexible, open-ended, so exquisitely responsive to the dynamics of a moment, people were comfortable expressing candid thoughts and asking each other politically incorrect and risky questions. Its spontaneous, informal, interactive rhythms provided the means, even the model, for residents to imagine and make a community and history. When Rene Lombardi arrived late at a Bertha Street group meeting and was asked for her observation on a touchy subject, her mother reassured her that she could speak candidly: It’s just talking, she explained (51). This very give and take of talk, sharing and comparing experiences and frustrations, provided the process through which residents contextualized their lives and generated a shared history around greeting, lending, borrowing, visiting – around just talking.²⁴

Widening the Focus from Sophiatown

The quest to turn strangers into neighbors in Sophiatown and South Africa paralleled similar quests throughout the urbanizing world. When migrants first came to cities like Johannesburg, Manchester, or Chicago in search of jobs, they often settled in places where people looked like them, spoke the same language, and practiced the same religion in communities that were extensions of places they left behind: Little Irelands; Italians in Buenos Aires and New York, Chinese in San Francisco and Vancouver and Lima. Within these homogeneous communities people developed their expectations of others as neighbors. Although apartheid was an extreme and anachronistic case of enforcing socially homogeneous communities around race and ethnicity, ethnic homogeneity was sustained