question contained the words ‘former comrade’ no less than fifteen times, and with each mention of the phrase the entire gaggle of youth leaguers repeated the bounce-and-giggle routine. Their ‘questions’ hardly qualified as such; they were not of the type to which one would normally affix a question mark. The majority of people in the audience sympathised with Shilowa, however, and found the young protesters’ behaviour deplorable. Despite the shenanigans I got home that evening feeling inspired. I itched to be part of the new movement.
Perhaps because I always regretted missing the excitement of the early 1990s, having been too young to really appreciate what was happening, I have been looking for a repeat of the miracle. All I can remember of politics in the transition years is how my friends’ parents stocked up on canned food and paraffin, and how bored I was waiting in the queue when my parents took me along to the polling station to cast their vote in 1994. They voted in Jamestown, a small town on the outskirts of Stellenbosch, which, under the old regime, was designated a ‘coloured’ area. Obliviously ignorant of the magnitude of the event I sadly missed out on the elation that accompanied the experience for so many South Africans.
To be born and brought up in Stellenbosch in the eighties, as I was, didn’t make for the most racially diverse childhood. I can recall thinking how brave the first, and at that stage the only, coloured pupil in my historically white primary school was. In standard five I had to break up a fight between a white pupil and a coloured pupil, the former allegedly having called the latter a ‘hotnot’. The fact that it was the first time I’d heard that word, and that I found it more amusing than offensive, testifies to my childish naivety.
I grew up with little exposure to the ugly aspects of society. I cycled to school, played in the neighbourhood streets, went to Voortrekkers and Sunday school, and was given enough pocket money to buy sweets and go to the movies when I wanted to. I had a couple of bicycles stolen and our house was robbed a few times, but I never heard of anyone who was hijacked, held up, raped or murdered. I was raised in an open-minded household and my parents taught me to challenge stereotypes. I was only confronted with racism when my friends, who were all white, made racist jokes.
During high school, with the country changing around me, I started paying more attention to current affairs. I joined the school debating team and developed some of my own opinions, but still knew more about WP rugby than about the cabinet. I got along with the coloured pupils in my class, but never thought about inviting them over for weekends. I played a game of rugby with the farm workers on my friend’s wine farm once, but ran away laughing when the supporters started breaking bottles. I didn’t spend much time thinking about either race or politics.
I only became genuinely interested in these topics after returning from Melbourne, Australia, where I spent three years at university directly after high school, doing a degree in finance. When Australians asked me about the political situation in my home country, as they often did, I tended to paint a rosy picture. I dismissed racial tensions and ascribed the country’s problems to the economic disparities. White Australians are as racist as white South Africans, if not more, I used to argue. South Africa’s race problems are just more widely publicised.
Only upon my return home did I realise the discrepancy between that picture and reality, and start fretting about it. Far from being the reconciled people I described, South Africans from different race groups seemed permanently at odds with one another. Racial tension was everywhere: in public debates, in the media, in education, in business, in sport, you name it. Where most of my peers in Melbourne were colour blind, or at least pretended to be at risk of being vilified, the Stellenbosch students were often openly racist. It was an unpleasant eye-opener and a shock.
A year later I was in limbo before I planned to head abroad again and so decided to dedicate a few months to NGO work. This opened up a world to which I was previously oblivious, and which I was intrigued by. I held two jobs: one with TSiBA Education, a free university offering business degrees, and another with Impumelelo Innovations Award Trust, which rewards public sector projects based on their innovations. The latter required me to appraise government projects and recommend the good ones for the awards. My job was to do write-ups about previous winners and drive around looking for new ones.
The first project I evaluated was the Sexual Abuse Victim Empowerment, or SAVE. SAVE is situated in Observatory, Cape Town, and assists the state prosecutor in cases of sexual abuse involving intellectually disabled victims. Dealing with persons with an intellectual disability can be complicated, and their abuse cases used to go unheard because the prosecutor didn’t know how to approach them. Since SAVE was started, the number of these cases that reached the courts each year increased from two or three, to over a hundred. Furthermore, the conviction rate increased dramatically.
Further searches for innovative projects led me to the North West province, a region I had only driven through once or twice on my way to some holiday destination. I encountered a wide variety of projects, some of which were moderately successful while others failed spectacularly. The most inspirational was the Animal Feed & Medical Distributors Co-op (AFMD) in Mafikeng. Project manager Joseph Sebolecwe told me how he came up with the idea of supplying animal feed and medicine to subsistence farmers in the rural areas when he was a young and unemployed graduate. He approached the Department of Agriculture and received seed capital for the business. Three years later, AFMD had a wide client base over an area stretching a hundred kilometres in each direction and was growing into a sustainable business.
Another inspirational project was the Ikageleng Tshwaraganang ka Diatla Project in the Mokutu township outside Zeerust. The project was run by Florence Modisane, who used to be a local social worker. In 1999 she brought together a group of women from the community to fight the problem of drug-resistant tuberculosis. It started as a nursing group doing home-based care, but with the help of government funding, Ikageleng grew into a neat medical centre with 32 nurses, two food gardens, a soup kitchen, a crèche and even a laundry service. However, Ikageleng faced a reduction in government funding, and the results were visible with infrastructure falling apart. This was a problem for all these projects: once the government stopped paying, things deteriorated rapidly.
I also came across some terrible money wasting. A poultry and vegetable project in the rural Tlhatlagandyane Village, where I had to meet the tribal leader before being allowed in the village, bought a brand new tractor that no one knew how to drive, a computer without power and an abattoir with nothing to slaughter. Yet, the water pump was broken and the dam leaked. A medical care project in Lomanyaneny Village filled an entire hall with fancy hospital beds, even though consultations were always conducted at the patients’ homes. In both cases, the government agency responsible for the funding determined how the money should be spent without consulting the project managers. Project managers complained that they had to use up their budgets, even on useless things, otherwise the budgets would be cut the following year.
The projects had two things in common: heavy reliance on government funding and a dire lack of skills. There were no mentorship programmes to assist any of the project leaders – they all had to figure things out for themselves and learn from their mistakes. The consequences were most visible at Nkagisang, a land reform project outside Klerksdorp. On what was once a thriving farm, judging by the remnants of infrastructure, I found a few dozen discouraged beneficiaries sitting around with nothing to do. They complained that the government gave them the farm and then disappeared. They didn’t know what to plant where, how to manage livestock, where to sell their produce or how to maintain their equipment. All the machinery on the farm was totally dilapidated, the animals dead and the soil barren. The instigator of the land reform reportedly took a job in town and never visited again.
Impumelelo also organised conferences on service delivery issues, such as housing, water provision and job creation. At these conferences public servants were encouraged to share their ideas and learn from each others’ successes. My role was to arrange the facilities and click the mouse to change slides while speakers were presenting. Looking out over the audience, my impression was that attendees were usually more interested in the fancy accommodation (such as the Radisson Hotel in Cape Town) than in the discussions. Session attendance was usually poor, especially early in the morning and late in the afternoon. Yet the mints and writing pads on the tables would be gone by the end of the day. It seemed as if nothing came from