16 Institute for Justice and Reconciliation
Southern Africa South Africa
of International Affairs (SAIIA), and a paper on ‘The African Union and UN Security Council: Tensions in Peace and Security Policy’ at a seminar organised by the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung. In May, the SARB Project – together with the Rethinking Race and Affirmative Action in the United States and South Africa Project – co-hosted a successful public dialogue on the topic of ‘Employment Equity: Ticking Boxes or True Transformation?’ The panel attracted well-known and established speakers, whose inputs were republished in the second issue of the SARB newsletter in 2011. Panellist, Kashif Wicomb later wrote to thank the IJR for inviting him to participate, ‘and for the absolutely professional post-event follow-up and capturing of the discussions’. An Employment Equity Forum, which was set up on the SARB blog to continue this debate, received 196 hits within several months of the event. During the same month, the Community Healing Project hosted a group of practitioners and policy-makers of Northern Ireland’s post-conflict reconciliation process. The group, led by academics from the University of Ulster, discussed the latest trends from the 2010 Reconciliation Barometer, the Community Healing Impact Evaluation Report and challenges to reconciliation. Channels for cross-learning between the South African and Northern Ireland contexts have emerged and future sharing of insights for the development of educational material on post-conflict community peace-building initiatives will be developed. In October, two further events provided a platform for stakeholders to share insights towards policy processes. These events related to a joint project with the Club de Madrid and Institute for Democracy in Africa (IDASA). The project, titled ‘Learning to Walk Together’, is aimed at finding new ways to conduct national dialogue at a time when the South African public discourse is becoming increasingly angry and polarised. The first event was a teleconference between stakeholders in Cape Town and Johannesburg to discuss the potential parameters within which such a project could be conducted, as well as possible partici-
Paul Mokoena began his history teaching career in 1990 and is currently a senior teacher at Potchefstroom Secondary School in Mohadin – a previously predominantly ‘Indian’ school which today draws its staff from across the traditional divides and is attended by learners from mainly black-African, Indian and coloured communities. During an educator oral history training session, Mokoena reflected on his prior participation in the Inkosi Albert Luthuli Young Historians’ Competition: ‘You will never know what potential learners have until you pose a challenge to them. All I had to do was to throw up the opportunity to them and guide them. The investigating skills they acquired in the project could also apply to other subjects like physical science. When I saw pictures of Makwateng, I became very emotional. Some of the houses looked like houses in Orlando East and in Atteridgeville. I said to myself this must have been a very beautiful township [...] my parents lived there before they were removed [...] so it was just an experience out of this world. This kind of project [Potchefstroom Schools’ Oral History Project] is needed to capture the history of our local community so that learners can know that even in their own community there are heroes. [Though] we acknowledge our national heroes, we also have our local heroes.’
pants and strategies to implement it. The second event was a scoping exercise, during which opinion-leaders from the Western Cape reflected on opportunities for, and obstacles to, more honest and inclusive conversations about the diverse challenges facing South Africa. The content and tone of the discussions highlighted a number of issues that will be incorporated in further conversations to be conducted elsewhere in the country during 2012. The general feedback to the project and its content was positive. The Institute’s Living Reconciliation series, which was launched in 2010, has contributed to serious and meaningful debates