Made in South Africa

A Black Woman's Stories of Rage, Resistance and Progress

Lwando Xaso

• Publisher: Tracey McDonald Publishers
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781990931680
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Storia e teoria politica

Like so many of her generation, Lwando Xaso came of age alongside the beginnings and growth of South Africa's constitutional democracy. Her journey into adulthood was a radically different one from that of earlier generations, marked by hope that changing perceptions would usher in a new and free society.

Made in South Africa – A Black Woman's Stories of Rage, Resistance and Progress, is a vibrant collection of essays in which Lwando examines with incisive clarity some of the events that have shaped her experience of South Africa – a country with huge potential but weighed down by persistent racism and inequality, cultural appropriation, sexism and corruption, all legacies of a complicated history.

As a young lawyer intent on climbing the corporate ladder, Lwando's life's direction was changed by a personal experience of the oppressive capacity of a supposedly democratic government when it unjustly fired a close family friend and mentor from a senior government position. She found herself on his legal team and the turmoil the case created within her led her to further her studies in constitutional law, and to pick up her pen and share with a wider audience her views of what was happening in her beloved country.

Her outlook was further shaped by her experience of clerking at the Constitutional Court for Justice Edwin Cameron, which deepened her respect for the South African Constitution, and what it really means for a resilient people to strive continually to live up to its moral and legal standards.

Lwando's writing reflects her unflinching resolve to live according to the precepts of our groundbreaking Constitution and offers a challenge to all South Africans to believe in and achieve 'the improbable'.

PROGRESS

LESSONS FROM SIERRA LEONE

REFLECTION

During my studies at the University of Notre Dame, I had the opportunity to participate in an inter-disciplinary programme at its Business School, called ‘Business on the Front Lines’. It’s an MBA programme to examine the impact of business in societies affected by extreme poverty and conflict. It’s an extremely competitive programme which, unlike other courses, students have to apply for and, because of the limited number of places, not everyone who applies gets in. I had heard about the programme from an alumnus of Notre Dame, who had told me about its transformative effect on them. I applied for the programme, because it would offer me an opportunity to learn more about business, to interact with MBA students within the Business School and also to have the opportunity to travel to one of the countries that have partnered with the programme.

I was excited about being accepted into the programme. However, I did not know how demanding it would be. The classes were long and the teamwork in between classes was also quite demanding. I found that my second semester at Notre Dame was spent more at the Business School than at the Law School. Halfway through the programme, we were presented with the different countries to which we would be travelling and we had to rank them by our order of preference. The options were Sierra Leone, Rwanda, Guatemala, the Philippines and Nicaragua. I had expected myself to choose the Philippines as I had never been to Asia before. However, when I saw that Sierra Leone was on the list, I knew that’s where my heart wanted to go.

Fortunately, I was assigned the country of my first preference, Sierra Leone! I found myself in a team of six students who would now be ‘Team Sierra Leone’. We were tasked with working with several NGOs in Sierra Leone, dealing with its healthcare system. Prior to travelling to Sierra Leone, we had to do our research on its health system, and also on its historical context and the broader societal issues that the country faces today. We also had a number of telecons with our in-country partners to hear first-hand what the issues were.

I had never travelled to West Africa and was looking forward to a first-hand experience of a different culture and a different historical context to South Africa. I was hoping that this trip to Sierra Leone would lead to other opportunities to travel the rest of the African continent. However, I did have some concerns about travelling to Sierra Leone with some of my teammates. A couple of days before our trip our team had a dinner to discuss our travel plans and the in-country meetings that we had scheduled.

We realised that we were about to spend two weeks with one another in a foreign country and that this might lead to some conflict, so at the end of the dinner we each took turns to explain our travel habits, like whether we were morning or evening people and what was likely to annoy us, so that we could make sure to not step on one another’s toes. This was an important exercise because four of my teammates were white Americans and I was nervous that the nature of our work in Sierra Leone would make for uncomfortable conversations, especially in respect of how Africa is viewed, whether consciously or subconsciously.

So when it was my turn to express my thoughts and concerns about our pending trip, I said that I was a morning person, which meant that I’m usually high energy at the beginning of the day and tend to fade out in the evening. This was an important fact to express to a group of people that you’re travelling with, because if we know one another’s energy patterns, then we know when to make the best of each other’s minds and also to ensure that any slump in energy would not be interpreted as being moody.

I also made the point that I had no interest in taking tourist pictures with African children in Sierra Leone. Being African myself, a part of me did not see myself as an outsider and I would be pained if it was assumed that I was an American simply because I was travelling with an American group. I had seen so many images of well-meaning Americans travelling to Africa and proudly posting images of African children. This, to me, fed into the white saviour complex associated with these kinds of American educational programmes. Fortunately, my teammates understood my concern and were very respectful of my boundaries, and I respected theirs.

When we arrived in Sierra Leone, my teammates and I got straight to work. We had a number of very informative meetings at the United Nations and various social justice organisations dealing with health care. We met a lot of locals and we all pretty much fitted really well into our new context. I bonded with my teammates even more, because of how we all conducted ourselves towards each other and towards others while we were there. In all earnest, we wanted to do something meaningful and valuable, in partnership with the organisations that were already steeped in the subject matter.

At some point in the trip, came the dreaded moment. I remember a group of Sierra Leonean children coming up to my teammates, wanting to take pictures. These children were so excited and so adorable that I realised that in theory it was easy to say that I would refrain from what I considered to be stereotypical ‘saviour-optics’. My teammates gave me a look as if they were asking for my permission to take the pictures. The answer was pretty obvious. There was no way they could have said ‘no’ and risk rejecting children.

That moment taught me so much about giving people the benefit of the doubt and that those young children were exercising their own agency and wanted to take the images, and who was I to judge that? Programmes like ‘Business on the Front Lines’ is why I think an overseas education is worthwhile, because these schools have the resources to design an education that is real, practical and impactful beyond the theorising in the classroom. It was an unforgettable experience.

One of the lasting impressions that Sierra Leone left with me was that I felt completely safe while I was there. This was something that I treasured, because I rarely feel safe in the city I love, Johannesburg. My sense was that Sierra Leoneans are not violent people and perhaps this has much to do with the violence that they witnessed during their civil war. However, I did notice that a lot of Sierra Leoneans were still traumatised by that civil war.

I noticed that almost all of the service providers that we came across, whether at restaurants or offices, stuck to a very rigid checklist whenever they interacted with us. For example, when we checked out of our hotels, we noticed that almost everyone followed the same check-out routine. This was sometimes frustrating, because we thought that the check-out process could be expedited and, believe me, we tried to make suggestions on how it could be shortened. One of my teammates commented that a lot of people in Sierra Leone were not critical thinkers. I was taken aback by this because I thought that for a recently traumatised citizenry, having a check-list must have anchored them and provided them with some kind of certainty in how they moved about their day. Anything outside of routine may have meant chaos and unpredictability which I imagine, post a violent conflict, was something to be avoided.

This essay is a reflection of my time in Sierra Leone. I hope to visit again sometime in the future so that I can gauge how things have changed since our Business on the Front Lines trip.

THE LIGHT OF SIERRA LEONE

2013

‘I live in the poorest district, of the poorest country on the poorest continent.’

These words were from a community member I was interviewing in Kailahun, Sierra Leone. This gentleman must have been about 65 years old. The moment stands out for me more than any other on my trip to Sierra Leone because it was the only moment where I could feel what it truly meant to be invisible and forgotten.

I was emotional because the dire state of affairs that this old man described would probably not change in his lifetime. I thought I had seen poverty, but what I saw in Sierra Leone is a poverty that should no longer exist in this day and age. It reminded me of the images that I had seen on television when I was younger – the poverty that We Are the World was sung about. I saw children wasting away right in front of us because of hunger. These children with abnormally distended bellies were, despite their malnourished state, also labourers carrying chopped wood on their tiny heads, selling fruit to passers-by and fetching water in buckets bigger than they were. Why was this happening in 2013, at a time when almost every country in the world had ratified the United Nation’s Children’s Rights Convention? Why was this happening in Sierra Leone, a country rich in valuable minerals and now oil? Why was this happening in a country with so many NGOs? Why was this happening in a country receiving so much aid?

A 2011 United Nations report stated that the level of poverty in Sierra Leone was still very high. Absolute poverty had fallen from around 70 per cent after the war, to around 60 per cent by 2007. Although the malnutrition ratio fell from 31 per cent in 2005 to 21 per cent in 2008, progress towards reducing by half the proportion of people suffering from hunger by 2015 is still a daunting challenge.

Another moment that I cannot shake was our meeting at UNICEF. I noticed a poster on the wall which was promoting good hygiene and the hand washing initiative. The poster was of a little black boy with a smile on his face washing his hands diligently. How could it be that in 2013 foreigners were still coming to Africa to help people wash their hands?

This was unbelievable to me. Is the issue that we Africans do not know the importance of hygiene? I doubt it. It is a well-known fact that hand washing is part of African culture as it is in many cultures across the world. We went to a restaurant in Kenema and after our meal a woman came to our table with a wash basin for us to dip our hands in and she dried them off with a hand towel. This is what I had seen so many times in many African homes. I will venture my opinion and say that the sense of hygiene is there, but it could be it is sanitisation that people do not have access to. So it’s not really about hand washing but about ensuring access to clean water and soap – that is what needs to be fixed.

All these observations in Sierra Leone made me think of economists Paul Collier and Dambisa Moyo. The people of Sierra Leone form part of the bottom billion who are living and dying in 14th century conditions. Even though Paul Collier does not list the bottom billion countries in the book of the same name because he does not want to stigmatise them, he does list them in a later book so that they can garner the world’s attention, and Sierra Leone appears on that list. Paul Collier stated that Africa was the core of the bottom billion predicament.

My experience in Sierra Leone was a roller coaster of emotions and I could not tell if I would get off the ride exhilarated to be learning from a country that had survived so much o...