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South Africa institute seeks to heal apartheid wounds
By MAGGIE I. JARUZEL
Even though Nkosana Mkhize never lived under South Africa’s apartheid system as an adult, he still carries haunting memories of the things he experienced as a child and teenager during that period of legalized segregation.
“It’s not easy to see people dying. If you go to sleep, these pictures will come to you unless you deal with it,” said Mkhize, 29, who lived in the segregated township of Soweto during his adolescent and teenage years.
“There must be an opportunity to share your pain. If you choose to hide your issues, you are bottling up poison and that poison can kill you.
“I think our violence is so high in this country because there are many people carrying emotional scars. There’s a lot of bottled-up pain.”
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| Nkosana Mkhize says many South Africans remain "paralyzed" from abuses suffered during apartheid. |
While some people use drugs or alcohol to cope, he says, his help came after he enrolled in a workshop in 2005 that was provided by the
Institute for Healing of Memories (IHOM).
For Mkhize, it was important to share his painful experiences in a place where he would not feel afraid or ashamed to speak up. IHOM offered that safe space in a small-group setting.
When he returned home after the workshop, Mkhize says, he carried with him practical skills to help resolve future conflicts, and he also had learned how to begin the forgiveness process. Consequently, he felt as if a big bundle had been pulled from his back.
“I felt lighter, like I had peace and joy. I had relief.”
The workshop was designed to open people’s eyes to the destructive power of hatred, anger and guilt — and to the healing power of forgiveness, says the Rev. Michael Lapsley, IHOM’s founder and director.
The non-governmental organization (NGO) was created in 1998 to address the emotional, psychological and spiritual scars associated with apartheid — and the struggle to dismantle that system. Based in Cape Town with a second office in the KwaZulu-Natal province and plans for additional offices in Johannesburg and the Eastern Cape province, IHOM has grown to a national organization. Also, its leaders foresee a New York City office on the horizon to give IHOM an international presence.
In addition to providing weekend workshops, the institute provides training for facilitators; seminars; and discussion groups that center around the topics of forgiveness, reconciliation, dealing with the past, peace building and restorative justice.
The interactive sessions build on the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), which “kick-started” a national conversation on racial injustice. But Lapsley says that because the TRC dealt only with the most dramatic and violent offenses — murder and torture — the majority of South African citizens’ stories have never been told. As a result, IHOM’s work can be more far-reaching because, over time, it allows for many more people to participate than the approximately 23,000 who submitted testimony to the TRC, Lapsley says.
“We are still a damaged nation. In the Western world, because of ‘instant everything,’ there’s a particular temptation to think we can heal a country in four or five years or even 15 years,” he said.
“Apartheid took several centuries to create. I believe that national reconciliation and healing will remain a part of the core objective for South Africa for the next 100 years.”
Since 2004, the Mott Foundation has provided three grants to IHOM totaling $210,000 to support its work.
From Lapsley’s perspective, IHOM is helping the nation move closer to wholeness by providing weekend workshops where people of different racial, political and cultural backgrounds can share their life stories in an atmosphere of mutual respect. His views were confirmed when a 2007 evaluation of IHOM’s programs by an outside group found that Mkhize’s life-changing experience was not uncommon. For most participants, the workshop’s impact was still evident at six-month and one-year intervals.
Although Lapsley, an Anglican priest, is not a native South African, he instantly earns respect and empathy from workshop participants.
“When they see my hands have been removed," he said, "they know that I know about pain.”
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| The Rev. Michael Lapsley has learned personal lessons in forgiveness and peace building. |
Originally from New Zealand, Lapsley arrived in South Africa in 1973, at the height of the apartheid era. Three years after his arrival, he was expelled, along with many others, following the riots that erupted when the South African police fired shots into a crowd of black youth protesting apartheid educational policies. The 1976 event became known as “the Soweto uprising.”
Although no formal reason was ever given for Lapsley’s expulsion, at the time he was the national chaplain of Anglican students and spoke out publicly in defense of students who were detained, tortured and killed.
Fast forward from 1976 to 1990 — the year Nelson Mandela walked out of a South African prison and Lapsley walked into a personal lesson on “forgiveness.” When the priest opened two religious magazines that had been mailed to his then-home in Zimbabwe, the package exploded. It is commonly assumed that backers of apartheid sent the letter bomb, but no one has ever accepted responsibility.
“I lost both my hands, an eye, and my eardrums were shattered,” Lapsley said.
What he has learned is that “pain is pain is pain — in whatever context you experience it.”
Others have proven that statement to be true when, on two occasions, IHOM has brought together peace facilitators from conflict zones around the globe. Whether recipients of violence are in Northern Ireland, Rwanda, Sri Lanka, Australia or elsewhere, pain is transcendent, Lapsley says, and the recognition of suffering connects people.
So do tears.
“There’s a saying that ‘When you laugh, the whole world laughs with you. But when you cry, you cry alone.’ That’s not true. We have learned that tears unite us.”
But IHOM’s goal — for the international conference and all of its programs — is to help people move beyond shared tears of pain to shared tears of healing and wholeness, Lapsley says. The organization’s staff and volunteers help victims of the apartheid era deal with their past traumas so they can become contributing members of society.
A giant first step toward healing, Lapsley says, is to move from having knowledge about a past event to acknowledging it as an injustice — to oneself and others.
Evaluators who conducted follow-up interviews with participants concluded that in addition to providing a safe space for people to discuss issues related to apartheid, the workshops have helped people release their pain and exhibit empathy for others.
A major recommendation resulting from the evaluation, which already has been implemented, was for IHOM to provide reunion meetings for participants four to six weeks after their initial workshops. Other program changes include providing healing workshops, classroom sessions or four-day residential peace academies for refugees; inmates at men’s and women’s prisons; people infected with, or affected by, HIV/AIDS; ninth-grade teachers and students in public schools; and youth identified as “at risk.”
Today — a full 14 years after South Africa’s first free and fair presidential elections — Mkhize is no longer a troubled teenager. As a single man with no wife or children, he devotes his time and energy to working with young people. He’s on staff at Life Choices, an NGO that equips youth ages 10 to 19 to make healthy decisions for their lives, including ways to prevent HIV/AIDS.
For him, the consequences of the nation’s apartheid past can still be felt today. For example, Mkhize says, he still sees people who are “paralyzed” by their feelings. His daily encounters with those living in townships without hope used to aggravate his own buried feelings.
But now Mkhize openly discusses his past pain and the forgiveness he granted to those who caused it. He talks about forgiving the authorities who harassed, intimidated or even killed his friends as they protested in street rallies, and the white people who laughed as they opened their gates for their large watchdogs to bark or bite whenever black people passed by.
Mkhize says he was suppressing a lot of painful feelings and memories when he first visited the institute.
“My fellow comrades and I weren’t supposed to cry,” he said.
“There had never been any opportunity for me to cry. But I was crying on the inside ....
“I had big wounds when my friends died and small wounds from the many funerals and marches I had gone to. At the workshop I learned that there must be — there has to be — an opportunity to share your pain with someone.”