FREEDOM AS A RELATIONAL PRACTICE

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CHAPTER 3 INTERWOVEN STORIES CONCERNING A HUMAN WORLD

If you saw me at a distance, you would think I was an ordinary person. Even if you got closer, you still couldn’t tell. Maybe if you observed me very carefully you might notice, that I seem somewhat alone, even in the middle of a crowd. You would be right, but you would also be wrong, for I am never truly alone. Thousands of people are always with me. My head is so full of ghosts that I sometimes think it will burst. My ears ring with cries from the voices of the dead. My dreams flame with horror. My memories are grey with ash.

Introduction

This chapter continues from the previous chapter in exploring the role of trust and mistrust within a post-colonial context which influences this research. The chapter then takes you on a journey that led to this research through returning to some of the TRC process. Although not directly concerned with this research I have included in the appendix (see appendix iii) a recording of the Mothers at the TRC process. This was filmed in 1998 and parts of it are referred to in the research (Maria in the poem Yeserday’s men, as well as Return Home. It is a long film and the two sections that are of particular interest to me are found at the end of each DVD. The first is the TRC proceedings in the amnesty applications and the second is the TRC visit to Nietverdient where the Mamelodi Ten were killed. I have included the complete film as it documents the TRC hearings in Mamelodi. This chapter includes the exhumations of the Mamelodi Ten group in the Winterveld, in an unkempt graveyard about forty five minutes North West of Pretoria. I filmed this exhumation, in which Argentinian forensic specialists exposed these graves. This can be viewed in appendix ii.
This chapter moves from focusing on trauma, individual rights, justice, race, forgiveness and truth towards an interest in the role of participation as perhaps a more indirect form of healing. Embracing vulnerability, personal, as well as collective history, it explores a difficult kind of freedom formed within relationship.

Trusting myself to the care of another person

Trusting myself to another person is an idea proposed by Levinas (1984, 1986, Mbembe 2005, Tracy 1994, Paperzak et al 1996, Dick & Zeiring Kofman 2002) which is threaded through this work. The idea is partly based on the premise that within the face and vulnerability of the other I find my own freedom (Levinas in Mbembe 2005, Cochrane 1999). This process is far less controllable, in that my ethical position becomes more than facing myself, in fact it is more a position of being open to being read by the other. Frank (2005:967) using ideas generated from Bakhtin says: ‘Dialogue depends on perpetual openness to the other’s capacity to become someone other than whoever she or he already is. Moreover, in a dialogical relation, any person takes responsibility for the other’s becoming, as well as recognizing that the other’s voice has entered one’s own. For Bakhtin, speaking about the other is both an empirical illusion of objectivity and an ethical failing of responsibility’. Such a research process then involves ability for the other to face and gaze upon me and in this being faced I also have the right not to be taken advantage of. Veling (2005:6), using Levinas’s ideas, describes it as being faced by the other. He says ‘Here I lose a certain hold over myself, and find that I am no longer the one who interrogates and questions; rather, I am the one who is faced by the other’s interrogation and questioning’. Being faced in this way challenges hierarchical orders embedded in discourses around racial superiority and power. This form of working and researching could play an important role in participatory practices of pastoral care that help to deconstruct the effects of colonialism on the people I work with. Writing with people in this way is very different to writing for them, or transcribing words in a more empirical fashion, as if words are static and can be analysed.
In the light of an uneven power relationship however, and my own experience, it is not always possible or right to expose oneself to the one who has power over you. To be faced by the other is only possible when the person who is being faced by another is able to see the other, not as an enemy but as someone who is reciprocally connected in a non-threatening way. My initial conversation with Cronje reflects something of the intense vulnerability and mistrust of people who enter with certain assumptions about another person. Within a dominant historical discourse of separation and racism such as has happened in South Africa, this takes time and care to develop reciprocal relationships that can dare to trust another person (in this context a researcher) who has the power to write about you in ways that you have no control over.

The social construction of truth, trust and history

Truth and trust do not live independently of an historical context and the beliefs that are selected in order to uphold certain truths about other people. In other words, as I have argued in chapter one and two, truth is context dependent and contingent on how a collective group of people interpret their experience through privileging certain knowledge to the exclusion of other knowledge. In the pursuit of finding understanding and making knowledge, the world in this way is not out there waiting to be discovered, but becomes pieced together through the social processes of interpretation (McNamee & Gergen 1999:20-21).
Truth and meaning within any society are also influenced by people we trust or people we have reason to be suspicious of. My son for example recently travelled back to Zimbabwe in which country he has permanent residence. He was anxious about his re-entry into the country, partly because a year earlier his brother had been refused re-entry. He was filling in his returning resident form, and the lady at the desk, who he described as friendly and helpful, asked him for his permanent address in South Africa. He did not have a permanent address in South Africa and did not want to jeopardise his re-entry into Zimbabwe either, so he left this question blank. She became angry with him and after explaining his reason she said ‘Do you not trust me? I am a government employee.’ He wondered why he should trust her given the recent history of Zimbabwe. Did she really think he should trust her? He did not wait to find out. He politely obliged her demands and was grateful for the re-entry stamp. It made me think about how often the Mamelodi Mothers seem to oblige and comply with what others ask of them. When I have asked Maria Ntuli (co-ordinator of the group) about this she says: ‘Bridgid, just do what they ask quietly, even if you don’t agree. God knows the truth.’ I have become more aware of such passive compliance in the face of power and authority and as a form of resistance to a dominant discourse.
Trust in this context is a volatile and unstable word that has a tendency of trading in previous experience of the world and the people in it. Trust is not something that is built overnight and can easily be broken on an individual as well as a collective level. It helps to explain something of the passive ways I have sometimes been a part of, either in my own dominance, or through witnessing others coming into the group.
Building trust often happens in small, seemingly insignificant ways. It takes time and happens within a relational space where we are not seen to be taking advantage of another person. I suggest in this chapter that trust has been built through ordinary every day occurrences that don’t necessarily fit or measure up against dominant texts of truth and justice. Consistency of relationship with the Mothers is one way in which I have built a trusting relationship with them. This has happened in contrast to other more traditional researchers who have come to the Mothers to gather stories, but have not returned to them with their results, leaving the Mothers often angry. Forms of less measurable care have happened of course all through history, but in the face of freedom struggles and traditional research methodologies, such forms of care can appear somewhat arbitrary or not sought out. They become the messy fragments of alternately lived experience that traditional research methodologies have left aside. Alternate truths and identities await discovery, put together through different stories and meanings that are concerned with caring outside the more familiar boundaries of dominant group loyalties. Wagener illustrates this very point in chapter two of this thesis.
To engage with trust in this particular work has involved enormous risk on my part. I risk exposing myself to this writing as well as exposing other people’s vulnerability to the written word. I particularly risk exposing people from the previous regime, knowing that if this is not written with enormous care, I could jeopardise people’s reputations. Ethical practices that attempt not to abuse or take advantage of another person might be easier within a quantitative study, or a less sensitive research in which names are removed and replaced with statistics.
Trust and mistrust are also difficult to comprehend in my relationship with the Mothers because it is often not visible. I experience myself as both trusted and not trusted. Trust as well as mistrust are present in every interaction with the Mothers. Trust and mistrust are also in every eye that looks upon me in the township. The tension of such a gaze is equally present in my own body when I return from Mamelodi feeling the tiredness of the constantly pressing needs upon me to be trustworthy. It is there in the historically assumed role of responsibility I feel for the Mothers, as if I am the mother and they the children. It is there in my obvious whiteness against their black skins and the historical meanings attached to whiteness. It is there when I bring a sack of second-hand clothes and the way in which they are shared out among the Mothers. It is there in some of the demands that are made on me, just because it seems that I am a white woman and with that assumption goes money. The invisible looks of mistrust drive me to perform, to not steal the Mothers’ stories, to be accountable to the Mothers, to not let them down and to not desert them. The Mothers tell me often of other white people who have come and stolen their stories; and others who have come and not returned to them with feedback or explanation as to why they no longer come. There are others who have come to give them empowerment programmes, forgetful of the Mothers own wisdoms and knowledges of survival. I have been present to these occasions and I watch myself vigilantly to not do the same thing. These dominant stories place me in a difficult position regarding trust.
These stories are rooted in history and the way it has been interpreted through the lens of race over generations of inequality, voiceless ness, mistrust and poverty. The Mothers call on me to help them, as if I have the position and power to change things. For example asking me to help find the bones and speak with the perpetrators perhaps illustrates the power they see invested in me. It might of course be that they would like me to join with them to employ my whiteness in ways that might give them access to people and places. I am aware of the powerful discursive position I hold, and rather than see myself powerless to change it. I use it hopefully to our mutual benefit, but this does not necessarily comfort my anxiety, because how do I know what is mutual benefit? The paradox is that within my position of whiteness and privilege is such silence and powerlessness.
Practices that participate across racial boundaries compete with the weight of hundreds of years of racial privilege and subtle civilising control and mistrust of one people by another. This becomes one way of reading the signs of our times through participating beyond discourses grown in the ground of apartheid, modernism and rationalism. Foucault (1970), using Freud’s idea of a death drive, suggests we need to find alternate discourses that do not reproduce forms of control. In his lecture The Order of Discourse (1970) Foucault for example exposes some of the dominant beliefs that drive Western civilisations on a trajectory of control that separate people as subjects from the objects of study or control through economic or other means.
Hearing the voice of participation in this capacity is one way of finding different ways of working, where separation of one human being from another is challenged. Co-creating realities that work outside a paradigm of Western forms of civilisation bound up with the individual, separation and juridical forms of sovereign power (see chapter five) towards our personhood and identity as a people who are not subjugated, subaltern or split away from our collective responsibility to one another, living as one tribe in what has become known as a global village.

Reparation from the TRC

Reparation in the form of R30 000 payouts was finally awarded late in 2004 to victims who testified at the TRC. These were people who were considered victims of gross human rights violations. The Mamelodi Mothers mostly fall into this category, although some did not receive reparation. Justice as a form of social empowerment was done during the TRC to promote unity through the National Unity and Reconciliation Act, No 34 of 1995. It mandated the TRC to ‘promote national unity and reconciliation through amnesty and reparation (Villa-Vicencio 2004:70). The R30 000 which the Mothers received was less than half the amount suggested by the TRC committee. The very process that promoted unity and reconciliation brought with it compromise as well as exclusion. Some of the Mothers for example were excluded from receiving reparation at the TRC, either because they did not testify, or because it did not fall under the categories decided upon at the hearings. This has led Maria to say ‘We need another TRC for those who did not testify. It is not fair that some got reparation and others did not.’
Any form of justice will of course not be fully fair, but there is a belief among the Mothers that certain justices still need to happen for healing to take place. For example the Mothers have said that perpetrators escaped without proper punishment and that they never apologised. Apology was in fact beyond the mandate of the TRC, and the Mothers are waiting for it to happen as an ongoing process of healing. The scales of justice are not easy in this sense to balance. Perpetrators received amnesty immediately at the TRC and the victims waited nearly ten years to receive theirs. Justice and truth are familiar companions on this path and have kept the mothers busy searching for healing through apology and forgiveness.

Justice as a way of avoiding revenge

At my initial meeting with the Mothers, they particularly asked me to help them find the bones of their sons, and to talk with the perpetrators so that they could know the truth and apology could happen.
Research in Southern Africa indicates that victims can get trapped in the past (Reeler 1998, Hamber 1998, Ranger 2004, Rosenblum 2002:1) where justice turns into vengeful acts of violence, particularly where truth and justice are not seen to be done. In work done by Mopane (2002:13) in Zimbabwe with victims of state sponsored violence, they say:
Recurrent in these very painful stories is the theme of revenge and the dominant idea that only revenge will give peace to these victims. We are motivated to find alternative, non-violent modes of release and restitution that might bring peace to both victims and perpetrators and the deeply wounded communities from which they both come.
Justice and truth routes would ask that perpetrators become accountable for their actions and acknowledge that what they have done is wrong. Amnesty International (1993:100) uses strong language when it says ‘perpetrators need to pay for the wrongs they have inflicted’. The United Nations (1997) on the sub-commission of the economic and social council (ECOSOC), when talking about justice say it is for victims to determine when justice has been done and the debt paid. The committee also makes interesting reference to group accountability, moving away from individual responsibility to relational responsibility in community. A part of this is that perpetrators should be permanently removed from positions of power. Reeler (2003b) makes reference to community accountability when talking of taxes that are still paid in Germany in reparation of the damage caused by World War II. It would appear that for collective as well as individual accountability to happen a context of trust needs to be created where people can apologise without experiencing shame or a serious loss of face. A participatory ethic in this situation attempts to create such a context. There is also doubt in my mind as to how much this paradigm of justice can work, particularly in the context of ongoing entitlements by victims from the apartheid regime. There is an urgent need in South Africa to find alternative ways to support this paradigm.

TABLE OF CONTENTS
ABSTRACT
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER 1 FACED BY THE PAST: LOOKING FOR A FUTURE
1.1 Introducing the context of this research
1.2 The group of Mothers with whom I have been working
1.3 Constructing the meetings together as a group
1.4 Pastoral care within a particular context
1.5 The use of ‘I’ in this research
1.6 Words and their constitutive effects
1.7 Invisible assumptions that reproduce exclusion
1.8 Caring with people as a way of challenging hierarchical orderings
1.9 Focus on race and civilisation
1.10 Naming and labelling categories in identity formation
1.11 Conversational partners
1.12 Some limitations of this research
1.13 Discontinuous knowledge held in a poetic form
1.14 A paradigm of social construction
1.15 Shifting faces in theology in South Africa
1.16 Harvesting the husks
1.17 Research question
1.18 Aims in this research
1.19 Agreement made for this research process
CHAPTER 2 FREEDOM AS A RELATIONAL PRACTICE
2.1 Introduction
2.2 Dualistic thinking
2.3 Imaginative wisdom
2.4 Relational practices
2.5 Freedom as an ethical practice
2.6 Conversations can only be relational
2.7 Multiple relational journeys that attempt to plot the territory
2.8 Additional conversational partners
2.9 Something of the ecology of interrelatedness
2.10 Sameness, difference and alterity
2.11 Discursive positioning within multiple webs of meaning
2.12 Heroic narratives that are in danger of excluding the complexity of relationship
2.13 Working within a post-structuralist and social construction paradigm
2.14 Structuring analysis in this text
2.15 Representing and finding order within this text
2.16 Participatory action research
2.17 A relational process of change
2.18 Some of the effects of separating a subject from an object
2.19 Researching a participatory theology within a post-apartheid state
2.20 Current research in pastoral participation within South Africa
2.21 Sustainable relational webs
CHAPTER 3   INTERWOVEN STORIES CONCERNING A HUMAN WORLD
3.1 Introduction
3.2 Trusting myself to the care of another person
3.3 The social construction of truth, trust and history
3.4 Reparation from the TRC
3.5 Justice as a way of avoiding revenge
3.6 In conversation with an old regime
3.7 An unusual meeting with Adriaan Vlok
3.8 Meeting a lawyer and a General
3.9 Travelling to the Western Cape to meet with Cronje
3.10 Listening responsively in relationship with voice and silence
3.11 The role of forgiveness in breaking with silence
3.12 Sleeping dogs do not lie
3.13 Finding the bones
3.14 Excavating graves; exposing secrets
3.15 Testing to find the truth about the bones
3.16 Respect as a form of healing
3.17 How do I explain the weight of history?
3.18 Facing some of the difficulties I have experienced
3.19 Facing my own fragility
3.20 Relational moments in the face of fragmentation
3.21 Facing whiteness
3.22 Moments of working together in multiple readings of relationship
3.23 Sewing the loose ends into the back of the story
CHAPTER 4 PLACING A PARTICIPATORY THEOLOGY IN CONTEXT WITHIN SOUTH AFRICA
4.1 Introduction
4.2 An overview of practical theology in South Africa
4.3 Voices in local African Theology
4.4 Voices in empirical research
4.5 Integrative theology
4.6 Voices as a contextual theology of crisis
4.7 Contextual theology as liberation
4.8 Prophetic documents that stand as testimony to freedom
4.9 Problematics and regimes of truth7
4.10 Liberation through other means
4.11 Centering relationship. De-centering theory, trauma, truth and dangerous memories
4.12 Post-colonial theology
4.13 Relational theology
4.14 Continuing a poetic engagement in theology
4.15 Inviting other stories
4.16 A theology of turning around to face the other
4.17 Multiple readings of faith within a context
4.18 Becoming grounded in participation
4.19 An ethic of values
4.20 Conclusion
CHAPTER 5 PARTICIPATING WITH RELATIONAL IDENTITY IN A POST-COLONIAL CONTEXT
5.1 Introduction
5.2 Civilised societies
5.3 Power discourses
5.4 Trapped inside historical constructions
5.5 Enemies and the sovereign state in South Africa
5.6 Imagining Africa through the eyes of Western rationality
5.7 Morality under erasure
5.8 Speaking for people
5.9 The ‘other’ of whom I speak
5.10 A Psychoanalytic construction of identity. Splitting the good and the bad
5.11 Globalised identities
5.12 Limits of Sovereign Power
5.13 Decolonising the state of violence
5.14 Surviving within a post-colonial discourse
5.15 Subjugated knowledge
5.16 A different challenge
5.17 Alternate identities
5.18 Excavating the territory of the not yet said
5.19 Resistance as multiple language games of identity
5.20 Difficulties encountered in a process of finding alternate discourses in the face of a dominant history of violence and separation
5.21 Sustaining alternate discourses
5.22 Levinas and the face of the ‘Other’
CHAPTER 6  IDENTITY AND RELATIONAL RESPONSIBILITY
6.1 Individual identity challenged
6.2 Identity as imposed by dominant discourses
6.3 Identity imposed from the West
6.4 Social construction of identity
6.5 Language and its role in forming identity
6.6 Deconstruction
6.7 Ethical practices that draw back a plurality of dialogue when encountering the other
6.8 Deconstructing post-colonial theory
6.9 Social construction as narrative
6.10 Constraints of discourse
6.11 Relational responsibility
6.12 Identity politics and social construction
6.13 Interdependency in relational responsibility
CHAPTER SEVEN REFLECTIONS ON A PARTICIPATORY PROCESS
7.1 Introduction
7.2 Reading of this text
7.3 Group reflection process
7.4 The generation of questions in this reflection process
7.5 Joyce Mabena. Thoughts on Ubuntu
7.6 Lizzie Sefolo on the active role of a participative counsellor
7.7 ..Joyce reflects on her role in meeting with Vlok
7.8 Local knowledge that embraces mystery and an ability to language relationship
7.9 A pastoral response to the meaning of love
7.10 An ethical commitment to not ‘quit’ in a post-colony. Adelaide
7.11 Being accountable to my own process of feedback
7.12 A prayer and spiritual wisdom within the rich tradition of Africa
7.13 The importance of privileging human-ness rather than clever-ness
7.14 Working with a friendly power relationship built on being human together
7.15 Romanticising relationship within a racial context
7.16 Constructing God within relationship
7.14 Themes and recommendations
POSTSCRIPT
REFERENCES .
GET THE COMPLETE PROJECT
A PASTORAL RESPONSE TO SOME OF THE CHALLENGES OF RECONCILIATION IN SOUTH AFRICA FOLLOWING ON FROM THE TRUTH AND RECONCILIATION COMMISSION