SOUTH AFRICA

Sometimes an experience can change your life. For me my trips to South Africa and the people I met opened my heart and sent my career and peacemaking in a new direction. While standing in a ballot counting station in a former homeland in South Africa, I struck up a conversation with an African poll worker about the differences between Americans and South Africans. With the votes ringing out for “ANC” around us, she told me about her experience of being ‘lost in the woods” for a year of schooling in Chicago. She saw it as simple. “In America”, she said, “you are given something and you take it, sometimes, look it over and hand it back or let it go.” But then she smiled, “In South Africa when someone gives you something,” and she held her clipboard tightly to her chest, “we hold onto it forever.”
It was with this fervor and heart that I too have held onto my South African experiences. For me, South Africa began with anti-apartheid work in the U.S. - divestiture and marches. In 1991, on my first trip it was filled with talking creative constitution making with the ANC, and dancing with former political prisoners and their families at braais on the day of their release from Robben Island. A quiet hopefulness while meeting with Mbeki, Sisulu and Slovo, or the smiling and hopeful faces of young Soweto children. The depth of their long struggle seem to manifest in the depth of their connection to our small group of progressive US lawyers from the National Lawyers Guild and the National Conference of Black lawyers.
In 1994 it was watching people come for miles on foot to vote and put their X next to “Mandela”, traveling with mediators who were helping people set aside long-standing conflict to create an atmosphere for a free and fair election, or dancing in the plaza at midnight when the old flags of the homeland and South Africa came down and the new unified flag of South Africa was raised.
In 11996 we gathered to hear President Mandela tell us about the importance of justice and reconciliation, and later I will never forget watching him turn on the water tap to celebrate water, life and the memory of CHris Hani high atop a hillside in the Transkei.
Soon after we birthed at the request of our South African comrades, an international monitoring project of Archbishop Tutu’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. More than 100 law students, legal workers and lawyers from the US went to hearings over two years, listening to victims and perpetrators tell their stories, watching as difficult issues of amnesty and healing were balanced with the goal to create a New South Africa. To us we were contributing in a small way to the process, but more importantly, what we got was a lesson in peacemaking and conflict resolution, and we returned with a greater appreciation of the value of forgiveness, truth and reconciliation.
Eric