The Power of Our Story
I arrived in South Africa to begin my professional career in 2008, a graduate of the sciences with ambitions of doing my part to save the world. I couldn’t do it in my home country, Zimbabwe, because I could barely get my hands on bread to eat, let alone a job to pay for it.
I was not an expat. When you arrive by malayitsha and are dropped off on the corner of a busy street, in Africa’s richest square mile with no job, company housing or relocation allowance you are not an expat. You are an immigrant and the world sees you as a burden. You might even begin to see yourself as one, too, when you are crashing at friends’ homes for months to find your feet.
A few months after I arrived the streets were on fire. Hate was in the air. There were attacks on foreign nationals accused of stealing jobs meant for locals, of clogging up the health system, of stealing local women, and sullying the inner city with illicit drugs.
At the height of these xenophobic attacks the conversations in various media streams were jarring. The language used to describe foreigners was dehumanizing and filled with vitriol. And the victims of the atrocities who were killed, maimed or displaced had no way to speak up for themselves. I found myself wishing we knew more. Who were these people? Why were they here? Why did they leave home to face such great difficulties in a country that did not welcome them?
And I wanted to know more about the people angry enough to set someone alight with a burning tyre and feel justified. What was the real source of this deep rage? How did we get here? How did we as a society fail them to the point that they were desperate enough to do this?
Dandelion Dreaming is my attempt at putting the spotlight on people whose voices we don’t normally hear through the din of so many issues demanding our attention on a daily basis. I’m interested in understanding how people experience life outside of the mainstream, how they situate themselves in the grand scheme of things and their perceptions of the systemic exclusions they experience on a daily basis.
We are currently piloting the project with four young people: a teen mother, a person living with a disability, an immigrant and an individual struggling with mental health. Their task is to document their lives from rural South Africa to the gritty inner city of Johannesburg, or wherever it is that they call home. In 2018, we ran a one day workshop on storytelling using the photo-voice methodology. We explored themes such as identity, personal narratives and the evolution of storytelling from our cave-dwelling ancestors to today. We trained the participants in digital photography and reflected on how images have been used to capture iconic moments throughout our history, generating emotive responses and bringing attention to important — but unexposed — issues. An example was how Sam Nzima’s iconic photograph of a slain Hector Pieterson in the arms of Mbuyisa Makhubu during the student uprisings of Soweto in June 1976 opened the world’s eyes to oppression in apartheid. Over the next few months my young storytellers will be taking their own photos and journaling about their daily lives.
Through Dandelion Dreaming I am finding new ways to listen to these young people. We have a WhatsApp group that’s mostly dead unless something’s going on affecting the entire group. But their one-on-one chats with me and their status updates are aspirational and at times emotional, reflecting a rich inner life filled with struggles, hopes and dreams. Their stories remind me of our shared humanity when it’s easy to forget the universality of most of our experiences, from simple moments of joy like finding your first love to the profound pain of losing a loved one ,whether it is to xenophobic violence or an illness like HIV or cancer the joy and the pain feel the same. Knowing that my experiences are not mine alone makes me brave when life gets hard and it keeps me humble when all is well.
We need to take the time to listen to people on the margins of our society. Listening keeps us honest, especially for those of us who work as development practitioners. It keeps us mindful of the fact that we do not wish to fall into the trap of a saviour complex. I do not wish to propose solutions to problems I only understand theoretically or anecdotally. When I sit in a room full of people banging out eloquent proposals about interventions aimed at the “bottom of the pyramid” I want to have fresh insights from the bottom of the pyramid, not just stale survey statistics from five years ago. I want to understand the people at the bottom, on the edges, in the badlands where we’d rather not go. I want to be close to them. When we talk about inclusivity I want to remember that wheelchair bound Katlego wants to be a movie star. When we talk of teenage pregnancy I want to remember that Susan from ga-Dikgale wants to be a business-woman so she can take care of her son. When we talk of leveraging digital tools to promote mental health I want to remember that Abigail wants to be a motivational speaker and that Ramadan wants to build bridges between people of different nationalities. I want to understand their lives beyond the statistics so that I can do work that contributes to them realising their best possible health and wellbeing and making their own dreams come true.
Dandelion Dreaming will be presented as a book of stories and images, a multi-site exhibition in each young person’s community and a short film documenting our journey. This pilot will inform a bigger process we intend to embark on that will span the entire country and across borders. We hope at the very least to empower young people to speak their own truths and at best to inspire them to find their own ways to contribute to society.
