Most African communities can relate to the proverb, “It takes the whole village to raise a child”. Although its origins are not traceable, people born and raised in African villages or even in peri-urban townships can immediately resonate with the sentiment and meaning the folk saying conveys.
To say it takes a village to raise a child, is to say that the healthy and full development of people is a whole society activity. It takes a volley of well-intentioned people and active institutions to contribute to the making of children and adults who are grounded and empathetic people ready to make positive contributions to society.
In the '80s and '90s, I was raised in Eldorado Park, south of Johannesburg. A formally coloured community borne out of the forced removals and Group Areas Act that the apartheid government used to violently dislocate people from their lands, families and communities.
My parents met and married in Eldorado Park after coming from very different backgrounds and family circumstances to form a stable family for us, their children. In the absence of cultural and extended family structures to provide support, they relied on church to serve as our family’s base.
Church provided us with more than a sense of a shared morality, it provided us access to communities of care, to activities like arts and culture and community service that focused our energies on positive pursuits and opportunities to see ourselves contribute positively to the making of our own lives and communities.
It was in Eldorado Pak and the church communities that raised me that I first learnt compassion. Where I was prompted to take leadership, sharpened my communication skills and implored to see value in service for the public benefit. It was there that I first became a community builder.
People build communities and communities build people.
As we reflect on the mounting social ills in SA, that manifests in violence, injustice and inhumanity, we must admit that we are products of increasingly broken communities. One headline after the next we ask, “what kind of person would do this?” or “why is this generation like this?”. The uncomfortable reality is that people contributing toward harm and dysfunction were raised and continue to be shaped by communities we are all a part of. Communities that we must rebuild if we are to change SA’s trajectory.
I remain hopeful that even in the ruins of the past and recent destruction of ongoing corruption and poor governance, there are still glimmers of hope for change. I was reminded of this last week in the Soweto community of Zola, at the Ekujuleni Kwenhliziyo Community Development Project.
Launched in 2019, this project came from the hearts of community members in Zola who could no longer sit back and do nothing as they watched the slow decay of their community. The director and deputy director are Khululiwe Mtshali and Skhumbuzo Mtshali, a couple who lead this project from their home.
Visiting this project, I found a wide range of services including home-based care, arts programmes, youth skills training and urban agriculture all run by unemployed community members with little to no funding. In the renovated garage, a community that includes old mothers and young men gather to change their communities and their own lives. Taking into their own hands many services that should be provided by the state while they have found it difficult to even secure the use of a public community hall to operate from.
Like hundreds of thousands of community-based project around SA, the Ekujuleni Kwenhliziyo Community Development Project provides to many people what my Eldorado Park church community provided me as I developed.
It gives people a sense of purpose, a place to learn and value service. It fosters much needed care and a shared humanity. These are SA’s under-resourced and unseen care economies. While macro-economist and state planners determine where value is created in our economy, very seldom is the value created in communities that deliver services that subsidise the country's social wage and when successful save the country the damage of the destruction that could result from broken communities if they are not cared for.
We must begin to recognise the value of community, to the wellbeing of individuals, families, communities and even the economy. Our collective politics needs to centre wellbeing in practical ways that champions the holistic development of the nation by investing in the care economies that are much needed if we are to reverse the path SA treads toward becoming a failed state. Understanding that the political is personal, our solutions will not only come from a capable state or growing economy.
Solutions will also be found in the solidarity we show in community with others and the common care we take to build our democracy together.
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.