Trauma is a common experience for people living in SA today. Whether we use the word trauma, we often find ourselves in conversations where we describe our realities with emotions that point to a deep sense of pain, disappointment, mistrust and the destruction of our being and livelihood.
A feeling of betrayal appears central to what it means to live in a post-apartheid SA. Hopelessness weighs too many of us down in ways that scar us. Violence was and remains a norm in SA, with new forms of trauma seeming to crop up daily.
We have seen a rise in township mass shootings and we collectively mourned the mass deaths of young people whose lives were taken at taverns this year. This week, we’re lamenting the deaths of toddlers mauled by pitbulls.
Meanwhile, pitbull owners prefer to talk about race instead of the innocent children who lost their lives. Constantly living in and through trauma in SA makes us numb to each other’s pain. On Monday, the Constitutional Court ruled on the case of Janusz Walus, the man who assassinated Struggle hero Chris Hani.
Hani was no ordinary political activist. His untimely death triggered the calls for an election date for the first democratic elections to be set with urgency. It also hastened the negotiations between the liberation movement and the apartheid regime.
The pain of Hani’s murder sent ripples throughout the country and his passing fast-tracked the reality of a new dispensation. The country collectively witnessed the pain and trauma of Limpho Hani, the struggle hero’s widow, as she responded to the judgment with agony and feelings of betrayal.
Mam’ Limpho agonised that the same system her husband fought and died for was now giving his killer an opportunity to live. Her response was not a debate about the technical correctness of the judgment in law but whether the judgment reflected the spirit of the law in a democratic and free SA.
One she and her family sacrificed so much for. Mam’ Limpho’s hurt is not isolated to the events that occurred in that court on Monday, as with many who fought for liberation only to experience the reality of a broken, corrupt and unequal society. A society that in no way aligns with the values Hani so boldly spoke about and espoused.
Hani’s ideology and beliefs were starkly different from much of what our society has become today, with our politics, economy and communal lives that are less about solidarity and more about individuality. A country still divided along race, class, gender and ethnic lines.
A society that prizes competition over collaboration and celebrates consumerism, blind to the impacts on inequality and injustice. As painful as each individual story of trauma is in our country, we will not heal by addressing one trauma at a time.
We will also not resolve our traumas through reactive interventions that numb our pain in the moment, or by attacking symptoms and not causes. Individualising healing and focusing on symptoms is how western health care is enacted, where people are taken out of the contexts of their homes and communities, ailment are identified and treated in a facility and people are released back into the same social, environmental and relational contexts that caused the “dis-ease”.
Disease is not limited to resulting ailments; it is indicative of a broader sense of dis-ease and discontent in the life of a person. African conception of healing understands that an individual’s ailments are not solved by focusing solely on the person with the dis-ease.
Rather, African healing practices often intentionally seek the source of the problem in the broader ecosystem of a person’s life. They ask about the wellbeing of the family, the wellbeing of the nation and wellbeing in relation to the land and ancestors. It seeks healing that connects individual healing to the wellbeing of the collective. As a wounded and hurting nation, perhaps it is time to embark on a journey of collective healing.
We must consider national healing in a holistic, sustained and inherently systemic way. We cannot heal through euphoric moments of national pride or even isolated practices like the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, as these practices are the equivalent of an injection by a doctor.
A shot in the arm that hurts in the moment and targets specific pain, addressing the symptom and not the cause. SA’s healing must actively include the making of new systems that intentionally replace systems of oppression within communities and practices that offer people meaning, centre care and connect us to each other.
SA cannot be healed until we all are well and our healing must connect us to our families, communities, the land and our ancestry. We need not rush the country into ICU for a quick fix. Instead, we need deep, comprehensive, sustained and collective healing. Our task and our job for the future is to build societies that promote everyday wellbeing and, true to our constitution, we must acknowledge the sustained legacies of our past and redress them so everyone can feel that the sacrifices made to get us here were worthwhile.
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