South Africa

Hundreds filled Hart House’s Great Hall at the ��Ƶ nearly 22 years ago to hear from Anglican Archbishop and anti-apartheid activist Desmond Tutu, who had come to campus to accept an honorary degree.

Speaking in February of 2000 – nearly six years after Nelson Mandela became the first democratically elected president of South Africa – Tutu thanked Canada for its opposition to white-minority rule.

“What a great privilege to be able to return to the people from whom we had asked for help, to return to say you gave it and look at the result, to return to say on behalf of millions of my compatriots: ‘Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you. Our victory is in every real sense your victory!’ he said during his Hart House speech.

In addition to an honorary Doctor of Laws from U of T, Tutu also received an honorary doctorate of divinity from Trinity College.

Tutu died on Dec. 26 at age 90, sparking an outpouring of emotion from supporters, including political and spiritual leaders from around the globe. After a week of mourning in South Africa, Tutu was laid to rest in a simple casket during a state funeral in Cape Town on Jan. 1.

Desmond Tutu is hooded by Mary Anne Chambers, vice-chair of Governing Council, as University Professor John Polanyi, left, and Chancellor Hal Jackman, right, look on (photo by Lisa Sakulensky/��Ƶ Archives)

U of T President Meric Gertler saluted the archbishop’s advocacy for truth, justice and reconciliation.

“Archbishop Tutu was a distinguished member of the U of T community – a religious and political leader of extraordinary moral courage and determination,” President Gertler said. “With his uncompromising commitment to truth, reconciliation and justice, in South Africa and globally, Archbishop Tutu was a vital force in the fight against apartheid. He demonstrated to us all the power of humanity in the face of violence and injustice.

“An important voice for civil rights, nonviolent resistance and moral justice has fallen silent, and on behalf of our community, I extend deepest condolences to Archbishop Tutu’s family and loved ones.”

A graduate bursary in divinity studies at Trinity College was established in Tutu’s name last fall in honour of his 90th birthday. The scholarship goes to a master’s student who demonstrates an interest in humanitarianism, truth and reconciliation or climate change.

Tutu, who retired from public life in 2010, wrote a letter thanking donors.

“It is an immense pleasure to see my friends come together to give and to create something that will benefit young people,” he said. “It is a generous act and I am deeply touched by it.”

Tutu was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984 for his role as a “unifying leader figure” in the non-violent campaign against apartheid. The following year he became the first Black Anglican bishop of Johannesburg and then, in 1986, was elected as the first Black archbishop of Cape Town. In the 1990s, Nelson Mandela appointed Tutu chair of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, charged with investigating crimes during the apartheid era.

In 2013, shortly after Mandela’s death, Tutu prepared a video message about his longtime friend for a tribute ceremony held at U of T’s Convocation Hall that was co-hosted by U of T and then-Lieutenant Governor of Ontario David Onley in partnership with the South African community.

“You are a tribute to his role as a beacon for global human rights and to his legacy of peace and reconciliation,” he told those in attendance.

“I hope that, today, you follow the South African tradition and join us in singing, dancing and giving thanks to God for Madiba,” he added, using Mandela’s clan name.

In his later years, Tutu continued to speak out in the name of justice on issues ranging from climate change, homophobia and the persecution of minorities. “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor,” he once famously said. “If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.”

Tutu’s commitment to public service continued right up until the end.

Earlier this year, he and his wife of 66 years, Nomalizo Leah Tutu, helped South Africa kick start its COVID-19 vaccination drive.

“All my life I have tried to do the right thing and, today, getting vaccinated against COVID-19 is definitely the right thing to do,” he said.

U of T researcher studies 'blurry' space between policing and collective punishment in South Africa

Christopher.Sorensen — Tue, 08 Jan 2019 20:28:18 +0000

U of T researcher studies 'blurry' space between policing and collective punishment in South Africa

Christopher.Sorensen Tue, 01/08/2019 - 15:28

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U of T's Gail Super says South Africa's shack settlements experience "an overlap between lawful forms of crime prevention, like neighbourhood watch groups, and unlawful forms of collective punishment (Photo by Andrea Lindner via Getty Images)

Topic

Inadequate policing, vigilantism, social inequality, the legacy of apartheid – they have all affected the landscape of law and justice in South Africa’s informal shack settlements.

Now, in a new study, ��Ƶ Mississauga's Gail Super is attempting to untangle these complex factors and learn how they relate to state formation.

“In these marginalized communities, there’s often an overlap between lawful forms of crime prevention, like neighbourhood watch groups, and unlawful forms of collective punishment. I’m interested in that blurry in-between space, and what it says about the levels of punitiveness in a democracy,” says Super, an assistant professor of sociology whose study, called “Precarious penality on the periphery: Crime prevention and punishment in South Africa's informal settlements,” won a $10,000 Connaught Fund New Researcher Award last year.

South Africa is one of the world’s most unequal societies, says Super, a South African citizen who practised human rights law in Namibia. The effects of colonialism and more than 40 years of apartheid government, in which a political and social system of white minority rule and racial segregation was brutally enforced, have had lasting effects, felt well beyond the 1994 transition to formal democracy.

These effects include disproportionately high levels of unevenly distributed violent crime, poverty, and staggeringly high levels of unemployment.

Super (left) explains that South Africa has a history of state toleration of informal policing and punishment, in what used to be known as “Black townships.” The apartheid government was not interested in protecting Black people against crime, but focused on protecting white citizens from crimes allegedly committed by Black people, she says. Since the end of apartheid, the police, after so many years of enforcing unjust laws, have struggled to regain the trust of township residents and those living in informal settlements. They are also perceived to be inefficient by the affluent, who, unlike residents in informal settlements, have the resources to pay for private security.

Thus, non-state policing continues to be the norm in South Africa, according to Super. She adds that residents in South Africa’s informal settlements experience extreme hardship marked by high rates of violent crime, scarcity of sanitation, water, safety, money, garbage collection and jobs.

Super’s research shows that in this type of situation, making communities responsible for crime prevention can be dangerous.

“On a day-to-day basis, this might mean bashing down the shack of a drug addict so that they leave the community, or beating up someone who stole your stuff,” says Super, who is the author of the 2013 book, Governing through Crime in South Africa: The Politics of Race and Class in Neoliberalizing Regimes. “The mainstream argument for carrying out these reprisals is that the police do such a bad job that citizens have to “take the law into their own hands.”

Yet, as Super argues, there are many complex issues at play.

For her study, she is examining the arrest and trial of a popular community activist in a former Black township in Cape Town. Together with five others, the activist was accused of kidnapping, assaulting and ultimately killing two men believed by residents to have been involved in two incidents of rape and murder. In most cases, township residents don’t want those accused of serious violent crimes to be granted bail. But, in this case, they protested for his release.

“There’s this contradiction at play: on the one hand, residents want criminals to be punished, but in cases like this, where the accused has punished a perceived criminal and is regarded as protecting the community, they support release on bail,” Super says.

Super spent six weeks this past summer interviewing 40 local community members about their perspectives on the case. She hopes her findings help government officials in South Africa improve their approach to addressing crime and punishment in informal settlements.

“This case demonstrates how constitutional principles such as the right to bail are distorted in practice and applied unevenly,” Super says.

“A better understanding of the relationship between punishment, local punitive practices and democratization can help policymakers be more effective.”

Reaching the hard to reach: Munk students in South Africa

lavende4 — Mon, 20 Jun 2016 12:56:05 +0000

Reaching the hard to reach: Munk students in South Africa

lavende4 Mon, 06/20/2016 - 08:56

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Children in South Africa: the U of T students are trying to find out why the country is so successful in registering births and how to transplant that success elsewhere (photo by Danny via flickr)

Alex Gillis

Author legacy

Alex Gillis

Topic

Global Lens

Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy

South Africa

Global

Joseph Wong

Kourosh Houshmand and four other U of T undergraduates are in South Africa this week for some intense field research into birth registration and human rights.

They’ve been preparing with the Munk School of Global Affairs’ Professor Joseph Wong for 10 months on “Reaching the Hard to Reach,” a research project in six countries, including South Africa, that focuses on how social services can reach the poorest of the poor. Chosen from 140 applicants, the five student-researchers are in South Africa to examine how and why the country’s birth registration was so successful, and more broadly, how that success can be transplanted to other communities. This work has been supported through a partnership with the MasterCard Center for Inclusive Growth.

“There are people in this world who need help but are invisible, and this study is essentially about how to make them visible,” says Houshmand (left), who’s in his fourth year of study in Ethics, Society and Law and who also runs an international non-profit called Solar for Life and is a recipient of Canada’s Top 20 Under 20 Award for his work in entrepreneurship, journalism and international development in Africa.

After apartheid, South Africa went from registering 20 percent of births in previously segregated communities to registering nearly all of them in only 20 years. Houshmand and the other students will interview experts in birth registration in Johannesburg and elsewhere to find out how and why this success took place so quickly and broadly.

The implications are enormous. Today, the births of more than 200 million children around the world aren’t officially recognized. The consequences of invisibility are devastating: people have no access to official healthcare services, education and political rights, and they’re susceptible to human trafficking and exploitation. The Sustainable Development Goals, the global roadmap for building the world we want, launched by the United Nations in September 2015, calls for all countries to provide legal identities for all people, including birth registration, by 2030.

To find out more about solutions to invisibility, the U of T students will interview South Africans working in rural health clinics, NGOs and children’s rights groups, among others. “Our goal is to shadow mobile units that go deep into the countryside to register births,” Wong explains. The students will start in Cape Town, and travel to communities in Johannesburg and Durban.

Last December, Wong, who’s the Roz and Ralph Halbert Professor of Innovation at the Munk School, took a different group of students to Brazil. (Read about their visit here). They interviewed policy makers and families about Bolsa Familia, a remarkably successful program that provides cash transfers for education and health services to 14 million hard-to-reach underprivileged families. Wong plans four more such trips to other countries in the next year, all involving student researchers.

Stephanie Lim, a fourth-year student studying Peace, Conflict and Justice, says that she read widely about birth registration to prepare for the South Africa trip. For 10 months, she’s attended meetings, worked on a hypothesis for the research questions and prepared with Wong and her co-researchers.

As an undergrad, I’m excited by this great opportunity to conduct field research outside of courses,” Lim (right) says. She interested in gaining insights about issues of personhood and the law. One day, she’d like to be an academic, merging a law degree with her current U of T studies.

During the research trip, she and the others will blog and tweet about their experiences. Afterwards, they’ll write blogs, insight essays and a report summarizing their findings – the second volume in a series for “Reaching the Hard to Reach.” They hope that these resources will influence policy-makers, NGOs and academic networks – with the goal of turning research into action.

Follow the hashtag #How2Reach on Twitter to see highlights from this research trip.

The original of the photo at top can be found at Flickr