Khulumani Support Group is a national membership organisation of more than 65,000 individuals from all nine provinces of South Africa. Members include victims of gross human rights violations under apartheid and their (extended) families. The work of the organisation focuses on the needs of these members and projects are initially shaped in the branches, in a truly grassroots fashion. The organizing structure seeks to enable the roll-out, shape supporting national initiatives and to ensure ongoing learning and cross-pollination between regions and provinces.
Khulumani’s Project in Transforming Survivors of Major Apartheid Trauma into Community Activists involves facilitating processes whereby Khulumani’s more than 65,000 members who reside in all the country’s provinces, reclaim their political agency towards contributing to community development initiatives for economic empowerment and for the accountability of local government in their local communities. The active citizenship demonstrated by empowered Khulumani members focuses on dealing with the ongoing reality that the post-1994 years have been marked by slow delivery on the promise of freedom with local government being beset by inadequate management and a slow roll-out of necessary services. Khulumani’s focus on empowering its members for active citizenship is informed by its mission statement – Responsive to the needs of its members Khulumani exists to restore the dignity of all persons harmed by apartheid through their transformation from victims to active citizens.
The process of healing traumatised individuals and communities that still carry the scars that remain since the closure of the Truth & Reconciliation Commission processes, involves recognising that many stories have never yet been told or acknowledged and continue to have an impact both directly on the lives of those involved or on the lives of their children and community members. Before people are able to engage fully in community life, they need opportunities to recognize their own worth and their own needs. Thereafter they need support in developing specific capacities and skills to give voice to those needs and concerns. Providing access to services and information enables people to help themselves, to become self-sustaining and to restore their dignity.
Khulumani facilitates these processes using a range of narrative techniques including the ‘HEARTS narrative process’ that was developed by Dr Karen Hanscom, founder of Advocates for Survivors of Trauma and Torture in the United States. Khulumani has found this community-based process very effective in facilitating the beginning of journeys of healing for individuals whose lives have been severely damaged by human rights violations. Through the process, individuals begin to confront their pain, to deal with its and slowly to begin reconnecting with the people in their lives as their capacities for relationship are restored.
As individuals begin to turn their lives around, Khulumani members also begin to address the harmful consequences of the impunity that has resulted from the state’s failure to hold offenders of the crimes of the past and often of the present as well, accountable. Khulumani facilitates that its members challenge these conditions of impunity through their planning of lobbying and advocacy initiatives.
The sense of solidarity and belonging that develops in these communities serves as a basis for invited processes of community rehabilitation and social reconciliation that may use art, drama and oral history methodologies towards recording memory across generations to honour the full range of contributions by ordinary citizens to the liberation of South Africa. In this way Khulumani strives to reclaim, restore and populate the archive of South Africa’s archive by ensuring that stories are told and remembered. These group processes function to build ‘therapeutic communities’ that are trauma-informed and characterised by practices of participatory democracy. The work of building therapeutic communities is described by psychiatrist Dr Sandra Bloom in a paper entitled ‘Building a Future Worth Surviving’.
As Khulumani members and associates develop these capacities, they begin to focus on urgent needs being experienced in their impoverished communities. Members become competent in the use of legislation as tools for activism and for making local government work more efficiently, effectively and accountably to meet the needs of communities for access to quality education and health care services including community-based mental health services, access to housing and skills training. The particular skills including in the Victim Empowerment Programme are the skills of hosting of public dialogues and deliberations; of accessing and using information for monitoring and accountability purposes; and of planning lobbying and advocacy strategies for solving local challenges. A critical component that contributes towards this objective is the training of Khulumani members as information and communication officers with each community hosting a Khulumani BBE (Blackberry-empowered) activist who has received training in citizen journalism and who is able to send relevant, concise and accurate information to the central information-collecting service for informing the public media more effectively about the real issues facing poor citizens in rural and township communities. They also engage in developing local community enterprises and livelihoods to assist in facilitating the much-needed shift from conditions of poverty to ones of survival and longer-term sustainability.
Operates in: All of South Africa
Established in: March 1995
Non-Profit Organisation Number: 008-135
Public Benefit Organisation Number: 9798648144
Section 21 Company Number:
Trust Number:
Contact person: Dr Marjorie Jobson
Phone: 011 833 2044
Fax: 011 833 2048
Email:
Website: www.khulumani.net
Physical address: 2nd Floor Khotso House, 62 Marshall Street, Johannesburg
Postal address: P O Box 31958, Braamfontein 2017
