Give the gift of dignity, not column inches

One of the sad realities of the world is that, once a newspaper story breaks, it is impossible to stop its spread. The story of 18-year-old South African athlete Caster Semenya is a case in point.

As everyone on the planet now knows, Semenya is at the centre of a global row about whether she is, theoretically, a man or a woman. The controversy followed the revelation by the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) that it was carrying out tests on Semenya shortly before the women’s 800 m race at the recent World Athletics Championships. Semenya’s dramatic winning margin, coupled with the announcement, created a media frenzy. If you type ‘Caster Semenya’ into Google, you now get over 700 000 references.

Caster Semenya, London 2012
Credit: Tab59 from Düsseldorf, Allemagne / CC BY-SA 

But the situation has been disgraceful. The IAAF, presumably for a range of good reasons, made confidential information public, breaching numerous ethical standards. The world responded by feeling it appropriate to discuss Semenya’s physical characteristics causally and in public. Even those claiming to support Semenya often made their case by referring to how she looked or acted. The more this happened, the more she became objectified.

The result is that it seems everyone has now lost perspective and the debate continues unabated, when the priority should be to try to give Semenya back her privacy – not to heighten public interest.

The real issue in this case is how, and why, the case was made public and how this has been sustained – not whether Semenya is technically a man or a woman.

It is reasonable to ask: Why did the IAAF publicly announce that it was testing someone before full results were known? We can only speculate. Was it to combat a leak? A mistake? In a BBC report, it was claimed that preliminary test results became public because a fax was sent to the wrong person. And has the IAAF done everything to protect Semenya’s privacy since the announcement and offered adequate support?

I do not think that the primary issue, at least at this stage, is the nature of the IAAF’s rules and tests of what qualifies someone as a man or a women, and what this means for participation in different races. If one participates in a sport, and it has rules of this kind, no matter how obscure or unfathomable they are, one agrees tacitly to accept them and to be judged by them.

If one thinks the rules are wrong, that is a different fight.

Gender tests of this kind have been carried out in the past. Athletes from India, Poland and Austria, besides others, have been banned from competition after being ‘found to be men’. I wonder how many people around the globe can name these athletes? Most of us cannot because, generally, it is only after a ruling has been made that any public announcement (if any) is made about an athlete’s future. Until then, the person’s private life is kept out of the public eye. Semenya herself was apparently tested in South Africa in 2007 – this never hit the headlines.

The IAAF has launched an internal inquiry into the handling of the issue. Pressure should be put on the IAAF to ensure this is not a whitewash. An understanding of how this mess happened and who was responsible, and strategies to minimise its continuing impact on Semenya are needed. The emotional damage to her by the IAAF’s actions and how this can be rectified should also be considered.

Wider than this, constant public discussion and political grandstanding should cease. I feel guilty of this myself by even writing this piece. Seems we are all perpetuating the story.

Specifically, what is needed is an immediate moratorium on speculation and discussion about the outcome of the gender tests. We should all try to give Semenya back her dignity by keeping our opinionated mouths shut about this and let her deal with the ramifications in private.

This article by Brandon Hamber was published on Polity and in the Engineering News on 11 September 2009. as part of the column "Look South". Copyright Brandon Hamber.

Use opportunity offered by rubbish

Research by the UK’s Institute for Public Policy Research has found that, in Ireland and the UK, the average person creates over 869 kg and over 603 kg of rubbish a year respectively. To deal with this, households in the UK and Ireland are expected to separate their rubbish, leaving it in appropriate colour-coded bins for collection and recycling.

Comedian Jack Dee categorises the current approach to recycling in the UK as more like filing than waste management. Nonetheless, and despite some criticism that not all recycled waste is used, the recycling drive has contributed to a shift in the amount of waste in landfills.

In 2000, some 90% of waste ended up in landfills in the UK. In 2008 just under 60% of rubbish was deposited there. This is a significant change, but still behind countries like the Netherlands and Austria, where over 60% of rubbish is recycled.

In South Africa, formal recycling schemes are less common. I have noticed that most South Africans who visit us in Belfast are perplexed by our recycling rituals.

In the majority of areas in South Africa, if you want to recycle your waste, the onus is on you to sort your rubbish and then take it to the appropriate site. Most local councils do not collect rubbish, or demand that rubbish is sorted at home and left in differently 
marked receptacles for collection. As the South African website, Going Green SA, notes, recycling in South Africa “can sometimes be quite an effort”.

However, I would not want to paint a picture of Europe as being superior when it comes to recycling or reducing waste. When plastic bags were sarcastically referred to as the ‘national flower’ in South Africa, in 2003, government moved swiftly to charge for them. South Africa was one of the first countries to do this. The UK has still not adopted this practice.

Effective recycling can also rely on a degree of privilege, that is, having regular refuse collections, space to have multiple bins, running water to clean containers and mass education campaigns. The need to recycle can also be influenced by the amount of material thrown away, in the first place. The developed world produces masses of refuse with its ravenous consumer culture and tendency to dispose of goods that might be reused in other countries.

Households in the UK throw away about 6,7-million tons of food every year. A study carried out by the University of Arizona’s Garbage Project, which analysed 250 000 lb of refuse, found that it was paper, and not disposable diapers or fast-food packaging, that dominated landfill sites. Paper is largely used by industry and consumed by the better-off.

The poor are often the best ‘recyclers’. In fact, in South Africa, the more you look, the more you realise people are recycling all the time. Squatter camps are built from recycled waste. Toys and ornaments common in flea markets are often made of recycled wire, glass and bottle tops, and old machine parts, food and clothes never go to waste.

So the problem is twofold.

The developed world has more entrenched recycling awareness and better facilities, especially in countries like Holland and Germany. However, this is often limited to sorting rubbish for recycling. A more developed consciousness around reducing disposable waste by buying less and more appropriately, and reusing goods, is needed, especially in the UK and the US.

In the developing world, the recycling consciousness needs to take root, and adequate formal facilities to deal with this need to be put in place. At the same time, the poor’s ability to develop informal and imaginative processes for reusing waste needs to be harnessed. The garbage business in South Africa remains a vast, untapped resource. Creatively using rubbish could be another aspect of building the economy and creating jobs, with the positive spin-off of environmental protection.

This article by Brandon Hamber was published on Polity and in the Engineering News on  21 August 2009. as part of the column "Look South". Copyright Brandon Hamber.

Transforming Societies after Political Violence

My book Transforming Societies After Political Violence: Truth, Reconciliation and Mental Health, now published by Springer in New York.

Transforming Societies after Political Violence offers a template for those tasked with providing truth, justice, reconciliation, and healing. This interdisciplinary study identifies complex relationships between recovery from political violence and the psychological processes that accompany widespread social change, showing how these can be integrated to strengthen both individual and society. Author Brandon Hamber draws on his extensive experience in South Africa and comparative examples from elsewhere to examine the centrality of mental health issues in transitional justice, and the social, cultural, and identity issues involved in meeting the needs of victims. In discussing reparations (what the author terms "repairing the irreparable"), the power of ambivalence, and especially concepts of closure, he eloquently sets out professionals’ roles in helping survivors move beyond the toxic past without covering it up or becoming mired in it. ISBN: 978-0-387-89426-3, Springer 2009

Available

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Endorsements
How to victims heal? We should not be too quick to presume. Those seeking truth and justice often prioritize victims’ interests – but without always fully understanding what those interests and needs are, or how different victims may recover in very different ways. Based on fifteen years of working with and listening to victims and survivors, Brandon Hamber helps us better understand the mental health backdrop to atrocity and recovery. With plentiful, poignant stories, and clear policy recommendations, this book should help shape – and greatly improve – future endeavors to confront unimaginable memories and pain (Priscilla Hayner, International Centre for Transitional Justice and author of Unspeakable Truths: confronting state terror and atrocity)

Brandon Hamber nails this tricky subject with humility, insight, learned insight, and golden recommendations..... if you are interested in how humans try to grapple with the consequences of man’s brutality to man, and ultimately the truth, read it! (Thulani Grenville-Grey, former South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission Mental Health Specialist)

Brandon Hamber's experience in multiple sites of transitional justice work, and his rare ability to bridge the academic and theoretical with the practical and logistical, ensures this publication is an extremely valuable contribution and a must read to those working in this fast evolving field (Piers Pigou, former South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission Investigator and Director of the South African History Archive).

Brandon Hamber has written a challenging and good interdisciplinary book, which will not only be helpful to those dealing with mental health issues during transitions from conflict, but also to lawyers and those concerned with conflict resolution more generally (Christine Bell, Director, Institute of Transitonal Justice, University of Ulster)

How countries recover from political atrocity is a question that has confronted dozens of regimes around the world for decades. The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission is an iconic symbol of what for some is a profound achievement in restructuring a “peaceful society.” In Transforming Societies After Political Violence: Truth, Reconciliation, and Mental Health Dr. Brandon Hamber applies his many years of experience both within the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and beyond it to a careful analysis of the complex issues – legal, historical, social, psychological - embedded in such a process. It is his astute attention to these complexities that make his book so rich. Hamber says that “if the TRC process and working with the victims appearing before it taught me anything it was that the psychological life of the survivor of extreme violence is cut through by this complexity." His work is clear testimony to that statement Transforming Societies After Political Violence is a valuable resource for researchers, practitioners, scholars and policy makers. If you read one book about countries emerging from their violent pasts, it should be Dr. Brandon Hamber’s Transforming Societies After Political Violence. I will rely on this volume in my ongoing work and I predict it will become a definitive text in this area (Nina K. Thomas, Ph.D., ABPP, Chair, Specialization in Trauma and Disaster Studies; NYU Postdoctoral program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis; Co-Chair, Relational Orientation; NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis; Adjunct Clinical Associate Professor NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis)

Hamber brings an acute clinical sensibility and sophisticated research mind to a complex problem: state handling of reconciliation after a catastrophic upheaval. … his main focus in this book is the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) process. … a must read for any psychologist working with trauma survivors, especially postconflict trauma survivors. It calls upon a rich literature–from psychoanalysis … to trial transcripts of commissions; it integrates all these sources to provide a truly unique contribution to the psychology of trauma." (Don Dutton, PsycCRITIQUES, Vol. 54 (47/3), November, 2009)

Belfast and Johannesburg: peas in a racist pod?

I long to live in a society where there is no racism but, living between Belfast and Johannesburg, this is impossible.

About a year ago, xenophobia in South Africa hit the international newspapers. Foreigners, mainly from Africa, were driven from their homes, with over 50 people being killed. Over 100 people have been prosecuted for the attacks. But recently information surfaced that local businesspeople in some townships have been meeting secretly to ‘look at’ how to rid the community of businesses owned by immigrants. Sporadic attacks continue.

Belfast recently featured in international papers with a similar storyline. Some 100 Romanians were forced from their homes by mobs of young people claiming the immigrants were taking their jobs and houses and stealing from the local community. The attacks seemed to take on a neo-Nazi feel, with swastikas and Nazi salutes being prominent. Most of the Romanians have now left Northern Ireland.

However, attacks against foreigners in Northern Ireland are not new. They have been a consistent feature of the society over the last decade.

In 2004, for example, Bill Rolston, at the University of Ulster, highlighted attacks against Pakistanis, Chinese and Zimbabwean immigrants, besides others. He also reported on incidents where local minorities were greeted at night by masked men robbing their houses and telling them: “You won’t be needing these; you’ll be leaving soon.”

Police statistics show that, in 1996, there were 41 racist incidents recorded; in 2006 and 2007, there were 1 047. Research by Neil Jarman, of the Institute of Conflict Research, has found that such incidents, although perceived as taking place largely in working-class Protestant areas in Belfast and linked to far right groups, have been documented in Catholic areas and recorded in all major cities, towns and villages in Northern Ireland. Perpetrators of such incidents also vary and are not restricted to rightwingers and paramilitary groups, as some believe.

Of course, the increase in incidents of racism can reflect the growing number of immigrants, improved reporting rates and the increased visibility of the issue. But the numeric increase is undeniable and the figures are also under-representative because many incidents go unreported. Weighing up the research on the issue, the conclusion is clear: racism is a serious problem in Northern Ireland.

The public response has been interesting. As in South Africa, the majority have condemned the xenophobic violence, and a range of antiracism protests have been organised. These actions are commendable. However, there also seems to be social distancing from the problem. Routinely, commentators and the public make reference to “groups of thugs” being responsible and are at pains to point out that the majority are welcoming and want foreigners in the cities.

I agree that the incidents are the work of relatively small groups, but there also seems to be a lack of acknowledgement that prejudice is deeply ingrained across the society, as it is in South Africa. People in Northern Ireland, like those in South Africa, tend to take notice only when problems explode. In the times in between, most of us, including politicians, ignore low-level violence and racism. This reinforces the idea that there is an ‘acceptable’ level of violence and that some racism is tolerable. This creates the foundation for extremism.

I am yet to meet an African living in Belfast, myself included, who has not, at some point, been abused for not being from the society. Such incidents are generally not life threatening and most people are indeed friendly, but the hatred must be coming from somewhere and cannot be overlooked or seen as concerning specific individuals only.

In this context, surely, the majority of the population’s general avoidance of issues until they reach mammoth proportions, the ongoing use of segregated schools and housing, which inculcates a propensity for division, and the fact that most political parties continue to appeal to voters using narrow, single-identity politics and, in some cases, anti-immigration rhetoric, cannot be helping the situation.

This article by Brandon Hamber was published on Polity and in the Engineering News on 10 July 2009 as part of the column "Look South". Copyright Brandon Hamber.

Where were you when the UK government imploded?

There is probably not a reader of this column who has not been part of a ‘where were you when?’ conversation. Where were you when Nelson Mandela walked free? When Princess Diana died? When the Twin Towers crumbled?

The last few weeks, in the UK, has been a ‘where were you when’ sort of time. Events have not been as dramatic as the assassination of JFK, but rather a slow build-up towards a ‘where were you?’ crescendo that is on its way.

This accumulation has concerned the revelations by the Daily Telegraph about UK members of Parliament’s (MPs’) expenses. The culmination will, at the risk of making wild predictions, be the collapse of the once dominant Labour Party of Tony Blair and then Gordon Brown. The process will reach its pinnacle when Labour loses the general election next year.

The revelations of how MPs from all parties have used expense accounts have been damning. MPs can claim expenses for costs of running a second home because most have to live in two places, that is, in their constituency and also in London, to attend Parliament. MPs can claim up to £24 006 (in 2008/9) for this ‘additional costs allowance’. They can claim things such as mortgage interest payments on second homes and utility bills. However, officials have allowed MPs to claim for furnishings, maintenance and food. Until recently, claims up to £250 did not even 
require a receipt.

The most shocking claims have included a claim for £1 645 for a ‘duck island’ (a little wooden house where your ducks can sleep, if you are wondering), expenses to clean a moat around a large house, £1 000 for the removal of ivy from a wall, household maintenance and refurbishment worth thousands, new toilet seats, trees, bath plugs, trouser presses, TVs, carpets and mock Tudor beams, not to mention all sorts of food claims.

What is even more worrying is that an array of politicians have engaged in ‘flipping’. This is the process whereby they claim one house as their second home, carry out necessary maintenance and refurbishments, and then flip to their ‘first’ home, claiming it then as their second home. Expenses for that property then follow. Other politicians have been even more crooked, claiming mortgage interest for properties on which they no longer owe money, and couples who are politicians claiming for the same property.

MPs, however, argue that their claims are, generally, within the rules. The rules, however, state that costs can only be claimed for those “incurred . . . wholly, exclusively and necessarily to enable” them to “stay overnight away from my only or main home for the purpose of performing” duties as an MP. But anyone can see that MPs have been using allowances to literally feather their nests, increasing their property values and lowering their daily expenses through having their grocery bills supplemented. Are such claims necessary to perform governmental duties?

Of course, not all politicians have been engaged in such practices, although most must have known about the system and its excesses. A number of ‘more guilty’ MPs have resigned. Others are attempting to pay back some of their extravagant claims. But even in making these repayments, most seem to continue to miss the point.

Many persist on defining their repayment as a benevolent gesture for an error in judgment that took place within the context of the rules. But, to the person in the street, this just smacks of insincerity because everyone knows the rules have been abused. There is the letter of the law, but then there is the spirit of the law. The actions of many UK MPs are, at best, ‘generally corrupt’, and, if such actions took place in Africa, no one would hesitate to condemn the whole system as endemically corrupt.

So, my MP friends, where will you be when the UK government comes crumbling down? Cleaning your duck pond or down on your knees begging for forgiveness?

This article by Brandon Hamber was published on Polity and in the Engineering News on  12 June 2009. as part of the column "Look South". Copyright Brandon Hamber.

JZ cometh – am I bothered?

I have a confession that is unpopular in both South Africa and globally, and will probably result in my being ripped to shreds from all side. But here goes – I confess that I cannot make up my mind about how I feel about Jacob Zuma and I am not sure if it matters.

Apparently, JZ is either the anti-Christ or the saviour South Africa has been waiting for – the the man who will lead us into a new dispensation of milk, honey and BMWs for the poor this Christmas, or into a barren wilderness of economic decline and corrupt, banana republic politics where we will all be taking regular showers (if there was enough water) to protect ourselves from infectious diseases.

What is it about him that provokes people so much?

Is it simply that he does not fit the mould of the Mbeki, Clinton, Blair era of politicians – the great reformers who spent their time on a slippery slope to the right while pretending to care deeply about the welfare of the poor as the gap between the haves and have-nots was increasing? Or is it because JZ is a so-called traditionalist, and many whites in South Africa and in the Western world do not know what that means and it evokes racist stereotypes in them? Or that his supporters are still so unfamiliar with the liberal democracy they voted for in 1994 that they think, rather naively, that JZ is actually the vanguard of a new revolution and, therefore, worth backing, no matter what?

I am not sure. But I do know we should all be asking ourselves why we feel so strongly about him. This might tell us more about ourselves than him.

What I like about him is that he provokes a reaction in people, whether by design or accident. Anyone who can help stimulate debate and breathe life into politics, as the recent South African election proved is okay by my book.

Of course, I need to qualify this. Robert Mugabe provokes debate, as did Idi Amin and Pol Pot before him, and I not particularly fond of any of these gentlemen. But JZ is more of an enigma. There is something about him that is potentially hopeful and destructive at the same time. I am also a sucker for his rendition of his theme tune, Umshini Wami (Bring me my machine gun). It reminds me of my grandfather asking me to fetch his slippers.

Many whites are now quaking in their boots, and probably some of the new black middle class are wondering about their investments too. But what did South Africans expect? Given the economic disparities in South Africa, how could anyone but a populist have risen to power at some point and promise radical change? It would have been nice if the person chosen to do this was as unsoiled as Barack Obama, but life is mostly not like that.

So this is how I read it: Zuma is in a position where complacency is not an option. Given the corruption case, he has to be squeaky clean. The biggest threat to everyone is not what he will do, but rather that he does not do enough. He has to deliver for the entire country. Whether we approve of him or not, or his choice of song when it comes to public crooning, his mission to change the lot of the poor is in everyone’s long-term interest.

So maybe it is time we all stopped worrying about him as a person and focused on the big looming questions. How is South Africa going to become a fairer place? How do we ensure that democracy remains robust and human rights are protected for all? JZ will be part of this for a while, but, in a genuine democracy, politicians are temporary, whereas social problems can endure, and that is worth worrying about.

This article by Brandon Hamber was published on Polity and in the Engineering News on 8 May 2009. as part of the column "Look South". Copyright Brandon Hamber.