A short course for community-based paralegals
Overview
South Africa boasts the highest inequality globally, despite almost three decades of democratic governance. Landlessness, exploitation, poverty, racism, violence, corruption, and service collapse persist. Politics faces mounting distrust, associated with elitism, patronage, and divisive agendas. Different explanations and answers to these challenges are presented. As the 2024 elections approach in South Africa and 64 other countries globally, political parties take centre stage: each representing different – or perhaps similar – explanations and answers to a countries challenges. Through delving into these challenges, explanations, and proposed paths to a better future, this course navigates South Africa’s past, present, and potential futures: exploring themes of African solidarity, critically assessing 1994’s significance, integrating global democratic perspectives, and scrutinizing elections’ role in participatory democracy.
After the successes of 2022 and 2023, this course returns for an exciting third year. Tailored for community-based paralegals and fieldworkers, it addresses a spectrum of community needs, from gender-based violence to labor disputes. By delving into historical roots and broader democratic frameworks, Rethinking Democracy equips participants with context and insights essential for navigating contemporary challenges in social justice. This year, the course is themed around the popular slogan “2024 is our 1994” – exploring, historicising, critiquing and debating what it represents for our democracy.
Woven through the course are these questions
1. What do the realities that community-based paralegals deal with on an ongoing basis reveal about the texture of South Africa’s democracy?
2. How can we explain the persistent and growing inequalities and injustices that dominate South Africa today, nearly 30 years into democratic rule?
3. What are some of the big struggles waged in South Africa today? What do they teach us about democracy, resistance and imagination?
4. What does a democracy for the many, not a few, look like? What can we learn – from the past and today – about attempts to craft expansive and radical notions of democracy?
Participants in the course will consider these questions, locate them historically and look at their theoretical underpinnings.
Approach
This course will complement the knowledge and experience acquired by community-based paralegals in their practice with conceptual tools designed to better understand why the South Africa we live in today, is a nightmare for so many and what can be done to change this. Between the two residential modules participants will engage in online contact, tasks and support.
A range of creative techniques – interactive games, role plays and scenario exercises, seminars, film screenings, fireside chats, reading circles, guest lectures, activist panels, discussion groups and debates – will be used in delivering the course. The course is residential and has two modules, each running over five days. Between the two residential modules participants will engage in online contact, tasks and support.
Who can apply:
Participants must be engaged in community paralegal work and provide legal assistance and dispute resolution services to communities on a range of issues. In selecting the participants, Tshisimani will consider geographic spread, gender, age and period of service to the community. We will make every effort to draw participants from different age groups and with different levels of experience, aiming for a diverse mixture in the learning space.
Participants are expected to commit to attending the entire duration of the course, which runs over two blocks: the advice office or place of work needs to approve leave for the applicant to attend these two residential modules.
Module Dates and Details
Module 1: Sunday 9 June – Friday 14 June (held in Western Cape)
Module 2: End of October (location TBC)
An expression of support from your community advice office or organisation is mandatory.
Tuition fees, data to support course work, travel and accommodation will be covered by Tshisimani. Space is limited to 25 participants.
Course summary:
Module 1: Why Democracy? Then and Now
Sunday 9 June – Friday 14 June
This module is about the realities that confront activists in South Africa today – inequality, racism, uneven patterns of land ownership, spatial segregation and endemic violence. The aim of the module is to ask questions about the persistence of these realities after the installation of a democratic government in 1994 – a government ushered in with the promise of “a better life for all”. In answering these questions, we will deal with the history of poverty and inequality; and how race, class and gender oppression worked together and configured the economy and society we live in today. We will use different lenses to grapple with a history which has been profoundly shaped by colonial conquest and dispossession, slavery, violence, indentured and migrant labour, enforced segregation and the creation of a system of production relying upon cheap black labour. Although tracing back inequality, poverty, land deprivation, spatial segregation and violence; the module will also look at political and policy choices that post-1994 governments chose and continue to take, with a contemporary look at the promises of the upcoming elections. By the end of this module, participants would have grappled with:
1. What were the key demands of ordinary people in the struggle against apartheid?
2. What do these realities reveal about how our society functions, who rules South Africa today, different group interests and the nature of the post-1994 state?
3. In what ways are the everyday issues that community-based paralegals deal with linked to unfolding struggles for dignity and democracy.
Module 2: Remaking democracy? Alternatives and strategies
End of October 2024
Activists today share a growing consensus that there is a big rift between people’s daily realities and the promise of a better life for all. While the broad consensus is evident across different organising spaces in South Africa, the same cannot be said about how to organise politically to challenge the social and economic crisis of our time. For this module, participants will examine some of emerging responses to the social and economic crisis besieging SA today, including a growing disillusionment with politics as a vehicle for change; greater appeal of authoritarian politics and the yearning for “strongmen” as well as a defense of the Constitution at all costs. We will look at how these responses point us to larger questions of what is meant by “alternatives” as well as what a democratic, egalitarian society would look like. This module hopes to foreground questions about strategy and tactics for radical social transformation and hone-in on real world cases and attempts to craft expansive notions of democracy that give ordinary people power over the political and economic forces that govern their lives. We will reconnect with and draw inspiration from ideas of democracy, located in our past and from the struggles being waged by activists in South Africa and the across the world today. Of particular interest are experiments from militant union traditions, women’s organising, shack dwellers’ movements, community organising as well as traditions that approach the law as a terrain of struggle.
By the end of this module, participants should be able to:
1. critically assess the different responses to the ongoing crisis in their respective communities and in SA more broadly,
2. map the social formations and struggles in their different communities and identify, starting with their own experience, the layers in society today that are invested in and most capable of ushering in a radically different SA,
3. locate the role of their practice in unfolding struggles to change the nature of South African society today.
To apply, please submit the following
- Submit a short bio by filling in this Google form
- Email a letter of support from your advice office or organisation stating that they support your application for this course and will grant you leave to attend the two modules. Send the email to info@tshisimani.org.za ensuring your name and the organisation you work for/with is included in the letter.
- Whatsapp your short video/voice note task (see below) to 0737099909.
Instructions for short video or voice note task (3 minutes):
Record and send a 3-minute video or voice note stating the following:
- Your name and where you come from.
- The name of the advice office/organisation where you are located.
- Tell us a story about a case that you dealt with in the last 5 years.
- What is the one thing you learnt from this case?
- Why do you want to form part of this course?
Your video or voice note should not be longer than 3 minutes
Video and voice note tips. Ensure that you record in a quiet place with no noise interruptions. Clean your camera before recording on video. Use the questions only as a guide. Do not repeat the questions on the video or voice note as this will take more time. Send your video or voice note along with your name and contact details to this WhatsApp number 0737099909.
The deadline for applications is Friday, 26 April 2023. Late applications will not be considered. If we have not contacted you by the 6th May, then please consider your application unsuccessful
For more information contact:
www.tshisimani.org.za
Twitter: @Tshisimani
Facebook: @tshisimaniCAE
