Facing a culture marked by gender inequality and disrupted by the AIDS epidemic, how can South Africans apply the principles of social justice and human rights to their personal relationships? This is a question Associate Professor of Anthropology Zolani Ngwane and his students hope to address through a new class and an ongoing project.

In the fall, Ngwane will begin teaching a course called“Social Justice, Human Rights, and Popular Imagination.” The class is one component of the larger project US/SA (United States/South Africa) Youth Encounters, a series of conversations with young South Africans concerning their feelings on the connections between justice and interpersonal relationships. Haverford students who take Ngwane's class will be eligible to participate in Youth Encounters.

Ngwane, who has been studying social culture, post-apartheid politics and AIDS prevention in his home country for two decades, plans to have his Haverford students converse with their South African peers about their day-to-day lives and personal relationships.“The Haverford students will see if these relationships embody or betray the concept of social justice.”

The course is designed around primary sources, which Ngwane gathered during a winter break trip to South Africa. He collected testimonies submitted to the post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and interviewed older citizens of both genders to hear their thoughts on the Commission's activities.“There were different expectations,” he says.“Some were promised reparations by the government, but the money never came. They feel betrayed by the government and the Commission.” However, the Commission ended up serving as a model for communities to start their own NGOs and nonprofits.

“It was very touching to me,” says Ngwane,“to attend local meetings where people talked about the wrongs done to each other, and to see reconciliation at work where people live—where it belongs.”

Ngwane also led focus group discussions with youths ages 18-22 to find out how they defined living“justly” in relationships. Although South African culture is dominated by adults (particularly men), with young people and women at the bottom of the social ladder, Ngwane found that exposure to American media has helped the younger generation carve an identity for itself.“There is a strong sense of cosmopolitanism, an awareness that they are citizens of a global community,” he says.

But, he adds, they are still unable to extend this worldliness to their intimate relationships, especially with women, who continue to be seen as the inferior sex. Nowhere is this attitude more evident than in the initiation schools boys enter as they reach adolescence. The initiation schools, Zolani says, reinforce“masculinist” behaviors by painting women as vulnerable, economically and physically dependent on men. As a result, many women in South Africa have no power to resist domestic violence, to abstain from sex or insist that their partners use condoms.

In the class, Ngwane intends to have his students break into groups and examine documents and transcripts, and re-create the context of each testimonial or interview.“I want students to realize that change lies not only at the level of institutions; it also requires individual participation,” says Ngwane.“Relationships among individuals can be sources of change.”

-Brenna McBride