Knitting together the traditional and innovative is where heritage really counts

Never mind the smell of meat sizzling on the braai – or even the curio shop version of the different cultures in our country which pop up in the media on this day each year.

The real challenge in our country - still groaning under the weight of inequality wrought by apartheid and perpetuated by a corrupt regime - is to knit the traditional and the innovative together.

That’s where heritage really counts: the existing beliefs and practices that feed into real on-the-ground solutions for communities pushed to the margins and denied basic resources.

A positive example is Orbis Africa‚ an NGO that focuses on preventing and treating blindness in communities through training‚ advocacy and partnerships.

Instead of seeing traditional healers as being in opposition to the work they’re doing‚ they realised these healers are in a fact a gateway to the heart of the community.

If their traditional methods could be combined with early screening for clinical methods‚ it was a win-win – and so training to this effect was carried out.

Lene Øverland‚ Orbis Africa CEO‚ said the training had “given healthcare facilities invaluable allies since the traditional healers live in their patients’ communities”.

She says that traditional healers are “already a trusted source of health information and treatment”‚ and can thus be crucial for early identification and promoting patient compliance.

Makhosi Msomi‚ secretary of a traditional healers’ association‚ gives perspective from the other side of it: “The training opened our eyes to the fact that someone might not be experiencing pain but still has a problem and needs to be referred to a clinic. We can now look for early symptoms.”

She said it was upsetting to meet people now who are blind for life and realising it could have been prevented if the healers had known before how to identify problems in the early stages.

Another example is the Philani Maternal‚ Child Health and Nutrition Trust.

Instead of rushing into the community in Khayelitsha in crisis management mode‚ they based their model on hands-on research that could lead the way based on existing resources in the community.

Two major aspects emerged.

The one was that there are already “positive deviants” in the community – women who have developed incredible coping mechanisms to raise healthy children in the most challenging of circumstances.

These positive deviants are best suited to be role models.

The other is that it works better to take a programme into the existing social fabric of the community and draw on ubuntu‚ rather than seeing everything as being problematic and then using bricks and mortar and teams from ‘outside’ to ‘fix’ those problems.

That saying “if you build it‚ they will come” is not in fact true.

Many people in communities face enormous barriers – access to money‚ time and transport‚ for example - when it comes to the ‘simple’ things that the rest of us take for granted‚ like getting your baby to the clinic to be weighed.

According to Ingrid le Roux‚ who heads up Philani‚ “The key idea of the mentor mother programme is to engage capable women in the task of improving the lives of families in their own communities ... In this way the programme takes maternal and child health‚ including the rehabilitation of malnourished children‚ beyond clinics and institutions into the community making it home based.”

On the other hand‚ there are examples where traditional and unequal roles in communities are not broken down but rather reinforced when ‘do-gooders’ fail to consult properly with the needs of a community before imposing an ‘intervention’ on them.

A perfect example of this is the PlayPump project – the concept was appealing‚ but the reality was a different story.

The idea was that merry-go-rounds (roundabouts) would be attached to pumps so that as the children played‚ they pumped water for the community.

However‚ no consultation happened beforehand with the communities‚ and it soon became clear that the system was failing.

Research showed that since women had traditionally been saddled with collecting water‚ a lack of consultation meant this was simply reinforced.

At one pump in Mozambique‚ it was discovered that the first the community heard of it was at installation phase and the community leader promptly told the women that this was where they should now pump the water.

At many of the locations surveyed‚ it was found that grown women were turning the roundabouts to pump water‚ rather than children doing so inadvertently by playing.

The roundabouts were “too low to be comfortable for adults to use” according to the research‚ and there was also a loss of dignity in having to pump that way so many said they had preferred the old hand pumps.

Without consulting with a community‚ or looking more closely at the traditional ways in which things are being done in that community‚ it becomes impossible to either draw on those traditions as a resource‚ or to challenge them in meaningful ways that can shift some of the injustices in those very communities.

- TimesLIVE