Learning a Lesson From South Africa

They will come from Indonesia, Hong Kong and Kenya, from All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena and USC’s Center for Religion and Civic Culture, to train with the peacemakers of South Africa in Los Angeles next week.

The public is also invited to much of the conference, “Learning From South Africa in a Consultation on Community Conflict Transformation,” said Michael Mata, director of the Urban Leadership Institute in Los Angeles, one of the event’s organizers.

The conference, Tuesday through Nov. 11 at the Los Angeles Convention Center, will include closed sessions for about 200 community leaders, who are selected based on nominations from civic and religious groups. Public events will include sessions with Bishop Mvume Dandala, co-chair with former President Nelson Mandela of the South African Moral Summit, and Alex Boraine, co-chair with retired Archbishop Desmond M. Tutu of the country’s post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

The idea, said Mata, is to look at South Africa’s struggle to recover from apartheid and the historical divisions of race, ethnicity, violence, crime and poverty. Using case studies and role playing, South African and U.S. trainers will lead participants through “community conflict transformation”--an approach to civil unrest that can translate anywhere, he said. The focus is on building relationships within groups before tackling the larger conflict.

A Connecticut-based group, Plowshares Institute, worked with South African leaders to develop the approach two years ago and then began training U.S. team leaders. Next week’s conference is the core leadership group’s first training sessions with community activists.

Joe R. Hicks, executive director of the Los Angeles Commission on Human Rights, sat in on an early planning meeting. As an anti-apartheid activist, he had watched South Africa’s transformation closely and noticed how the country’s problems were not unlike those that dogged the United States.

“If you look at L.A. or Chicago or Harlem or any other urban environment, what do you have? A lot of youngsters who have grown up in societies torn apart by drug addiction, societies that have used violence as part of a cultural clothing it puts on. You find a lot of similar things underneath the surface. . . . Both [the U.S. and South Africa] are struggling to use nonviolence as a tool to resolve conflict.”

For information: (213) 746-2211 or https://www.urbanonramps.com/cerj.