Remembering, Healing, and Telling: Community-Initiated Approaches to Trauma Care in South Africa

Abstract

This chapter presents three case studies of, what the authors have termed, trauma care in contemporary South Africa. The case studies are not about psychosocial interventions in the traditional (counselling) sense, but they look rather at how migrant communities in South Africa have sought out ways to deal with the deeply dislocating effects of living as migrants in the complex political context of post-apartheid South Africa. They therefore present a range of activities which may not, at first glance, seem to be trauma interventions. Nevertheless, they were taken seriously as interventions precisely because of their frequent use by migrants and the absence of more mainstream psychosocial interventions for migrants in contemporary South Africa. The previous work that the authors had done on psychosocial interventions had made us realise that their use by migrant communities is not common and so we began from a different starting point. We began by asking what it is that migrants are already doing to deal with distress, trauma, and post-violence reconciliation, and how does this in turn connect to the ongoing process of peacebuilding, development, and social transformation both in South Africa and in their countries of origin. It is from this question that the three case studies presented here were selected. These three were chosen (from seven in total, see Palmary et al., Healing and change in the city of gold: Case studies of coping and support in Johannesburg, forthcoming) because they presented the diversity of what might be considered a trauma intervention, but also because they spoke of the need to consider how the context of political transition in so many African countries and associated attempts at peacebuilding, connects with the contemporary socio-economic injustices that characterise South Africa’s political transition in ways that refuse a distinction between the economic, social, and psychological.