WEB Du Bois wrote in The Souls of Black Folk of what he called “a peculiar sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity”.
I am told that anthropologists have diagnosed a condition among some indigenous peoples as “loss of soul”.
Apparently, this means the breakdown of a connection a people have to their traditions and inner lives. They have forgotten the language and prayers their fathers used to speak to the gods, land and animals. They don’t hear their ancestors, and their ancestors are deaf to them.
In their lives, they are invisible to themselves. They lack a story that is their own. Instead, they drift, trying on the customs of other peoples. Sometimes they accept identities thrust on to them. And, since none of them fits, they wander, carrying a nameless ache they can’t quite identify.
This used to be my story and the story of my people. I am a lawyer and mother who grew up “coloured” in apartheid South Africa.
I rejected that label, as it erased my history and made me a political category. But if I wasn’t coloured, who was I?
My father said I came from the Khoisan, but I wasn’t sure what this meant either. A tradition doesn’t mean much if there isn’t anyone practising it. It felt a bit like playing at being Khoisan and making things up as we went along.
So I went on a quest in search of my soul. My search involved dropping out of law school to do transformational work with the inmates of Pollsmoor Prison.
The coloured prisoners who constituted nearly 70 percent of the prison population were many things. The 300 gang members I worked with were hard men, fathers, brothers, husbands, gangsters, Christians and Muslims, but they too seemed to share with me the classic symptoms of soullessness – an inexpressible sorrow and an anxious search for some identity. Together we started to make sense of the identity hunger we bore like a cross, that had driven us into gangs, drugs and violence.
At the end of our time together, the rawness of our hunger had transformed into grief for a loss whose gravity we had finally begun to comprehend. And the embracing of our profound grief had begun the healing and set each of us on our individual quest for soulfulness.
I returned to law school, hoping my legal skills would help serve these men better, and I enrolled for an LLM programme at the University of Arizona.
Here, studying with Native American law professors, confident in their identity by having regained their souls, I learnt a language to express what had happened to my people. The gangs, drug abuse and foetal alcohol syndrome endemic among my people were a result of collective trauma.
We had been stripped of our history, and the memory of this was buried deep in our collective psyches. Yes, we could still function, but we were traumatised, and we dealt with this trauma by hurting each other and ourselves.
The socio-cultural institutions that could help us cope and heal had been wrecked, and we were estranged. I understood that our political and legal victories were insufficient to regain our souls. We needed to heal as a people.
I returned from the US and later joined Natural Justice, an international collective of environmental lawyers with its main office in Cape Town. I began working as the lawyer for the National Khoi-San Council, an umbrella body of chiefs representing the Khoisan.
Along with the daily legal battles for rights to land and culture, we – colleague Kabir Bavikatte and I – initiated the Heroes Project as a Natural Justice initiative.
The Heroes Project is all about soulful journeying to help heal collective trauma.
It is inspired by the work of the mythologist Joseph Campbell, who spoke of the common myth of the “hero’s journey” in cultures across the world, involving the three stages of separation, initiation and return. The quest is triggered by a painful grit or symptom, which through courageous journeying is transformed into a pearl of great value.
This pearl is soulfulness – an insight into one’s purpose and its place in the collective purpose of one’s people. The Heroes Project works with traumatised Khoisan communities through the selective use of our myths, ceremonies and rites of passage, seeking to reinvigorate the spirit of our traditions and adapt them to address our present challenges.
We are building a bridge over the desolate chasm between our past and present. I feel it in my bones that one day my people will walk across this bridge to find their souls on the other side.
* Dr Bavikatte is a founding director of Natural Justice. Lesle Jansen and Bavikatte are both working on developing the Heroes Project as a legal innovation. Jansen can be contacted at [email protected]