Cultural Citizenship and Civic Activism

Stefan Norgaard

Cultural Citizenship and Civic Activism:  Service Learning Final Blog Post

Allow me to set the daily scene at Whizz.  The “front room” is always buzzing – with young people getting help on CVs and items printed or photocopied.  And some days, there is a long line at the photocopier as people scan their identity documents:  passports, visas, birth and death certificates.  These serve as a constant reminder that these residents of Site C, Khayelitsha are legal citizens.  And the reason I am so surprised: 

• Site C Khayelitsha residents aren’t treated like citizens. 
• They don’t receive dignified services.  As we learned, for example, many Khayelitsha families receive only a bucket toilet or a “loo with a view”
• When trying to protest against these concerns, many were arrested and silenced.  Shots were fired in response to nonviolent protest.  
• The South African constitution, in the Bill of Rights, guarantees “the right to human dignity” (Section 10) and “the right to unionize and the right to strike” (Section 23).  And Section 20 of the Bill of Rights states:  “No Citizen may be deprived of citizenship.” 

The notion of “cultural citizenship” is the topic I use as my metaphor for learning in Cape Town this quarter.  I have learned about the notion academically in previous Stanford courses. In Cape Town, I learned by seeing real applications of cultural citizenship in the South African context.  And finally, I learned that this new understanding of cultural citizenship can be harnessed. 

Rosaldo and Coll run the cultural citizenship project at Stanford.  They note that one can be a legal citizen and not be a cultural citizen.  To be a cultural citizen, one has to be comfortable being a minority.  In Khayelitsha, as opposed to the U.S., the black population group is not a minority but a majority.  They had 79.2% of the population in the 2011 Census.  Yet many South Africans are still fighting for cultural citizenship.  I came into South Africa ignorant to the application of cultural citizenship in this context.

Coming into South Africa, I knew the facts about South Africa’s demographics and segregation.  But that knowing was far inferior to my coming to know this quarter at Cape Town.  As Barnett states, “at the intersection of knowing and doing lies a new sense of being.”  The facts I learned couldn’t nearly prepare me for being this quarter at Whizz and in Cape Town.  Reading the “Single Story problem,” by Ndzendze, I realized how guilty of the single story I was.  I thought of “Khayelitsha” as one place I would visit, not the patchwork of places—Site C, Site B, Village 3, and the nuances within each of those—that I now know.  I also found myself thinking of places and communities in an overly geographical way.  In other words, I did not think about people or nodes of social contact or “communities of interest”.  Rohlander and others wrote about this earlier in the course and taught me that community is more than a physical concept.

The most important thing I learned and observed was this fight for cultural citizenship pervading Site C. Seskikhona, an activist group 10,000 people strong, is located right outside of Site C. Sesikhona protests everything from service delivery to ethical standards in politics to apathy among youth.  At first, I thought Sesikhona and the “airport 9” poo protests were part of a disjointed, fragmented effort of people too apathetic to express themselves through the traditional political system and instead turn to violence.  And this is where I felt I “came to know.”  This is where I felt myself push deeper into the cycling spiral of phronesis – this is where I began learning how social movement in Khayelitsha operates. 

I interviewed, for my thesis, many of the members of the “Airport 9” awaiting trial for the poo protests; yes, they dumped poo at the airport, on the N2, on the steps of Parliament.  And if there was one thing that I took away from that, it was that these individuals want the same things I do. These guys have been to jail; one is on trial for a 30 year sentence.  But we are more similar than different.  And knowing just how different our circumstances are greatly saddened me. 

These protests are not immature violent outbursts;  this is not about fragmented and disjointed wants.  Sesikhona is a broad based social movement.  More important, this is not about violence, or even about service delivery.  It’s about dignity, and being treated with respect-- the right of cultural citizenship.