The little group looks so comfortable together, you’d swear they were all blood relatives. But they are not. Nthabeleng, or Nthabi, has brought her new ‘family’, fellow FLOW Ambassadors Unathi Hams and Thandokazi Duku, to visit the family that raised her, in a small farming community called Pakkies in KwaZulu-Natal near the town of Kokstad.

The people of Pakkies own and farm this land, growing vegetables and tending sheep and cows in the protective embrace of the mountains that surround them. It was a good place to grow up, rooted in this sturdy little community of many relatives (Jafta is a common name here). Nthabi, 26 years old, has a strong presence and sense of self, clearly due to the encouragement and affirmation she received here as a child.

But this powerful rootedness is not enough in itself for a young person who seeks broader horizons, in a world of wider opportunities. Nthabi needed to venture out of her small world into the unknown world of Kokstad to flex her muscles and grow. ‘There were big surprises,’ she says. ‘For me, it opened a big door.’

Fractured communities

While big-city urbanites might assume that everyone in such a small area knows each other, that’s not true. What’s the distance between Pakkies and Kokstad, after all? Many city-dwellers would travel as far – 25 kilometres – just to go shopping. But for the transport-and money-poor people of these communities, it’s far enough to make the other place seem somewhat alien.

Even within Kokstad, the FLOW Ambassadors living there found that they did not know their own town. When Nthabi’s group helped with the survey of Kokstad, she was surprised by some of the things she saw.

‘You go door to door and see how people live, how the businesses are doing. I was shocked sometimes by the way that the people live in these places. You can think that you are in a bad situation, but when you are seeing some people, eh, it’s very sad.’

There’s also a tendency for those in the alienating big cities like Johannesburg to romanticise smaller towns as places of community, places of strong social bonds. That, too, is not always true. Kokstad has a separation built into its geography, an inequality expressed in the ‘big houses’ on one hillside, looking across town centre to the poor communities of Shayamoya, Bongweni and Horseshoe, on the other, separated by an open space (wetland) ‘buffer’.

The constant changes, the coming and going of people sucked in to town by the opportunities here, or drawn away from Kokstad to bigger things, creates shifting sands where there should be solid social networks – a stark contrast to sturdily rooted communities like Pakkies, a farming community made up of inter-related family members. Many of the FLOW Ambassadors come from somewhere else – places like Lusikisiki or Mthatha in the Eastern Cape, for example. Even those who grew up here retain a sense of being foreign to Kokstad. Lindi Ntaka says she comes from the small Eastern Cape town of Qumbu, even though her mother and father came to Kokstad before she was born.

Within communities in this region, some social cohesion remains, but it has been very stressed by the domino effect of the global economic crisis, a two-year-long drought and consequent deepening of poverty. When the ambassadors talk about their town, they reflect on the fruits of this: violence or self-harming behaviour such as drug-abuse. ‘We’re a really, really vulnerable community,’ says FLOW Ambassador, Mlu Dlamini.

Moving out

There’s a very frail link between the outlying communities, which are part of the Greater Kokstad Municipality, and Kokstad itself. Pakkies is a world unto itself, as Nthabi points out: ‘When you’re in Pakkies, that small place, you don’t know anything about Kokstad. Everything to us was rumours. Me, I got a chance to see those things.’

Like any other young person, at first she relied on blood relatives to help her to ‘see those things’ – showing just how important a helping hand from family and friends is in creating possibilities for young people. The first time Nthabi left Pakkies, just after she finished school, she went to a sister in Durban (eThekwini) to study: ‘I went to SA Maritime [School and Transport College] but I didn’t finish it because of a financial problem.’

The second time she ventured out of Pakkies, when she was 24, her springboard was friendship. It was a friend who alerted Nthabi to an ad for a job that she thought she might be well suited for. But transport was a problem – how would she get from Pakkies to Kokstad for the interview?

‘I must thank my friend Happiness. I don’t have money, so she said ‘I give you R50’. When I got the job she was screaming.’

Her next step was forming ‘family’ from a network of unrelated people. The FLOW programme brought a new set of interpersonal relationships and new experiences, all of which had a profound effect on this young woman’s life.

Nthabi presents as a confident and self-assured person, a persona formed by her background and key experiences of personal achievement. At a young age, she’d become a local champion at Morabaraba, an indigenous board game that is thousands of years old, played across large swathes of Africa. Like chess, it’s a game of strategy and daring.

But the confident exterior hid some personal insecurities, the classic baggage of the farm-child-come-to-town. In the whirlpool of new experiences, some of these insecurities would naturally surface. Because Nthabi was not just taking on a ‘job’ when she signed up for the FLOW programme; she and her fellow FLOW Ambassadors were adventurers in a new world of sophisticated technology and interpersonal challenges. The bonds they formed helped them to navigate this world, and also to overcome personal obstacles.

Owning the solutions

During the ups and downs of FLOW training, Nthabi began to make a new kind of family in her relationships with Thandokazi Duku, Unathi Hams and the other FLOW Ambassadors, relationships which endured through sticky patches and thrived on achievements. The group was nurtured by architect Joanne Lees in Durban, who, in addition to being a member of the core team, was also the FLOW project manager for Kokstad, and became such a strong maternal presence that the group simply calls her Mama Jo. ‘They built us a home, a warm home, we were the kids of the same woman, Mama Jo,’ says Nthabi.

But the groups in Kokstad and Bergrivier were not kids; they were adults in a country riven with lines of fracture that have painful histories – fracture between black and white, between rich and poor, between urban and rural, between resourced and poorly resourced. This creates a complex landscape for those who are ‘doing development’. Whilst working on the design of FLOW implementation, the core team was constantly conscious of the need to avoid imposing solutions from the outside.

‘We didn’t want to be seen as the mlungus [whites] coming in with all the answers, that any problem that arose we were going to fix it,’ says Jo. ‘Anyone who has ever ‘done development’ will know there is always that line, where you come in as the expert, and everyone sits back and waits for you to tell them what to do. We were very clear from the beginning that we wanted them to take this thing and make it their own. This is about your community and it’s not going to work if outsiders are driving it.’

A big aim of the FLOW Ambassador programme was precisely to address this issue, she adds, to train local youth to be the link between the project and the community, and so they were very involved in the evolution of the programme. ‘We changed things that they felt would not work or might not be acceptable to their community; they ran the community meetings; they informed the survey questions. The project relationship with the committee was completely through them, and through the regional co-ordinator for the Kokstad ambassadors, local farmer Piet Bosman, who wore a local businessman hat as well as a project hat. We were actually pretty hands-off with the broader community.’

The design of FLOW also shifted this dynamic, because it was a training programme. The young people were attracted to it as a means of gaining skills they could use elsewhere, which instantly put the core team in the position of trainer, and the ambassadors were trainees. ‘Our roles were more clearly defined,’ says Jo.

But the training involved much more intimate and personal work than your average computer course would entail. ‘One of the things that draws [the FLOW core team] together is that none of us can imagine working in a situation where personal growth isn’t integral to the project,’ Jo explains.

From the outset, the ambassadors were asked to do some deep reflection, to ask themselves questions like Who am I? and to share some of the answers. Jo gives one example. ’When we asked them to look at their homes, at the resource flows in their homes and share that, it was clear that they lived in vastly different living conditions, and they wouldn’t have necessarily known these things about each other.’

Each day, the group were asked to do a morning ‘check-in’ with each other, to keep them in close touch with their own and other’s feelings, followed by a ‘check-out’ at day’s end.

On and off throughout the programme, but especially towards the end when they were building up to the Business Model You exercise, they were given targeted questions to mull over, and explore in their journals. ‘We would reflect on everything that we’d been doing each and every day,’ says Aphinda, ‘and then after a while, you could just turn back to the old pages and read and then when you read the person that you were a month ago compared to the person that you are now, that helps to see, I’m growing.’ Some of these insights, too, were shared in the group.

These were opportunities to build trust and personal growth, Jo says, forging bonds even in the teeth of the normal group dynamics and problems, such as cliques and grudges and jealousies.

And it clearly worked: ‘With FLOW I had a family, I had sisters, I had brothers,’ says Mlu. ‘They taught me a lot, they taught me to be patient, to be strong, to stand on my feet.’ Mlu needed this network badly. Unlike his solidly rooted peers such as the 24-year-old Aphinda and Nthabi, he has a very shaky family background, raised by his grandmother after losing both parents when he was young.

‘I never thought I could do a lot with what I had. FLOW taught me something… they taught me to stand for myself, to do things for myself. They taught me how to smile, how to laugh. I’m just happy. There’s peace in my heart because of them. If it wasn’t for FLOW, I don’t know.’

Support and challenge

Undertaking projects which pushed them to their personal limits – such as modelling their own homes or editing raw footage into mini-documentaries – demanded a willingness to help each other and to share. ‘I’ve discovered things that I never thought I was able to do,’ says Unathi. ‘Through FLOW I’ve discovered that I was able to do presentations.’

The ambassadors often found inside themselves – and inside each other – skills they didn’t even know they possessed, in what were sometimes difficult circumstances.

‘Organising together, and doing difficult tasks together, builds trust,’ says Anna. Trust in each other and trust in self – both core goals of the FLOW programme. ‘The organising of the currency events was often rather challenging, and filled with disappointments, even though the FLOW Ambassadors always pulled it off in the end.’

So Nthabi, for example, morphed her Morabaraba think-on-your-feet skills to become the champion negotiator of deals with taxi drivers for event transport. To have these innate skills recognised by those around you is a powerful affirmation.

The design of FLOW was one of ‘support and challenge’ – the ambassadors were asked to take initiative, in ways they never had before.

This journey brought lessons for trainers and trainees alike. In Kokstad, distance was the teacher. The necessarily ‘hands-off’ role of the core team saw a problem brewing towards the end of 2014 and start of 2015: various team members were taking advantage of the fact that the management team was so far away by skipping days and arriving late for work, for example.

The situation came to a head in February, when Jo received a forthright email from Mlu laying the problem out. The team took a trip to Kokstad for a week of hard group work to resolve the issues.

‘The line we were walking was one of how much support do they need, how much self-management can they do?’ Jo explains. During the full group sessions held that week it became clear that they ‘needed more rules and to know exactly what the boundaries were.’ They wanted parameters that defined their requirements and how they would be held accountable – the kind of structure you would find in a formal job. Together with the core team and project co-ordinator Piet Bosman, the Kokstad ambassadors forged formal agreements that spelled things out more clearly

One example was the timekeeping agreement: ambassadors agreed that each month, on payday, they would contribute R20 into a kitty. If an ambassador was late more often than twice in a month, they’d have to fork out a R10 fine. At the end of the month, the money in the kitty would be shared among those who’d been in on time every day. This agreement was seen as fair, and created a sense of order and certainty. MS

His hand-painted sign announces to the passing vehicles that swing around the traffic circle on the N7 highway between Cape Town and Namibia: ‘Sollie se rooskwekery. Te koop, alle kleure.’

Sollie’s rose nursery. For sale, all colours.

This is one of the small businesses that became part of the business network that was established around the Bergrivier community currency, the BRAND, and it started with a chance encounter in 2015. Municipal manager Hanlie Linde struck up a conversation with the part-time municipal gardener one day, heard about his vision to start his own nursery, and agreed to let him cultivate rose bushes on this piece of land.

‘I usually ask people for R35 a rose tree,’ he explains, ‘but when you come to me, and you buy more than five, then you get a discount.’

He’ll also make a special arrangement with Piketberg locals if they let him tend their roses exclusively, and keep the clippings to cultivate into bushes like this.

But as those first clippings established themselves, Oom Sollie saw that he would soon run out of land. If he wanted to expand, he’d need to find more ground.

That’s when he met Merle Dietrich, a farmer from nearby Goedverwacht, during a committee meeting for people involved in the community currency, the BRAND. When he mentioned that rose-selling season was approaching and that he needed more space, Merle suggested that he consider moving some of his operation to the Goedverwacht valley, where they have plenty of land available for just this sort of cultivation.

This is still the germ of an idea, and Oom Sollie hasn’t followed up on it yet. But the connections he made – first, in the municipal gardens with a manager of influence; and second, with a fellow entrepreneur from a nearby community who has resources that he doesn’t – is the kind of relationship building that FLOW’s business network aimed to foster, building closeness between these two towns otherwise divided by a high mountain and a 20-minute drive.

It’s a chilly June morning and Oom Sollie is busy planting another few rows of clippings into narrow trenches that he prepared in the soggy clay soil earlier, swinging his spade expertly in spite of only having one hand to wield his tools.

‘I don’t let this disability get me down,’ he grins, planting another stokkie (little branch).

It may take a few weeks for these cuttings to take, the way the first batch did, but hopefully before too long, they’ll bloom too. LJ

Leadership comes rather naturally to someone like Nthabi. For others, like Unathi, the idea went against her natural inclinations. And yet, somewhat to her surprise, this chance to experience the programme as ‘leader’ instead of ‘follower’ proved positive.

Despite being one of the older ambassadors and a committed mother, the 32-year-old Unathi is a naturally reserved person – and a good demonstration of what being given a shot at leadership can do for someone, precisely because she started out from a reasonably solid foundation of experience. ‘She had trained as a fashion designer,’ says Jo Lees.

She’d worked for various businesses such as Edgars, the major fashion chain store, saving money all the time to open her own fashion business. (Unathi even managed to get her dream off the ground, but was ultimately defeated by the cost of the rent.) ‘She worked regularly for the IEC [Independent Electoral Commission], too. And she’s studying part-time – she’s doing an education degree.’

But when the FLOW team reflects on things, they argue that conventional organisations and businesses often operate from a competitive rather than nurturing space; that they make their staff fight for leadership positions, to out-compete their peers. The FLOW model meant leadership came to each individual at some point, naturally and organically; and when the ambassadors were in a leadership position, they made personal discoveries about the qualities leadership could unfold within them.

‘I was given a chance to do things my way and bring my own ideas [to] the table,’ Unathi says. ‘I’m a shy person. I need to be given a chance to talk. Being the leader gave me space for that.’

Another quiet person, Lindi Ntaka, found the experience opened up a space to be heard: ‘I felt like a president sometimes. When you are in the big chair, everyone is listening to you… you know, you don’t always get that.’

Today, although she remains reserved, Unathi is clearly confident. The quiet leadership qualities she discovered within herself, the confidence to speak and reveal her ideas, will stand her in good stead, whatever the future brings.

‘The big thing – the thing I feel most proud of – is that we have changed the way [the FLOW Ambassadors] see themselves,’ says Jo. ‘They can get up in the morning and believe that they can be agents for change.’

Shifting roles – and shifting perspectives – has played a part in this new sense of autonomy.

MS