The monthly Transdisciplinarity Seminar held at the Environmental Learning and Research Centre was led by the Khulumani team in Makana Municipality on 21 August 2014. The topic was 'Complexity in Community Relationships' and focused on the requirements for 'the dominated' to act to change their circumstances through making organised and effective demands through asserting a tactical agency. This is defined as 'discerning and making use of possible opportunities to find a way or to use one's own means.' Moving from victimhood to empowered citizenship (Khulumani's mission) requires that the dominated link historical consciousness, critical thinking and emancipatory behaviour.

1. Complexity in Community
Relationships
KhulumaniWater for Dignity
21 August 2014

2. Jo’burg Man: A flaneur
A flaneur – urban, individualistic, a solitary stroller.
A sauntering ‘botanist of the asphalt’ with a magpie
collection of anecdotal vignettes, exploring public
rather than private space. (Heather Acott )
Nat Nakasa: Fortunately, like most young men from the
smaller towns in South Africa, I was thrilled by simply
being in Johannesburg. While others made for their
homes hurriedly at the end of the day, I took long
leisurely walks from one end of the city to another.
(1975:4)
The image: A working class man asserting a sense of
ownership within a city that excludes him.
Artist Arlene Amaler-Raviv,
Photographer Dale Yudelman
Inner-city renewal project, Johannesburg

3. What if the tables were turned?
• Nakasa adroitly & humorously tells tales about incidents that illustrate the
subversive survival tactics of the weak (de Certeau). He engaged the city
not seeking a market as a consumer so much as supplying it with a
commodity - his views on Johannesburg.
• Writing on Soweto: ‘People live haphazardly, in snatches of a life they can
never afford to lead for long, let alone for ever’.
• To those who had eyes to see, and ears to hear, he significantly and clearly
whispered a very important message – blackman, you are being lied
to. And to whites, he put a mirror before them.
• From: Tactics of the Habitat: the Elusive Identity of Nat Nakasa (MA
Dissertation, Nat Nakasa: an African Flaneur, Heather Acott, Unisa, 2009)

4. Thriving on Adversity: The Art of Precariousness
• The emergence of grass-roots movements can be attributed to a loss
of faith in the willingness or ability of governments to do anything
about major problems. (Anna Dezeuze, 2006)
• de Certeau suggests that practitioners of everyday life constantly
tinker ‘within the dominant cultural economy in order to adapt it to
their own interests and their own rules.’
• Precariousness exists at the junction of crises and reactions, of
adversity and coping strategies with people struggling to make it
through another day, with little possibility of making organised and
effective demands.

5. Tactics & Strategies
• Tactics enable people to survive.
• Do tactics challenge peoples’ oppressibility?
• Are new coalitions possible between ‘a symbolic class’ (Zizek) & the
precariat, based on empathy, not voyeurism?
• Working across these divides means learning how people have coped, how
they have made do, how they have escaped without leaving, how they
have in fact resisted repression, deflected and deformed it by operating
within it.
• Seeing how the day-to-day procedures of the repressed have helped to
transform the place of the dominant into a habitable space for the
dominated.
• Remembering to dream because when ‘[y]ou lose sight of your dreams,
you die.’[Potrc]

6. The dominant order & the dominated
• de Certeau explores how the dominant order is limited in its exercise
of power by the very fact that it operates strategically while the
dominated order, however, exercises its power anywhere it chooses
because it operates tactically. ('Writing the wrongs of history: de
Certeau and post-colonialism', Ian Buchanan)

7. “That's just how it is”, Submission and victimhood in coping
with violence: Claudia Seymour, SOAS
• Agency involves ‘acting within and influencing established
social structures & relations, constructing & determining
one’s own life outcomes.’ (Bourdieu 1977, Boyden 2000, Arnfred
and Utas 2007)
• Tactical agency (de Certeau 1984, Marriage 2012): Finding ‘ways
of using the constraining order’ (de Certeau 1984:30)
• Making use of and discerning possible opportunities ‘to
find a way’ or ‘to use one’s own means’

8. What alternatives?
• Defeat and powerlessness: “Inside we are destroyed.... We’re losing our morale.
We are unable to defend ourselves. It’s the authorities who have become our
enemy... We have realised that power is not ours, that there is nothing we can do
to protect ourselves… We have learnt that anytime we try to defend ourselves,
we’ll be punished by force.”
• Victimhood: Using an assumed weakness as a tactic to access patronage – with
the consequence of generating dependence.
• Embracing victimcy (Utas 2003): Presenting oneself as a victim to access
assistance while discerning differentials in power & resources; feeding an
international political economy of violence in which vulnerability invokes an
assumed humanitarian duty to provide material assistance.
• Blaming others for an individual lack of advancement, reinforcing a conflict
dynamic

9. Becoming Citizens
• In moving beyond victim tactics to empowered citizenship, we need to link
historical consciousness, critical thinking and emancipatory behaviour.
• Historical consciousness is understanding who I am I the context of how
others have made me. (Sartre)
• Critical thinking is the political act of stepping beyond common-sense
assumptions to evaluate them in terms of their genesis, development and
purpose to discover that "I am able, (through my individual capacities &
collective possibilities) "to go beyond the created structures in order to
create others“; that I can escape my history (the place designated to me by
the existing powers) to work with others to actively shape history.
• Emancipatory behaviour is acting to overthrow structures of domination.

10. Possibilities of Empowerment
• Empowerment is a continuous process; it provides people with
choices and the possibility of asserting a choice; it expands the
‘political-manouvering-space’ in and of a community.
• Empowerment through developing human rights advocacy capacity
involves social mobilisation to address the delivery of services.
• Community representatives must be involved in decision-making & in
the delivery mechanisms including their management, to ensure that
beneficiaries cease to be passive recipients of services.

11. Skills for Engaging Citizenship
• Being able to continuously upgrade the ability to analyze & understand a
situation through collecting, interpreting & using information for action.
• Being equipped with practical skills that lead to community ownership of
the interventions undertaken.
• Being able to carry out decision audits about who currently makes what
decisions.
• Being able to create new employment opportunities with democratization
of access to income and credit.
• Learning which persuading methods to use when dealing with different
duty-bearers.

12. Some tools & examples for ‘acting from
below’
• Embracing the Citizen-Based Monitoring Proposals of the Presidency
• Generating citizen participation in meeting water needs – Khulumani
Water for Dignity Walls of Hope
• Engaging school communities in building dignity through access to
dignified sanitation
• Exchanging experiences of struggles for & with water through direct
exchanges (Eastern Cape Water Caucus) & through monitoring the
media