TRAINING OF TRAINERS FOR THIRD PARTY NONVIOLENT INTERVENTION

April 25-29,05

Led by Gerald Gomani, Institute for Cultural Affairs, and George Lakey, Training for Change

Electricity blackouts occurred several evenings when we had sessions planned. We used candles. Participants had difficulty reaching the site because of drastic shortages of gas. Participants believed (with reason) that a government spy was among them; discussions in the whole group would suddenly go dead because no one was willing to say what they thought in public. At that point we would declare a break, and then discussion would rage in pairs and small clusters.

Zimbabwe is a country in crisis. Thanks to the stamina and motivation of the fourteen participants who came to the Westwood YWCA conference center just outside Harare, the five-day workshop was a success. In fact, the workshop produced more than its share of laughter and insight. Organized by the Zimbabwe Institute for Cultural Affairs, its director, Gerald Gomani, co-facilitated with George Lakey. Gomani is a graduate of TFC's Super-T and was among the trainers in Thailand who prepared the first Nonviolent Peaceforce team in Sri Lanka.

"This course improves our community organizing."

"Marvelously electric!"

"By far the most practical course on peace and conflict resolution I've ever taken."

From one of the people especially discouraged by the democratic opposition losing the March 31parliamentary election: "This course rekindled my desire for social change and revived my drooping spirit."

The fourteen participants were from a variety of human rights, church, community development, and other nongovernmental organizations. All were black Zimbabweans. Women and men were equally divided. Nearly all rated the workshop 9 or 10 on a ten-point scale of excellence. They were hopeful that new developments in nonviolent action could assist their beloved and sad country, and indeed assist a variety of African situations. "Hope" is not a word lightly used in countries where violence and poverty have taken the shine off African pride.

Dictatorship in a failing economy

The05 elections for parliament were neither free nor fair, according to impartial international observers. The party that has ruled since independence in 1980, ZANU-PF, prevailed. As I got on the plane to leave, a post-election crack-down continued, with arrests of some leaders of the opposition party (Movement for Democratic Change) and the Trade Union Congress. Only one independent newspaper remains; other media outlets are government-controlled. While the workshop was going on, a dozen nongovernmental organizations were visited by government officials to be "investigated." No one is supposed to have a gathering of more than ten people without police permission, permission which is often denied or delayed until the date for the meeting has passed.

Meanwhile, the economy continues its free-fall. One of our workshop participants slept most of the night in her car to keep her place in the long line waiting to get gas from one of the few stations which actually had some gas to sell. The fuel shortage has gone on for two years, to larger or smaller degrees, because the government can't generate the foreign exchange to pay for it. Foreign exchange has shrunken to a trickle because of the government's assault on agriculture, once Zimbabwe's greatest source of prosperity.

Tourism has almost disappeared because of political and economic crisis. Unemployment is estimated to be over 75%, and inflation is out of control. While I was there the annual trade fair was held in Zimbabwe's second largest city; participation by other countries was down and Zimbabwean exporters reported few orders were gotten.

Not only were electrical blackouts common while I was there, but water shortages were showing up, to the extent of some schools having to send their students home by mid-day because there was no water to drink or to use for flushing toilets. Urban areas are months behind in trash pick-up, increasing the hazard to public health. The former mayor of the capitol city Harare called in April for residents to protest against lack of essential services by refusing to pay their taxes!

AIDS prevention workers believe that one in three people is infected by HIV! Those who have AIDS not only have to worry about how to get drugs for treatment, but also how to get food! The combination of drought and the government's land re-distribution program has turned a food-exporting nation into one in which hunger is widespread. I heard various estimates of the number of Zimbabweans dying each month from starvation and malnutrition-related diseases. While I was there some areas were running out of maize - the staple cornmeal - and also cooking oil, sugar, even soap. Food aid from outside the country was reportedly used by the government to manipulate the vote in the last election.

Under these conditions the resiliency and communal values of Zimbabweans stand out in bold relief. A crisis of this proportion in some countries would stimulate massive riots, soaring crime rates, and mass movements challenging the state through people power. A combination of patience, coping skills, mutual aid, and peaceableness minimize the amount of people's protest, plus the repressive violence of the state and the wily strategizing of ruler Robert Mugabe.

Third party nonviolent intervention, plus

Gerald Gomani believes that building capacity for Third Party Nonviolent Intervention (TPNI) - also called nonviolent civilian peacekeeping - is an indirect yet valuable contribution to the eventual liberation of his people. Zimbabwe reached independence through armed struggle - it does not have the collective experience of mass nonviolent action which Ghana had, for example, or South Africans in ending apartheid. Having broken free of the British through the gun, Zimbabweans may have an exaggerated respect for the gun, even when wielded by their own independence leader Mugabe. Despite a variety of important nonviolent campaigns in their history, Zimbabweans as a whole have no more confidence in people power than do, say, Americans.

TPNI is not, in itself, a means of forcing social change; it cannot substitute for mass nonviolent struggle for democracy. Instead, TPNI is a set of four techniques which are being used in various parts of the world to SUPPORT those who mobilize for collective action. TPNI aims to keep alive the democratic activists and the defenders of human rights, so they can do their work. TPNI's job is to increase the political space where it has been shrinking, to give breathing room to the change agents.

Gerald and I, therefore, made the four techniques of TPNI the core curriculum of the workshop: protective accompaniment, monitoring/observing, interposition, and presence.

We did, however, add brief attention to nonviolent action as a means of social change, so participants would be able to see TPNI's relationship to that other technology which has been in the news so much recently with the people power successes in Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgestan. To do that we showed the outstanding video documentary Bringing Down a Dictator (the overthrow of Serbian dictator Milosevic), and two cases from the film A Force More Powerful: the Chilean overthrow of dictator Pinochet and the Eastern Cape's grassroots dimension of South Africa's struggle against apartheid.

What was the workshop like?

Given the national context of tension and anxiety, our first priority was what TFC calls "building the container." The first two days were virtually a laugh-in. We challenged the group with adventure-based learning activities, created a buddy system, used various tools for inviting self-disclosure. By the end of day two the participants were marvelling at how quickly they'd formed community - unparalleled in their experience. A few participants questioned why the workshop seemed "so frivolous" and asked when we would get to the "serious content." This opened the teachable moment for learning that TPNI work on the ground is subject to difficulties in the team of fieldworkers, so solid TPNI training needs to include rigorous team-building skills. (I'll put this issue in a cultural context, below.)

Participants focused in turn on each of the four techniques so far identified in TPNI. As far as possible we drew from the 600pp. curriculum and trainer's manual, OPENING SPACE FOR DEMOCRACY. (See TFC's website.)

For the protective accompaniment technique, we invented three new roleplays to fit more closely the participants' context, and these will be shared via the website. We also did the Confidence in the Face of Violence series of exercises.

For the monitoring/observing technique, we did Peripheral Vision Milling, the Fishbowl Observation Challenge, and a series of roleplays about ethical challenges for those using this technique. We then reviewed accompaniment and monitoring/observing with a series of Quick Decisions exercises.

For the interposition technique, we did the Enlisting Allies Tag Team, and a series of de-escalation roleplays.

For the presence technique, we drew on the experience of participants' lives and also did the Voice Barometer and the Presence Skills Arena.

Gerald had warned me that five days was more than the expected length of a workshop in his country. We didn't, however, see how we could shorten it further. We aimed not only to cover the essentials of third party nonviolent intervention, but also give participants practice as trainers in using some of the pedagogy that goes with this approach. The workshop included, therefore, two practice periods, in which small groups formed to enable each participant to practice facilitating two different tools/activities. This "hands-on" approach helped make the workshop so practical to the participants, most of whom were trainers but not experienced with this cluster of skills.

Why train TPNI trainers in Africa?

The maldistribution of money and power in the world disadvantages the Global South/Third World - especially Africa. While all peoples are inventive, inventions in the Global North are usually backed up and developed in ways that further the historical dominance of Western whites. This happens in the nonpofit/NGO sector as well as in business and the military. There is nothing more predictable than that TPNI, the newest nonviolent kid on the block, would follow this pattern.

When TFC completed its research and writing of the training manual Opening Space for Democracy, it knew that the small global pool of TPNI trainers was largely white Westerners. Fortunately, we found funders who agreed that this bias should be changed. The Zimbabwe workshop was the first step in this process, and we are in dialogue with other nongovernmental organizations about another workshop in the Global South in the near future

Workshop pedagogy and culture

"I'm sad to see the spread of individualism in our country," the woman remarked to me during the braai (the cook-out celebration following workshop graduation). "A key to our joy and to our survival has been our communal tradition, but the impact of the West is eroding that strength."

One dimension of that erosion has been the pedagogy imported during centuries of colonialism in Africa: individualistic and competitive. The conference center hosting our workshop automatically set up the training room with tables, facing front. Of course we got rid of the tables and put chairs in a circle, inviting participants to a training approach which is consistent with their traditional value of community. Hence their amazement, and delight, when participants discovered how rapidly they'd become a learning cooperative.

We also tackled the corrosive impact of colonialism on self-esteem which leads people to doubt their own knowledge and wisdom. Direct education (the theory and practice used by TFC) deeply respects participants, and affirms their knowledge and ability to teach each other. In the beginning, participants were of course out of their comfort zone; Gomani and I were not buying their belief that they were empty vessels waiting to be filled! The pay-off was not long in coming: each day of the workshop we witnessed more initiative, more risk, more assertiveness - more empowerment.

One form the assertiveness took was in challenging the typical role of Western humanitarian intervention in Africa. Of the many roleplays we did, the one which drew the most energy was about this issue. In simultaneous two-person roleplays we set up dialogues between a local, indigenous person and a Western person intending to assist the country to develop in some way or engage in positive social change. Those playing Westerners were roasted by those playing local people, and when we reversed roles, the same thing happened. Accusations filled the air: dependency-creation, condescension, lack of curiosity about local conditions, hypocrisy, do-goodism while accepting injustice at home - summed up as arrogance.

Recognizing that such charges do not come from thin air, Gerald and I were glad they surfaced and that the group had moved to a place of authenticity. We were in the presence of Africans who were preparing to step into their rightful place as members of a global pool of trainers to work with colleagues of other races for effective third party nonviolent intervention.

- George Lakey, 5/15/05

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