Saturday, 01 October 2011

Mbekweni Unite project Videos part 1 & 2

From June to August 2011 REACH held a campaign to inspire community members of Mbekweni township to stand up for the rights of their community. The campaign included 3 events commencing on Youth Day where participants were able to dialogue about the problems most affecting their community and how they could see themselves playing a role (pledging) to fight these.  We share here part 1 (interviews with community members) and 2 (part 1 of 2 parts of the a play that facilitated discussion with the audience).

Video 1 includes the introduction to the youth day event and interviews from some of the participants attending the event. Video 2 includes a performance by a drama group called RB Productions that REACH has worked in before and who are well versed on the types of problems affecting REACH’s beneficiary communities. The play allowed the audience to interact with the characters, providing a platform for further awareness, discussion and debate. Click on the read more button for more detailed information on the play and its outcomes

The play featured a household (father, mother, son, an absent daughter and a grandfather) marred by domestic violence, alcohol abuse, teenage pregnancy, miscommunication, and general dysfunction. The play also raised issues of gender inequality, child sexual abuse, poverty, unemployment and HIV.

Each actor began with a mono-dialogue on how they felt as that character and at different points interacted with each other. The play commenced with a grandfather and grandson talking about Human Rights and its relation to Youth Day that is celebrated in remembrance of 16 June 1976, a day that marked the beginning of a series of protests by students fighting for their rights to education but ended in a day that turned deadly as violence erupted between students and the police.

The play then switches over to the mother of the household who, while the grandson and grandfather remain in their stage positions, complains about her husband who is drinking again at the shebeen, spending all their money, but who then complains when he isn’t offered a “decent” meal to eat or gets angry when he demands that she sleeps with him but she refuses to. This particular section of her monologue ends with her saying that she wants her circumstances to change, and she wants to be respected. She adds that she doesn’t know how or when it is going to happen but she knows she has that right.

While she remains in her stage position, the character that plays the father enters the stage with a bottle of beer in hand. As he drinks, he complains about his life particularly how he doesn’t feel respected by his wife and his children. He states that as a man, he is the roof of the house while his wife is the floor. He goes on to add that in today’s society there is too much talk of equality and women demand too many rights. He describes his drinking as his way of coping at not being “seen” at home or at work. When his monologue ends, his wife re-enters centre stage and they begin arguing. The mother speaks of her thirteen year old daughter who has fallen pregnant. The dad then also later reveals that their daughter got mixed up in the wrong crowd, abuses drugs and alcohol, and walks around virtually naked. It’s the daughters fault, he says, for all the problems that have befallen her but also the mothers fault for having failed to teach her how to be a lady. The mother in turn blames the father’s alcoholism as he was not a good role model and his daughter was just mimicking his behaviour and attitude towards life. At different points of this interaction, the father becomes verbally and physically abusive of the mother.

The play highlighted on how these problems led to violence in the home and how the cycle of abuse kept repeating, impacting the entire family not just the parents. Participants reacted quite passionately at different points throughout the play, particularly instigated during the course of the fathers monologue when he speaks of his children not respecting him because his wife didn’t respect him. This elicited disagreement from the audience and one woman shouted out that the reason he didn’t get respect from his wife was because he didn’t respect her first.

We are very pleased that the audience reacted positively to this experience and could reflect on what they had observed and dialogue on these issues at the end of the play. One woman said that the play was very realistic – these were the problems that women were facing in the community. Others confirmed what she had said as they spoke of men not respecting women and that drinking in particular played a big role in the physical abuse of women in the home. One participant added that she wished her husband had attended this event so he could learn from this experience.

Funding for the project was facilitated through the Foundation for Human Rights which is funded by the Department of Justice and Constitutional Development & the European Union under the Sector Budget Support Programme—Access to Justice and the Promotion of Constitutional Rights