The following article is taken from a book on the history of Catholic Welfare and Development (CWD), a Cape Town based agency. I was employed by CWD, between 1992 and 1995 and was invited to contribute this chapter to a compilation by past employees to capture the institutional memory of the agency.

The story of my time with CWD is, for me, about ‘letting go’, which is best illustrated by this story: a mountaineer hiking in the Drakensberg alone is suddenly caught in a descending mist. Panicked, he speeds up his walk, loses his footing on the path home and slips over the edge of the path. He just manages to grab hold of the exposed roots of a tree and stops his fall to what he believes to be certain death.

Hanging on for dear life, he prays out loud, “If there’s anyone up there, help me!” A voice booms down from heaven, “I will help you but you have to let go of the branch”. Panicking still more, he calls out, “Is there anyone else up there?”

 In December 1989 I was blown down Sir Lowry’s Pass into Cape Town in a strong easterly wind with wife Sharon, four month old baby Samuel and Labrador dog Portia. I came with a moderate sense of accomplishment and was fully expecting to write the next chapter in my quest as a “soldier who has chosen to fight poverty”. That is how The Southern Cross headlined a report about me as conscientious objector to participation in the war of the apartheid government. I had spent seven years “fighting poverty”, employed by World Vision, the Christian evangelical humanitarian aid agency, as area manager for KwaZulu-Natal. I had left my team of development workers largely because of the paradigm shift precipitated by the baby who was gurgling happily in the back seat as we descended Sir Lowry’s Pass. As a Catholic layman I had been well schooled by the Dominicans (at school, the Newcastle and Oakford Sisters; at university, Father Albert Nolan and Father Bernard Connor) and hugely inspired by Archbishop Denis Hurley.

 C.S. Lewis’s observation, “The church is awfully full of good works but awfully lacking in good work”, summed up how I felt about what I had been doing for the aid agency.

When Cyclone Demoina unleashed her torrents in KwaZulu-Natal in 1984, washing away bridges, devastating farms and drowning scores of people, reports came in of people being isolated by rising flood waters. My colleagues and I decided to buy a motorboat and rush wherever we were most needed. We were directed to the Makatini Flats north of the St Lucia Reserve. Before the floods local villagers had complained about the fresh water canal that had been dug by the Natal Parks Board to channel greater volumes of fresh water into the St Lucia wetlands. Severe droughts caused the salinity levels of the estuary to rise so much that the estuarine ecosystem was threatened, but no bridges were built and scattered villagers were left isolated and angry.

We assumed that the floods had aggravated their problem and saw this as a chance to remedy a development problem with a relief measure but when we reached the ferry point, we discovered that the villagers had devised their own solution. A local entrepreneur had acquired a simple rowing boat and was doing the job.

We took our motorboat back and sold it, putting the whole episode down as a humbling experience.

Welfare and development

When I arrived in Cape Town, reality soon made mincemeat of the romantic ideals that had formed through the adventures and misadventures of my first seven years of professional social work.

 Before Peter Templeton recruited me to CWD, I worked as Director of an NGO, the South African National Epilepsy League, and completed a Religious Studies honours degree part time at UCT. As the apartheid edifice began to crumble, Cape Town was a good place to be at the time of the unbanning of organisations, the release of Nelson Mandela and other political prisoners, and the return of exiles. In seminars with my fellow postgraduate students and teachers, John de Gruchy, Charles Villa-Vicencio, John Cumpsty, Itumeleng Mosala, Barney Pityana and others, I became restless for something more directly relevant to the dream of a reconstructed and developing South Africa

Peter and Annie Templeton had been helpful during difficult times in Cape Town. Now Peter convinced me that CWD would “float my boat” and that he needed me to take over as his deputy. He said that he and Annie were ready to move on to other challenges and that apace with the changing socio-political climate, CWD was wanting to start walking on two legs: Welfare (the way of mercy and compassion) and Development (the way of justice), instead of hopping on only one.

That is not quite how Peter put it but how I interpreted the assignment. I was excited about the challenge as Peter explained it and CWD did float my boat, in the sense that I got what I think I needed to learn about development. Alas, after two years Peter moved on and I had to paddle my own boat in a heavy current.

My formal job title was training and organisational development coordinator. I was also a consultor and shared with the other consultors a support and mentoring role with field workers.

There were lots of interesting trips to get to know the Western Cape and appreciate the value of a support agency that cared deeply and modelled practical interventions.

CWD was coming to terms with the move from the pioneering stage, from chaotic creativity and innovation and initiative, to the scientific management stage of procedure-driven order and predictability.

Allan Kaplan of Community Development Resource Association (CDRA) – who had mastered a framework of organisational development inspired by the philosophy of Rudolf Steiner – was the consultant tasked to help the CWD caterpillar transform into a butterfly and spread its wings. Allan was really taken by Peter and Annie’s vision and did a great job in helping CWD cross the threshold of managing its own change process.

Perhaps the most beneficial legacy I took from my time at CWD was working with the legendary Anne Hope. Anne is well respected for the Training for Transformation workbooks she co-authored with Sally Timmel. These books offer a framework for understanding alternative responses to poverty, first developed by the Paris based Ecumenical Institute for the Development of People. A shorthand way of explaining the shift from welfare to development to liberation and finally to transformation is to take the well-known “give a man a fish” proverb to its logical conclusion.

Give a man a fish, if his hunger is due to unforeseen natural disaster (the appropriate Welfare response).

Teach him how to fish, if his hunger is due to ignorance of fishing (the appropriate Development response).

Fight for his right of access to lakes and fishing grounds if his hunger is due to exploitation, lack of freedom and his unjust exclusion from the earth’s bounty (the appropriate Liberation response).

 But once he has free access to the sea, rivers and lakes, and knows how to use technology to harvest life with dramatic efficiency and is well fed, ask him the question, “What will our children eat tomorrow, next year, next decade, next century, when all the fish are gone?” (Transformation).

Regaining the capacity to dream

 Thanks to Anne Hope, I discovered Manfred Max-Neef, a Chilean development economist and Right Livelihood Award winner. Taking time out of the 1993 Chilean presidential election campaign which he was contesting, Max-Neef came to South Africa to address the Transition and Transformation Conference organised by the South African Council of Churches. A network was formed in South Africa to promote the human scale and ecologically sound development methodology he and his colleagues in Latin America had crafted. To describe their crisis he said, “…in our opinion its most serious manifestation seems to lie in the fact that we are losing – if we have not lost already – our capacity to dream”.

With South Africa on the eve of its own emancipation from apartheid structures, the network members hoped to facilitate a South African capacity to dream again after the apartheid nightmare. This was happening in the political context as the ANC mobilised support for its Reconstruction and Development Programme. For over a year, after I had left CWD, we gathered development practitioners to build momentum for a movement we called the Network for Human Scale Development. With very little money we managed to publish material and run workshops to advance the understanding that poverty was not just a material condition, and human needs were not reducible to the mere production and consumption of material goods.

 The Network was boosted by the challenges posed by the first democratic election in 1994, when a number of us found ourselves employed by the Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) to assist in running South Africa’s first democratic election. My report entitled “Inside the IEC: A human triumph over an organisational nightmare” concluded that the IEC succeeded only because of the abundance of what Max-Neef calls “non-conventional resources” (solidarity, wisdom, commitment and vision, mobilised by people such as Mary Burton, the chief provincial electoral officer) and not because of the extravagant use of the conventional resource (money). The latter resource is depleted and becomes scarce by usage. The former resources are often latent in the system and abundant, but are not appreciated. They then become depleted by non-usage. They are, however, indispensable for developmental success.

At this time, Father Bernard Connor accompanied me in trying to articulate a developmental, contextual theology that carried the things that make for peace into the massively unjust socioeconomic systems that still prevailed.

The annual organisational development event at CWD that precipitated my departure was to be about restructuring so that the many and varied social enterprises under CWD’s umbrella could become independent of CWD. Peter encouraged each project team to develop their own board and constitution and to take responsibility for their own fundraising. Anne Hope and I tried to articulate the need to allow projects to be autonomous but at the same time accountable to and nested in a larger shared identity. Anne and I did not think that it was ultimately about independence and securing funding relationships but we were grasping for a language to express an alternative to Peter’s vision. We were trying to champion the valuing of and trust in non-conventional resources over and against conventional resources – with money (as in the ability to fundraise) as the yardstick of success.

The parable of the panic-struck mountaineer ends when, after God does not respond with any less frightening solution to his predicament, he lets go of the branch. Resigned to his fate, he only then realises his feet were just six inches above a wide, secure rock ledge. In the darkness and swirling mist he had not dared look down so he was unable to see the rock ledge below. Since letting go of the CWD branch, I have been engaged in other struggles – in the Eastern Cape and against e-tolling – and I have been writing books. It is a constant struggle to let go and trust – to make way for something that we’ve previously only dreamt of. Perhaps the table below will illustrate the model that I believe in so passionately for the poor and for us all: the gradual shift from good works, through development, through the struggle for liberation, to a time for which every heart longs, the transformation into what has sometimes been called the Commonwealth of Love.

 Table One: Appropriate responses to poverty

For more information on the CWD, please visit www.cwd.org.za

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