November 4, 2020 – Last month, the Whitaker Peace & Development Initiative (WPDI) partnered with Professor Ndagwa Noyoo, a social worker and expert in addressing interpersonal trauma, and William Magenya, a human rights and conflict mediation expert, to provide specialized three-month training to our cohort of 35 youth peacemakers in Cape Flats. At a time when their country and neighborhoods are still grappling with COVID-19 and its consequences on all aspects of life, these sessions were designed to strengthen the skills and knowledge that these aspiring community leaders acquired with us over the past year by increasing their capacity to cope with the conflicts and traumas that they will have to face as they work in their neighborhoods.
As our cohort of youth peacemakers in Cape Flats are about to graduate next month from their one-year of intensive training with us, they are still preparing to return back to their communities and rally fellow youths to promote positive, transformative change. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the impact it has had in Cape Flats specifically and South Africa more widely, their future work would be, we realized, even more complex than imagined at the onset of their training, as manifest, for example, in the rise of cases of domestic violence that followed the national lockdown and other measures necessary to combat the pandemic. Therefore, it was vital for them to hone their skills in conflict mediation, and also, to give them tools to address trauma, which cripple the capacity of individuals to build resilience which, in turn, affects the community as a whole.
To conduct these important sessions over the next three months, WPDI turned to Professor Ndangwa Noyoo and William Magenya, both highly regarded experts in their respective fields. In his workshop, Professor Noyoo is working to teach the youths techniques to conduct successful person-to-person interactions, specifically in traumatic situations. He is also helping the peacemakers develop greater self-awareness, key to their future community work. Meanwhile, William Magenya is assisting the youths in further exploring conflict mediation techniques, conflict styles, and behavioral dimensions to conflict. By expanding the skills the youths had already learned about from their WPDI trainers, they are gaining additional confidence that will serve them as they work to serve the community.
The youths themselves are finding the two special training workshops to be very helpful. Gcobani told us that “Mr. Williams’s training is helping me feel more ready to mediate conflicts in my community soon. He is making things practical and his views help me form a new perspective.” Jemima echoed a similar sentiment, explaining how “Professor Noyoo is helping me learn additional information about the resources we have around us to identify challenges and successfully address them.”
With the workshops ending in December, the 35 youth peacemakers will be able to start soon putting into practice what they have learned over the past year. We have high expectations for them – and confidence that they will best themselves to make their neighborhoods in Cape Flats better places.
