Lala Steyn
(South Africa)

Born into a white, middle-class family in South Africa, Lala Steyn has enjoyed a relatively privileged upbringing, but she has used her advantages to help others. Social researcher and activist, she and her team have worked on gathering information for communities threatened with land eviction. She looks forward to the building of a new South Africa — one that provides equally for all its citizens — and hopes to contribute personally to that new society through her work, her writing, and her role as a mother.
by Zubeida Jaffer

IN THE YEARS WHEN SOUTH AFRICA'S BLACK POPULATION was declared "surplus" and ordered moved to reserves, Lala Steyn was a youngster growing up in one of the white neighborhoods in Cape Town. She was unaware that one day her work as a social researcher would lead her to confront the bulldozers sent to forcibly remove some of these black communities.
Instead, she regularly attended the Dutch Reformed Church in Rondebosch where, with her parents, she rubbed shoulders with some of the grand architects of apartheid. "We went to tea at Vorster's house; it was just a normal thing," says the 33-year-old Steyn as we sit in a room dominated by a diaper bag and a carry cot for her 3-week-old son. "My father was a judge, and he was part of the establishment at the time. We had no little with black people." Vorster was Willem Vorster, one of the chief proponents of apartheid — a man whose government adopted a policy that, over the past three decades, resulted in 3.5 million "Bantu" being forcibly removed from their places of birth.
By the time she reached high school, Steyn became slightly more aware of what was happening. The English Society at the prestigious Westerford High School invited the coloured poet Adam Small to read his poetry in 1976 — the turbulent year when black school children protested against the use of Afrikaans in their schools. Steyn remembers that the state security police visited the principal after the incident and this gave her some inkling that something was going on in the country. "But 1976 came and went without my knowing what was going on," she said.
Little could she have imagined then that a decade later — 11 years later to be precise — she would stand trembling in front of a bulldozer not knowing what to do. A week after she joined the Surplus People Project (SPP) in April 1987, a cry for help came from a community of shack dwellers living in the white group area of Noordhoek, a corner of the Cape where sea, white sands, and green mountains flow together. As researcher and field worker for the project, Steyn was sent to help. She watched in the pouring rain as church ministers prayed for the white landowner to find the strength to tell the police not to move the local people. "They put their hands on the landowner who just stood there saying you have to leave now. He was a tall old man, the white landowner. I can still see his grey hair, his grey face, with stooped shoulders, stooping more and more as the day went by."
By then her gradual transformation from a school-girl to a community activist had come full circle. From never having had contact with black people, she taught herself to communicate with ease with people of different races and backgrounds.
Looking back, she believes that, although her parents were part of the establishment, they gave her the basic human values that were to stand her in good stead. "We had no little with black people, but they gave me the foundation that enabled me to go beyond a racist viewpoint," says Steyn. Her father, Jan Steyn, did move in a different direction after the 1976 uprisings. He left the bench to become involved in the establishment of the Urban Foundation, an organization with a commitment to social change initiated in response to the uprisings.
Her first contact with black people came in 1980 when she joined an organization during her first year at university. POLSTU (the Political Student Union) based at the University of Stellenbosch, which was considered to be a liberal Afrikaner institution in the Cape, was to provide her with the first opportunity to meet compatriots from across the colour line. "We met students from Soweto. I started realizing that things were not right."
She was also exposed then to some of the critical Afrikaner thinkers of the time — such as André duToit and Johan Degenaar — and they challenged traditional Afrikaans thinking, urging her on to pursue her studies in philosophy to the honours level, "which qualified me for nothing." But she had firmly become part of "die andersdenkende tradisie" (the tradition of those who thought differently).
The ease with which she ventures into unknown homes today is a skill that developed in her student days at the University of Stellenbosch. It was the early 1980s — a time when students were inclined to move off campus into communities to express their social commitment. She remembers going from door to door in the poor communities surrounding the university to raise public awareness of the shortcomings of the tricameral (three-level) parliamentary system that the government was about to introduce. She laughs as she recalls that the people were not always interested to find her at their doors. "Sometimes they did not want to be disturbed from their television."
Those days were clearly formative for Steyn. "I joined the United Women's Organization and got to know local women from the coloured and African areas. The greatest experience came with the United Democratic Front's [UDF] million signature campaign." The UDF was a major political movement established in 1983 to oppose apartheid, and it brought together local organizations such as the women's organization that Steyn belonged to.
A further deepening of her communication skills with local people came the following year when she joined the teaching staff of Luckhoff High School in Stellenbosch. She taught English as a second language to the predominantly coloured Afrikaans-speaking scholars. "I joined the school because I was looking for a way to help contribute to change," says Steyn. "I learned a lot from the kids. I had to find ways to make English more accessible and language more simple."
She left the school at the end of that year to marry her university love, lawyer Dawie Bosch. Both she and Bosch shared a commitment to the empowerment of rural populations and they chose to work in the rural town of Montagu, north of Cape Town, where they established an Afrikaans literacy program for farm workers. Their efforts at finding ways to make language accessible were to be of great benefit to her in the years that followed.
On the farms and surrounding areas of those mountain valleys, life went on as usual despite the great upheavals in the country. Those were the years of the states of emergency when thousands were detained, tortured, and shot in the streets. It was a difficult time for Steyn and Bosch. As a lawyer, Bosch soon shifted to running an advice office to assist workers in the nearby black location of Zolani. Their work attracted the attention of the local security police and they were followed and watched. They lived on the border of the coloured and white area in a house occupied by staff members of the project. "We were racially mixed and the white neighbours did not like us." The neighbourhood where she lives today is not segregated and she is relieved that her sons will be growing up in a racially mixed community barely 10 kilometres from where she herself was raised.
The pressure on her husband to do military service forced Steyn to leave Montagu and led her to join SPP. As with a number of young white South African males, Bosch was expected to do 2 years of compulsory service in the army. He applied for alternative service as a conscientious objector and was eventually placed at the city council in Cape Town. "Dawie's father, who was a Christian minister, had to go to Bloemfontein to testify to the special court that his son was a pacifist and religious," explains Steyn. Bosch's efforts to be placed in the rural town of Worcester failed, and the two moved to Cape Town.
It is cold and rainy outside, not unlike the day when she first faced those bulldozers in Noordhoek. Despite her slight frame, I sense a tremendous strength of purpose as she bends forward to continue her story. Her face tightens and her eyes momentarily lose their sparkle as she describes a scenario that she was to live through many times over in her years as an activist researcher. "We would bring in the press, community leaders, take legal action, and help stay the removals," says Steyn. "In Noordhoek, it worked for up to a year and then the authorities came one night at 3 a.m. and piled the people and their belongings onto trucks at gunpoint."
It became crucial for her to brace herself against the bitter emotions that were to well up in her. She learned to maintain a certain detachment in her work: "I had to cut myself off from too much of a personal relationship with the people." She concentrated her energies on gathering the information needed by the communities to fight for their right to land. She could not fall apart each time she watched entire families being uprooted. This no doubt contributed to her survival and growth as a researcher.
Lala Steyn now manages a team of researchers working toward a community-based strategy for use of agricultural land in the Namaqualand reserves. She is the SPP coordinator of the Action Research and Documentation Unit, which receives financial support from IDRC. (In January 1995, Steyn left SPP to implement a land-reform program in South Africa.)
Namaqualand is a sparsely populated, semidesert area in the northwestern corner of South Africa covering 47 700 square kilometres. It has a population of 60 000 and is made up of fourteen small urban settlements, six "coloured reserves," vast stretches of white-owned land, and mining company property. The reserves were formed during a historical process that deprived Khoi-Khoi tribes of their land. As the Dutch colonialists took the land of these tribes at the Cape, they moved northward to Namaqualand. Two Khoi-Khoi¬Dutch wars in 1658¬1660 and 1673¬1677, and a smallpox epidemic in 1713, destroyed most of the tribes. By 1761, the stock farmers had established themselves in the Kamiesberge near where Leliefontein is today. By 1795 and 1847, the border of the Cape Colony had been moved by the invading colonialists to the Orange River. The indigenous people were effectively driven off their land and grouped into reserves, which started as mission stations to offer a measure of protection against the colonialists.
Africans were, because of apartheid legislation, not allowed to live in Namaqualand except as contract labourers in mine compounds. The only African settlement is in Port Nolloth, where Steyn was to have her first experiences with the people of this vast territory. "With the ending of apartheid, Africans can now live permanently in Port Nolloth. They have been given land."
Availability of land and land usage will continue to remain crucial issues in the years to come. The research coordinated by Steyn challenges development strategies unfolded by the government in the 1980s. It began applying a development strategy that had as its aim the division of communal land in the reserves into economic units for hire to individual farmers. The system was applied in Leliefontein, Steinkopf, and the southern part of the Richtersveld — all three larger reserves. A call for help came from Leliefontein, one of the six reserves in Namaqualand, and thus started Steyn's sojourn into a region of South Africa that is, ironically, second richest in mineral resources while being one of its most underdeveloped areas.
She found that the residents were against the government's plan to sell off economic units to individual farmers. With the assistance of SPP, they applied to the court to set aside the system and won. Yet, after long discussions about the court victories, the communities realized that the government still had the power to implement the economic unity system in a different way. Although the local people had valuable knowledge about land management, they did not have access to technical information from other sources and did not have the skills to document what they knew. Once again, the research unit at SPP stepped in.
SPP appointed a development researcher for 6 months, under Steyn's supervision, to help draw up a management plan for the three reserves where land was being used communally. "While the research offers possible solutions to problems, we did not work out how the management strategy could be applied," says Steyn. "The reason was that communities were still divided and there was then no representative local or central government." With a new government in place, despite her reservations, she has greater hope: "There is a chance to shift policy at last."
Yet the only guarantee of changed policies lies in the participation of ordinary people in formulating development plans. She and her fellow researchers have found the participatory research appraisal (PRA) approach to be most suitable to their development objectives. "We bring together the people in the local community and involve them in the discussion of the issues. This forms an integral part of our research," says Steyn.
In this way, they try to alter community perceptions of researchers. "The difficulty is that researchers extract information, but what do they leave behind? The research must have value for the community. With the PRA approach, the people are involved in developing the plan," says Steyn.
But there are complications here too. "Sometimes, as researchers, we have different positions from the community. But then, we have to accept their decision because we want to avoid top-down policies," she continues. With the negotiation process going on in this country, this has not always been so easy. "Negotiators would approach us and want to know what the people want in this region. Researchers are thus faced with the danger of becoming experts of what the people want and getting more and more removed from the local community."
The greatest challenge for her remains the ongoing empowerment of local people. And this takes time. "If the community is forced to accept quick decisions, they will later retract them. There were times when it was frustrating to answer a question over and over again. But it was necessary to ensure that the agreement arrived at had full community support."
The organization of local communities brought its own problems. SPP opened an office in Namaqualand in an attempt to coordinate the land struggles in the whole region. "The idea was that we would hand over control of the office to the community after 2 years," says Steyn. Those 2 years (1990¬1992) were some of the most difficult times for her. "There were internal differences among the communities that made central coordination of the work difficult. We decided to eventually close down the office and have found it better to work at a local level and link up communities when common issues arise." Steyn has also found it useful to draw on the assistance of a wide range of researchers beyond her team to both deepen the understanding of local people and to strengthen their demands.
Demonstrating the changes that are currently underway in South Africa, SPP recently hired a Namaqualand resident, Boeboe van Wyk, to coordinate and lead the land claims struggle. With the support of over fifteen local communities, van Wyk also works very closely with Cape Town SPP workers.
A report on the communal grazing patterns in one of the reserves, the Northern Richtersveld, compiled by researchers from the University of Cape Town, helped inform the negotiation process for the formation of a national park in that reserve. "When stock farmers in this reserve were told that they would have to vacate 162 445 hectares of their land for the formation of a national park, they saw this as another act of dispossession," Steyn told a summer-school university program on Namaqualand: the neglected land. "The people were not opposed to the formation of a park but wanted it on terms favourable to them."
Calling on the expertise of additional researchers meant that environmentalists and other organizations become aware of the situation in the Richtersveld. "This resulted in many valuable contributions being made from outside and inside the country," says Steyn. "Environmentalists such as Richard Hill and Fiona Archer, who believe that the interests of local people and conservation can and should be integrated, played an important role. They made all parties to the negotiations aware of other models of national parks in other parts of the world. They explained to the community what a national park is and can be. In addition, they questioned the assertion that stock farming was the sole cause of overgrazing in the Richtersveld."
Her travels to Bolivia, Brazil, and Chile in 1992 have made her doubt that there will be proper land reform in South Africa. She came away after 2 months with the feeling that land reforms are very difficult. "The lessons of land reforms in these countries were not taken into consideration during the negotiations for a new constitution," Steyn maintains. "We have been limited by the process. We have an interim constitution that protects property rights."
For her, one guarantee for greater reforms lies in researchers working as activists to help strengthen and empower local people in their struggles. The Latin American experience has taught her that there has to be strong local organization. "If there is no strong local organization, the political will to do anything becomes less and less." Believing that action research has contributed to building such organization, Steyn has now turned her attention to passing on her skills to other researchers.
With the momentous changes taking place in the country, Steyn herself is undergoing change. "As the new South Africa is born, I am going through my own transition. I have just had Themba who is 3 weeks old and my firstborn, David, is now 17 months. For years now, I have been traveling into the rural towns regularly, but now I have to find another role for myself. I could never have done it with children."
She expects to be more office bound and to have more time for her children and her husband, who remains committed to the upliftment of South Africa's rural poor. "Dawie works for the Centre for Rural Legal Studies in Stellenbosch. They are developing legislation for farm workers," Steyn says with pride in her voice.
A wealth of experience that many researchers in less turbulent times would have taken a lifetime to acquire, lies within this young energetic woman. The tradition of action research that she remains committed to will be carried through to the young researchers who will train under her. She has lived through the momentous times of this nation: born into a system that made large numbers of her compatriots "surplus people," growing up to help fight this system, and fortunate enough to have witnessed in her lifetime the return of the "surplus people" to their rightful citizenship. This citizenship will only become meaningful through just restoration of land, and Steyn's research tradition — if extended and deepened in the years to come — provides some guarantee this can be achieved for the poor of South Africa.
 
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Zubeida Jaffer, an award-winning journalist based in Cape Town, South Africa, specializes in issues of development
and women's rights.
This page was created 15 March 1997
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