Lillianna O’Brien-Kovari

This dispatch is entitled “The POA Tenet: Africa Should Be Known Most of All Through Its People”. It is written by Lillianna O’brien-Kovari who has recently graduated with  a degree in Political Science. She is the child of community organizers and activists in Detroit and I know her parents are very supportive of her love for POA and her unstinting work in it. Lillianna was nominated by CAAS for the Martin Luther King Spirit Award, which she received. This dispatch reflects the latter part of their Johannesburg stint and does include some personal references to me. But I have allowed it because the students were very loving and sensitive to me on the loss of my dear friend Robert. Lillianna has dedicated this dispatch to him. Her parents have raised her well.

-Nesha

The POA Tenet: Africa Should Be Known Most of All Through Its People

In the second half of the week, we started teaching at the University of Witwatersrand, which is the considered  one of the best universities in Africa. During the process, our group began to reflect on why we teach at universities in South Africa. There seems to be a romantic notion that participants will spend the month charging into townships like cowboys to teach “THE COMMUNITY.” Going to a university is far less romantic, and easy to dismiss as “disengaged in true community work.” In reality, we must face certain complexities about community work. We use the university system as our point of entry  since they already have an intact infrastructure that would facilitate sustainability. Most university students who are interested in HIV work come from townships where they know the people, the stigmas, and the language. So we invest the module, and its subsequent skills, into these students. They then translate the module and teach it in their communities. This strategy has been proven to work over ten years.  After assessing the module’s reach at the University of Zululand, we found that participants of the program have taught over 20,000 people in their rural communities.

Following our teaching at Wits, we met with Mr. Ayabatwa, who is a very successful entrepreneur from Rwanda.  Despite his fascinating story, Mr. Ayabatwa focused largely in our conversation on America and its systemic nature of poverty.  After a heated debate, we arrived at a striking parallel between government corruption in Africa and the roots of poverty in America. Intellectually though, the most interesting part of our experience with Mr. Ayabatwa happened beyond the country club. It began before we met him, as I was struggling to connect this entrepreneur to the POA experience. Professor Haniff rightly noted that my distrust of the connection was a very simplistic view of POA. She said, “POA is wrapped in the process of acknowledging people who are doing the work of social justice, regardless of their class. One of the pillars of POA is race consciousness and that is why coming to Africa is so important. You cannot ignore race in a country where people are in the throws of it.” Mr. Ayabatwa is the essence of this consciousness. We have exoticized Africa as exclusively impoverished. In the  And  those who escape poverty often leave the continent. Mr. Ayabatwa, on the other hand, is an entrepreneur who faced enormous obstacles in growing businesses in Africa and despite this never left.Throughout his success, he has also displayed a tremendous sense of generosity and commitment to others. One small example of this generosity was inviting ten young Americans, whom he has never met, into his country club for lunch. In the time he spent with us, he was more interested in our lives than he was in sharing the profound story of his youth as a refugee from Rwanda.  Mr Ayabatwa is an African who has invested in Africa successfully. His example of both this success, his generosity and humility embody the POA tenet that Africa should be known through its people.

The next day, Rangoato Hlasane–an assistant for POA an artist who grew up outside of Johannesburg–took us on a tour of Hillbrow in Johannesburg through the lens of Qwito music. Qwito music is an emerging South African genre based on Chicago House, hip-hop, and the genius of artists from Hillbrow. True to the Rangoato way, the walking tour was complex and tangled with interesting juxtapositions about wealth and poverty. As a generally accepted sentiment, Ra is a profound human being and has been the highlight of many POA experiences. The connection that participants have felt about Ra is particularly striking, given the news that we received this week. One of Professor Haniff’s closest friends,  Dr. Robert Carr, passed away during our stay in Johannesburg. Much like Ra, Dr. Carr was both a profound academic and a global community activist. Dr. Carr dedicated his life to HIV in the most vulnerable populations in the Caribbean community, with a particular focus on homophobia. He has contributed immeasurably to this struggle, and his spirit cannot be replaced. He was also only 48. How can we justify such a loss?

Professor Haniff shared a video of Dr. Carr during on of our debriefing meetings (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zkw7fP4XO7I). While watching the speech Dr. Carr gave in Vienna, Professor Haniff broke down. I have never seen her cry in that way; it was almost like watching a father cry. For the last 3 years, I have seen her as a pillar of unwavering strength and guidance, particularly when I needed her the most.  Her vulnerability and true suffering that she expressed so publicly seemed like a private moment, to which we were not worthy enough to bear witness. At the same time, in one fleeting moment, the magnitude of her loss illustrated our group’s sense of urgency in the work we must all do to continue his legacy. We said a prayer of comfort that was done beautifully by Jalynn, in which she cited Jeremiah 21 Verse 11. The prayer was so moving that Professor Haniff passed some of the words onto friends who were touched by Dr. Carr’s life. In his name, we dedicate this dispatch.

Lillianna O’Brien-Kovari
Pedagogy of Action Team Member 2011