Fourteen years ago, I began an ‘open source’ experiment in collecting and sharing stories of local capacity building on Hopebuilding wiki. (Sadly, I can no longer access the wiki because some malign force set up a forwarding system that sends you elsewhere.) However, I also told the stories in a book I drafted in 2008, and I have been revisiting some of those stories because it’s no longer possible to find much of the source material I used.

This story is about a community-led peacebuilding activity that took place in a South African community, and its roots in Canada. The story is also told in a fascinating and influential article entitled Nodal Governance that was published in 2005, which is where I first read about it. This is the story as I told it in 2008:

“Zwelethemba is a township located about 90 kilometres from Cape Town. Like many of South Africa’s townships, its people had responded to the apartheid system by doing their best to make their township ungovernable. The problem was that, once apartheid ended, they no longer wanted ungovernability: they wanted someone to solve the problems they experienced every day. That “someone” turned out to be them.