7.1 Introduction

This chapter is concerned with the evaluation of the PAR and TOL processes, while Chap. 9 evaluates the outcomes of the entire research. While efforts have been made to stick strictly to process evaluation, it has been difficult in some cases not to comment on outcome where it relates to the process (e.g. Sect. 7.5).

In this sub chapter I evaluate the extent to which the research conformed to standard understandings of PAR and participants’ opinions about the process. For the purposes of comparison, I will use a set of qualities, stages and levels of understanding attained by participants, and some general challenges encountered.

7.1.1 Qualities of Participatory Action Research

As indicated in Sect. 5.6, PAR has several distinguishing tenets including the following features: the people being studied participate in the research; popular or local knowledge, personal experiences and any other commonsensical ways of knowing are included; there is a focus on emancipation and power relations, conscientisation and education ; and collective or political action takes place (McIntyre 2007, 2008; Greenwood/Levin 1998; Guishard 2009; McTaggart 1998; Dickson 2010). This research exhibited these values in varying degrees.

7.1.1.1 Participation

According to Weaver/Stark’s (2006) diagram on the levels of participation, participation in PAR moves from minimum to maximum involvement and from practical to liberating (see Fig. 5.1). The purpose of this research was to discover non-clinical self-healing methods that could proffer relief to the participants through the healing of their bad memories resulting from their experiences of Gukurahundi . It was therefore important for the group members to have as much control as was possible under the circumstances (see Sect. 6.2). It was not just the actions carried out that were meant to bring healing but the whole PAR process. As was discussed in Sect. 5.3, the very nature of PAR challenges the status quo and seeks to equalise power inequities. Despite the inconsistencies in attendance (Sect. 6.8.3), the participants played an active role in the process, making decisions about the direction of the process, questioning certain things, deciding on the actions to be taken and contributing immensely to the discussions during the dialogue sessions. However, I think that the potential for maximum participation was greatly tempered by my limited experience with PAR and their hazy understanding of PAR. In addition, time constraints, competing interests and their life’s responsibilities conspired against their full participation. Nevertheless, to a large extent, I was satisfied with the participation levels. Participants, by and large, produced quality participation and enjoyed the whole experience. Several of them commented at various stages of the research on how much they were benefitting from taking part. Even the benefits of the life stories writing exercise, which most found taxing to do, was deemed to have been worthwhile by those who finished it.

7.1.1.2 Indigenous Knowledge

PAR values popular knowledge, personal experiences and feelings, as has been posited by Greenwood/Levin (1998, p. 253): ‘Local knowledge, historical consciousness, and everyday experiences of insiders complements the outsider’s skills in facilitating learning, technical skills in research procedures, and comparative knowledge of the subject under investigation.’ The participants’ knowledge was important for me and I believe I genuinely valued the knowledge we generated during the research process. In my attitude and actions, I sought to recognise, validate and honour their knowledge. Our interaction revealed that the participants had thought deeply about their situations and what these meant to their lives. Even in situations where I might have had more knowledge in terms of theories and concepts, I tried to keep in mind Swantz’s (2008, p. 38) advice that in PAR,

The researcher needs to be open to learn from others and to adopt a genuine learner’s attitude even in situations in which apparent ignorance tempts her to become a teacher. The researched and the researcher share their knowledge as equals. The researcher genuinely recognises that she does not know the life world, wisdom or meaning of central symbols of the life of the co-researchers .

It was with this in mind , that whenever we were engaged in such discussions, I adopted Freire’s ‘problem-posing’ approach to education (see Sect. 6.8.2). In this way, we could generate useful knowledge and there were instances where terms more appropriate to us and our situations were coined. One such term being ‘a measure of relief’, which was coined during a discussion on trauma healing .

7.1.1.3 Consciousness-Raising

Consciousness-raising allows individuals to view their problems and situations in relation to larger societal forces and throws a different light on them. The consciousness levels of my participants were quite high: they did not just show a firm grasp of self and their contexts, but they had a wide understanding of the macro context too. In fact, owing to their previous and current stations in life, they possessed inside information that allowed them to easily make connections between their personal problems and the broader politics. In effect, they helped me gain a better appreciation of the dynamics and intricacies of the bigger picture as reviewed in Chap. 2. They all had personally experienced some of the events written about there, and had been victims of many of the conspiracies aimed at ZAPU and ZIPRA, though sometimes I felt that some of their conspiracy theories were too far-fetched to be true. Nevertheless, they possessed a great and present appreciation of how intricate and intertwined with bigger issues their individual problems were. In retrospect, I think this awareness was a source of frustration for them when it came to some of the actions they wanted to carry out. Initially they wanted to tackle the systemic issues related to the causes of their suffering but I felt that this was beyond the scope of this research as we neither had the resources nor the time to take it on. Grant et al. (2008, p. 596) counsel that ‘in social change work, it is important to achieve “small wins” rather than expecting large-scale change to occur dramatically’. On this need to be realistic about the expected change, I was able to persuade the group to start with actions that would not overwhelm us before we even started.

7.1.1.4 Political or Collective Action

According to Babbie/Mouton (2001, p. 321), action in PAR should induce positive , remedial and corrective social change or transformation. It focuses on problem solving and involves challenging beliefs, attitudes, structures and systems which perpetuate inequities and injustices. The action, which is undertaken together with the participants, should result in their emancipation . The group undertook two major actions: the TOL workshop which focused on the inner healing for the participants and the writing of their life stories that was aimed at critical recovery of history as a way of challenging the status quo and the suppression of ZAPU and ZIPRA’s contributions to the liberation struggle, by presenting an alternative historical discourse (these are discussed in full in Sect. 7.4). The group also carried out an exercise to garner the views of the community on the conditions necessary for healing (see Sect. 6.8.3). The actions performed had to do with knowledge gathering, emancipation through the healing of memories and a challenge to the political system.

To that extent, our research demonstrated adherence to the principles of PAR, albeit in varying degrees. Had the research been longer and well-resourced, I think there could have been an escalation of the magnitude of the actions geared towards challenging the system. The actions undertaken were not actions for their own sake but were relevant and meaningful to the participants and contributed to their wellbeing.

7.2 Stages of Participatory Action Research

As described in Sect. 5.4, PAR projects are characterised by four main stages: inquiry, planning, action and reflection . While all PAR projects will reflect these stages in one form or another, these are iterative and cyclical rather than linear , and how they manifest in a particular project will depend on the nature of that project.

7.2.1 Inquiry and Planning

At this stage of the research, participants spent time identifying the problem they wished to study; setting the agenda for the dialogues and prioritising issues that were important for them; reflecting on their experiences; and drawing up actions they considered to be possible and pertinent in the context of their lives (Koch/Kralik 2006). I have included these two stages together because, in our group, from day one, while we were still crystallising the issues and problems, hints and suggestions of actions that could possibly be taken were already being made. Once the initial hesitations of the first dialogue were overcome, participants delved into serious and deep analysis and reflection regarding their situations and tried to construe meaning out of their experiences. Although possible actions were mentioned quite early on in our dialogue, we did not start thinking seriously about the actions to take and plan for at this point; this happened at the 5th meeting, which was four months later. The two activities we eventually settled on meant that I did most of the organising, since I had connections with the facilitators of the TOL and writing workshops. I was also friends with the proprietors of the campsite where we planned to have the TOL workshop and I was meeting some of the costs for the camp. The actual working out of the modalities for the two activities and decisions that needed to be made was a group effort and each participant had as much a say as the next person in the group . I recall that the issue of the timing of the days was debated quite extensively: the TOL facilitators had preferred weekdays but the group felt that a weekend suited them better and this is what we settled for.

7.2.2 Action

This aspect of PAR has already been discussed above and I have indicated that three actions were carried out (see Sects. 8.3 and 7.1 for a full discussion). I am including this matter here just to indicate the progression taken by this research. In this section, I merely wish to point out that the inquiry and exploration engaged in resulted in the translation of the knowledge generated into action (Koch/Kralik 2006). The actions were geared to answering the question of self-healing and, in so doing, we were not oblivious of the macro and systemic dimensions that interacted with the participants’ situations and experiences, and, as has been stated (Sect. 7.1) and as is discussed below (Sect. 7.4), we were quite sensitive to these. However, given the prevailing conditions around the issue of Gukurahundi (see Sect. 4.1), the research had to address what was possible at that point in time and what was possible was addressing the issues of resilience and agency of each participant. The other actions which participants discussed, such as challenging the perpetrators to apologise , large scale truth-telling or testimonio sessions and legal action, were beyond the scope of this research as they would have required mass mobilisation and a direct challenge to the political authorities, none of which we had the capacity nor the time to do. The advice that ‘PAR participants must be willing to reasonably live with the consequences of the decisions they make, and the actions they take, and the actions that follow from those decisions’ (Kemmis/McTaggart 2005, p. 46), weighed heavily on my mind during the discussions about what actions to take. I for one was not sure I was willing to live with the consequences that would result from such action and ethically, I felt it would be wrong to expose the participants to the dangers that result from direct confrontation with the power holders, although they themselves seemed willing to do that. I also had to consider the fact that an important aspect of PAR is that action is not taken on everything that the participants bring to light. Our actions were of course limited because they did not confer on us the power to change or influence policy (McIntyre 2008), but then that was never one of the stated objectives of this research.

7.2.3 Reflection

Francis (2007) suggests that reflection should happen at two levels: the evaluation of the action and its impact on future action, and the research itself. Babbie/Mouton (2001) view it as a discussion of the action implications of results, the reviewing of experiences and reflection in general on the nature of the research with the participants. This group could reflect on the TOL workshop two weeks after the event. The reflection process involved members of the group who had not attended the workshop and it was fascinating to observe the difference in the thinking patterns between the two sub-groups (see Sect. 7.4). This was followed 18 months later by an interview with three of the group members to assess the long-term impact of the workshop, as well as by a final dialogue session where reflections on the whole research process and my preliminary findings were discussed.

Periodically we had what I will call ‘informal’ reflections on the process and other similar healing processes that the group members had taken part in prior to the research. That is, people kept making inferences during the dialogues about what they thought about the research process. However, in our sixth dialogue, when I tried to ask a direct question about what the group thought about the research process so far, the discussion took an unexpected turn: we ended up having a deep conversation about what it was exactly we were trying to accomplish with the research, which led to a discussion on forgiveness, revenge , tolerance and healing . What I had hoped for in asking the question was to hear how the participants found the process, if it was challenging their thinking capacities, whether they were gaining new insights, etc. On hindsight, I think I should have provided questions that allowed the participants to interrogate the various aspects of the process systematically.

7.3 Points of Tension

7.3.1 Research Knowledge

At the outset of a PAR project, it is the responsibility of the researcher to make sure the participants understand the values and principles of PAR and how this research approach is carried out. In our case, as already indicated in Sect. 6.8.3, owing to my lack of practical experience and limited knowledge of PAR, I was not confident that participants had a full appreciation of this research design. But, as Kemmis/McTaggart (1991, p. 290) have counselled, ‘What makes PAR “research” is not the machinery of research techniques but rather an abiding concern with the relationships between social and educational theory and practice.’ As I have shown in the sections above, we were nevertheless able to abide by the spirit and praxis of PAR by our approach to knowledge generation and consensus building on the direction and actions to be undertaken by the group . Although not explicitly defined, my epistemological assumptions were that we were unlikely to come up with one answer which was devoid of dissonance and ambiguity. What we created, and what was meaningful and effective to us as a group, was the knowledge which guided our theories. We constantly interacted with this knowledge process right through the research process, and, even by the end of the research, answers generated were still being interrogated. A lot of useful knowledge was created. In some cases, it helped to clarify theories and concepts read in literature; at other times, it helped to crystallise issues by the way certain phrases and ideas were framed (I discuss some of these in Chap. 8).

7.3.2 Research Resources

For PAR to be effective, adequate resources need to be utilised: namely—time, finance and skills. This is however not unique to PAR as it applies to most forms of research, but it is often overlooked in PAR because of the view that this is a grassroots approach done by local people themselves, and therefore not requiring the same levels of resources as the other mainstream research approaches (Dickson 1997). In most PAR researches, there is a need to allow for sufficient time for building trusting relationships, but this was not necessary for our group as we already had this established (see Sect. 6.8.3). What was problematic was trying to balance the university time-frame with the participants’ life demands. As shown by the case studies (Table 5.3), PAR demands a lot of time and the researcher must be willing to commit an extended period of time for the process. The average time for most of them was two and half years, while bigger projects can take up to 10 years.

Funding is often necessary to sustain the longevity of the project; ours relied on my student scholarship which was not enough to prolong the research. I was unable to fund the participants’ bus fares to and from the research venue and it is possible that some might have struggled with this challenge silently. I thought our research still had a few more rounds of action to go and, with time and resources; it might have grown to encompass the wider community. One aspect of the research that continued was the TOL workshops, which the participants felt would benefit the rest of the ZVT membership. TOL continues to fund and run these workshops for them and, as of May 2014, between 50 and 60 of the members had attended the workshops.

7.4 Evaluation of the Tree of Life Workshop

7.4.1 ‘If the Tree Can Survive Under All Those Conditions, I Can also Live Under All These Conditions’

This subchapter critically examines the impact of the TOL workshop on the participants, based on reflection and interviews with the participants (see Sect. 7.2 on reflection). The life stories writing exercise is not assessed here as, at the close of the project, the stories were not yet edited and published as planned by the group. I could not therefore, effectively evaluate that process as it was incomplete. The proceeds of the dialogue sessions are discussed in the analysis chapter (see Sect. 8.1) and the overall impact of the whole research process is discussed in Chap. 9.

7.4.2 Effectiveness of Tree of Life in Other Contexts

GTH and TOL belong to the same trauma healing network in Zimbabwe, so I knew its staff and knew about the work they were doing. Although I had met some of their participants I had not yet witnessed their healing approaches . Most of the work they had done involved recent cases of organised violence and torture in the last ten years. Reeler et al. (2009) carried out an assessment of TOL’s work in Mashonaland. According to them, a sample of 73 persons who had attended the TOL workshops were surveyed but detailed data was available for only 33, and these revealed that 36% of participants had shown significant clinical improvement , while the sample as a whole showed significant changes in their psychological state. A smaller sample of 19 had more complete data, and from these it was deduced that 39% showed significant improvement. During the follow-up done a few months after the workshops, they found that 56% reported coping better, while 44% were still experiencing difficulties, with most (72%) experiencing economic difficulties. Only 9% reported health problems, while most of the respondents still had connections to the groups in which they had participated in the process. They report that all the participants felt that the process had helped them find new things to focus on in life and had changed the way they felt about their traumatic experiences. They conclude by saying the ‘Tree of Life appears to be a useful, cost effective, non-professional method of assisting torture survivors’ (Reeler et al. 2009, p. 180).

I was therefore curious to find out if this method would be appropriate and effective for 30-year old trauma experiences. At this stage of the research, our discussions and the current eventsFootnote 1 had confirmed something I already knew: that there was an unofficial systemFootnote 2 in place to deliberately marginalise and suppress the people from Matabeleland. In addition, I had become wary of programmes that encouraged victims of violence to ‘forgive’ their perpetrators so as to heal, but fail to deal with the systemic causes of the violence. Such an approach, I now felt, left people vulnerable to further abuse by the state, as such a process simply served ‘to heal lambs for the slaughter’ (Wessells 1999, p. 6, see also Sect. 4.1). As I pointed out to the participants during the workshop review:

I am beginning to develop an issue, having listened to what we have been talking about for the past, almost now…I think it’s about three months mmm…I have been a bit concerned that I did not want to do something that will make you forget that there is a system that still needs to be dealt with. That we would say ok, fine, let’s get healed and let’s go on with life, whereas there’s a system that is out to actually continue to destabilise, and that to me has been quite an issue that I have been battling with…

I was therefore concerned that the TOL workshop would turn out to be one of those that would be a tonic for continued suppression of the traumatised communities because of a reckless push for a ‘forgive and forget’ type of philosophy, at all costs.

7.4.3 Effectiveness of Tree of Life Workshop in the Context of This Study

I will evaluate the workshop’s effectiveness by tracing and comparing some of the sentiments expressed by the participants before and after the workshop. I will discuss the contents of the workshop evaluation meeting and end by reviewing the follow up interviews that took place about 18 months after the workshop with some of the participants.

When we met on 28th June 2012 to analyse the workshop, the atmosphere created by the retreat was still present and people were still excited about their experiences . The first question asked was, ‘What had been helpful and what had not been?’ While the entire process had been helpful, the one exercise that stood out above the rest was the discussion we had around the tree about its resiliencies (see Sect. 6.8.3). Our discussion was not linear : certain responses triggered reactions that veered the discussion in other directions which connected to previous discussions, after which we would come back to the original question—and so the process went.

7.4.4 Change in Tone of Language and Attitude

During the dialogue sessions and before the TOL workshop, there seemed to be a general consensus among the participants about the need for revenge . This issue specifically, as well as other similar sentiments, were discussed robustly, and several of the participants appeared to favour and seemed prepared to exert vengeance in one form or another, given an opportunity. They could not see any other way of dealing with the situation besides getting their own back, as one of them succinctly summed up the hopelessness of the situation as they perceived it: ‘I can’t see the way through. The only way through is the way in. The way we got in is the way we will come out’ (italics added). At the workshop review this tone of language and attitude had changed significantly and the focus had shifted to healthier ways of dealing with the hurts. The discussion indicated that there had been a notably diminished desire for revenge by most participants. T said, ‘I for one had that mind that if one day, if I’m given that chance, I would do it. But looking at this workshop, the way things were laid out, I had or maybe I gained a positive attitude …I noticed that after this I just had a positive mind…’ He further indicated that, whereas previously he saw nothing good in the offender, which is a step away from the dehumanisation of the offender (see Oelosfen 2009), he now tried to ‘re-humanise’ or, as he put it, ‘view the person with a positive mind.’ Another one added: ‘…I think it’s what I said before, that the violent manner has left, and in the end, I also realised that for this thing to end I should not solve it violently…’

While a few had specific individuals in mind when it came to the question about, to whom the vengeance would be meted out, by and large the indication was that vengeance would be targeted at ordinary members of the ‘offending’ ethnic group (see Sect. 2.3). While I had encountered this attitude mostly among countless survivors and Ndebele activists over the years, I found this somewhat disconcerting within the context of the group, because this was coming from people involved in peacebuilding and students studying peace and conflict at a high level. It appears that when people have no outlet to express their hurts and anger, they will channel their revenge or desire for revenge against innocent members of the group from which the offenders originate (see Botcharova 2001). This phenomenon is similar to the displaced aggression theory in psychology, wherein the target of the aggression is not the source of the initial harm , and is usually less powerful than both the initial offender and offended (see Anderson/Bushman 2002; Kramer 2000; Finch 2006).

What was interesting was the contrast in attitudes between those who had attended the workshop and those who did not. One individual, L, who had not attended the workshop and who was one of those with strong views about the need for revenge, was still in the same place, expressing similar sentiments, albeit in a less vehement manner (I discuss the issue of revenge in detail in Sect. 8.3.2).

7.4.5 ‘Our Branches Have Been Broken’

The workshop introduction is done in such a way that it puts participants at ease and tries to show them that they are interlinked and interdependent, even though they might be strangers. Although we were all familiar with each other, this approach helped to remove whatever inhibitions there might have been, as the participants felt at home with the process and were able to open up from the beginning. In Sect. 6.10, I referred to how I felt the participants and I were working at cross-purposes in terms of the inward and outward focus of the healing process. The workshop solved this issue as its emphasis was on inner healing, and it prioritised building capacity for resilience and agency in individuals through a group-based approach. It helped to demonstrate the need for participants to be healed themselves before they could embark on efforts to heal their communities. As one of the participants, V, put it: ‘Tree of Life gave us an insight into how we can heal as individuals and also empowered us in our quest for resources that would obviously sober down and give us a direction of inducing the rest of the communities around to do the same.’

The issues of resilience and agency came up as some of the things participants had gained from the workshop. Resilience could be defined as the ability to bounce back from adversity or, according to Rivas (2007), the ‘ability to respond positively to a stressful event or negative conditions’ (see Sect. 3.2.5 for a discussion on resilience). On the other hand, agency could be defined as the capacity of human beings to shape the circumstances in which they live, rather than being shaped by them (Emirbayer/Mische 1998; Abele et al. 2008).

In our case, it was closely tied to the tree we spent some time studying. This tree had one of its boughs sawn off, several scars on its trunk and one branch which at one time seemed to have been growing downwards but had managed to grow upwards again. This particular tree presented an excellent analogy of the type of life experiences that participants had gone through. While analysing this tree and comparing it to our lives, it became clear to all just how much adversity the tree had endured and this became an inspiration to the participants for how it was possible to overcome their personal adversities and live victoriously despite their circumstances. The following were some of the attributes of the tree which participants thought were instructive:

Firstly, the tree continues to grow healthily because its roots, which are the centre of its life, are intact. On this B concluded:

It helped me a lot, because when I observe, the tree won’t die if you cut it and leave its roots. That is the first thing I realised that as long as the roots are not removed the tree will not die…As long as it has roots it will always grow, this is one of the things I liked. If I am cut…, but then still you as a human being, how is your nature, it is to continue going forward you must not go back and say I have been cut and then stay there and limp.

V took this analogy further saying:

People would say but I am more than a tree, you see. If you cut the tree and it continues to live, why can’t I be the same? That’s the way of trying to forego the past and continue focusing on the future, because the tree has a future, because it’s still continuing to…, isn’t and to us this is a double advantage that we had, in the sense that we got to yield ourselves as individuals and also, we obtained a vehicle or we acquired a vehicle which we can institute in our quest to develop this, this face, you see which we always have.

In a way, the participants were saying that, although they had been ‘cut down’, their life’s essence had not been snuffed out or completely destroyed. Like the tree, they still had what it takes to regain their agency and live fruitful and fulfilling lives. It gave them hope and a fresh perspective on life as they realised that the scars and the ‘woundedness’ that had been inflicted on them and which had been hindering their wellbeing, did not necessarily mean the end of a future they might have once dreamt of.

Secondly, the tree has adapted to its adverse environment; that is to say, the conditions under which it is striving have not necessarily changed to favour it, yet it apparently is growing like any of the other trees around it. If it did not have the visible marks of its adversarial experiences, it would not have stood out from the other trees. Here is how T thought it benefited him:

Looking at the tree, how it is nurtured or how it nurtured itself, uhm… how it gets to adapt to the environment, all those things. I took it upon myself that, that tree resembles my life, how I’ve managed to go through all those things and found it helpful because this gave me the strength to keep on keeping on, because looking at the challenges that one might face, you might never in life get the chance for someone to come and apologise,… but looking at this workshop that we had, I think it is, uhm… I think it was really helpful, a good benefit to me… So, I took it upon myself that if the tree can survive under all those conditions, then I can also live under these conditions that is how, I found this helpful to me.

Lastly, although the tree was ‘hurt’, because of its nonviolent nature, it did not retaliate.Footnote 3 As they saw it:

…If you take the symbolism of a tree, when we were around that tree. We all stood by it, we touched its branch, we touched its trunk but then we realise that, that tree was nonviolent, ok, that tree of course it’s not a human being, however it had feelings, it has got feelings because it bled by the time it was cut that other stump which was on it. I’m sure it bled for weeks on end, isn’t it? Until that area dried up but then still it didn’t go out to retaliate because it’s a tree. If we can symbolise ourselves in the feature of that tree we will be able to reconcile with ourselves… If we imagine ourselves in the form of a tree and say he came, he cut, but left us standing, but our lives must go on isn’t it?…Now as human beings we have got feelings and we have got motives…But if we re-align our brains as human beings, ah, let us behave like trees so that we can then be able to reconcile with ourselves.

I was intrigued by the deduction they made about the tree being nonviolent by nature. I think it had to do with the fact that the issue of revenge had featured prominently in our dialogues and was an issue that several of the participants struggled with. The tree’s apparent inability to react could have also been interpreted negatively under different circumstances . The fact that the group interpreted this positively could be an indication of the effectiveness of the process and the atmosphere under which the workshop was held. While acknowledging the power of their emotions and motives for revenge, they also realised that as human beings they were superior to the tree in the order of creation and, as such, they had a moral obligation to resist reacting violently towards those perceived to be the perpetrators.

7.5 Lessons from Tree

7.5.1 Facing the Everyday Realities

Further to the tenets discussed above, a few more lessons were drawn from the tree. The first one, which is related to the tree’s ability to adapt mentioned above, was that the tree lived positively with its everyday realities. That is to say, the tree was not in denial about the realities of its situation. E put it this way: ‘We have a saying that, when the tree is cut, the axe will forget but the tree won’t. It’s another lesson, that tree will always have that stump and so even us as people we live with the reality of our stumps, our branches are broken.’ This was in reaction to the question I had asked about whether the participants were finding what they had learnt at the workshop helpful in their everyday situations. They agreed that there was still a positive transformation but also acknowledged that they faced real obstacles as they tried to apply lessons learnt. B pointed out:

Let me say that it’s relief, because it is a short-term relief because, yes at that time you will be relieved, but then you come back to the real society now; you come back and as soon as you arrive you realise that you are still part of the system, you are still in the same environment, in the same environment which cut you down.

My summary of the situation after some discussion was as follows:

When we were there it was almost like a mini paradise. Problems here are not problems there, we are all in solidarity you know, we are crying with you, but then we come back, you come back to the real world and, you still have to struggle with the same environment. Like that tree is still surrounded by the elements that hurt it, but how is it surviving? I think that is where the big challenge is.

To emphasis this point, L used the analogy of a funeral wake. While the bereaved person has people around her to offer support and comfort, she feels fine and can even joke and laugh but the reality comes back when the coffin is being lowered to the ground. With time this person will learn to cope with the situation but there will always be times when thoughts of the deceased will come back and one might find themselves crying and longing for their loved one. His conclusion was: ‘So I think he (referring to B) got relief when the TOL process was going on, but as soon as he got out of that, it was all over again’ (I must point out that L is one of the participants that had not made it for the workshop and his views had not been challenged by the process).

Having discussed the reality of their struggles, the participants who had attended the workshop nevertheless unanimously agreed that the process had been worthwhile and that they still found it helpful as they tried to adopt a new perspective in their lives. We settled on the analogy of ‘positive living’ used by persons living with HIV/AIDS. As we expressed it: ‘You are not denying the fact that you are infected, but you have ways of living with it, not as a victim of it, but being able to contain it, to have victory over it.’ The point was that while our circumstances had not changed and were unlikely to change in the near future, participants had been equipped by the workshop to live, not as victims but as something above that. This process is similar to that described in Sherman et al.’s (2012, p. 263) study of breast cancer survivors who learnt that they had to develop a new mindset which, while not dismissing their experiences of cancer, required a new way of thinking about their experience and its impact on life in terms of relationships with oneself and others. I understood the participants to be saying that, in the same manner as the cancer survivors , they needed to create a ‘new normal’ they had control over, using the skills learnt at the workshop. This issue also came up in my follow-up interview with the students 18 months after the TOL workshop (I discuss their responses in Sect. 7.6 below).

7.5.2 Agency

The second lesson, related to the above point, was the issue of agency—that participants could still take charge of their destiny despite the debilitating circumstances around them. T expressed it this way: ‘So the thing I am trying to say is fine, all these things happened, but we should not glue ourselves to those things and say that all those things happened and my life ends here, no, you can still live within that situation…’ His point was that being at the TOL workshop had been like receiving counselling and becoming equipped to live through their circumstances . For him, whether a sick person healed or not, depended on that person’s attitude. Even if one receives the best medical care, if they have already given up on life, they will not heal. B pointed out that, even though at some point one of the tree’s branches had been growing downward, it had found enough resources within itself to grow upward again and, in comparison, he thought that it was important for one to acknowledge one’s pain but then decide on the next course of action in order to move forward. This corresponds with Gaventa’s (2006) two forms of power necessary for persons to have mastery over their adverse circumstances : the ‘power within’ which is defined as ‘gaining the sense of self identity , confidence, and awareness that is a precondition for action’ and the ‘power to’ which is ‘important for the capacity to act; to exercise agency and to realise the potential of rights, citizenship and voice’ (Gaventa 2006, p. 24).

7.5.3 Reconciling with Self

Another lesson learnt from the tree by the participants was the ability or need to reconcile with oneself. In chapter three, we discussed the traumatic effects caused by organised violence and noted there, the devastation such effects tend to have on people who experience it. Such experiences, tend to leave individuals alienated from both themselves and their community (see Sect. 3.3.3; Gobodo-Madikizela 2008). So, when the participants spoke about the need to be reconciled to the self, I think they were referring to the journey traumatised people must make back to themselves and their community. As V pointed out:

In our own hearts, we have to be reconciled with ourselves. Say yes Gukurahundi it happened (long pause) and of course it’s not even in a thousand years will Mugabe come back and say sorry…I think it is a departure point where we can look at another window where we can find a correct, straight path to healing and personal empowerment, because what we need at the end of the day is for our people to be healed, because as long as we remain with hurt we will not be able to forgive, whether forgiveness is necessary or not, but we may not be able to live with history of the past that which is distorted, that tree trunk that got cut and probably bent on one side (italics added).

This process of ‘reconciling with self’ is called ‘reclaiming life on one’s own terms’ by Sherman et al. (2012) or ‘meaning making’ by Casey/Long (2002). According to Sherman et al. (2012, p. 258), the cancer survivors,

revealed that breast cancer survivorship is a process marked and shaped by time, the perception of support, and coming to terms with the trauma of a cancer diagnosis and the aftermath of treatment. The process of survivorship continues by assuming an active role in self-healing , gaining a new perspective and reconciling paradoxes, creating a new mindset and moving to a new normal, developing a new way of being in the world on one’s own terms, and experiencing growth through adversity beyond survivorship (italics added).

One way of achieving this is through storytelling as a way of creating meaning out of one’s experiences. For the participants, the workshop, dialogue sessions and life stories served this function (refer to Sect. 8.2.2 for a fuller discussion on the participants’ views of narratives as healing).

7.6 Follow up Interviews

7.6.1 The Students

As indicated, approximately 18 months after the workshop and the initial post-workshop review, I met with two of the students who had taken part in the research as interns with ZVT. I was interested to determine the long-term impact of the TOL process given the hostile environment the participants faced almost daily. So, I wanted to find out how they had been coping and to hear about their experiences in the ‘real’ world. The sense I got was that overall, they were still finding the workshop experience helpful. They had apparently developed buzz words such as ‘moving on’, ‘positive mind’ , ‘positive attitude’, etc. In fact, in a six-page transcript of the interview the phrase ‘moving on’ and its derivatives was mentioned 17 times. Both participants indicated that they had had to learn to move on. This was said in the context of what it means to heal. N equated moving on with having a ‘clean heart’ and for her, it meant the application of the life skills learnt during the TOL workshop. B expressed it thus:

So, that is the most important thing I learnt is that we have to move on sometimes. We don’t of course; sometimes we don’t get an apology from someone who has hurt us but we have to move on. We have to go on by ourselves, it’s not about the other person, it’s about you personally, so that you can move on because, if you don’t heal by yourself, you will always be living in the past; and if you hold on too much to the past, you tend not to grow as a person; it causes trauma to you because you will be always be thinking about that event and blaming the event. If only, if only, if only… So, I think the Tree of Life helped me to have that view on life that you have to move on after you have been hurt (italics added).

I was then curious to know what they actually meant by this term ‘moving on’. I felt that this was perhaps a key concept in the whole process, and their understanding might provide insights into how they made it work in their lives. N’s view of this was that:

… there are some conditions that have to be met for you to like heal; so, those conditions, they are part of like moving on, because when you say you are moving on with life, it’s not like just looking forward and going looking ahead. You have to like look back at the past: That’s ok—this is what went wrong. It was supposed to go like this and if it’s possible to change that route to be what it is supposed to be, then you do that; but at some instances it’s not possible because that route would include justice being met… so instead of focusing mainly on those parts that pull you down in life, you focus on the positive. You seek to meet up the demands that have to be met by your positive side…and focusing on that thing, it will help you yourself, even if you are thinking at night, you are thinking about your assignment, you are thinking I should do this, you are not thinking about that thing that happened in the past…but you are just moving on in your heart, which is why I said a clean heart. It means you are no longer burdened by those burdens from the past, but then it’s looking forward to challenges in the future.

B pointed out that:

Moving on is not necessarily forgetting what happened in the past, it is being strong to move on: that is healing. Healing for me is that, that wound which has been there shouldn’t be a stumbling block to where you want to go; it should give you power to move on to the future. Yes, that thing happened to me, this thing happened like this to me. It should inspire and motivate me to move to the future rather than going back. Because sometimes we tend to focus too much on the wound or the scar, let me say on the scar, that it was like this here (pointing to a scar on himself), but then it’s only a scar. That scar shouldn’t pull you back; instead it should motivate you to forge to the future to give you strength rather than pull you back.

Their views represent a higher level of perception and mirror Papadopoulos’ (2007) Adversity-Activated Development theory (see Sect. 3.3.4 for a discussion on this), what Carver (1998) calls ‘thriving’ and Tan (2013) ‘posttraumatic growth theory’. Basically, what they say is that sometimes adversity can make a person become better after undergoing that particular adverse circumstance than they were before. In fact, that is exactly what I perceived from the conversation with the students. I understood them to be saying that the workshop had helped them to discover the potential of growing everyday through the adversities they faced. Their conclusions about how to deal with stressful situations corresponds with some of Meichenbaum’s (2013, p. 6) pathways to resilience and thriving. He suggests that there are several factors that influence how effectively people deal with trauma and adversity in their lives, and I find some of them to be applicable to how the students seem to have ordered their individual coping strategies:

  • The extent of perceived personal control and use of energies and time on activities and circumstances in which they have some effect.

    The participants revealed that they had learnt ‘certain life concepts’ at the workshop, which they said gave them the life skills to deal with obstacles encountered. They spoke of having mastery over their circumstances or seeking to exert this mastery as an important aspect in their healing journey. As B described it: ‘If you have a victim mentality you will always have a bargaining chip, like, these people are the ones who did this to me. So, whilst you, you are not trying your best, you see,…you won’t try your best, you will be knowing that I am a victim, so you won’t get to your full potential if you are a victim.’

    The issue of the currency of victimhood was discussed in Chap. 3, where it was indicated that sometimes practitioners may encourage it for their own selfish ends (Sect. 3.3). B’s insight is very perceptive and agrees with the viewpoints of Papadopoulos (2000) and Lamott (2005), who state that this attitude of self-entitlement and perpetuation of the victim mentality can be addictive and ultimately self-defeating as it prevents the development of the affected individual from victim to survivor. I thought this was a profound pronouncement because the people of Matabeleland have been accused by ZANU PF politicians from the region many times of being ‘cry babies’ , who complain all the time and yet do nothing about their situation (for instance, The Chronicle 4 October 2012; Bulawayo24 News 5 June 2012). It indicated a determination by these students to shake the lethargy and be proactive in their situation in the face of unfavourable circumstances.

  • The extent to which people can have positive emotions and control negative feelings (those who daily experience a 3 to 1 ratio of positive to negative emotions tend to be resilient).

    Having a positive mind or attitude and focusing on the positive side of things are some of the things that were referred to constantly by the two students, as being important in assisting them to face their daily realities. They emphasised the need not to allow one’s circumstances to dictate one’s outlook on life. ‘If you let a situation change who you are then you are destined to be bitter all your life. You will be bitter because every situation that comes will change you. At least if you are focused then no, you will keep on forging ahead step by step,’ posited one participant.

  • The ability to function with cognitive flexibility , using problem-solving and acceptance skills, depending on the situation.

    I think to a certain extent this also applied to them, as the whole interview indicated their ability to interact with their situations and at least, at that point, they seemed to have found ways of addressing their situations. I think the most important dimension was their acceptance that life is full of obstacles; what matters most is how one approaches those obstacles. Taking ‘each day as it comes’ and ‘approaching each situation that you face with a positive mind’, seem to suggest a well-calculated effort to systematically encounter adversities.

  • The ability to be involved in activities that follow their priorities and values in life and for their future.

    N spoke about focusing on her education in order to secure employment and how this was a priority for her at present. This focus, she said, made her a ‘happier person’. For B also, being at university and focusing on the prospects of a better future, was a factor in dealing with the effects of a bad past. As he put it: ‘Every day you have to have your own goals, so I set my goals where I want to go. I know where I want to go each and every day. Sometimes if I take one step back or when a situation makes me take a step back, I know where I want to go so that keeps me going.’

  • The ability to face life’s adversities and trauma, work through them and share their struggles with others, instead of denying or avoiding negative emotions and pain.

    They stressed the importance of viewing the negative effects positively and believing that, out of the bad, good could emerge eventually, because ‘everything happens for a reason’. For B, it was, ‘because every negative aspect teaches you something about life, so in the end you will learn something that will help you in the future later.’ N saw it as being ‘about learning everyday’ (in Tan 2013, p. 358–359).

My deduction of this interview was that a measure of healing was possible but, for it to be holistic or meaningful, it was still necessary for conditions discussed in Sect. 4.4 to be fulfilled to a certain extent. The students also felt that there was still a need to have a dialogue between the Ndebele and the Shona to deal with misperceptions and tensions that exist between the two ethnic groups. While a person could attend the TOL workshop and be able to live and carry on with life, it would be difficult as long as the prevailing conditions exist. However, the big difference would be that person would no longer be living as a victim. They might be living in the same circumstances and struggling with the same circumstances as before, but their outlook towards life and circumstances and how to deal with them would no longer be from a victim mentality perspective.

7.6.2 Interview with J

I consider J to be the litmus test for the workshop and an intriguing candidate to interview. As indicated in Sect. 6.7, J was not able to go beyond one sentence in trying to tell her story. She was still very emotional and hurt by her experience. J was unable to attend our workshop due to other commitments but she later attended another one organised for other members of ZVT. I interviewed her in October 2013, about 11 months after the workshop. I was therefore interested to find out what the workshop had done for her.

J exhibited a phenomenon that is very similar to a theory that Romero-Jódar (2012) espouses. According to this theory, after a traumatic experience, which may lead to PTSD, an individual is deprived of the mental defences that normally allow him or her to arrange their past memories and gives him or her, a linear perspective of their life. These memories become dissociated and are stored in the subconscious where they remain buried until another apparently unrelated incident brings them to the fore. Furthermore, this theory posits that there are two types of memory in a traumatised person: a ‘narrative memory’ and a ‘trauma memory’. Narrative memory allows remembrances of past happenings to ‘be organised and arranged sequentially, thus granting a narrative, coherent sense of the passing of the subject’s time’. On the other hand, trauma memory includes ‘the memories of extreme events which cannot be assimilated by the mind, and therefore, surface to the conscious as dissociated images which find no logical place in the lineal structure of the narrative memory’. Consequently, these memories tend to return unexpectedly to afflict a traumatised mind that is unable to integrate them into the structure of the narrative memory. Therefore, these fragmented memories allude to the destruction of the conception of time as a lineal continuum in the individual’s daily life. One of the results of this destruction of the linear is a distorted coherent perception of existence. The affected individual struggles to organise their narrative in a linear progression of time, as they have to come to terms with two different timelines: the linear perception of narrative time and the fragmented memories of traumatic time (Romero-Jódar 2012, pp. 1002–1004).

I have witnessed three such similar instances: two in the context of my work and one with J in the context of this research. The first instance was the ascribing of a wrong timeframe to an experienced event. This was during an interview with an elderly lady who had two of her children killed during Gukurahundi and who had also been politically active in the 1970s. While telling us the events surrounding their deaths, she also narrated an event that happened in the 1970s, during the liberation war, as if it had happened in the 1980s during Gukurahundi and was part of the whole plot. This came to light when we were verifying the story with someone else familiar with the incident from the same area (see Chap. 2). This conflation of time was also observed in victims of violence in the former Yugoslavia, where it was found that, when people told stories of the atrocities experienced, listeners would occasionally be uncertain whether the stories had occurred yesterday, in 1941, in 1841 or in 1441. The conclusion was that ‘these people were not living in a serial order of time, but a simultaneous one, in which the past and present are a continuous, agglutinated mass of fantasies’ (Minow 1998, p. 13).

The other two incidents bear a very striking resemblance (coincidentally, both ladies were members of the ZVTFootnote 4). The first incident happened during a trauma healing session conducted by a member of staff. The woman’s first words were: ‘I hate Shonas for the pain they caused me.’ She then proceeded to narrate her childhood story, how her mother, who was South African, had been segregated and mistreated by both her father and his family (from a different ethnic group) when she was young and how much this had hurt her.

As already introduced in Sect. 6.7, J informed us that she was a victim of Gukurahundi and at that point could not proceed to narrate her story to the group. When interviewing her, I expected to hear a horrific account of what had happened to her during Gukurahundi . However, she narrated a different incident that happened to her in the 1970s when she and a number of her school mates were abducted by some ZIPRA guerrillas and forcibly taken to join the war. There were four soldiers and in the group , there happened to be only four girls. The soldiers forced the girls to have sexual relations with them all the way into Botswana and this had severely traumatised her, more so because, although they were taken aside, the other students could guess what was being done to the girls, even if they couldn’t talk about it. In contrast, her Gukurahundi experience was mild because the most she suffered was being locked up in the army detention barracks for two months. It would appear then that prolonged and sustained traumatic events caused what Lopez-Corvo (2013) calls ‘trauma entanglement’ . J’s two major traumatic experiences had been enmeshed into one another and, because Gukurahundi had occurred after her rape incident, she viewed it as her source of pain and hurt, as it had elicited emotions that echoed similar emotions to her previous experience. I think therefore the fragmented nature of her traumatic memory at this point precluded the development of a narrative, sequential account of her experience (Kaminer 2006, p. 485).

J’s trauma was compounded by the fact that she was never able to tell her mother and her husband what had happened to her and this affected her marriage in particular, as she noted:

The pain that I felt, it turned to be, I could say, I was not faithful to my husband. This is the most painful thing, that I should have told him what happened, but I had……… it stayed in my heart for a long time till he died without, aaah, I had not told him, even my mother died without me telling…Can you imagine, even my marriage, Ngwenya, I didn’t enjoy it from the beginning anyway. You know that process, as you start you already have that picture, it was so difficult, very, very difficult but I stayed, I stayed like that, always saying aaah, what can I do, but it was stuck in my heart and it did not come out.

Interestingly, when I asked J if she thought her past experience had contributed to her trauma or had any bearing on her current feelings , she said that it had not, and yet it was clear from the interview that it had a profound effect on her. Her reasoning was that, though she had heard what had been happening to the ZANLA female soldiers, where it was an accepted norm that the girls were available for the senior officers’ entertainment, in ZIPRA this was forbidden. So, according to her reasoning: ‘I told myself that it was probably the normal system .’ I find this to be a paradox because, at one level she recognises that her bitterness and pain stem from that particular experience, yet at another she does not seem to see how this connects with the rest of her exhibited behaviour. I say this because, according to Mullet et al. (2013, p. 72), ‘We live a personal narrative that is grounded in our past experience, but embodied in our present. As such, it filters what we see and how we interpret events.’

As with other participants, J also found the experience around the tree liberating:

You know, the thing that made me bold enough, the very day we learnt about the tree, I said, ‘So which means everything created by God has what, it has its own issues.’ So, that tree was cut and it felt pain but the tree did not dry up, life goes on and so I said, ‘I am a human being whatever happened, I too will live my normal life.’ For me the thing that did it was the tree. I really looked at it and studied it properly, that oh, the tree also feels pain like a person. It has been cut and all sorts of things done to it, but still have leaves. I said, ‘Aah well I am alive, I am alright then I will move on…’ So, when we went there and when we were being taught about the tree, I said, ‘So it is possible to bury your past and talk about it, and heal.’

More significantly, narrating her story in an environment that both honoured and acknowledged it, had a definite cathartic effect for her and contributed significantly towards her healing (see Sects. 6.2.2 and 8.2). She told me that she was the first to volunteer to narrate her story. During the interview, it was clear that something momentous had happened in her life, as she could narrate her story without breaking down. Her countenance, demeanour and several of her statements during the interview, bore testimony to this. As she pointed out:

It was as if there was something pushing, saying, ‘Just speak, speak out till everything is finished.’ Just like that, as if there was a person pushing me saying, ‘Talk, talk, talk,’ because when I started I didn’t stop. I cried until I had finished, but I had courage to say it, you know, eeh… After opening up, you know, it was as if I was a new person…. I cried a lot to the extent that everything came out. Then the following day, I could even talk about it without feeling the pain I used to feel before this day.

This points to the importance of creating a conducive and enabling environment, which Staub et al. (2005) and Mitchels (2003), say is important if narratives are to have a healing effect. The danger of a haphazard approach to narratives is all too real as Kaminer (2006, p. 481) notes: ‘In the absence of a clear and coherent theoretical framework to guide trauma reconstruction, re-tellings of the trauma story could create a risk for re-traumatisation of the survivor’ (I return to this discussion in Sect. 8.2.). J found the process to be so helpful that she sent her maid, who was in a very abusive relationship, to the next workshop. According to her, this young lady had been so affected by the husband’s abuse that she barely ate and looked like she was sick. She claimed that, when her worker came back, she had changed and could open up and for the first time tell J what had happened to her. She even had courage enough to stand up for herself against her abusive husband. Asked about the possibility of a relapse, she responded, ‘You think it will recur? Aah, I don’t think so, I don’t know about others but to me, no, it’s now water under the bridge. It went just like that, I am very happy now… it’s like someone going for baptism. I don’t believe that…, when I came from there I said aah, I’m born again now.’

It would appear therefore, that the participants benefitted variously from the TOL workshop. The workshop, to a great extent, dealt with most of the effects caused by the participants’ traumatic experiences, such as feelings of disempowerment, the desire for revenge , misdirected anger and hurts. Participants appear to have been internally fortified and their resilience levels increased and, in some cases, posttraumatic growth had taken place, or at the very least, the foundation for thriving in adversity was laid. What is crucial is that this process did not create a false sense of hope based on intense emotions. The process emancipated the participants and left them with a real sense of freedom. It also gave them the courage to face their daily realities, not as bitter, defeated victims, but as victorious survivors . The workshop did not, however, neatly address all pertinent issues: it problematised some issues which I shall address in Chap. 9, together with other issues from the whole research process.

Virtually all participants said that they thought the workshop was relevant and appropriate and could see the possibility of the process benefitting not only their colleagues, but other people as well. N said, ‘I think it is important that from the communities where we come from, there be trauma processing, but then as the issue is being raised, I don’t think it should only target the victim communities, but then the communities that side, who don’t know what happened…’ E thought that they, as ZVT, could incorporate the process into their existing community healing programme. D was more specific on how they could apply the elements of the workshop to their constituencies:

If you look at that workshop, I think it empowered us so we can have the… at that time we were targeting big groups, but now we can start with small groups. Maybe we call five or six guerrillas; we almost conduct the same thing with them alone. After that we can go within, they can go within their communities and do the same thing, so we can do healing starting with this. I think this is one of the things that benefitted us greatly from that workshop.

At the time of writing this thesis, several TOL workshops have been facilitated by the TOL staff, for the benefit of the other members of the organisation, and between 50 and 60 individuals have attended the workshop. This is likely to continue with the expectation that as many of their members as is possible will be assisted.

7.7 Conclusion

In this chapter, we have assessed the degree to which the PAR undertaken during this research conform to other PAR projects. Using several ‘bench marks’, it can be ascertained that, to a great extent, this research adhered to the spirit and letter of PAR. It has been shown that, by and large, participants formed an integral part of this research. Their involvement in terms of participation, creation of indigenous knowledge and the planning and execution of agreed actions, was high per Weaver and Stark’s (2006) scale of levels of involvement in PAR projects (see Fig. 5.1). In addition, the research satisfied all the prerequisite requirements of the various stages of PAR as undertaken by the researcher and the participants. The chapter also evaluated the effectiveness of the TOL workshop, which was part of the actions the group chose. Overall, participants acknowledged the usefulness of the process and, even those followed up some months later, revealed that they still found the skills acquired to be helpful as they tried to negotiate the hazards of their daily realities.

Chapter 8 analyses and discusses the findings of the dialogue sessions.