There are literally thousands of individuals and non-profit organisations (NPOs) doing vital work in education and development among disadvantaged communities. They are the moral underground that fill the gaping holes in public services that government cannot or will not do. Salt-of-the-earth people, no doubt, but they are not all the same.
Some do more harm than good for one simple reason: they do not know the difference between upliftment and empowerment. The upliftment NPOs see themselves as strong and the others weak. They hand down things, sometimes second-hand.
They drop off the soup in the township during winter and then rush home to their warm living rooms in the suburbs, thereby remaining detached from the situations of others. Sometimes the do-gooders use words that extricate themselves from history; in white Afrikaans communities where I worked the recipients of hand-outs were calledagtergeblewe(left behind), as if there was no deliberate historical and political forces that kept the “left-behinds” in states of oppression. It soothes the social conscience, it reinforces one’s own state of superiority, and it allows for a never-ending role in the upliftment of the wretched.
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Churchesare very good at this kind of upliftment work. They pray for you inside the safe and sometimes opulent surroundings of a cathedral or akerkand send money to missionaries doing work far away. White churches seldom work with whitepoverty, for those people are an embarrassment, even if their numbers are much smaller.
The target is black people who are kept in their place and at a distance from ornate places of worship, while receiving blankets and food parcels at pre-determined drop-off points. What this means is the left-behinds are given fish, never taught to fish, as the saying goes.
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