Social Change

Grassroots Organizing in South Africa

Writing a Business School case study of the Amy Biehl Foundation Trust became an exploration of organizational and personal identity. 

by EVERETT HARPER, MBA ’99

Photograph of author Everett Harper by Peter Stember

NEAR THE END of South Africans’ struggle to topple apartheid, four boys whipped up by anti-white rhetoric knifed to death a young Fulbright scholar who was working for human rights in Guguletu township outside of Cape Town. The scholar was Amy Biehl, a recent Stanford graduate and one of six children of Linda and Peter Biehl of La Quinta, Calif. After several visits to Guguletu, Amy’s parents founded an organization dedicated to preventing continuing violence in South Africa’s impoverished townships. Their well-publicized journey has become a modern fable. Like the stories of the visionary Nelson Mandela and of South Africa itself, it conveys universal themes that ignite emotion and invite reflection.

At the Business School, however, Professor Greg Dees hoped to find out more: Could the Biehls’ story be used as a parable to help teach students in the School’s social entrepreneurship course how to build a successful grassroots organization? When he offered me the opportunity to write a case on the Amy Biehl Foundation Trust, I jumped at the chance. I was excited to use my business education and for-profit and nonprofit experience to help raise the visibility of social entrepreneurship—the innovative application of business principles to the creation of social value. What I did not expect was a deeply affecting personal experience that changed my perception of myself and of social entrepreneurs.

I had been to South Africa once before—on an MBA study trip in 1998 that was the highlight of my Business School experience. The case study offered me the chance to experience daily life in Cape Town—walking the streets, dancing to qwaito music, playing soccer, or drinking rooibos tea at the café. However, South Africa’s stark contrasts—of wealth amidst poverty, of sudden violence and warm generosity—challenged my comfortable notions of success, failure, black, white, colored, right, wrong.

To live an “ordinary” life in Cape Town is to encounter extraordinary daily events—and to grapple with the consequences. I felt this struggle most strongly in terms of my social identity. My experience with white supremacy in the United States—ranging from being passed by a taxi in favor of a white passenger to physical confrontation—had served to remind me that my identity as an African American man was fixed for most people, most of the time. In South Africa, my identity could change in minutes, without warning.

Take, for example, the casual eye contact, nod, or “What’s up?” that is a common greeting among black Americans. In Cape Town, my greeting was sometimes returned with a quizzical look. Once, a “brother” came up to me speaking Afrikaans, figuring that I was “colored,” by apartheid’s lingering definitions. Another “brother” asked me directions in Xhosa, one of the black languages. The indifference I often felt from the white elite would change to friendly curiosity as soon as they heard my American accent. While I expected trouble from Afrikaners, most were warm and some were beyond generous with their help in my research. In short, I could be black, colored, or American on any given day, with any given person, and I had few ways to predict.

I know “who” I am as much as anyone, but “what” I am changed in South Africa from an assumption to a question, opening a range of possibilities inconceivable in the United States. Yet each possibility—black, colored, American—had its own set of consequences, privileges, and sacrifices. As an American, I could command attention and respect, but I could slip into arrogance. As a black man, I could be credible in the townships but invite danger by assuming I was “in.” As a colored man, I could enjoy modest status, but I could not share the language. In a country with explicit racial barriers, I experienced a bizarre racial fluidity.

A physically integrated life is nearly impossible in South Africa because each racial group lives separately, enclosed in the familiarity of the township or the suburb, glimpsing only a fraction of each other’s lives. A spiritually integrated life is a deeper struggle, especially for what some South Africans call the “lost generation”—people aged between 20 and 40 with one foot in apartheid and the other in the “new South Africa.” Yet many South Africans are committed to this vision, whatever it turns out to be. The nation is attempting simultaneously to revolutionize its political, economic, and social structures—and it is doing so without the massive bloodshed afflicting too many other nations. Somehow, despite not knowing the outcome, this vision keeps them working together.

Today, my self-awareness is deeper because Cape Town challenged me to absorb new identities. Similarly, creating an integrated identity is a central challenge for social entrepreneurs (and for different reasons, any entrepreneur). As they steer their organizations, they are constantly changing roles—partner, funder, fundraiser, organizer, and businessperson—sometimes in one meeting! Along the way, they consciously or unconsciously make choices about their identity that have consequences for themselves and for their stakeholders. Those choices can be informed by parables—like business cases—that integrate the strategic, analytic, and financial discipline required to sustain an organization. Yet at the core of a compelling identity is a fable—a vision that excites volunteers, attracts funders, and motivates communities.

For me, two statements capture the spirit of this challenge. One is something Linda Biehl once said: “No matter how long we’re here, we’ll never truly understand Guguletu.” The other is from historian Cornel West: “I’m not positive about the future, but I do have an audacious sense of hope.”