Iain Morton

Former game ranger and peace worker, Iain is tackling social intolerance by demonstrating how human rights values can inform the daily lives of individuals and communities.

Political violence racked South Africa in the 1980s and early 1990s. As a Regional Organizer of the National Peace Secretariat, formed in 1990 as part of the transition to democracy, Iain became all too familiar with the crisis management "band aid" approach to conflict intervention. With the advent of democracy, Iain sees a unique opportunity to build an enabling environment in which people can relate to one another in ways that respect their differences and acknowledge their commonalties. To do this, he has developed a rights education approach that contextualizes the ideas about human rights in every day life and enables people to create the conditions under which citizens can fulfill their true potential. His workshop methodology enables participants to create their own "Bill of Rights" specifically for their community. In practice, it enables antagonists to work together to create "rules to live by" in a process that transforms relationships into mutual respect and affirmation.

No society has solved the problems of communal violence. But South Africa faces a unique challenge in this regard. Over forty years of apartheid policies were designed to divide people by race and insure that one minority race, those of European descent, were dominant in every way over those of African and mixed race descent.
Enforcement of these policies necessarily and deliberately stripped black people of their dignity and basic human rights and had the effect of dehumanizing people. Traditional rural African societies were deliberately destroyed in favor of white agriculture and employment conditions in mines and factories and urban living conditions were for a century regulated in such a way as to maximize social dislocation and the rending of the fabric of community and family. The police were more interested in enforcing the political order than in combating crime, which became a significant way of life for blacks who were denied opportunities to participate honestly in the ostentatiously wealthy formal part of the economy. When political resistance grew in the eighties, the apartheid state, having given up the struggle to win people ideologically, used every instrument of repression at their disposal to crush opposition organizations, including: arming and giving license to counter-revolutionary groups to attack opposition organizations; organizing hit squads to assassinate political opponents; and detaining tens of thousands of people without ever bringing them to trial.
This created a situation of acute social anxiety and political intolerance in the townships: either you were with a particular group or you were considered to be an enemy. In this context, political violence in the townships reached endemic proportions. Between 1984 and 1993, one monitoring group estimates that over twenty thousand people were killed in political violence in South Africa. The culture of violence became self-perpetuating because violent attacks hardened people's attitudes, and often led to revenge attacks. The result is that the post-apartheid state has inherited a political culture of intolerance within which scant respect is shown for human life and property.

Iain's plans involve five separate thrusts, all of which are based in his new rights contextualization methodology. His method communicates and teaches human rights through rendering rights concepts through participatory activities related to every day life. The philosophical grounding for his approach is the philosophy of ubuntu. Ubuntu is a Zulu word which means human being. The word implicitly draws on a widely shared traditional African idiom: "A person is only a person because of other people." The idiom is used to invoke the importance of treating people with respect.
The first step in Iain's work involves the production of literature and media coverage with the aim of creating a general grassroots awareness of some of the concepts and values that lie behind the new South African Bill of Human Rights, which was adopted as part of the new Constitution.
The second project will involve the production of a Human Rights Training Manual. This will focus on equipping communities with the skills needed to apply the new Bill of Rights at a grass-roots level. Specific conflict ridden communities have been targeted for pilot projects, after which the organization Iain founded as the vehicle for his vision, the Ubuntu Institute, will embark on a national campaign to train facilitators and disseminate the manuals. The Institute will also provide a service to business with the aim of building unity in the workforce of racially torn enterprises, such as mines. This service will partially subsidize the rest of the activity.
The third activity of the Institute will be the Human Rights Values Workshop Manual. This will be directed primarily at the business and industrial sectors, with the aim of encouraging and enabling large businesses to attract and employ individuals from marginalized groups.
The Institute will also make its experience and resources available to any marginalized group that requests its assistance. The focus here will be on researching the situation of the group, providing them with relevant human rights information and skills necessary for self-empowerment, and if necessary, assist them in the process of lobbying or fighting for their rights.
Finally, the Institute will work to facilitate the establishment of a consortium of human rights organizations around the aim of preparing a human rights syllabus to be included in the public schools.

The son of a Royal Air Force pilot, Iain grew up in the Far East. He attended nine primary and secondary schools. During this period, he developed a lasting empathy with social outcasts. His family eventually settled in Southern Africa, where Iain became a game ranger. As a ranger he learned how even the most marginal animal plays an important role in an eco-system, a principle he believes should be central to the organization of society. He later studied theology at a seminary in Cape Town. During a holiday he began to do relief work in a squatter camp, where he witnessed acute social deprivation. He quit the seminary after the church refused to acknowledge the importance of getting involved in homeless communities. He moved to the Witwatersrand where he lived in a squatter settlement and established the first multi-racial church and youth club in the area for the Methodist Church Ministries. His ideas about the importance of church involvement in the politics of the poor, however, led to a clash with the traditional church structures and he left his ministry. His religious beliefs gave way to a profound humanism and he left the church. He became the Regional Coordinator of the Wits Vaal Peace Secretariat, where he formed local branches of the Secretariat and intervened in countless violent situations. Frustration at the limitations inherent in the Secretariat's methodology resulted in his forming the Ubuntu Institute.
Addendum
Due to personal reasons, Iain temporarily suspended work on this project in 1996. It is hoped that he will be able to resume this important initiative in the near future.