My name is Gerald Navema. I'm the chairperson of the Ikamva Labantu — the chairperson for the past two years. We will be having our next AGM on the third of this month. I have been asked to stay in the organisation again, which I did — so, hopefully, if I feel I'm good enough to get on with the job, I will definitely stand again.
There's a museum on District Six. I'd like to go see it.
I'm Helen Lieberman. I'm from Ikamva Labantu. I'd like to explain the structure of the organisation so you'll understand. We have a board of patrons. The organisation has really run bottom-up. It consists of many, many projects from these areas — some of these areas, the Cape Town areas — but we also have areas throughout the country. We're countrywide.
What year would that have been?
1964. About 35 years ago.
I'm a political exile. I spent 33 years in the UK. I was arrested in 1961 for organising the Stay-at-Home Protest Day. That was one of the reasons I was arrested. My husband and I were both arrested. And then we were involved in sabotage and things got a bit hot, so we decided we'd better get out of the country. We actually left at the beginning of '62.
Myrtle has been the angel in our life. She's just amazing.
And what's your role? What will you be doing?
I will work with the shelters in Langa, in the township. I've never been there before — I just start there next week.
I am working with preschools in Ikamva Labantu. What I am doing with preschools is coordinating the preschools. There is a food fund programme that I organise with the mamas of Thembalabantwana (that is the principals of each school). There are about 350 preschools that are involved in this organisation, from 14 different areas here in the Western Cape.
I work with children with disabilities in marginalised and impoverished communities, giving the moms support — getting them to an understanding of the children's disability, and getting assistance from hospitals, doctors, occupational therapists. Volunteering services. Linking them into the main health system in South Africa.
We've been able to get great positive things through Helen's travels. She's made so many friends, and we have a situation now where we're able to get gifts of disability aids donated to us — and this we can distribute, and make sure that it reaches the rural areas.
I won't keep you long. I'm a part-time fundraiser for myself. And a bit of other writing as well. General factotum in some ways, I think.
What's an example of fundraising you do?
I write up funding proposals, whether it be to government departments or business or overseas donors. We're wanting to get it into a more consistent structure actually — because we need to do more fundraising locally. We actually need to have a set menu, almost, of fundraisers. It's not an easy time for that.
I'm a coordinator of the shelters — which is homeless people mainly. I work in different areas with different ages — from age 6 to the last age, people become homeless. My role is really to try and help them to go back to the society, which would mean that I have to look at the education of those who are supposed to go back to school — and help those who are not in any school go and get some kind of skills that they would use to generate some income, so that they can sustain themselves once they are out of the shelter.
Joe Washkansky. W-A-S-H for Sam, K-A-N for Nelly, S-K-Y.
I'm looking after elderly — not looking after them, I'm helping them.
[Acknowledging the absence of male voices] — They've been absent from this, the men. This is a woman organisation.
Well, we've got the three male — the new acquisition has been a managing director. He's here for months now. [Helen has mentioned him in Section 2.] That's why it sounds complicated. How can men complicate everything?
And where do the resources come from?
Well, Helen. [Laughing.] We're all professional beggars. She's the beggar par excellence. It doesn't always work. It's really a hard thing. One of the things is that many people say, "Hey, South Africa now has freedom, has democracy" — and they don't realise we changed our property for a long time. Also, there are things that people like to sponsor, and things that people don't like. And it's the most important thing to have your infrastructure, your running cost, your transport — one of our greatest needs, and the greatest need of anybody working in the communities, is transport — because as the country was, as apartheid was set up, it divided the community.
- Helen Lieberman — founder; born 1942, speech therapist by training; the 1964 origin story is well-documented in subsequent South African press
- Myrtle Berman — South African anti-apartheid activist, arrested 1961, exiled to UK 1962, returned post-1994; management consultant
- Gerald Navema — chairperson at time of interview
- Frank Najoli — chairperson of Western Cape Blind Association, UWC social work student at time of interview
- Joe Washkansky — admin; the surname is famously the surname of Louis Washkansky, the first heart transplant recipient (1967), at Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town
- District Six — the formerly mixed area of Cape Town declared white-only in 1966 and forcibly cleared; now a museum and ongoing land-restitution case
- Mitchell's Plain — the large coloured township east of Cape Town established as one of the destinations for the District Six forced removals
- Langa — Cape Town's oldest black township
- Khayelitsha — Cape Town's largest township
- Monwabisi Beach — Cape Town beach used for community gatherings
- UWC — University of the Western Cape, the historically coloured university
- The Stay-at-Home Protest of 1961 — Myrtle Berman's organising work that led to her arrest; declared illegal by the apartheid government and resulted in widespread detentions
- Helen Lieberman's 1964 origin story (Section 2). A young white speech therapist goes into a township to follow up on a patient she thinks was prematurely discharged from a Cape Town hospital — and discovers what apartheid actually means for the first time. The single most compressed "moment of awakening" anywhere in the South African material. Pairs editorially with Kahin's account of housing in the women's-organisation safe house and the Karoo lawyer's "I was being conned, but I didn't quite have the consciousness to know exactly in what way" (SA Interview 01) — three different moments of the same awakening, in three different decades.
- "It wasn't speech that was the issue — it was survival" (Section 2). The one-sentence summary of how clinical practice became community practice, and how Ikamva Labantu's whole model originated. A perfect compressed studio-line.
- "I had to get out of that township without the police finding me" (Section 2). The operational anatomy of doing grassroots community work under apartheid surveillance — slashed tyres, tapped phones, threats. Pairs with Petr Scherhaufer's account of the StB watching the Brno theatres (Czech Interview 04) — different country, different state, same operational reality for civic actors under authoritarian regimes.
- The transition from white founder to community ownership (Section 2). Helen Lieberman has just announced that she is stepping back from the executive role and a young black lawyer who came up through the organisation is taking over. The successful handover from founder to next-generation leadership is one of the hardest moves any organisation makes — and Helen is articulating in real time why it has to happen now and on what terms. Directly relevant to the studio's eventual handover-of-Through-Line-Studio question, and to the broader pattern of post-apartheid (and post-1989, and post-counter-disinformation) institutional succession.
- "All the people we work with, we treat as normal people who have a special challenge to overcome" (Section 10, Angela O'Brien). The Ikamva Labantu operating philosophy in one sentence — and exactly the editorial register the studio's work on counter-disinformation should adopt for its target audiences. Vulnerable populations are not victims to be rescued; they are agents with capacities under conditions of structural difficulty. That framing is the studio's editorial line.
- "Why is Ikamva Labantu still necessary since 1994?" (Section 9, Avril Hübner). Her direct response to the implicit critique that the post-1994 South Africa should have made organisations like hers obsolete — and her answer: "They're open to privileged people. With education. So you'll find the educated people being promoted and moving forward, whereas you have a huge generation of people that are there still, that there's nothing to be done about." The single most directly applicable passage in this transcript to the studio's 2026 work — what looks like a formal democratic transition leaves vast populations unreached, and the institutional model that reaches those populations does not get built by the new democratic government on its own. This is the structural argument for Ikamva Labantu in South Africa and for Through-Line Studio's editorial work in CEE.
- "South Africa now has freedom — but they don't realise we changed our property for a long time" (Section 13). Helen Lieberman's final remark before the recording ends. The compressed account of why funding for community-development work collapsed after 1994 — because international donors believed apartheid was over and the work no longer necessary, while the organisation knew the actual conditions on the ground had barely begun to change. The same pattern that is now happening with USAID and other counter-disinformation funding in CEE post-2024 — international donor attention moves on before the work is done. Worth quoting verbatim in any Anabasis episode on transition-fatigue funding.