Story telling for change

Violence in dating relationships has increasingly become an accepted social norm for men, women, boys and girls in South Africa. How can aspects of popular culture support work in schools and convince adolescent youths that it’s cool not to be cruel?

The Storyteller Group in South Africa has carried out groundbreaking work, using comic stories as a tool to explore the gendered dimensions of violence within adolescent relationships. Innovative methodology shows how it is possible to diffuse the conflict between the need to reflect the realities of young people's lives and the need to transform harmful behaviour.

Within a storytelling group, students (aged 16 to 20) ages?) from Acornhoek High School in Mpumalanga Province were asked to write a love story about a boy and girl in a rural village. Reflecting their own experiences, the students treated domestic violence, forced sex and having multiple partners within a relationship as the norm. Using Boal’s Forum Theatre techniques, however, the students became active agents of change: acting out scenes from their own story, they started questioning and debating the legitimacy of the actions they had given the characters. The students explored previously undiscussed topics such as rights over one’s body, male violence, sexual double standards, teenage sexuality, and traditional gender roles. Thus a new story, in comic form, emerged, with an educational agenda, yet still retaining its popular status by remaining true to the social conditions created by the students.

The Storyteller Group is developing two youth, sexuality and gender violence projects that seek to explore participatory methodology in materials development further. The simultaneous development and publication (for sale in cheap mini-comic format) of parallel narratives by two production teams, one all-male, the other all-female is one idea. The second aims to explore interactive story development on a mass scale by involving the readers - also community radio station listeners - in its development. Working with local radio not only provides publicity for reading in a country with very low reading levels but also a forum to stimulate discussion about the issues being raised.

The Storyteller Group urges students to:

• Get real! Media messages on HIV/ AIDS are sterilised. The media needs to address inequitable gender practices in sexual relationships and take a proactive stance in denaturalising male sexual violence against women.
• Picture it! The delivery of development communication resources can effectively capitalise on the power and dynamism of the comic strip.
• Listen up! The credibility of a message lies not only in its veracity but whether it sounds right. Creative collaboration with the target audience will produce lively, popular lingo, and real-life scripts.
• Act out! Storytellers and media workers can use 'Theatre for Development' to create stories with an educational agenda. Improvisation allows people to reflect, to criticise, and harness their own power as agents of social change.

Source(s):
‘Dialogue gender and performance: producing a rural South African comic beyond the learner paradox’ PhD Thesis, University of Witwatersand, South Africa by P. Shariff, 1998

Funded by: The Storyteller Group

id21 Research Highlight: 28 January 2002

Further Information:
P. Shariff
PO Box 92234
Norwood 2196
Johannesburg
South Africa

Tel: +27 11 4830 585
Contact the contributor: pwatson@iafrica.com

Neil Verlaque-Napper
The Storyteller Group
P.O. Box 146
Muizenberg 7950
Cape Town
South Africa

Tel: +27 21 788 8771
Contact the contributor: storyteller@icon.co.za

Other related links:
Insights Special: 'Conspiracy of silence? Stamping out abuse in African schools'

Men's Roles & Responsibilities in Ending Gender Based Violence: envisioning men as part of the solution

More about Augusto Baol's Forum Theatre techniques

See the Trust Fund in Support of Actions to Eliminate Violence against Women

'Premarital Sex and school dropout in Kenya: can schools make a difference?'