The Farther the Better > Endeavors, Spring 2000

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Kan is prelaw and worked with a watchdog committee in Cape Town that monitored the forms of popular justice occurring in South Africa. It was a good look at South Africa’s judicial system, at the way the police, at times, were unable to deal with different infractions of the law.

“The main thing I worked on was doing a special report on popular justice or alternative justice for most of the underprivileged areas,” Kan says. “What happens is that there is a mounting frustration with the police’s inability to get anything done regarding tracking down criminals. So communities are doing their own kind of vigilante justice.”

Kan says the taxi drivers are a strong union and one group that can provide the vigilante justice he speaks of. Occasionally this group might nab a known criminal and sjambok him—beat him severely with a combination rod and whip.

“Or sometimes there would be a community uproar, especially in rape cases,” Kan says. “And the community would just hunt down the person and beat them to near death. Then they would call the police and an ambulance. It’s kind of one of those things where the community is reaching out and saying, ‘Listen, we don’t like what you did,’ but the call to the ambulance is, ‘You paid your debt.’”

On the average day during his internship, Kan would take a minibus into town and do research at the Cape Town Office of the Human Rights Committee, writing sections on various organizations that were participating in civic justice. His paper to end the semester centered on that.

For Haac, the experience was an opportunity to leave what she has known her entire life—Chapel Hill, North Carolina—behind.

“I have lived here all my life,” Haac says. “So for me it was ‘Wow, that is the farthest I can ever get from home. That’s great, let’s go.’”

As a sophomore, Haac’s academic path isn’t yet set in stone, but she has an interest in working with the underprivileged. She contacted the South African Environment Project, a program that recruits interns, and she spotted an internship that grabbed her attention—working with a social theater group in the Langa Township. She helped them translate to English their plays dealing with critical social issues, such as the rampant spread of AIDS in the country. She helped the group get into the public eye and even got them on the Internet.

“I gave two Internet workshops, and we created a web site together,” Haac says. “They got their first paid job—for South African Brewery—putting on a play about AIDS because (the brewery’s) workforce is 30 percent HIV positive.”

But for Haac, the growth and change that occurred within her had more to do with the culture, the people, and the experiences she had than the actual work she did for her internship. She formed friendships—she is still in contact with the kids she worked with and is helping them plan a trip to the States, where they want to educate others about South Africa.

And Haac saw things that she would never have seen during a semester in Chapel Hill—the manhood ceremony, for instance.

After this ceremony, the male gets circumcised, and then goes out into the bush for four weeks. When he returns, he is a man.

“At the ceremony, there was this big black cauldron where the sacrificial goat was boiling with candles on the side,” Haac says. “And everybody paraded into the house clapping and singing. It was a huge party, they have beer in this big tub and they drink from paint cans.”

All the work the undergraduates did was funneled back to Nyang’oro, who used it in his own research.

“For me,” Nyang’oro says, “the research of the undergraduates and their involvement makes my research become bigger. Each student provides a way for me to further understand what South African civil society is all about.”

Every moment of every day becomes part of the research. Simply watching haggling in the market sheds information that clings to the foreigner. So does observing groups participating in popular justice, or working with the Red Cross in their fight to stop the spread of AIDS, as one premed student did. Even socializing in a bar—it all provides an insight to the way society thinks, feels, and works.

“So many experiences become relevant to what (the students) are studying,” Allen says. “They learned so much whenever they met someone and struck up a conversation. They were learning from bus drivers and waiters and the people they met everywhere.”

All that learning has its effect.

“All of a sudden, James (Kan) is talking about international human rights and is no longer looking at law as simply this basic American phenomenon where you can go to law school and make money but instead is looking at human rights in Kosovo,” Nyang’oro says. “And now, even his choice of law school is being determined by a place that will allow him a semester or a summer to do an internship in a foreign country.”

Kan, whose hair is still blond at the tips, agrees. “I definitely have an increased interest in international human rights and international law,” he says. “And different types or systems of law.” Law school for him has taken on a new meaning.

“Life changing,” Nyang’oro says, smiling. “That is the most important element in all of this.”

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