It might be 5am in Mthatha in the Eastern Cape, but already a long queue of people will have formed at the gate of Nkosi N Jumba’s home.

“They are waiting for me to attend to their grievances and problems,” explains Jumba, a senior traditional leader in the Jumba Traditional Council. “We are supposed to be the agents of peace in our communities.”

About 1 500 households rely on her to mediate or arbitrate their disputes, comfort the sick and grieving, and intervene on their behalf with the government.

“You see us in hospital wards and clinics, and at Home Affairs offices,” Jumba says. “We have to stay ahead with information when the government changes policy, because we are the people’s only hope.”

The crossing of lines between traditional leadership and the government is one of five types of ‘disconnections’ that the University of Pretoria’s (UP) Centre for Mediation in Africa (CMA) identified when it began engaging with traditional leaders and other stakeholders in Mthatha in May 2023.

Being a woman traditional leader can be challenging, even after more than 20 years of resolving disputes of all kinds. This is why Jumba is often accompanied by a male official, currently Stanford Nkcinkca, a senior administrative clerk of the Department of Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs (COGTA) in Mthatha and secretary of the Jumba Traditional Council.

“My role is to be the support staff of Nkosi Jumba so that she will be recognised as a traditional leader,” Nkcinkca says, noting that women traditional leaders have to work extra hard to prove themselves. His other responsibility is to ensure that government policies are observed in Traditional Council matters because traditional leaders sometimes “cross the line”.

Disconnections fuel conflict, but making connections leads to peace

Other disconnections were identified between the different levels of government, value systems, the resources needed in communities and the budgets available, and between policies and their implementation.

Such disconnections can be major sources of conflict, especially in places that are severely under-resourced, where levels of anger, frustration, crime and violence are high, and where many people are suffering from generational trauma. According to Nkosi Ntsika Joyi, another senior traditional leader in Mthatha, 16 families in the area lost fathers, brothers and sons in 1964 due to apartheid era hangings, creating trauma that continues to afflict communities today.

While disconnections of the kind that the CMA has identified in Mthatha can ignite or fuel conflict, it found that the inverse can bring about peace. By making connections where there are disconnections and by keeping conversations going no matter what, conflict can be resolved before it flares up and fragmentation within communities can gradually be replaced with cohesion.

Making connections with and between multiple stakeholders is the backbone of the conflict resolution and social cohesion pilot project that the CMA has been running in Mthatha with the support of the embassies of France and the Kingdom of the Netherlands.

Through the programme, community peace forums have been established along the lines of the peace committees that were so prevalent in South African townships during the late 1980s and early 1990s.

“It has been said that those peace committees and the national dialogue that took place are one reason why South Africa did not degenerate into civil war,” says Professor Cori Wielenga, Director of the CMA. “What the CMA and our partners would ultimately like to see is a network of community peace forums all over South Africa, all connected to one another.”

Just as the peace committees of the past served as early-warning systems and platforms for dialogue on issues critical to communities, so too could the community peace forums that are being piloted in Mthatha.

How rural leaders are pioneering solutions for gender-based violence

South Africa’s rural areas are often characterised as economically stagnant and lacking in innovation, while urban areas are credited with being entrepreneurial and dynamic.

“As far as the rural areas are concerned, that is not the experience of the CMA,” Prof Wielenga says. “We have seen incredible resourcefulness and innovation in the way that traditional leaders such as Nkosi Jumba and Nkosi Joyi in Mthatha are resolving conflict.”

An example is Jumba’s approach to ending violence against girls and women in her jurisdiction.

“The question of dependence is an issue in gender-based violence,” Jumba says. “As women in traditional leadership, we decided to teach young girls to be independent by assisting them with handwork and beadwork. Then they can be themselves. You cannot be a person of peace with a hungry stomach and a lot of stress.”

Additionally, the CMA has trained 25 community leaders from Jumba and Joyi’s communities to take the work of the community peace forums to other parts of Mthatha. This is a small but important step forward towards the CMA’s vision of interconnected networks of community structures working towards bringing peace.

Meanwhile, given the crucial role these traditional leaders play in dispute resolution in their communities, the CMA has worked closely with leaders in Mthatha to strengthen their conflict-mediation skills and assist them in addressing the crisis of generational trauma. Here, it has partnered with the Trauma Centre for Survivors of Violence and Torture in Cape Town to provide trauma training and support.

At the end of August 2024, women traditional leaders from Mthatha, KwaZulu-Natal and Limpopo spent a week at UP honing their dispute-resolution and dialogical skills so that they can be even more effective as peace-bringers in their communities and beyond.

Other stakeholders are joining the project, including elected officials at local government level, as well as senior members of provincial and national COGTA departments.

“We also welcome the involvement of the private sector, and have reached out to Business Unity South Africa,” Prof Wielenga says. “Champions of social cohesion are needed in every segment of our society, from business and government to religious organisations and civil society. Collaboration is key to building cohesive communities and a cohesive country.”