Letter from South Africa

It has been my experience that many ex-South African psychotherapists who lived and trained in London during the apartheid years viewed South Africa as a more or less fallow field, one that would benefit from the planting of seeds we had spent a great deal of time and money collecting. In this, I include myself. This perception was partly shaped by the academic and cultural boycott - we didn't really know what was going on. As democracy dawned, I and many others who wanted to contribute to the new South Africa, became involved in a number of initiatives. Some actually came to fruition and had important repercussions; others never saw the light of day. Some were patronizing, while others attempted to impart skills and thereby to be empowering.

By the time I returned to South Africa in 1999, the euphoria with which some of us in London had greeted the first democratic election had become tempered with the realities of the task ahead. Poverty, unemployment, and the lack of housing had to be addressed; the transport, health, and education systems all needed to be massively overhauled. As an educated white person with resources, the issue that was most likely going to bother me was the level of criminal violence.

As a therapist, how was I to understand this phenomenon? I thought that Felicity de Zulueta's book From Pain to Violence (1993) had to have some relevance, and so this brings me to attachment theory and the possible role that insecure attachments may be playing in the cycles of violence that plague our society.

I wouldn't want to pretend that the social complexities of the Western Cape could possibly have a singular explanation, since colonialism and apartheid have a lot to answer for. Economic hardship, Population Classification and the Group Areas Act divided families and led to the erosion of family life. Gangsterism in the prisons, in District Six, and on the Cape Flats existed from the early twentieth century. Alcohol addiction among rural farm workers as a re