Who is Tshisimani Centre for Activist Education?
The Tshisimani Centre for Activist Education is an activist education organisation orientated towards supporting working class social justice movements, organisations and community groups with political education. We are based in Cape Town.
Our name Tshisimani comes from a tshiVenda word meaning fountain or spring, ‘the water at the source’. This captures the driving inspiration of the centre to nourish, replenish and sustain. Tshisimani was established in 2016 to assist social justice movements and activists in challenging inequalities and supporting struggles for freedom and dignity. We do this by developing political education programmes with social justice organisations, to equip activists with the conceptual tools to resist inequality and to imagine and create alternatives. Our educational offerings range from one-off seminars, workshops and film screenings, to intensive residence-based programmes developed with and for specific social justice organisations, and monthly engagements with regular cohorts of activists. We also publish political education materials online for use and adaptation by activists wherever they may need them. Our core constituents are activists from poor and working class struggles with a particular focus on youth and women. Our strategic vision for the next five years is to extend our work throughout Southern Africa.
What is important to us:
We believe in consultation and collaboration. We strive to be non-sectarian meaning we promote a plurality of perspectives to enable activists to decide approaches that will work best for their struggles.
Our educational programmes are co-designed with our partners, and participants in our work co-create knowledge with us. We operate from the assumption that participants have valuable knowledge which needs to be brought into the learning process while bringing in expertise and experience from history and international contexts to broaden the learning environment. We seek to develop activists’ ability to think critically, analyse, strategise and dream. In practice, this means emphasising history, ideas and concepts, and exposing participants to a diversity of perspectives on any given topic. It also means using popular education methods and integrating creativity, the arts, and digital media into our work, encouraging participants to think beyond the usual repertoire of activist strategies and tactics. We seek not only to build the consciousness of activists, but also, their leadership abilities and confidence.
With participants, we document activist experiences and build ‘new’ theory and knowledge about organising and imagining change.
We strive to connect with what is current, urgent, and innovative in contemporary politics while learning from historical examples. Our approach creates a relay between the personal and the political, the past and the present, theory and practice.
Our approach to activist education:
Our teaching methods are diverse and aimed at different learning styles and backgrounds. We use multiple media (including visual methods, film, active learning, reading groups, participatory arts processes and social media such as WhatsApp) and our teaching is rooted within the experiences and contexts of participants. At the same time, we seek to develop activists’ understanding of the wider world through case studies, examples from history, and are particularly invested in teaching about Africa and the Global South and building relationships and solidarity between Southern African and international activists. Our education programmes strive to build and support activist autonomy, critical thinking, creativity, confidence and the capacity to understand and change the world around them. We create spaces to experiment and learn – be it about digital technologies and the world of activism or about how to formulate impactful messaging for campaigns.
A hub of contemporary politics
We aspire to be the go-to place for activists who are curious about the world around them and remain on the pulse of pressing issues that activists and communities are grappling with today. We host public events that emphasise critical engagement, historical context and bringing in lived experiences within the room. These offerings take the form of workshops, book talks, seminars, film screenings and teach-ins on contemporary issues such as the ongoing debate about South Africa’s unresolved land questions, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the politics and impact of state capture.
Collective gatherings and convenings:
We facilitate spaces for reflective gatherings and convenings where activists from different contexts come together to share, exchange and strategise. These spaces promote solidarity, collaborative planning, and networking, breaking down silos within activism towards a stronger unified approach to activism.
Schools and Foundation Courses
Every two years we hold intensive residential foundation courses that host activists from across South Africa and sometimes internationally. These courses offer conceptual training and are carried out using creative experiential learning techniques and methodologies. The 3 to 5 day modules are held at retreat accommodation to allow for indepth learning through a customised workshop programme that is developed by our team of popular education facilitators. The programmes for these are adapted for digital platforms, available on our website.
An exciting arts in activism and film programme
We recognise the value of the arts in harnessing activists’ imagination and creativity. Our teaching methods infuse creativity and playfulness in what we do - not as an ‘add-on’ but as an integral part of what we do and how we do it. We help movements to integrate and use the arts in how they campaign, build community, and find creative modes of political expression . Our arts programmes centre the youth in our communities and connect participants from diverse communities and centre young people as political actors through diverse storytelling modes that are witnessed by their peers, family, and community.
Land Justice Programme:
Tshisimani’s land justice programme is a cluster of dynamic educational offerings that respond to the unresolved land question as it develops locally, regionally and internationally. Locally the programme takes the form of monthly assemblies of land occupiers in Cape Town, two national land schools and one regional land convening that takes places in Harare, Zimbabwe. Working with partners in the sector, Tshismani also holds responsive workshops and policy briefing sessions .
Land justice is at the heart of many struggles in the Global South, linking to socio-economic, cultural, spiritual and ecological questions. In realising this part of the programme focuses on international and regional exchanges of land activists – where activists co-learn from other’s struggles and build solidarity across international networks of land activists.
Tshisimani emphasises the importance of undermining historical divisions by ensuring that land schools include activists from different geographical locations/ provinces, language and cultural backgrounds in a manner that foregrounds gender and ecological politics. Our approach in developing education programs include partnering and actively involving organisations and movements that are impacted directly.
Centring feminist principles:
Tshisimani seeks to centre feminism in all of its work. Patriarchy profoundly affects the communities we work with. Gender based violence, inequality and gendered oppression are found within the movements and organisations who look to the centre for popular education and support. Understanding the intersection of oppressive structures who operate on the basis of gender, race and class is important for those engaged in struggles surrounding the centre’s work.
Practically, this has meant the development of the Women’s Assembly, a monthly forum empowering working class women to take up mantles for power within their organisations and communities. The women’s assembly includes a wellness component speaking to true feminist values which seeks to not only empower women but better their lives through healing the wounds caused by generations of patriarchal violence and oppression. Women’s Assemblies not only strengthen feminist ideas within those who participate but work towards changing the ways in which they engage struggles, making anew old patterns of political activism we seem to be trapped within.
Digital Activism
Digital activism has become vital to the work of social change. The digital era has meant online organising, mobilising and campaigning are now a daily part of activists’ toolkits – especially under covid-19 and lockdown. Skilled media practitioners with political insight and a social conscience are thus crucial to the effectiveness of today’s social movements and organisations. However, there is a scarcity of those with both technical media skills and progressive political insight regarding digital media.
Tshisimani’s digital activism programme takes the form of a whole-year course, “Digital Activism: Tools & Tactics” to develop skilled media activists; and oneday workshops for organisations and movements that request media training in a specific area – such as social media campaigning.
Sustained engagement with cohorts: youth, land activists, women, and workers:
The pandemic has meant several shifts in activist spaces today. The most profound shift has been the need for lasting solidarity across poor and working class activist communities to fight the encroaching conditions produced by prolonged crises. Tshisimani has shifted it’s work to facilitate spaces such as the Women’s Assembly with the Bonteheuwel Development Forum and the Occupiers Assembly with housing activists across Cape Town to develop spaces in which solidarity is a priority. These spaces are built through self-sustainable organising and popular education. Spaces like the occupiers assembly and the women’s assembly have since grown to involve activists from a variety of contexts who traditionally would not have had space to connect. In these spaces, Tshisimani offers facilitated sessions, with room for new ideas and the brewing of grass-roots solutions developed together with self-organising collectives.
Online courses, resources and materials:
A crucial component of our work is the production of creative and engaging popular materials that can support our work and render complex ideas and situations accessible. We use a wide variety of media including illustrated content, video, animation, comics and infographics to create educational materials and courses in response to the political and educational needs of the activists we work with. These materials have been used both by our own educators and activists in a wide variety of sectors in many different locations both locally and internationally.
