Story Telling for Change - South Africa

Organisers describe the strategic focus of this project as follows: "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." Using this methodology, they asked pupils between the ages of 15 and 21 from Acornhoek High School in the Mpumalanga Province 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 multiple partners within a relationship as the norm.

The students then became active agents of change: acting out scenes from their own story, they started questioning and debating the legitimacy of the actions they had assigned to the characters in their stories. The students explored topics such as rights over one's body, male violence, sexual double standards, teenage sexuality, and traditional gender roles. In this way, organisers say, new stories - in comic form - emerged. While raising awareness, they say, these stories remained true to the social conditions created by the students.

Throughout this process, the Storyteller Group urges students to:

• Get real! Media messages on HIV/AIDS, they say, 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, they say, can capitalise on the power and dynamism of the comic strip.
• Listen up! According to organisers, the credibility of a message lies not only in its veracity but also whether it sounds right. Creative collaboration with the audience being addressed, they believe, 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 can enable people to reflect, criticise, and harness their own power as agents of social change.

Violence, Youth, Gender, HIV/AIDS.

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