ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to explore the role that social work can play in and after political conflict. It focuses on the experiences of two social workers in South Africa during and after the struggle against apartheid. One social worker, a woman identified as so-called ‘coloured’, quickly became disenchanted with social work’s complicity with apartheid and left the profession to work within the mass democratic movement as an activist, as this was the only way to contribute to radical, structural change. The other social worker, a white man, was conscripted into the defence force and had to grapple with how to give voice to social work values from within the apartheid machine. Social workers accepted working in racially segregated offices and provided racially segregated, discriminatory services, thereby maintaining the status quo. Social workers who were either political activists or who felt from a purely humanitarian basis that something needed to be done, got together to form Concerned Social Workers.
