ABSTRACT
I n their book Walk Out Walk On, authors Margaret Wheatley and Deborah Frieze (2011) take readers on a “learning journey” (p. xv) to communities in seven different countries where individuals come together in new forms of relationships and with new ideas about how to live and work to solve seemingly intractable problems in our world. One stop on the reader’s journey is Joubert Park in Johannesburg, South Africa. The park was once a Whites-only recreational place in the heart of the city during the days of apartheid. Then on April 27, 1994, the park was the site of long lines of voters waiting to elect Nelson Mandela to South Africa’s presidency “four years after [he] was released from prison, ten thousand days after he entered” (p. 81). By the late 1990s it had become a hopeless and broken place. Following the end of apartheid, Johannesburg was flooded with migrants and immigrants after decades of prohibition and segregation, which until then had reserved jobs and other opportunities in the city for Whites only. Joubert Park, “the first port of entry for new arrivals” (Wheatley & Frieze, 2011) in Johannesburg, saw a dramatic rise in crime, homelessness, and desperation, as the resources available to absorb the impact of these new arrivals quickly ran out.
