RECASTING SOCIAL WORK: HUMAN RIGHTS AND POLITICAL ACTIVISM

I am deeply honoured to be the recipient of the Eileen Younghusband award and to deliver this address. It is a particular privilege to be talking about a topic dear to my heart in a country and among people for whom political activism has been rooted in daily life through struggles that many of us have never directly encountered. This is my first time to South Africa since I was ten years old – indeed a long time ago – and back then I was here quite by accident for, on a journey on an ocean liner to England and back, the Suez Canal was closed and boats were diverted through the Cape. I don’t want to make too much of my political awareness at the age of ten, the same age as Anfani Okosun who spoke on Sunday, for, unlike Anfani, I was a late onset activist. However, I do recall an awareness at that time of inhumanity in action. It is these very questions of humanity and inhumanity that have framed the social work endeavours of my adult years. The conference theme of transcending global and local divides is important at a time when, despite the catch-cry of globalisation, many nation states are increasingly bunkering and drawing themselves into what anthropologist Ghassan Hage (2003, p