The South Africa Community

1,000 African men initiated in Cradle of Humankind

Evidence suggests that all life began in Africa, so whether you are reading this at your desk in Sioux City, Iowa or on your laptop at Heathrow Airport, you can trace your roots back to this beautiful continent (although some of you might have to go back about 150,000 years). In fact, our Johannesburg training site is a short drive to the Cradle of Humankind where fossils of some of the earliest known life forms on Earth have been found. Every human being on the planet shares an African heritage. We are one, diverse species spread out across the globe, with our roots in Africa.

The South African MKP community began in 1998 when a handful of men from South Africa were given some funding from US men to attend an NWTA in England. They came back and formed an I Group and managed to put on a Head, Heart and Soul in 1999. In 2000, another group of men journeyed to Sioux City to get initiated. This group of pioneers ran South Africa’s first NWTA in early September of 2001 with help from leaders Snake Bloomstrand, James Mcleary, Jason Stover and Simon Finch.

Since then, South Africa has hosted 27 fully enrolled NWTAs, countless Head, Heart and Souls and Crossing the Thresholds, many Multi-cultural and Diversity trainings, as well as BSDTs, LTs and other trainings.

We have been repeatedly blessed by inspirational foreign leaders who have visited South Africa to share their experience. In our early, financially wobbly years, some of these leaders donated their fees back to the community and used air miles to get here.

2009 was a milestone for the South African community in many ways.
We celebrated this year the certification of two new co-leaders, Rurik McKaiser and Craig Henen. These certifications enable us to increase the amount of ‘local content’ leadership we can provide on our NWTA weekends, reduce the cost (and environmental impact) of transporting foreign leaders to South Africa, and lead the way for the nearly half a dozen co-leader candidates we have stepping into their leadership.
In addition to having 3 Certified Co leads, we also celebrated the certification of our first Full Leader, Eugene Oppelt. To understand what an accomplishment this is, you must realise that there are more than 40,000 men who have been initiated into the Mankind Project worldwide. Only about 50 of these men are currently Full Leaders; that is about a tenth of a percent of all men initiated. Of the 38 MKP centres, only 23 have Full Leaders in their community, and of these 50 odd leaders only 5 leaders are outside of the US. In terms of diversity there are fewer than 10 black Full Leaders in the entire project.

We also hit our quarter century mark in May with Johannesburg’s NWTA25. 25 fully booked NWTAs in a row and the pace isn’t slowing down! If we continue at this pace we will have held 35 NWTAs before we are 10 years old.

Another highlight of the year was having Mankind Project founder Rich Tosi lead our 26th and 27th NWTA. It was his first trip to our African community and he was welcomed with open arms. As one local man put it, for the initiates on those trainings it was “like having one of the three wise men lurking around your manger, Einstein helping you with your science homework or Bono playing your Bar Mitzvah. Rich Tosi initiated our 1,000th man on NWTA 27 in Johannesburg while he was here.

And that for me was the biggest highlight. One should be careful of the measure used to judge success in any endeavour, especially for an organisation like ours. One might ask: how many I Groups are meeting regularly. One might ask how many leaders we have, how many people attend our community gatherings or how much money we have in the bank. But by anyone’s metric or calculation, initiating 1,000 men on African soil is an accomplishment worth celebrating.

And celebrate we will in March of 2010 when we will have the first all South African Leader Team leading NWTA28 in Cape Town. This will be another monumental milestone in the development of our community, and in the development of MKP as an international entity.

Oxford anthropologist Robin Dunbar suggests that each person has on average 150 friends (real friends, not the people who poke you on Facebook). I like to imagine the impact these 1,000 MKP men have had on the 150,000 people in their lives and the hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people they will meet in their lifetime.

We come to the end of the first decade of the new millennium as a strong, sustainable, honest, and accountable organisation. It has been an outstanding year for this community, and we are growing from strength to strength.

Next man!