LONDON — Here’s the fascinating story of how a story about a “jungle doctor” turned troubled lad into one of South Africa’s leading social entrepreneurs. After following in the footsteps of his fictional role model and using his medical doctor qualification to practice in Alexandra township, Garth Japhet moved on to make an even bigger impact. He is the mind behind the hugely impactful Soul City and now Heartlines which aims to reconcile South Africans one story at a time. The antibody, if you like, to Bell Pottinger. – Alec Hogg
I’m with Garth Japhet. Garth, we’ve known each other over the years and you are a social entrepreneur, also a medical doctor. What got you into this line of work, not the doctoring work but the other?
Yes, Alec, I did medicine because I wanted to make a difference. They told me I’d get over it but I then found that being a clinical doctor, which I was for about 6 years. I spent 5 of those years in Alexandra Township in Alexandra Clinic.
When was that? What time was that?
That was in 1990 – 1996 so it was quite an interesting period. I was in Alex during that, what was called the Inkatha and ANC stuff so, yes, an interesting time.
As a medical doctor, you must have seen interesting things too.
Yes, that’s an euphemism. Yes, an interesting time. I just found that clinical medicine was not dealing with the big issues. It’s very much at the very end of a cycle, which is often lack of education, it’s socio-political and it’s structural. I was doing maternal and child health at that point and the biggest cause of child death, even in Alexandra Township, under the age of 5 was diarrhoea and I had been thinking for a while about how do you reach people beyond the walls of your clinic. I had this idea that what about telling stories and doing it at prime time on television, radio, and print when people are watching and listening. That was the genesis of Soul City, which is a platform that deals with multiple issues through drama, television/radio in 9 languages and then 20 years later probably 50 million publications.
An enormous outreach and you’ve moved on from Soul City — and we’ll talk about that in a moment — but just to dwell there a little. When you look back on it the impact that it’s had, is there any way of quantifying it?
We were very fortunate in that there was a lot of money towards research, which for us, coming out of a medical background and public health background – research was at the heart of what we did, including evaluation. So, to give you an idea we had one grant which was €1m from the EU just to research the impact of Soul City. There’s a huge amount of evidence around impact. I remember in 2005 this survey which was John Hopkin’s University etcetera, said that Soul City could be seen to be responsible for at least preventing half a million new HIV infections and that was just around HIV alone. There’s lots of lovely stories of the 12 communities in SA that have called themselves Soul City. It spun off a whole series called Soul Buddies, which was our children’s series. That in turn spun-off children’s clubs called Buddies Clubs. There are still 7 500 clubs with about 200 000 kids in them. Each week after school kids get together and it was inspired by seeing kids like them on television getting together to make a difference in their community.
An extraordinary story that you’ve had or a life up to that point. And when it was well settled, you then decided to do another challenge.
Yes, I was very lucky. Soul City was never built around me. I had a wonderful group of senior people who together with me, I could not have done it by myself. It got to a certain point where I realised that I could go and potentially innovate again and that was the birth of a new organisation called Heartlines in 2002. Heartlines is using a very similar approach, which is using story which is the only thing that really has impacted on human behaviour through history. Is that we are emotional beings. We don’t change because of fact. We change because of emotion and I wanted to take what we learnt about leveraging that emotion into community settings through story. And start to look at value issues around basic things, integrity, trust, compassion, and honesty and all of these things. That we began with the support of FNBA Series in 2006, which was 8 television films, which dealt with 8 values. Off that we built a range of interventions into schools churches, prisons and so on.
Again, quantifying something like that can’t be very easy.
No and it’s probably part of the difficult part of what we do is that we know that anecdotally, and even from these big studies, the impact it has. But because it’s not building a school, and it’s not treating people in a hospital, and it’s not bringing down HIV/Aids by this amount of percent; it’s a very difficult one for people to understand its power and its impact. Again, there’s a lot of anecdotal evidence around the difference it has made in people’s’ lives. Yes, we are able to quote that evidence.
Garth, is that because when you see somebody that you aspire towards or a role model that perhaps impresses upon you that the natural inclination of a human being is to strive to repeat what they’ve been doing. Is that the psychology behind it?
It is to a degree. It’s using the Malcolm Gladwell tipping point concept and believe we’re all at different stages on that thing, wherever it may be, whether it’s around trust, or credibility or compassion or whatever. People on the one end of the scale, it doesn’t matter what narratives or what interventions are never going to shift. But getting those people at the beginning of that curve there’s often something like what we do can be the tipping point which actually can make all the difference. We often equate it to a glass of water. We’re either the drop that actually creates the spill or we’re the drop that begins the glass. I did a Ted Talk the other day, which I called ‘we don’t build cathedrals anymore.’ The analogy there is that in ancient times they would spend 300 years building a cathedral. This concept of you build for future generations and so a lot of, I think, one of the problems with our society is that we are so instantaneous. What difference did you make to Alex now? Whereas actually it’s not quantifiable like this conversation, what this might mean to you because of another conversation in X-teen years’ time. Yes, it’s a difficult thing but it is about just feeding positive and impactful stories into people’s’ lives, which we truly believe actually can make all the difference. But then very importantly it’s about leveraging the moment. So, we don’t just tell the stories. We create these resources that people can use in groups to take that narrative and then engage in teaching or communal discussion or activities, which then almost entrench the lesson, so to speak.
Like a very good man, Warren Buffett is giving all his money to the Gates Foundation and not the Buffett Foundation. He talks about building moats and he says the way you build a moat is by every day doing little things that will improve the organisation that you’re working from. So, in a way, what you’re talking about is building a moat for humanity.
Yes, absolutely. I think within all of us the amazing thing about the work we do is that it does resonate. I think there is the vast majority of people, even though we are this combination of good and bad. When you see good and when you hear good, etcetera, you aspire towards it as you were saying earlier. Yes, it is just that little drop or little moat that we are trying to do.
You have a movie called ‘Beyond the River’. Now ,where did the whole idea come from and how’s it being going?
Well, about 3 or 4 years ago, as an organisation, we are often driven by things that we feel personally passionate about as well and a while back we started connecting values to issues. Our first foray into that was around money and we produced a thing called ‘Nothing for Mahala’ and it’s about values and money and your attitudes towards money. How you save, how you spend, and how you give away? That became really successful. The issue of race and reconciliation or about difference actually around how do you enable ordinary people to saying I desperately want to do something but I don’t know how. Without bringing in a skilled facilitator what does the everyman do to make a difference to diversity or to reaching across the divides in our country? We looked around the world and couldn’t find any examples that were simple, and easy mass. We came up with this idea, which is again story based, about getting to grips with each other’s stories. When I hear Alex’s story you become a human being to me and not an early, middle-aged, white male. We just realised that if we could promote that at scale, both inspire people to get to know the people around them better.
The people who look like them, like their parents, their friends, etcetera, their cousins, but people who are also different to them. The people that they work with, people who perhaps work in their own house that that opens up conversations in a real way around difference and diversity but also it begins to build this understanding and one of the pillars of this intervention called ‘What’s your Story?’ Is the feature film, ‘Beyond the River,’ which is a wonderful story based on a true story so, it’s a story of 2 guys who combined to win gold in the Dusi, one is a 19-year-old black from Soweto and the other is a 39-year-old English teacher from a school in Jo’burg? It’s in fact, based on their true story but it’s fictionalised and it’s not a story about canoeing although obviously, it’s against the backdrop of canoeing. It’s a story about how 2 guys coming from very different backgrounds, who stereotype each other. You’re young and black and that means this. You’re middle class and white that means you’ve got it all together – that’s all fine.
Through the film and through the story is that they are forced to understand each other’s story, and it strips away their stereotypes. In doing so, they are able to compete and win. It’s a lovely analogy for SA. We’re all in the same boat. There’s a very rocky river and if we don’t actually get to understand each other better we are going to hit rocks and break our boats. Essentially, it went out on circuit in April. It was seen by lots of people. It was on for about 11 weeks. It’s now on Box Office, etcetera. But what it has done is that it’s created the impetus for the next phase, which is taking what’s your story into companies. Where we are able to give some guidelines around how do you get people in your company to get to know each other better. So, we’ve got a number of big SA companies that have started, Hollard, Discovery, amongst others. We were able to take it into the church context. Lots of churches are now picking up on this idea. Getting to know people in their congregations better and then taking it into the world outside of their walls, into schools. A number of schools have done the same, where they’ve taken their kids, seen the movie, and then begun the conversations and, also this concept of getting to know the stories of people in their classes.
We’ve also got a leadership component to it where the same concept of, so often we cross tables from each other and we vehemently disagree. Mainly based on what I see in front of me, a white person, a black person or whatever. So, we take away groups of leaders who need to find a way forward and instead of this 5-minute icebreaker we spend a day shedding identity and getting to know each other’s stories. That has been fantastic. We’ve done 4 or 5 of them already. We’ve had an amazing impact on the advertising industry where we’ve worked with leaders to try and get a way forward in terms of transformation.
It’s quite phenomenal when you look at the SA story because, given the history and given where SA is at the moment, these are not luxuries. These are real issues that companies and people have to grapple with. Given that South Africans are doing this under the initiatives that you’ve introduced. Surely, it’s something exportable to other parts of the world.
Absolutely, I mean the issue of diversity and difference is becoming an increasing issue around the world. Europe with immigration, Islamophobia, etcetera, so there’s a big research component to this, which is so that we can document and make a case for why we already are seeing extraordinary results. Obviously, we hope that if it works well in SA that it can help in other contexts, where difference and diversity is a big issue.
A great vision starts with some idea and some first, few steps. Looking back on it now, how’s the journey gone, according to your plan or has it been a lot more difficult?
Well, I think with most things you might not start the journey if you knew how bloody difficult it was going to be. Interestingly, I track my own interest in making a difference, etcetera, back to a story book which I read at age 13 called the Jungle Doctor, which all my inclinations were towards the arts. I hated the sight of blood and I wasn’t good at maths or science but I was so inspired by the story of the Jungle Doctor, which was about a missionary doctor really making a big difference in Africa. That at the age of 13 I decide that’s what I wanted to do. It’s actually quite strange how I’ve come full circle to having being impacted by story to now using story to impact others. I’ve been exceptionally fortunate. It’s been an extraordinary ride, which I hope hasn’t yet finished.
What are you doing in London?
We are basically, starting a crowdfunding campaign to take ‘What’s your Story’ and ‘Beyond the River’ to what we call a ‘Thousand Places.’ We want to reach a million people and we’ll launch it on the 23rd August in SA. But we want to do a London viewing of the film sometime in September. First of all, to inspire South Africans or people who love SA with what we are doing. Then hopefully people will feel inspired enough to support the campaign.
And with crowdfunding, how much money are you looking for?
I would love to say that we’re looking for R10m but if we got R500 000 it would be great. I think we’ve never done anything like this before and I have absolutely no idea how this will work. Coming back to your initial question about the impact is we are in one of those areas, which is more difficult to fund on an institutional level because we don’t build schools and we are not a job creator directly, but we think we’re doing something exceptionally important. That might resonate more with a thousand-people giving R100 than with one organisation giving R1m. Hence the thought behind crowdfunding.
The Jungle Doctor sounds like a lovely story and it’s interesting that if that book hadn’t come across your path you might have taken a different road but there must be more to it as well. What drove you into this path or did you read the book and then things just fell together?
No, not exactly. I had an interesting childhood in terms of schooling. I dropped out of nursery school, which was my first dropout. I then dropped out of grade-1. I then had to repeat grade-1. I then went to an all-girls school for 2 years. I then managed to do 3 senior schools in one year. I was a pretty mixed up kid and I felt I suppose the need to do something that would get my own sense of self-esteem back. I think a lot of us are when you think it all probably comes back to identity and who I wanted to be in the world. I’d love to say it was purely altruistic. But no, this came out of a difficult period in my own history. I suppose I romanticised of being a doctor and making a big difference.
Would you ever go back to medicine?
I think medicine is a great training and a poor education. It’s an amazing training in terms of getting to know people and thinking logically. In terms of education, understanding the world – it’s really a bad education. I still believe that I am very much being a doctor. The work that I do now is driven by exactly the same desire that led me to become a clinical doctor. Now, my tools are not clinical. They are media and other things.
And you’re making people healthier.
When I talk ‘I’ – I must give credit to all the people that I work with because there is no ‘I’ there is ‘we’ so I think we certainly, I think are in an important way making some people healthier, yes.
What’s next?
My sense of ‘what your story is’ is that it has a beginning and no end. We want to bookmark the month of September every year, a heritage month. So, this becomes a habit in the life of South Africans. That instead of just braaing on Heritage Day that in that month you reach out to one other person. We will continue to drive this for as long as we can and hopefully it becomes part of the fabric of our country. We are already working on our next intervention, which is around father absence and the impact that the absent fathers have on the development of kids. That’s not to undermine the extraordinary work that mothers do, and particularly single mothers but unfortunately there are too many men who are missing in action. The impact on children is profound in terms of potential to be involved in criminal activity, drugs, you name it – educational attainment. We want to take again the concept of using narrative to this time at perhaps a more Pan African initiative, which will probably be a set of 8 stand-alone television films from different countries. Then combining that with resources that can be picked up with at a faith based level, at a community level. That again, will feed off the power of these narratives. So, in the process of trying to raise funding towards that as well.
Do you sleep well at night?
The nice thing about being a doctor is that even if I don’t there’s a pharmacy nearby.
But your soul, is your soul at rest? It appears as though the work you’re doing is soulful and you called it Soul City.
Yes, well I think absolutely. I’m exceptionally fortunate to be doing something that I really truly believe in and to have made a living through it. I don’t think people like myself ever really get at rest because it is what spurs you onto the next thing or gives you the drive to continue to innovate or make a difference. I’m at peace with the fact that I’ll probably never be at peace.
