Although various socio-economic and political changes can be identified in South Africa’s¹ 26 years into democracy (cf. Beukes 2016; Haddad 2016:7; Koopman 2005:150; Pieterse 2001:75.), Van der Westhuizen, Greuel and Beukes (2017) and Prinsloo (2016) discussed how practices to address social issues in the South African society are not always informed by active participation of the South African people, leading to frustrations and a feeling of not being heard and not being respected. This is evident in various social actions and protests, against, amongst others, poor service delivery, gender-based violence, as well as xenophobic acts of violence and intolerance. Also, the Ipsos’ People’s Poll (2016) found that two-thirds of South African citizens are worried that the country is going in the wrong direction because of matters that undermine democracy. Further illuminating the frustrations of citizens, more than half of South Africans who participated in the above-mentioned survey reported that they do not expect a positive change. This occurs despite the fact that post-apartheid policy documents clearly indicate the inclusion of social development as the approach to ensure that the diverse South African people are empowered and included in processes that are aimed at social justice through improving the lives of all citizens. However, the challenge to move towards a socially just post-apartheid South Africa is unique. The uniqueness of South Africa’s apartheid era lies in the systematic way in which the National Party, which came into power in 1948, formalised segregation through legislation, leading to ‘a particular form of colonialism not experienced by other nations of Africa’ (Haddad 2016:2).

Reflecting on the impact of the interplay between colonialism and apartheid, Louw (2010) concurred that the South African people experience an added challenge to build a new identity as both South Africans and as Africans. In order to move forward and away from colonialism and apartheid, which officially ended in 1994, the African heritage must now become a central part of future ways of thinking and doing. This viewpoint supports Makgoba’s (1997) description of the term ‘Africanisation’. According to this author, one cannot forget the past, and therefore one cannot exclude the European influences of the past. The author suggests that, whilst acknowledging European viewpoints and practices, the African identity and culture should be affirmed and included in the way African people move forward. Africanisation of how African people deal with different issues should, therefore, become a way in which they ensure that what they think, how they think and what they do are influenced by the reality of their specific context. We acknowledge that Africa is rich in cultures and that different contexts should be considered when working towards an Africanised understanding. Furthermore, the term ‘Africanised’ should not be a mere concept but should be transformed into a working concept. Africanisation, therefore, implies that (Van der Westhuizen et al. 2017):

Community development is one approach to work towards a change process where social justice is actively implemented. This approach falls within the social development paradigm and supports a movement from the state satisfying the needs of the citizens to a facilitation of processes where citizens themselves become involved in their futures (Hart 2012; Van der Westhuizen et al. 2017). Therefore, in order to work towards such a movement, the transdisciplinary team representing social work, theology and the arts started their discourses and work based on a shared argument that citizens must become aware of the diverse indigenous resources, such as knowledge and skills, available to them to stimulate collaborative and participative positive change in communities.

The terms ‘social welfare’, ‘social development’ and ‘community development’ may be viewed as inter-related. Social welfare refers to programmes, benefits and services that are offered by religious, voluntary, non-government and government organisations to individuals, groups and communities. Social development may be viewed as a part of social welfare, focusing on activities/actions directed at social, economic, education and health development (Green 2012). It is specifically aimed at poverty alleviation, where the government addresses this issue together with social and economic sectors (Green 2012). The danger exists, however, that it becomes a top-down approach and that people affected by social issues are then not provided with platforms to share their understandings, experiences and ideas on how to address these issues. In line with this concern, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO 2011) affirms that community development must focus on social justice where human well-being is, amongst others, supported through the development of sustainable social relations.

Drawing a link between social and community development, Geoghegan and Powell (2006) asserted that community development is an approach within social development where democratic governments aim to maximise social-economic development through partnerships and social development policies to facilitate a process of sustainable development. In community development, a unique leadership style is needed to facilitate partnerships between government and role-players, stakeholders and communities, with specific emphasis on empowerment and participation strategies to attain sustainable and collective change, inclusion and equality within communities (Hart 2012; Korten 1990). Community development is furthermore based on the rights-based approach, as it is a participation-driven process where both service providers and users are responsible for the planning, implementation and monitoring of services. The right to obtain support is also linked to the responsibility to participate. As such, development is based on the willingness to take ownership of a situation and to join hands to find solutions (Weyers 2011). Characteristics of community development include that the community as a whole is seen as a system, with interdependent subsystems that join hands in order to work together for the ‘common good’ through participation and cooperation, with networking and collaboration as key factors to success. The inclusion of subsystems means that intervention takes place at grassroots level. It is based on the belief that the community leaders, together with the community members, are best qualified to identify and deal with contextual needs and problems through the inclusion of internal knowledge and skills. The strategy is, therefore, the mobilisation of the community to address their needs and problems, whilst intervention emphasises cooperation, group capacity building and consultation. Community mobilisation focuses on a collaborative capacity and community development process through which local groups and/or organisations identify needs, develop an outline of an action plan and then implement it. With the emphasis on capacity building, the process aims to develop skills, leadership and to create self-supportive services, groups and structures to improve sustainable growth and independent functioning through cooperation and participation (Weyers 2011). The inclusion of participation, collaboration and cooperation as part of the community development process leads to authentic community development because it is truly based on the inclusion of the voices of the people in the community.

It should be noted that the focus on providers and beneficiaries and the lack of democratic inclusion and participation in services in the previous dispensation, and arguably in the current dispensation, created a platform for dependency that inhibited personal and socio-economic growth (Harvey & Lind 2005). To address this, community involvement is viewed within the framework of stimulating growth towards independent living, which is key to authentic community development. The principles of authentic community development include social justice in that it informs the movement towards a participatory and shared set of values focusing on tolerance, diversity, human rights and a liberal democracy (Swartz 2006). In order to facilitate a socially just community development process, the implementation of the principles of community development requires ‘…emotional maturity and compassion with the circumstances of people’ (Waghid 2004:525). Waweru (2015) identified the following principles that we viewed as complementary to social justice and needed for praxis that involves African knowledge and skills to guide community development processes.

From the above description, the transdisciplinary team identified four preferred outcomes of authentic community development that can also be seen as a process, namely:

Transdisciplinary work moves beyond the bridging of understanding of social issues. It engages in a search for solutions through a collaborated effort between disciplines (Toomey et al. 2015). Therefore, transdisciplinary work refers to a concerted effort between disciplines that create a movement across the disciplines and result in a product beyond all disciplines (Nicolescu 2005). We were interested in a transdisciplinary approach, as it is a strategy that works across disciplines to identify a more holistic understanding of a specific issue. Castree, Adams and Barry (2014) argue that such an approach can contribute to a new focus on the inclusion of an understanding of human diversity and social inequality within a specific context, which relates well to our exploration of authentic African community development practices in the diverse South African society.

Typical of the transdisciplinary approach, all disciplines involved in a specific field work together and learn from each other through joint research on grassroots level to develop services and products. A key component is that it also involves the voices of the users of such services (Van der Westhuizen et al. 2017). Hinkel (2008) explained in this regard that the transdisciplinary approach is particularly useful to address problems that cannot be solved by a single discipline and also not by science alone. In summary, this approach focuses on interpretation, language, discourse and meaning from different perspectives that are harmonised and integrated. The importance of including the people affected by the problem to find effective solutions further aligns well with the characteristics and principles of authentic community development.

The transdisciplinary team acknowledged the diversity and post-apartheid challenges within the South African context. We were interested in contributing to the social sciences (Toomey et al. 2015) by finding a practical process to assist communities to develop in an organic manner. In support of this, Abdi (2006:16) explained that we have to revisit our epistemology of what we know, how we know it and what we need to know in order to ‘develop diverse trajectories of knowing and constructing select bodies of knowledge’.

The link between the disciplines of social work, theology and the arts, the transdisciplinary approach and community development are depicted in Table 1.

Whilst social work and theology are both disciplines aimed at improving the quality of lives of and interactions between people (cf. George 2012; Thesnaar 2012; Van der Westhuizen & Kleintjes 2015), the arts becomes the vehicle to create awareness and to promote communication between individuals, groups and communities in a non-threatening manner (Kinnunen & Kaminski 2003). Joint musical activities include cultural diversity being viewed as an asset and an opportunity for communities to learn from each other. The inclusion of the discipline of the arts was also based on the viewpoint that the reality of diverse communities does not only challenge economic and social structures but also involves symbolic and cultural issues that should be addressed in a creative and non-threatening manner (European Commission 2014).

The transdisciplinary approach acknowledges the conflicts between different perceptions and understanding and supports the principles of participation, cooperation and collaboration in search of a new collective understanding of a particular context (Leiner & Fläming 2012). An important prerequisite is a willingness to explore new ways of understanding through a cooperative process. It requires an openness to learn from other disciplines and grassroots level to productively discuss the work of other disciplines, to develop new innovative processes and to develop new materials such as texts and toolkits to address social needs (Mittelstraß 2005).

Through this approach, we were able to include a bottom-up strategy, whilst all those involved in the transdisciplinary team had to be willing to share knowledge and skills and to learn from other disciplines and participating community members to develop a unique understanding of the context. As a result, the different members of the team became able to use knowledge and skills from another discipline, whilst integrating this with the knowledge and skills from their own discipline (Stock & Burton 2011). Nissani (1995:121) explained that distinctive components of two or more disciplines are being integrated into ‘a single mind’. In this way, the disciplines develop a unique and integrated way of developing knowledge, understanding and skills. In addition to sharing existing knowledge and skills between the disciplines, the single-mindedness of the transdisciplinary approach also moves towards obtaining new knowledge, understanding and skills that reflect multiple viewpoints (Van der Westhuizen et al. 2017). With a specific focus on working towards contextual African community development, the transdisciplinary team worked together to develop a new knowledge and skills base with the aim to address context-related realities, as well as to move towards decolonised praxis. Throughout this learning process between, across and beyond the disciplines, the voices of the people at grassroots level are incorporated in the development of a new understanding.

In order to frame the actions to be taken towards the outcomes of authentic community development, we used a transdisciplinary process and the social dimensions of joint music.

Past and present socio-economic and political trends represent external facets that dominate communities’ well-being. This then leads to internal facets that prevent communities to decolonise their minds and to develop ownership for their own lives and futures. Internal facets include stagnation or an attitude of ‘this is as good as it gets’, disempowering emotions, a lack of participation and excessive conflict situations (Van der Westhuizen et al. 2017; Weyers 2011). We attempted to Africanise our understanding of internal facets with the aim to create a space where the people of the country could find hope for a better future (Villanueva 2013). Working within the community development framework, our goal was to create a community identity, vision and hope (Weyers 2011). The objectives were (1) to stimulate interest in an effort to encourage participation, (2) to promote unity, (3) to acknowledge negative or painful emotions, attitudes and behaviours and to explore the origins thereof, (4) to explore opportunities to explore African ways of dealing with problems and (5) to explore knowledge, understanding and skills that could address societal problems.

We framed our own discourses related to our shared interest, namely, authentic community development in a diverse context, in the hermeneutical learning process and combined this with the phases of appreciative inquiry. The theory of appreciative inquiry was included as it is similar to participatory research where the aim is to involve all role-players, encourage conversation and interconnectedness and identify and build on collective strengths (Cooperrider Whitney & Stravos 2008). It resulted in an identification of four inter-related phases that guided our discussions and the planning of the participatory research (cf. Cooperrider et al. 2008; Van der Westhuizen & Greuel 2016):

As an outcome of the transdisciplinary discourses and the participatory research, we integrated the outcomes of authentic community development with the transdisciplinary process proposed by Lang et al. (2012) and used the findings of the mentioned research projects to identify actions in each phase of the process and how musical activities would be used as communication and to collect the qualitative data, as illustrated in Table 2.

In order to create non-threatening spaces to encourage a transdisciplinary discourse through appreciative inquiry, as well as an intercultural grassroots concerted effort to work towards authentic community development, the arts as a discipline within the transdisciplinary framework becomes essential. As described in the Table 2, we used joint music-making as an art form. The social powers of music (Koelsch 2012) were therefore adapted to the following social dimensions to be used as an integrated tool for authentic community development (Greuel 2019):

The learning process described above resulted in a framework for authentic African community development praxis with which we will conclude this discussion.

Our shared interest was the development of authentic African community development practices to encourage a movement towards decolonised community building, bridging and action through a sense of belonging. The final outcome of the transdisciplinary discourses and the participatory research projects resulted in an integration of a hermeneutical learning process through appreciative inquiry and the use of the social dimensions of music, as illustrated in Table 3.

We aimed to contribute to authentic community development through the transdisciplinary participatory research that informed this discussion. We used music as a non-threatening and non-verbal communication method to serve as a vehicle to work towards social justice, where community members experience a sense of inclusion and belonging. We hoped to contribute to a process of post-colonial healing through this contribution. The final aim was to assist communities to find creative ways to use their African knowledge and skills to become active participants in their own futures. We conclude this discussion with the words of Van der Westhuizen, Greuel & Thesnaar (2018):