Crafting Positive Futures for Africa with Michael Haupt

All right. Okay. Welcome to another conversation with one of the contributors to the inaugural journal, Crafting Positive Futures for Africa. And I'm chatting now with Michael Haupt, who's done some amazing work, which we'll get into in a moment. The, the purpose of the journal is to capture some of the thoughts, ideas, concepts, and work that is being done by futurists in Africa about Africa so we can get a really good set of conversations going about things that are relevant in the context of Africa and not just imported from other parts of the world. Michael and I have known each other for a very long time. Our careers have done various things in that time. We were just chatting about it before, before we started. But when I asked Michael to contribute to the journal, I had an inkling of what he was doing. But when I read your article, Michael, it absolutely flew me away. So before we get into that story, maybe you can just describe broadly about your career and the kind of futures work that you do, and then we'll look specifically at this project.

Beautiful. Well, thank you, Charlotte, firstly for pulling the journal together and secondly for hosting these conversations, because in those journals you can only go to a certain level of depth and we can go to a little bit further in these conversations. So appreciate you for pulling it all together. So very briefly, from an African perspective, I helped launch mobile telephony in South Africa in That was just before the first all-race elections. And by sheer luck, the project went well. So I was headhunted, ended up in Sydney, Australia, and then from there ended up living in 16 cities on 6 continents, implementing high-end computer systems for corporates, which was great. And I managed to see the world at somebody else's expense. But at some point you realize this is not what I was brought to this planet for. And so through a series of coincidences, ended up in the systemic change space. And this was advising and consulting organizations, think tanks, research, academic departments, looking at the system that causes the individual challenges in society. Can anything be done about that system? Spent an incredible 15 years in that space, met the most unbelievable people, saw just about every kind of systemic approach on the planet. And then when lockdowns happened, I walked away completely burnt out, mainly because there's a huge amount of blah, blah, blah. Lots of conferences, lots of meetings, lots of research papers produced, but of course the system itself doesn't change. And so I then ended up in the Valley of Grace, Greyton, Genadendal, in the Western Cape, where we were hoping to bring to life some of the elements that I saw in the systemic change space. Hopefully that gives a good enough 50,000-foot view of how we got here.

All right, that's very good. I'd love to hear a little bit more though about the systemic change. So, You know, obviously there's going to be lots of things that need to be addressed before something, before a system can be changed. But like, what was your experience? You were burnt out. So obviously it's a really big, difficult task. What did that look like for you?

I think the biggest issue that I see in this space is that when you use the word system change, there's 2 ways of interpreting that. One is that we have to do something to change the system. But the second interpretation is the system itself will change, and how do we align ourselves with an inevitable change that happens? So if I can take 2 minutes quickly to give some context to what I mean by that, you need to look quite a few hundreds of, or even thousands of years back in history to see that there is a cyclical rise and fall of empires. And that's happened for the past 5,000 years. And what's interesting about each of those empires that rise and fall is that they are class-based empires. In other words, end up with people at the bottom of a pyramid and people at the top of the pyramid. And invariably, the people at the top of the pyramid, we often call them the 1%, end up hollowing out the middle of society, and then it eventually collapses in on itself. That cycle has repeated over and over again. There's immense bodies of research and books that have been written about it. So it's no longer a questioned fact anymore.

Yeah.

The interesting bit to me is that in parallel with that, we have cycles of consciousness, human consciousness, and we've basically been through 4 major evolutionary transitions in terms of the way humans think, all the way from the point where we couldn't speak, and then we got to being able to communicate via languages and so on. We won't go into too much detail about it, but the point of those cycles, those converging cycles, is that it appears that we stand at the cusp of being able to this time after this system has ended, which is going to happen anyway, no matter what we do, we either repeat that class-based empire or our consciousness has evolved sufficiently to the point that we can now try something different, a different human experiment, which is what each of these empires have been. And in Africa, we have the concept of Ubuntu. There are a couple of other concepts that teach us about what a values-based society might look like as opposed to a class-based society. So first you need to wrap your head around what's the difference between a class-based and a values-based society. I'm not sure we're going to have time to dive into that, and then recognize that the system is changing in some or other direction anyway. We can maybe unpack that a little bit more, but our efforts in terms of system change are fairly ineffective, and that's quite a significant awareness and understanding to come to, and most people working in the systems change space haven't yet fully understood that yet. Wow.

All right. I'm desperate to get to your essay, but I've got to ask another question. I also see in the world this kind of changing consciousness, this awareness of being more conscious and intentional about the values we have and the decisions we make. But at the same time, there's a kind of a growing resistance to that and kind of almost a yearning for I call it a nostalgia narrative for a past that was never the way the people see it, but also seems to go back to reinforcing old values that would be that kind of class system dichotomy of how the world is, kind of like the noise is coming from 2 different places that just seem so incongruous in the same time.

It's useful to use a model to try and understand the dichotomy that you've just described, and that's the 3 horizons model. So very briefly, horizon 1 is the horizon of the system that is currently ending. Horizon 3 is the system that's emerging.

Mm-hmm.

And then horizon 2 is the one that bridges those 2 worlds together. But within horizon 2, you have H2+ and H2-. Age 2 miners are innovations, but that hold on to Horizon 1. And these are the people invariably that have been successful in Horizon 1, and they refuse to give up that narrative, rightfully so from an evolutionary perspective, because from a survival of the fittest point of view, that's what made them successful, and therefore they're clinging onto that desperately. And then there are others who have much more of a Horizon 3 view, and their innovations fit into the H2+ space, which moves us towards the 2. So the dichotomy and the tension is between H2- and H2+. Oops, Zoom is kicking in with some graphics there.

Very excited about that. All right, now that is really helpful to see it that way. All right, I will play with that in my brain a little bit more. But now, Michael, let's move on. You've had all this vast experience, and you're now pouring yourself into this particular project, and the title of your essay is Chapter 9: 1999, The Abundance Project in 2035, about eco-regional renewal in the Cape Overberg. So let us have an understanding of what that is, please.

The first concept to wrap our heads around is the difference between man-made borders and natural borders. So in geopolitics, you're aware of the borders that every country, you know, the shape of each country on a world map, those are man-made borders. And we can get into the details of how and why they came about. Natural borders are formed by mountains and rivers and the natural lay of the land, including microclimates, and then the culture of the people living in that space. So there's an emerging body of work and research called bioregionalism, which takes into account this natural lay of the land. And so what we are doing is rather than accepting the artificial construct of a national government or a national identity, to come back to your bioregional identity. which means taking into account those various biophysical characteristics that make up the space, but especially the history of the place and the people who were originally there and what their lifestyles were like and learning from them, and then putting into place some kind of human activity that reverses some of the damage that we've seen. So essentially, interestingly, the place where we are in Valley of Grace, Genadendal, is the location of the first mission station in South Africa outside of Cape Town. And it was the location of the first teachers training college in South Africa. This is going back to the early— late 1700s and early 1800s. And that teachers training college essentially birthed the thinking that has caused us to have these kind of conversations in the first place. So it ran reasonably effectively for 150 or so odd years, and now we're realizing there are negative externalities. And to me, it's quite telling that we're coming full circle back to the same location as the first teachers' training college and asking the question, are there other ways of learning, tapping into the original Khoisan settlers who knew the land, who knew how to live abundantly on their land without destroying the land? And how can we bring that back into a way of living, building, and not regressing, not going backwards? I'm not a believer in the post-growth movement because the living system doesn't stop growing. It constantly keeps growing. It changes the way in which it grows. A human fetus grows in a particular way, and when it gets to a teenager, the rate of growth slows down. So the same thing is happening with the human species. But let's now build on the good things that came out of modernism.

Okay, so practically, what does it look like? Actually, let's just start with your chapter first. It's based in 2035. So I remember when I read it, I had a number of different articles on my desktop and I was just kind of like scanning through and, and I was reading through your chapter and I was getting more and more excited and drawn into it. This is amazing. And then I went back and looked at what it was actually about and realized that this is a vision for the future. But it was so almost tangible how I felt the excitement about what, what you intend to see happen in that space. So, so let's just talk about why have you positioned it that way? Why, why have you written that picture from that angle?

Firstly, thank you for the feedback. That means a huge amount. Secondly, our ability to tell compelling stories defines or dictates how quickly we can pull ourselves into a future that is evolutionarily coherent. So let me stress this, the story that I've written is going to happen anyway. Whether it happens by 2035 or not is dependent on the efforts of the group involved in the Valley. Why 2035? My daughter turns 21 years old in that year, and my calling is to give to her the best 21st birthday gift a father can possibly think of giving. And it's a way of living that's completely different to the destructive, extractive lifestyle that we have now. When I say we, I'm talking about as a human species. So within this valley, let's now get down to the practicalities of what this means. Firstly, we're in a unique location, so we're at the end of a 35-kilometer dead-end road from the N2, for those who are familiar with the South African road layout, which means we don't have a huge amount of through traffic. You've got to make an intentional detour off the N2 to get to where we are, and when you want to go home again, turn around and go out. So there's a reasonable feel of isolationism, which means that you can remove yourself somewhat from the current system. Let's just refer to it as capitalism. It's way more complex than that, but just for the ease of explanation. And then secondly, we have a size of population that is, we think, ideal to work with. So there's about 25,000 people that live in the valley from very different socioeconomic levels, and yet it's bigger than an intentional community, which is just 100 people or so, and it's smaller than a massive city of 1 million, 2 million, 5 million people where it's really difficult to implement these kind of changes. 25,000 people is sort of in the sweet spot. which doesn't make it easy. It's really difficult. So just to give an example, there's a huge amount of trauma around what happened with the 1950s Group Areas Act, where the people living on the land who were fully, you know, there was nothing wrong with them being on the land, and yet they were forcibly removed with very little logical explanation given. And all of that generational—

Yeah. Can you, can you just, for anyone watching from outside of South Africa, what was the Group Areas Act? What did that mean for the people?

The government of the time decided that there were 3 types of land. One was for the Black people, the other was for the colored people, and I'm putting those in air quotes, and then the third was for the white people. And of course, the most favored land from the perspective of living, industrial activities, or agricultural activities were— all of the best pieces of land were given to the whites. And the people who were originally living there, who had no concept or even a desire for ownership. Their view of the land was stewardship. If I'm on this land, it is my duty to look after the land. And of course, with the mindset, a mentality of ownership, we can extract as much as we can from the land, in doing so damaging the long-term capability of the land to continue providing for us and giving us the riches that we've all enjoyed. There we go. Did that give enough of an explanation?

Yeah, that's good. And you were saying that there's trauma from the people who are living there now because of that, even though it was decades ago, it doesn't just go away overnight.

It's intergenerational, so that trauma is passed down from generation to generation, not only the trauma of being removed from the land, but the trauma of the system itself. And what I mean by that is that the youngsters growing up in the valley, all that they can see is this false idea of success, and that when they finish school, all they want to do is go and play back in the same system that has caused all of the social ills that we see in the valley here. There's a disconnect between cause and effect. And before we even come in with any kind of different way of living, one needs to address the desire to want to continue a system that quite visibly is causing fairly significant damage.

Yeah, yeah. And that in itself is, in terms of our just earlier conversation about being conscious, is Very often when people look at success, and I see this quite often with the professional and aspiring speakers that we deal with around the continent, is they see a version of a successful speaker as an American speaker or a speaker from Europe, and, and they want to emulate that. And then they lose what is the unique value and wisdom of being a speaker from Africa and sharing other kinds of wisdom than the broadly capitalist version. So yeah, just without being conscious of things, people can just fall into the wrong system as opposed to embracing what you're trying to do, which seems to be disrupting that concept a little.

And maybe just to build on what you said, let's not call the previous system a wrong system because it was responsible for massive progress ever since the Industrial Revolution. So let's not poo-poo that because I see a lot in the activist space. Oil is an example. Oil was a key criteria to getting us to the point that we're at now. Was that right or wrong? At the time, nobody was pointing fingers at it saying, this is wrong. We enjoyed the progress. We enjoyed the growth spurts, which is what happens in your teenage years. And now we're realizing, hold on, we've got to do something about it. So it doesn't mean that it was wrong. It means that it's run out of its efficacy, its ability to maintain the growth of the living system. And so now all we're doing is looking for different ways of growing. We can unpack that, but that's another long conversation.

All right. So share more, a little bit about the project. What does it look like now?

So what we're looking at is there's different elements of this, and it's fairly difficult to describe a project. And the reason it's difficult to describe is because we're taking a whole of society approach, WOSA, which means it includes your education system, your financial and economic system, your food production system, the way you handle waste. Absolutely every aspect of the way your society lives has to be considered and it has to be addressed at the same time. You can't do one piece and then the other piece. So that's what makes this particularly complex. So all we're doing, if we put it into a nutshell, is to be as independent as possible from the existing system. In other words, grow our own food, handle our own health system, handle our own education system, which ultimately will prove to look very different from those that we rely on currently. But we're just changing them piecemeal at a time. We can get into the complicated logistics of how that works, but then this will end up being a 3-hour conversation.

I sense there should be some follow-up. Tell me about the people who are there. How aware are the 25,000 people about what is happening and what is their buy-in to the process, or is there any resistance from them?

So the first thing to mention, which I believe is not unique to this location, is that there are many individual initiatives and activities happening in any community that are all working towards a better future in some way. And within those activities, there's a massive amount of overlap because each initiative don't talk to the other initiatives. So we've seen that over and over again in many of the communities we visited to go and learn lessons from. So the first activity we've engaged with, and this is through a South African organization, I'm going to mention them because I'm very happy with the work that they've done, Runyaka. And they go into a community without waving a big red, big white flag saying, you know, we have the solution. They go in with a listening ear and they bring all these individual stakeholders together and get them around a table in a very specific methodology and process and get the conversation happening. So for the first time ever, I believe we had all of the stakeholders. There were 90 from the valley, all representing different and overlapping groups, all sitting together under the same roof for the first time. And many of these individuals, you know, have clashed historically and would never sit in the same building before. So that's a slow-going process, just getting to talk to each other. And what we're doing is building trust, because until you have trust across the entire community, until I can trust you and you can trust me, you're not going to get anywhere. So, you know, that's an indication of how early we are. in a multi-generational process. This is not something that's going to change overnight, but we've got the conversation going, which is a key part of it. Now, your question was— that was a bit of a long-winded way to answer your question, which was how engaged or how involved, if I understand correctly your question, are all of these stakeholders within the process? And here you have to be quite careful about bringing in any kind of predetermined model. So at this stage, we're meeting them where they're at, which is tell us what your concerns concerns are, and let's map out all of the concerns because everyone has different concerns. And then rather than addressing each stakeholder's individual concern, let's collectively say, what will it take to address all of these together? So we're in that phase of trying to answer that very complex question from a community perspective. And they will come up with the great ideas, and they will buy into those ideas because it was theirs in the first But until you can have the conversation saying what solution will address this massive list of issues, you know, you're going to continue chasing symptoms and not really change anything.

Yeah, this concept has come up with some of the other contributors as well, and something that I've been quite aware of in the projects that— is that you can't just bring in this model from other places. And that's why, you know, for this journal, we're talking about futurists in Africa or who have studied in Africa or work in Africa? What are their experiences, rather than having perspectives from other parts of the world about what should happen in Africa? And once you're here, it's not just about the model. It is about that you're saying listening, and, but it's the co-creation. It's not, it's not collaboration necessarily of 2 organizations who work together to achieve something, but it's the co-creation of I'm bringing this, my experience, my hopes. you're bringing yours, and together we find out what it is we're going to create together. And I think that model is, it doesn't have the nice KPIs and ROIs. It's not a nice thing that you can put on a Gantt chart, but it creates something that is way more powerful and sustaining into the future so that you don't have to keep managing it to make sure that it stays on track. So I think, you know, a much more powerful investment of time and effort into achieving something that makes fundamental difference in the future.

Completely agree. And if I may build on that a little, so in this past system, the Global North has focused on 2 forms of capital, which is material capital and financial capital. And as that model or system ends, there is a slow awareness, a growing awareness of many of the different capitals, which are natural capital, social capital, spiritual capital. And it's my firm belief that Africa will lead the way in showing the value of particularly social, natural, and spiritual capitals. And so the trick that we try— not the trick, the approach that we're taking is to create healthy value flows from the material and financial capital world into the natural and spiritual capital space. Interestingly, we're using the corporate ESG mechanism. Again, this is a conversation that will require another call to unpack. But when you can see that there's a need to have healthy flows between these different forms of capitals and potentially different geographies or bioregions, then the pattern, or rather then the model starts making a lot more sense. So let me stop there because we can go into quite a rabbit hole with that.

Yeah, you suggested at the beginning that like 20 minutes is not going to be enough to cover all of this. So, Michael, as we kind of head towards the end, what is the progress that has been made here? How do you see it happening over the next while as you move towards this 2035 goal?

It's such an interesting question because depending on what view you take when you look at the progress, on the one hand, it's incredibly slow and painstaking. You know, like you, I have a corporate background and, you know, things move very quickly because there's a a very narrow focus of what it is that you're trying to do with specific KPIs. And so you can go for it and accomplish the measures of success quite easily. Whereas, as you mentioned, there's so many more measures of success here and they're interrelated and it's messy. And so when you take a look at the big picture, the progress looks as if it's really slow. And for many who aren't aware of the process unfolding, they You probably wouldn't even know that something is underway. But on the other hand, the number of synchronicities and coincidences, in air quotes, that happen when somebody introduces you to someone else who's been working on this same aspect for— they've dedicated their entire life to it, and it turns out that their experience fits exactly a puzzle piece that you're trying to solve. So I'm not answering your question directly, but so far— The trust that we've built in the community, although we have a long way to go, is quite significant. And to give context, we only kicked this process off formally in February this year. So I think we're 9 or so months into it. But we've met now with every single stakeholder, every group in the valley, both individually and collectively. There are new sprouts or roots rather being planted every single day. And so it's encouraging and frustrating at the same time. It's one of the reasons I chose this slide. Slightly longer timeframe, 2035, for us to see some real progress. The latest thing that we're working on is what we're calling an institute, because once you have a building, once you have a place that you can identify with, you can bring people there. There's education and experiential learning going on. So we're in the process of raising some funding for that. We hope to kick that off early in 2025. And then you've got something tangible to touch and see and come and visit. and experience. So that, that for us is the next big milestone.

Okay, fantastic. Yeah, Michael, definitely we could carry on talking quite a bit more, but thank you very much for, for this insight that is behind the article that you wrote and contributions of this very first edition. I really, I felt inspired, you know, Do, even if it is meaningful work, every now and then we kind of feel this, this frustration that, you know, we haven't made progress or we feel like we're going backwards or we haven't seen things happen. And then if you've got, like you're saying, you know, a tangible building, but, but a story like this, a picture, a clear vision, a reason for why we're doing this work to aim towards that, that, that lifestyle. I don't want to call it a goal because it's much broader than that. But, but you're working towards that. And that is what inspires and encourages people. So thank you for the work that you're doing. Thank you for this article and for giving us a picture of how other people could use the same kind of visioning to really draw people together around a project that they're working on. As we finish off, how can people get hold of you if they want to follow up or hear more about the work that you're doing?

The easiest is we don't have a website or anything like that, but we're keeping a wiki going. So if you search Valley of Grace You'll come up with a— where we're documenting the entire process, all of the meetings that we're having, all of that is being recorded as an open source project. And then if you'd like to reach out to me directly, I'm michaelhaubt.com and Michael Haubt on all the socials, although I try not to use them very much, but LinkedIn is a good place to start. And thank you, Charlotte, for pulling this work together. I know what an effort it has been, and I know you've had a lot of other stuff going on in your life. So it just felt meaningful to me that somebody is bringing these stories of hope forward. It's what we need, the stories. You know, some people, particularly in the corporate space, may poo-poo, oh, well, you're just telling stories. No, we're not. We're bringing forward a future that all of us feel in our DNA. And by telling those stories, the more effectively we tell those stories and the more we can amplify them like what you're doing, the sooner we'll get there.

Oh, thank you. There are very many negative narratives about Africa, and every time we can put forward another story that is more powerful, then that's what we want to do.

Absolutely.

Great. Michael, thank you very much for your time, for your inspiration, and for the work that you're doing. And I know we'll carry on connecting later on, but thank you so much for this.