Michael Gaffley, professor at the Fischler School of Education and Human Services, teaches courses in social justice and diversity, and his life has reflected what happens when these things are ignored.
“Until 1994, I was a nonexistent person in my country,” Gaffley said. “I couldn’t travel because I didn’t have a passport. I was not allowed a passport because of the apartheid.”
Encouraged by a Fischler professor he met in South Africa in 1989, Gaffley completed his master’s at Fischler in 1996 and received the school’s outstanding student achievement award. He finished his doctorate at Fischler in 1999 and returned to South Africa. He said that his studies at Fischler encouraged his to ask critical questions about the quality of life of children and families in South Africa.
In South Africa, he worked under Archbishop Desmond Tutu as the principal of the Leliebloem House, an orphanage for sexually, physically and emotionally abused children.
Gaffley said his job brought him face-to-face with the realities of South Africa’s socio-economic conditions and the reality that children were still being incarcerated for petty crimes and being removed from their families with no hope of reunion because of their skin color. Gaffley was close enough to the government to challenge it to accelerate the change of these issues.
The research he conducted at NSU was quoted in Hansard, the record of South Africa’s parliamentary proceedings and was used to change the Child and Youth Care Act.
“I was the transformational leader within social development for the Western Cape Province to transform the thinking of magistrates, psychologists, social workers and teachers to not remove and alienate children from their families,” Gaffley said.
Gaffley launched Child and Family Reunification Initiative to reunite children with their families, who had sometimes not seen each other for more than 10 years. The initiative still operates in South Africa.
“The CFRI was our attempt to bring social justice to the traumatized population,” Gaffley said. “We wanted them to be re-linked with their families.”
Gaffley also worked with the government to treat child offenders fairly.
“A child would be hungry and get six beatings and six months in prison for stealing a piece of bread,” Gaffley said. “We had to work with the justices to make them see that we don’t want to inflict pain in a child who’s already been traumatized. We want to restore them and find the reasons this child is behaving anti-socially.
Restorative justice instead of penal justice became the preferred way of dealing with marginalized children and young people.”
Although he was doing well in his work, Gaffley decided to leave South Africa in 2001 after his 11-year-old daughter was the victim of a car hijacking. He and his family moved to the U.S., and he became a professor at Fischler.
He uses his experience of inequality to equip his students with the skills to make education anti-oppressive and give their future students opportunities. Gaffley that the first step to giving others opportunity is to give them the skills to control their own minds and mouths, a message that reflects his life.
“I was oppressed, and because of my oppression, I was victimized,” he said. “And because of my victimization, I saw my life eroding in front of my eyes, and I became very bitter. But today, with the skills that I learned from NSU, my bitterness has become better. My victimization has made me victorious. My oppression has become my new opportunity, and my mess has become my message.”
Gaffley wrote a book called “Flatline to Change: Identity, Reality, Conflict, Engagement.” The word “flatline” is appropriate because he decided to write it after he had a heart attack in February 2008. His heart stopped beating completely, and he had to be resuscitated twice, first with 120 volts and then with 150 volts.
“While I was dead, I relived my childhood,” Gaffley said. “I could see this bright light, and the fervent memory of my life as a child — my hardship, my abuse, my suffering — all came back.”
Gaffley said he decided to record his childhood stories after he was discharged from the hospital. He wrote about how his family fought with each other over color issues.
“My brothers and sisters are all much fairer than I am, and it was painful to be with them and often hear the question, ‘Who’s this?’ because I didn’t look like them,” Gaffley said.
Eventually, he said he had to face the fact that his parents were racist.
“I was the only one in my family who would get a spanking,” he said. “Only later in my life did I discover that the white regime wanted colored people to be under control. So my parents had an obligation to the state to keep me under control.”
His life experiences brought him to the idea he writes about in the book: his identity is not who he is but whose he is.
“If my identity is who I am, then it’s a very sorry state if I’m just this poor kid on the block with no means,” Gaffley said. “But I can enrich my life by seeing my connections, and who claims ownership for me and who cares for me.”
Gaffley continues to have a passion for children. He is on the board of the Association for Child and Youth Care Practice and the Florida Community Alliance. Every summer, he works with the Youth Empowering Program.
Gaffley said that he tries to be encouraging and uplifting and help people reframe their lives.
“We frame our lives, and we trap ourselves in how we frame our lives through our perception,” he said. “If I think I’m bad, I’m going to behave badly. But if I can think myself into being good, I can be good. So I help people to rethink possibilities.”
