I see you

“Sawubona”, she says to the guest client, and she adds: “That means ‘I see you’, and I see all of you and I welcome all of you.” The client was visibly touched by this greeting. She is a South African participant with Zulu roots and she welcomed a white South African guest client in the training. As one of the trainers of this training, System Dynamics in Organizations, this interaction gave me goosebumps. So many layers can be felt in this warm greeting, between citizens from different lineages in this country, that still suffers daily from the effects of older and more recent colonial history.

It was the third and last module of the training System Dynamics in Organizations that the Bert Hellinger Institute facilitated in Capetown, on invitation of Tanja Meyburgh from African Constellations. Each module was facilitated by a different trainer from the Netherlands: Chandra de Vries, Marion Latour and Barbara Hoogenboom. This training we offer also in our own locations in the Netherlands, and on invitation we go international with this training, such as this time in South Africa.

It was a profound experience to work in the country of South Africa that has in its cells the ancient wisdom of living in tribes, of living in resonance with nature and the greater spirits. A country where Bert Hellinger lived for 16 years in Kwazulu Natal, the region of the Zulu people. All of which is and was a source of systemic work as we know it. And a country where the Dutch history is connected to in a very painful and shameful way. The Dutch were the first colonizers and slave traders entering Capetown in 1652.

As trainers we each are in different ways connected to the ancestral history and we each could bring and learn different things from other perspectives. Working abroad always asks an out of the box type of creativity from you as a systemic trainer, simply because the cultural and historical context is different. It is in that way a full exchange: we offer specific teachings that the participants gladly take and are able to use in their daily practises. And in return we take our own learnings from working abroad and bring it gladly back to our Dutch training programs and workshops.

Barbara Hoogenboom

December 2025