• News and events

  • SGI-SA in the media
  • Steve Biko - My Revolution
  • Celebrating National Women’s Day in Cape Town
  • SGI-SA featured in SGI Quarterly
  • Celebrating satyagraha
  • Gandhi, King, Ikeda

• A video introduction to SGI's movement for peace

  
  Our Shared Humanity: a 20min video introduction to SGI which includes a South African member experience.

  SGI Brochure

  
  Download a printable introduction to SGI (Adobe pdf, 2MB, external link).

• Contact us

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  www www.sgi-sa.org.za
  

Welcome to SGI South Africa

Soka Gakkai International South Africa is the lay Buddhist organisation for those practising the Buddhism of Nichiren Daishonin in South Africa and promoting humanism and dialogue for true peace. We currently number around 400 members, across the country, drawn from all South Africa’s diverse peoples.

SGI, the “international value-creating society”, largest in Japan, has around 12 million members in 190 countries and territories practising in accord with local cultures with the aim of creating a better world by supporting each other in creating happier lives. (more…)

NEWS

SGI South Africa has been attracting some media attention. On South African Human Rights Day, March 21, our general director, Loren Kabosha, represesented us in a Human Rights Special live broadcast. On Sunday April 6, Loren Kabosha will appear again, on Encounters on SABC2 at 12h30, a programme focusing on fraud and corruption. Then on Sunday 27 April, Louis Zwane appears on the same programme to discuss reconciliation. As if that were not enough, our Johannesburg centre will soon be visited by a crewing filming for the spiritual and religious interest programme Free Spirit.

Turning to SGI publications, Johannesburg member and storyteller Nomsa Mdlalose recounts her experiences in the latest SGI Quarterly, an issue devoted to poetry. Friend of President Ikeda and of SGI South Africa, poet Oswald Mtshali, discusses “The Light of the Poetic Spirit”. And our recent commemoration of the life of Steve Biko is described.

On Saturday 8 September, at 6.30pm (doors open 6pm), SGI South Africa in Johannesburg will be hosting My Revolution, a tribute to Steve Biko in dance, music, song, storytelling and poetry.

My Revolution will include a performance by poet Khosi Xaba. The venue is the SGI South Africa community centre in Johannesburg, corner of Dudley and Wells streets in Parkwood (the former bowling club, entrance for secure parking on Dudley.)

You can read more about Steve Biko on the Steve Biko Foundation website.

Cape Town member Julie Catto writes:– 9th August in South Africa is Women’s Day, a public holiday, so we decided to do an outreach activity in a nearby community. Our plan was to create a peace garden at a member’s home; we chose Sweetness, a member who lives near Cape Town in a tiny home with 3 children, a new baby, and a cousin of hers who is expecting a baby in two months time. This is a very poor area, and there are not many plants growing here.

About 15 women and young women members, and a couple of friends, drove out to Sweetness’ home. Read more

A profile and history of SGI South Africa was published in the January edition of SQI Quarterly, the English-language journal of SGI.

Written for Buddhists and non-Buddhists alike, SGI Quarterly describes the peace-building activities of SGI and other organisations and persons with similar philosophies. The article on South Africa describes the context in which SGI-SA started in the 1980s, and how it has developed up till the present day alongside tumultuous changes in the life of the ‘rainbow’ nation.

The same issue carries the experience of a South African member of building dialogue between opposing political parties during the stormy period of negotiations leading to South Africa’s 1994 political settlement.

The 11th of September 1906 witnessed the birth of a peace movement in South Africa, an event that had resonance throughout the world. On this date, Mahatma Gandhi launched Satyagraha, a movement for non-violent activism in protest at racist laws proposed by the South African administration. In celebration of this centenary, SGI-South Africa, in partnership with the Gandhi Development Trust, hosted events in 2006 in Durban, Johannesburg and Cape Town.

Building the Foundations of Peace - The ‘Gandhi, King, Ikeda: A Legacy of Building Peace’ Exhibition was brought to South Africa by SGI-SA in 2004.

The ‘Gandhi, King, Ikeda: A Legacy of Building Peace’ Exhibition highlights the commitment to human rights and world peace by men and women of different cultures, personalities, and ethnic backgrounds - each advocating the use of non-violence, dignity for all and a universal respect for life. The purpose of this exhibition is to show ordinary South Africans how these individuals, each of whom had humble origins, was able to overcome great obstacles to effect peaceful change.
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