The First SA Burnout Conference: 18–19 March 2002 - A remembrance
It began, as good things often do, with an idea nobody else had acted on yet. Nobody in South Africa had ever gathered a room specifically to talk about burnout — that quiet erosion of people who care too much for too long — and so the decision was made that the country would simply have to have its first. The research programme “Human Resource Management for Development” carried it, the old Potchefstroom University lent its walls, and for two days in the late-summer highveld light, a small, serious, slightly irreverent community of scholars came together.
The line-up read like a gathering of characters as much as colleagues. Deo Strümpfer, the grand old man of South African positive psychology, who had spent a career insisting we study what keeps people well and not only what breaks them. Theo Venter, reading the country's transformation like weather. Frans Cilliers, understanding burnout through a systems psychodynamic lens — not as an individual failing but as what happens when an organisation unconsciously offloads its anxiety onto one person, who ends up carrying the whole system's strain. Joppie van Graan, who viewed burnout as a matter of energy — the slow combustion of a person's finite vitality — and was unafraid to name the smoke and blood beneath the surface of any organisation. And the organiser himself, who had pulled the whole thing into being — standing at the screen, pointing at that famously tiny speck of local research and daring everyone to laugh at how much work still lay ahead.
Somewhere in the audience sat a psychiatrist with a pen and a wicked eye. While the rest took notes, he took likenesses — catching not the faces so much as the essence of each speaker: the windmill-tilter after twenty years of research, the roller-coaster rider who couldn’t see the end from the beginning, the man lost in a Pirandellian maze of signposts, the elder who could now claim to know “something of technology and Shakespeare too.” Cartoons, yes, but the kind only real fondness produces.
Then Deon Meiring — a good friend — did the thing that turned a two-day event into a lifelong keepsake. He gathered the drawings, framed them against a deep wine-red mount, and gave them over. A private joke made permanent. A wall one could keep.
What no one could know in 2002 was how much weight that frame would come to carry. Joppie van Graan, Deo Strümpfer, and Deon Meiring have all left us in the years since. And so the caricatures have quietly changed jobs: they were once a joke among the living, and now they are a way of keeping good company with people who were loved. The windmill still turns. The little speck of research grew into a whole field.
And the through-line holds all the way to now — because in September 2026, Wilmar Schaufeli, still one of the world’s foremost minds on burnout and a mentor of many years, will walk into Optentia. The seed planted in that Potchefstroom hall in 2002 has become a place worth visiting for the very people who defined the science.
The friends in the frame would have loved that.
The caricatures and their captions
As the psychiatrist saw the speakers — read clockwise from the top of the frame:
The roller-coaster — “I’ll just provide a bit of ‘xtinct energy…”, beneath the line “You can’t see the end from the beginning…” — transformation as all momentum and no visible destination.
The windmill — “20 years of research: where are we?”, answered in Dutch: “Dat is een heel goede voorbeeld van burnout” — the professor tilting at windmills after two decades of chase.
Technology and Shakespeare — “Well Noah, now I can tell you I know something of technology and Shakespeare too…” — the two cultures, science and the humanities, bridged in one breath.
Smoke and blood — “Ô…ô…! I smell smoke and blood!!!”, with a bloodhound and a piranha tank — the darker, systems-psychodynamic reading of what churns beneath organisational life.
The overview — “…and that little spit, ladies and gents, is not fly-sh*t, but an overview of SA research on burnout…” — the gloriously self-deprecating measure of how small the local research base still was in 2002.
Pirandellian — “This is frightfully Pirandellian?” — a man wandering a maze of signposts marked “other side” and “elsewhere,” unsure which reality he is in.
In memory of Prof. Deo Strümpfer, Prof. Joppie van Graan, and Prof. Deon Meiring.
