confession

Even though apartheid ended a year after I graduated from high school so I was plenty old enough to comprehend it, I don’t think I knew much about it, only that it had to do with Blacks and whites living separately.

But in my world, Blacks and whites seemed mostly separate already (a reality that I assumed was by preference, not design), and since apartheid wasn’t slavery, I wasn’t sure what the problem was exactly. Apartheid was bad, I was told, but how? It didn’t make sense to me.

Constitution Hill: in a solitary cell, looking out

So here’s a question: for those of you who were alive during apartheid, what were you taught about it? How much did you understand?

***

Day Three
We headed to Sophiatown, a community in Jo’burg.

It used to be that Sophiatown (pronounced with a long ‘i’) was a mixed-race town, so vibrant and rich with writers, artists, and musicians that it was referred to as “the Chicago of South Africa.” But in 1954, the forced removals began. City officials arrived in the wee hours one morning, forced people from their beds, divided them according to race (Black, colored, Indian, and Chinese), and relocated them into separate communities from Sophiatown.

“Waiting for the Trucks”

In Meadowlands, a community in Soweto where the Black people were taken, the small houses were so identical that residents often got lost trying to find their way home. The forced removals took years to complete, and in the end the entire town was razed but for the Anglican church and the home of Huddleston, the English Anglican Bishop who deeply loved and supported the community. 

Huddleston: in Christ the King Church
^{photo credit: Betty Shenk}

As we toured Huddleston’s home, I couldn’t help but notice that it was the white man’s legacy we were learning about, and I found myself wondering what Nkosi would say about that. Sure enough, later Nkosi pointed out that everyone knows about Huddleston, “But what about all the Black community leaders? Why aren’t we hearing their stories? It’s not because there weren’t any — there were lots of Black leaders in Sophiatown.”

I’m not the only one asking this question.

Before Sophiatown was destroyed, the Anglican church boasted a glorious mural with Black angels, painted by one of the sisters.

But after the forced removals, the Dutch Reform church took over the building and painted over the walls.

A church white-washing its walls, quite literally. 

In 1997, the Anglicans bought the church back, and since then the mosaic was added, but the original mural is still buried beneath the white washing. For years, former Sophiatown residents would make the long trek back to this church for important events like marriages and funerals. This church was a touchstone for them, the one remainder of their former lives.

While we ate our lunch outside Huddleston’s home, Mbali Zwane, our tour guide, performed some of her poetry. Prior to reciting “I Confess,” she told us that when she was a little girl, she had been late for class one day. As penance, she was told to go to confession, but when she got there, she didn’t know what to confess. 

I thought about that poem a lot in the days that followed. “I Confess” wasn’t just about a little girl bewildered about what to apologize for, I realized. Rather, it was about something much deeper, much more insidious and troubling. Under apartheid, melanin-enriched skin was a crime. People, simply because of their skin color, were offensive, their very presense an afront. Just by existing, they were doing something wrong. They were wrong.

What is the impact of such lunacy on the human psyche?

How does a person confess that.

***

The Hector Pieterson Memorial tells the story of the June 16, 1976 student uprising in which hundreds of students marched to protest of the government ruling that Afrikaans (a form of Dutch and the language of the minority whites) be the medium of education. That day police opened fire on the children, killing 176 (and the death count rose in the days that followed). Hector was one of the first children to be killed. 

The museum courtyard was strewn with bricks, each with a name of one of the slain.

A quote from Hector’s older sister, Antoinette Sithole caught my eye. “When my brother was killed in the June 16 student uprising, he was just a 13 year old school boy. But this does not justify the heroism around him as a martyr… He was an ordinary child without glamour. Why the glamour around his death?” 

Later that evening when someone expressed awe-filled admiration for these children who were so brave, I shared Antoinette’s quote. “When we label people as heroes,” I said, “we distance ourselves from them. Pedestaling people is a form of self-preservation. They are special, they are different, so I don’t have to be like them.” 

“The hero story,” Steve added, “is propaganda, and the purpose of propaganda is to cover up the mess so you can’t see what’s actually real.” 

“I find it interesting that our current practice is to pin all our hopes on one hero,” noted Andrew, a theologian and one of our group leaders. “Just listen to our language: our political leaders are the people ‘in power.’ Our job is to vote. That’s it. That’s the extent of our power. Everything else is up to our hero leaders.”

“We are living in a filthy rotten environment with a vocation of detanglement,” said Steve, whose sentences were so jam-packed with truth that they often sounded poetic. “It’s our job to take a long, hard, loving look at what is real and then ask ourselves what is actually happening. There’s a reason that most people don’t do this: it’s hard.”

But remember the manbaby? The sleeper must* always wake up.

***

*Which isn’t totally true, I pointed out. Some people are really, really good at sleeping.
Naps are good, Steve said, laughing, so take naps, my friends, and then keep waking up.

This same time, years previous: my kids love motorcycles and this is how I feel about it, six fun things, unleashing the curls, the quotidian (11.10.14), mashed sweet potatoes.