unlearning

Day Four
I woke up crying. I’d been dreaming that the contacts in my eyes were too big — they were like saucers — and I couldn’t make them fit. 

A couple nights before that when I was going to sleep, I suddenly started sobbing. 

My body, I was beginning to realize, was so emotionally full that the feelings were leaking out around the edges.

***

At the church in Hillbrow, the largest Brethren in Christ church in South Africa, our bus dropped us off a couple hundred yards or so from the entrance. The street was teeming with people. Move quickly, we were instructed. Stay together. I shifted my backpack so it hung on my front, a safety technique I employed regularly when we lived in Central America.

At the church’s gates, we were warmly greeted by the leaders and then guided to our chairs at the very front and center of the sanctuary. Along with one other person in our group, I had been assigned photography duties, so I soon slipped over to the wall so I could more easily take photos without being as much of a distraction. (Not that my photos were any good, and not that I was any less noticeable, but I tried.)

The morning’s service was a celebration of the elders. At the start, the elders — anyone 50 and above (to realize that I was just one year away from being classified as an elder was a bit of a jolt) — were told to gather at the back, and then they all made a grand entrance together amidst the congregation’s cheers and ululating. 

Throughout the morning, the worship leader shared quotes from the congregation’s elders about their favorite scripture and/or some insights about what’s truly important. Different congregational music groups performed, a traveling singer did a number, and then two women in our group each gave a sermon. When the three(four?)-hour service was over, we were ushered to a room at the back of the church sanctuary for a brief visit with the church leaders and refreshments.

Afterward, I sent a clip of the service to the family group chat. “I bet my Sunday morning was louder than your Sunday morning,” I said.

***

That afternoon, the cooks prepared a braai, which is the South African version of a cookout: a feast of grilled meats, sides, and salads.

Our leaders told us that friends of Iziko who were curious about Anabaptism would be joining us that afternoon for conversation. The idea of a theological discussion on a Sunday afternoon didn’t exactly make my skirt fly up — my friends and I don’t typically sit around and discuss church theology in our free time, and a dry topic combined with language and cultural barries sounded about as fun as spending a Sunday afternoon sitting rigid on a wooden bench and reading the book of Leviticus.

starting at the top: chakalaka, potato salad with green beans, lettuce salad,
grilled chicken, cucumber salad, pap, tomato and feta salad

But whatever.

We were finishing up our meal when the friends began to trickle in. At first I thought they were college students — they looked so young — but it didn’t take me long to figure out that these young adults were definitely not college students. Turns out, they were theologians, philosophers, and writers at Unisa, the University of South Africa (and, fun fact, the longest standing dedicated distance learning university in the world).

I’m not sure how to describe the next three-plus hours. How can I possibly convey the depth of academic insight, passion, and intensity that was in that room? These people knew their stuff. They had a comprehensive understanding of theology, politics, history, and philosophy, as well as a profound, gut-level awareness of how everything connected to each other. The whole time I felt like I was in the same room with a bunch of Steve Bikos, Mandelas, and Maya Angelous. I could hardly take a deep breath for fear I’d miss something. 

I don’t remember how the meeting started, exactly (and what follows is an inadequate and clumsy summary*), but I think one of them asked us how we were finding South Africa and if we had any questions for them. A woman in our group asked how they felt about the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). “What did the TRC get right? What should it have done differently?” 

They all laughed — ooo, jumping right in there with a biggie, aren’t you! — and then said that the TRC didn’t end up hearing many of the stories because the TRC’s limiting guidelines (around who qualified as a victim) didn’t allow the depth of the problem to be exposed. 

“Let’s talk about your country,” said Obakeng, a philosophy scholar who was sitting to my left. “If you think about truth and reconciliation around the Trail of Tears, what does justice look like for you?”

His question was met with silence, and after a number of reframed questions, long pauses, and restarts, Obakeng turned to me and whispered, “Do people in the US know about the Trail of Tears?”

“Oh, yes,” I said, “but it’s not something that’s really talked about. Kids learn about it in school, like in the fifth grade or something, but then that’s it.” 

Obakeng nodded and then turned back to address the group. “There is so much silence in this room, so let’s study it. What makes it so difficult to respond to this question?” How interesting that these South Africans understood, and valued, our own country’s history better than we did, I thought. 

A good thing that the TRC did, one of the South Africans said, was that it allowed people to talk freely, even callously, about the horrors of apartheid. In the United States, on the other hand, there’s been nothing, no collective truth-telling structure, that openly names what happened and holds people and institutions accountable for the horrors of slavery and Jim Crow (in fact, to the contrary: we erect statues in honor of those oppressive leaders), so in the United States, we don’t even really know how to have this sort of conversation. Perhaps this was the reason for our group’s collective silence?

“You took all this trouble to come here,” one of the South Africans said, “so I’m curious. What did you expect to find?”

“Well, before I came here, I thought you had it all figured out,” said a woman from our group, laughing. “I was hoping you were gonna tell us how to solve racism so we could finally fix our problems!”

“We are here because we want to learn from you,” one of the guys in our group said.

“But why do you need to come here to learn about racism? Why spend all that money? Why don’t you already know what you need to do?”

“Sometimes a fish needs to swim in new water to better understand the water it normally swims in,” Andrew said. 

“There’s the issue of sentimental ethics,” said one of the South Africans. (Sentimental ethics, I have since learned, is the belief that morality is rooted in emotion.) “Feeling bad, or sympathizing with South Africa, is not enough. You need to go deeper. Because when you feel ‘sad’ about our situation, you are still wielding your epistemic power.” (People: this is the way they talked. At one point, I tried to write verbatim what Obakeng was saying just to capture a taste, but I only got two words down before I gave up and instead settled for capturing phrases like afro pessimism, hermeneutical cycle, the perspectival nature of being human. My brain was spinning.) 

“So what should we do?” asked one of the guys in our group. “How can we help? Tell us.”

“If you can’t articulate how to do better in your context,” said one of the women, “how can you ask us what we want to do? That’s a colonial mindset, asking Black people to be more vulnerable on behalf of the white people.”

I spoke up for the first time. “I’ve been thinking a lot about listening in recent months. I think listening can atually sometimes be a form of violence. When we tell the people who have a problem that we’re going to listen to them — when we expect them to make themselves vulnerable while we disclose nothing of ourselves — that’s a power move. Mennonites, I’ve been noticing recently, are quite good at weaponized listening. Me included — I do it a lot.” 

“Having a dialogue is more helpful than sending in an NGO to help,” said one of the South Africans. “We have some deep colonial wounds, so often the gesture [from white people] is the problem. We need to stay in the problem.” 

United Statesians: “But how does that help anything? Where are you going? How can I be in solidarity with you — how can I help you — if you won’t tell me where you want to go?”

“Staying in the problem doesn’t mean doing nothing,” someone (maybe Obakeng) said. “I think what we’re trying to describe to you is Gelassenheit, a yieldedness to the problems. We’re not looking for solutions, but rather the willingness to swim in the waters. The gesture to quickly act, help, or fix is the problem.

One of the friends of Iziko, a white South African professor and Dutch Reform Minister whose grandfather had been a counselor in the apartheid government, offered a question that he said would, perhaps, get to the heart of the confusion. But before he asked it, he admitted that his white skin and ancestory aligned him more closely to the white people in the room than the Black South Africans, so the question might seem strange coming from him. “I think what is being asked of you is perhaps very simple,” he said. “It’s a question for the present — for the now — and it’s this: How will you stop the killing?” 

Silence, again. 

And then another question from the South Africans: “Who are you when you say you’re the church? Mennonites have been in South Africa since 1978, so what does it mean to be companions to solidarity on the road to liberation?”

More silence. (There was a lot of tongue-tied silence.)

“I’m trying to think of a question that you can answer,” said Obakeng, always so gentle, so serious. “You are from the US and Canada, right? Let’s talk about your ancestors. Who were they? How were they involved in the formation of your countries?” 

Round and round the conversation went, the South Africans sharing their perspectives, debating with each other, and asking us pointed questions without ever, not once, succumbing to providing answers for us or alleviating the frustration and confusion that some of the people in our group expressed. 

Finally, Mzi named the four themes that had emerged — silence, white people’s opacity, yieldedness, and genealogy — and concluded the meeting. People milled around eating cake and drinking more wine, and Obakeng and I, plus a couple others, huddled in a corner for a follow-up conversation about religion and ancestry. And then the friends left and it was just us, reeling in the aftermath.

Later, I asked if Iziko has facilitated this sort of dialogue between these Black friends and white South Africans. The answer was no. Generally speaking, white South Africans are not ready for — or available, or open to — these sorts of dialogues. Which made me wonder: was our conversation feasible primarily because we are from different countries? Are whites and Blacks in the states having this sort of open dialogue?

I mentioned to Tany, a Canadian woman in my group, that I was blown away by the South Africans’ insight and passion. I don’t know of anything in my life that I am that passionate about, I said. I care about lots of things very deeply, of course, but their passion — the clarity with which they address these issues — is so much more raw and profound. Much more intense. 

“Maybe it’s because we’ve never had to fight for something as basic as our human rights?” Tany said. 

She’s right, I thought. Having one’s basic human rights collectively and systematically stripped away provides a clarity that I, as a member of the white race, had not ever experienced and might never fully comprehend. If I wanted to break with my inherited colonial mindset, then I’d have to proactively learn a new way of seeing the world.

So much of this trip, I was beginning to realize, was an unlearning. It was a stripping of my identity as a white person, an identity which I didn’t really understand or even claim. I felt bland in my whiteness. Powerful but meaningless. In contrast, the Black South Africans knew exactly who they were. They knew what their names meant, who their ancestors were, what they believed and thought and felt, and why. My whiteness, I realized, and all the power that went with it, had been handed to me — it’s who I am — yet I held it casually, almost flippantly. 

That evening was perhaps the richest time of the entire trip. That those people took time out of their full lives to come talk with us, some random white people from the United States who didn’t even know how to begin to have a conversation, struck me as nothing less than incredible.

What a gift. 

***

*Thanks to Keaton and Tany for sharing your notes/memories from Sunday afternoon.

This same time, years previous: jammy crumble cookies, perimenopause: Laura, age 48, introducing how we homeschool: a series, my new kitchen: the island, the quotidian (11.12.18), George Washington Carver sweet potato soup with peanut butter and ginger, I will never be good at sales, my apple lineup.