Day Six We are fragment workers, Mzi said that morning in our last gathering in Jo’burg. Our leaders repeatedly referred to that term, coined by Willie James Jennings, and our job, they said, is to pick up the fragments of our world — the fragments of faith, of colonialism, and of commodity — and try to put them back together again.
In the center of the circle, Mzi had arranged a variety of common South African beverages on the mat: red wine, amasi, stoney (ginger beer), some sort of a fermented drink that is meant to be sipped from a gourd, and fruit juice. Two baskets were heaped with a wide variety of bread: short bread, multigrain bread, steamed bread, flatbread, etc.
photo credit: Isaac Witmer
In Iziko’s communion liturgy that we read outloud, each bread and each drink stood for a different group of people — the flat bread for the people of Palestine, the saltines for the “salty” elderly ones, the rye bread for the laboring class, and so on — and then we all converged on the food and drink, sharing communion with whoever, and with more than one person, too.
I chose amasi for my communion beverage. I knew that amasi is the South African term for clabber, the thickened sour milk that I use to culture my cheeses, so I wanted to see if it was similar to what I make in my own kitchen. I poured myself a small bit (because I’m not keen on thickened sour milk beverages) and whaddyknow, it tasted exactly like clabber.
(So if you’re a cheesemaker in South Africa, try using a quarter cup amasi per gallon of milk as your cheese culture.)
***
Something I was noticing… I don’t like flowery language about ordinary things, and God-talk makes me feel queasy, but in South Africa, the roundabout way of speaking, the scriptural references, and the layers of meaning they attributed to simple things like names and histories felt rooted — poetic and true. I kept waiting for my impatience to bubble up, but it never did. Which made me wonder: why not?
And then I began to wonder if the artifice I often rail against in the states is a byproduct of colonialism? As white United Statesians, our physical place in the world is rooted in exploitation. We have so much to protect, and so much to fear, so perhaps that explained why I so often got the feeling that what we said and did (particularly in Christian/Mennonite circles) smacked of pretention.
I don’t think oppressed people, or any particular group of people, have all the answers (we’re all just people), but I was beginning to notice that the Black South Africans seemed able to access the depths of humanity in ways that didn’t seem that easily accessible to us white people — or just me, maybe. I don’t know. Maybe I was just windbagging, myself?
What I did know is that when the South Africans were guiding our group, I somehow felt less skeptical. More open, maybe? Perhaps because, without my BS detector constantly going off, I was better able to hear them?
It’s something I’m still mulling over.
***
That afternoon we hopped on a plane to Cape Town.
photo credit: Seth Myers
I immediately noticed that the city felt more European than African. Parts of it were utterly gorgeous, with Spanish-style architecture and riotous flowers and greenery, but then right there, on the other side of the two-lane road, there’d be an encampment of unhoused people. (A week after we’d left, Steve posted on Instagram that hundreds of police were evicting one of the communities of unhoused people. “This city is sick,” Steve said. “It has no moral center.”)
“It’s not ‘loss’ here,” he told us that evening. “It’s a robbing. And a blessing that comes at the expense of another is not a blessing, it’s a curse.”
the view from my single(!) en suite(!!) room at Schoenstatt
I’m pushing the pause button on the South African ventures for a hot sec to tell you about yesterday, but first, I gotta backtrack…
For Father’s Day this year, my older son and daughter-in-law gave my husband two gifts: the first was to make his life easier — a thingy to haul around big sheets of plywood — and the second was to make his life harder: they wanted to pay his entrance fee to the Richmond marathon, if he’d agree to sign up. (They had actually wanted to sign him up without his knowing but I advised against that. “He needs to be in on a decision that big,” I said.)
We can train together, they wheedled (the two of them had already signed up), and then they informed him that registration ended in two days so he had to make up his mind quickly. My husband said he’d think about it, and they were like, “Okay, cool. But you’re gonna say yes, right? So why don’t you just say yes now?”
So he said yes, and my daughter-in-law smacked the laptop down in front of him so he could complete the signup. It looked like my husband would be running a marathon!
My husband found a treadmill on Facebook Marketplace (he hates running on roads) and stuck it in the garage, but it wasn’t until September, he began to get more serious. By the end of October he’d gone on a handful of longer, 12-15 mile runs (on roads, yes).
But then two weeks before the race, he developed some sort of injury, we weren’t sure what it was. He knew he’d whacked his leg at work a couple weeks back, so perhaps all the running made that injury flare? His right shin was tender and swollen. Was it a shin splint? Something worse? It was too late to pull out of the race but he was struggling to walk and he wasn’t even done training.
“You don’t have to do this,” I said. “We can go cheer on the kids. It’ll still be fun.”
“We’ll see,” he said, and he bought a compression sleeve and began wrapping and icing the leg.
Thursday morning this past week, I got fed up and, unbeknownst to my husband, I set up an appointment with a physical therapist. I wanted a professional to assess the leg: if he ran on it, would he be doing lasting damage? The therapist didn’t seem too worried about the leg which was reassuring; he was more concerned about whether or not my husband was inclined to push through pain, should it intensify.
That evening, my husband jogged from the chicken coop to the house. Thursday, he ran for a few minutes on the treadmill just to see how his leg felt (okay, he reported). Friday, we drove to Richmond and checked into our hotel. My younger daughter joined us — she came bearing pastries and homemade banana bread — and camped out on the floor.
Saturday morning, the city was chaos with bumper to bumper traffic. We found a spot in an almost-full parking garage, and then joined the stream of people heading to the starting line. My son and daughter-in-law met up with us. With just several minutes to go, the three of them squeezed through the fence into the mob.
While they waited, they peeled off their extra clothes and handed them to me, and then they were off.
Free clothes, anyone?
Eight-minutes later, we got alerts on our tracker apps that all three of them had crossed the 1-mile line, and I was like, Cool. I guess he’s running.
My older daughter joined us then, and we watched the starts of the half marathon and the 8K (there were 20+K runners total), before heading back to our car. While we were driving to the 12-mile checkpoint, we got another alert that they’d passed the 7-mile marker. Was he for real doing this?
We cheered as my son went by followed shortly by my daughter-in-law, and then when my husband came close, he slowed. “Do you have my food? I forgot to pack it.”
Good grief. Could the guy possibly be any more unprepared?
We swung by my older daughter’s friend’s house to use the bathroom, and then stopped at a coffee shop for breakfast, so by the time we got back on the road, our trackers said they were at the 18-mile mark. We decided to skip the 20-mile checkpoint and head straight to the finish. Parking was still tricky — we found a private (?) garage and decided to risk getting towed — and then attempted to join the masses piled below the finish line. It was too packed, though, so we went a little beyond that and perched on a fence along the exit corridor.
There was plenty to watch while we waited. The earlier runners (those running gods) looked amazingly cool and collected, but as time passed, the finishers looked increasingly battered — wobbling about, limping, clutching their glutes, etc. An ambulance inched through the crowd at one point, and we saw a person packed in ice go by in the back of a golf cart.
My son finished at 4:00 hours, looking semi-stunned — “That is the hardest thing I have ever done” — and then my daughter-in-law breezed in at 4:09. “That was insane.”
My husband came in at 4:12. “You did it!” I screamed, completely losing my ever-loving shit. “YOU RAN A FREAKING MARATHON!!!”
“Here, drink,” my daughter-in-law said, passing a partial bottle of whisky through the fence.
We milled around for an hour while the runners collected their hats and blankets, free pizza, and snacks.
my daughter-in-law’s sister ran the half and her brother ran the full — all five of them first-timers
“Was it fun?” I asked as we walked slowly, very slowly, back to the car.
“It was fun,” my husband said, kinda surprised. Amazingly, his leg had been fine the whole time.
My husband hobbled around gingerly the rest of the day (“Now I know how you’ll be moving when you’re eighty-five,” I said), and every now and then we’d look at each other and shake our heads. “I can’t believe I did that,” he’d say.
“Me neither,” I’d say. “You ran a freaking marathon.”
*The unemployment rate in South Africa is somewhere around 38%. To put that in context, the highest the unemployment rate got in the United States during the Great Depression was 25%. In Kliptown, the unemployment rate is 98%.
*White, Indian, colored (biracial Black and white), and Black are the four main categories for race. During apartheid (and, to a large extent, today), whites owned and controlled everything, Indians were charged with managing businesses, and colored and Blacks were the black and brown bodies doing the hard labor.
*Instead of using the word “tribes” or “tribal people,” it is now more correct and respectful to use the phrase “people groups.”
*Many South Africans speak multiple languages, as in six or more. A number of the languages are similar (kinda like romance languages), so often people will have conversations in which each person speaks the language they are most comfortable with, but yet they can all understand each other.
*I thought the languages (we were most exposed to Zulu and Xhosa) sounded a little similar to Spanish. What was different were the three kinds of clicks made for the ‘c,’ ‘q,’ and ‘x.’ One is made at the front of the mouth, one at the side (like when telling a horse to giddyup), and one is made with the back of the tongue popping against the roof of the mouth. They are beautiful to listen to and (for me) impossible to do. (If you want to see them in action, watch this “click song.”)
Tany’s breakfast plate: fresh fruit, porridge, homemade muffins, and bread with avocado mash, mushroom saute, and eggs
On our way back to Hillbrow to visit a homeless shelter, we made a stop for some of the members of our group who wanted to do some shopping for the shelter. While the rest of us waited in the bus, we had one of our many pop-up conversations, this time primarily about the previous afternoon’s discussion.
“What does ‘how are you going to stop the killing’ mean? How can we stop the killing?”
“It’s disconcerting to realize that we represent the colonizers.”
“We don’t represent the colonizers,” someone corrected. “I think what they’re saying is that we are the colonizers.”
“How do we listen without being violent?”
“What do we do with all the stuff we’re learning?”
As I listened, I realized that I didn’t feel the need to do anything. Quite frankly, I’d probably go back home and pick up exactly where I’d left off … Or not? I’d figure that out later. I didn’t feel it was realistic to think that a couple weeks in another part of the world would change me all that much, and I said as much, and then I went one step further.
“It seems to me that Mennonites often feel that our presence is extra important. Like, just by virtue of being us, we are helping the world around us. I know we have power and responsibility — I’m not trying to sidestep that — but the assumption that our actions are helpful comes across as a bit arrogant. This idea that we must fix the problems — as though we are the ones with the answers — is beginning to feel a lot like the colonial mindset we’re learning about.”
These flat hills are gold mine dumps, and they are scattered throughout Jo’burg.
At the shelter, we were told to keep everything on the bus, including phones, and to greet the men with fistbumps only, for sanitation reasons. We were discouraged from taking photos in the poorer communities. “They have been stripped of so much of their dignity already,” Pokie explained. “To photograph them only adds to the indignities,” which is why I have no photos of Kliptown or Hillbrow.
But I can tell you this much: the poverty I witnessed in the various neighborhoods we drove through was unlike any poverty I’ve seen before. Correction: it was “like” other poverty (rock bottom is rock bottom), but the South African poverty felt different. Thicker, maybe, and more pervasive. People lay sprawled in the median strips, sleeping. Entire communities had erected cardboard shelters, each one the size of a single pup tents, smashed up beside each other on sidewalks lining busy roads. Garbage clogged the creeks and ditches. In those communities, I never, not once, saw a single white person.
photo credit: Seth Meyers
The leaders of MES (mould, empower, serve) met us at the bus and let us into a large room where they explained their programming, and then, when it was time for lunch, about 60 men filed into the room and people from our group began ferrying trays laden with pap and ground beef sauce from the kitchen to the men lining the room, and I immediately felt deeply, profoundly uncomfortable.
See, when we’d first arrived, Iziko offered us a three-part framework to help guide our interactions with our contextual Bible studies and the South African culture: see, judge (discern), act, and that day at the shelter what I saw was white people handing out free food to Black men.
It was an innocent act — an act of love and generosity — but all I could see was the white savior image. White people, in the name of helping (and “helping” is, perhaps, a too-generous word) had caused South Africa so much harm. Even though those men at the shelter probably got food handed to them every day by MES staff, what right did I have to give them anything? I would’ve gladly washed dishes, scrubbed bathrooms, or helped bathe people, but I didn’t want to hand a Black person anything.
Each day in South Africa was feeling more and more like a stripping — a stripping of my identity, my assumptions, my religious beliefs. Both metaphorically and literally, I wanted, maybe needed, my hands to be empty. White people had done so much harm in the name of “helping,” and I didn’t know enough — of the culture, power dynamics, and actual needs — to give anything, or even really participate in any meaningful way. My job was to keep my hands empty and be present — full stop.
So instead of helping, I sat down on a bench and struck up a conversation with Pokie. After all the men were served, we each got a plate of food, and it was delicious.
photo credit: Seth Meyers
We spent the afternoon shuttling around to the various MES organizations — a day care, a tutoring program for high schoolers, a training program for young adults — and then on the way home, we pulled up in front of Montecasino.
“Go on in and get yourself an ice cream,” Andrew said. “Notice what you see, and then meet back here in an hour.”
To enter the mall, we had to go through a metal detector and have our bags searched, and inside, it was like an indoor city.
The ceiling was made to look like the sky — in some parts it was broad daylight and in other places it was a starlit night. I even discovered a little “river!”
We got ice creams, and then a couple of us walked through the casino with eyes agog. When Arloa, one of our group’s facilitators, sat down at a slot machine to make-believe play and then actual players plopped down in the same row, I made her stay put so I could watch how one goes about gambling.
My conclusion: I do not understand the draw.
That night, the women at St. Benedict’s prepared veggies, salad, curry, and a homemade na’an for supper, which I enjoyed immensely.
photo credit: Tany Warkentin
After supper, Nkosi let us in a classic web-building exercise in which a ball of yarn gets tossed from person to person creating a web of connection, but in his version the person doing the tossing had to say something nice about the person they were tossing to (and then a couple more people were allowed to piggyback comments). This was no casual activity — it lasted a good hour and a half.
photo credit: Seth Meyers
Here are a couple of my takeaways:
The South Africans often opened their sharing by first expressing how that person angered or frustrated them. I noticed this openness to disagreement, and the valuing of the other person within the disagreement, at other points, too, and it gave me pause.
I chose to address Nkosi. After I’d finished (and the follow-up people had spoken), Nkosi said, “This is the first time I have ever been moved to tears by white people — I mean not-angry tears,” which made us all shout with laughter. Was he just saying this, I wondered, or was his perception of white people actually being challenged because of his interactions with us?
One person opted out of the activity, but when it was Mzi’s turn he (with permission) named this person’s gifts. Among other things, Mzi said that he valued this person’s need to not participate. “You take time away when you need to and I think that’s beautiful.” (Which is definitely not my first thought when someone refuses to participate.) And then Mzi reminded us that re-treat is one of the four Rs of Iziko, along with re-search, re-source, and re-member, and that’s when I realized that my unwillingness (or inability) to serve food at the homeless shelter was absolutely okay. Stepping back — holding back, not doing, re-treating — is not only okay, it’s also necessary work.
That’s the thing about Mzi: he had a way of seeing people, really seeing them, which, in turn, helped me to better see myself.
