Day Eight
In the Bo-kaap, a Muslim community in the heart of Cape Town, we learned that this neighborhood had been the only area in the city center that was never named a “white-only” area during apartheid.

^{photo credit: Andrew Suderman}

At one point, the city government wanted to build a bridge to racially divide the neighborhood (so much for bridges being used as tools of connection), but because officials hesitated to destroy religious buildings and the Bo-kaap sported ten mosques, they never did it. 

^{photo credit: Seth Myers}

There were Palestinian flags everywhere we looked, as well as lots of pro-Gaza graffiti. We’d seen this same messaging in Jo’burg, too. South Africans, we learned, are deeply attuned to the Palestinian situation. In fact, just a week or so before we’d arrived in the country, Steve had helped organize a march in Cape Town to protest the genocide and nearly 90,000 people showed up. 

“If the olive trees knew the hands that planted them, their oil would become tears.”
^{photo credit: Isaac Witmer}

It makes sense that South Africans would be so proactive with what’s happening in Palestine: once a person’s lived under an apartheid government, it’s all too easy to identify one when you see it. (And for anyone needing a refresher on apartheid, here’s a simple rule: when there is one set of laws for one group of people and a second set of separate and unequal laws for another group of people, that’s apartheid. We had it in the States with slavery and Jim Crow; they had it in South Africa; and it’s ongoing in Israel-Palestine.)

These days, the people in the Bo-kaap are called “Cape Malay,” a term which is also used to describe their particular food. And lucky us, we got to eat some of that food!

^{photo credit: Andrew Suderman}

Our tour guides greeted us with warm koesisters, homemade doughnuts spiced with cardamom, cinnamon, and anise and then rolled in coconut. 

And then after the tour, we went to the home of a Palestinian family for a homemade lunch. Fatima was frying up the bread when we arrived.

^{photo credit: Keaton Shenk}

Best I could tell, it was like a cross between na’an and roti. When it was hot off the griddle, she had me scrunch it up like a piece of paper, never mind the buttery shards shooting all over her kitchen, before rolling it up and then cutting each roll in half. 

And then we all sat down at tables stretching the length of their house for a feast of curry, fried chickpea flour and veggie balls, samosas, chutney, rooibos tea, and more koesisters.

And then it was time for Table Mountain! Some of us had decided to hike up while the rest of the group was going to take the cable car. I was excited — and nervous. Driving around Cape Town the last couple days, I kept eyeing that mountain, wondering if I was nuts for wanting to climb it. I don’t do heights, and from the city floor, it looked like a sheer cliff shooting up.

^{photo credit: Andrew Suderman}

But I watched a bunch of videos, read some stuff, talked to people, and finally decided, Oh, get over yourself, Jennifer. You can TOTALLY do this. Because it’s all about the mindset, right?

But then we arrived at the entrance and — noooooo! — it was closed! There’d been some sort of fire situation that impacted the cable car, and they’d shut the whole place down. (Over the next couple days, a few of us kept checking back to see if it was open, but nope. And then we learned that it would probably be shut down for several weeks. We could’ve hiked up and back — there was no requirement to take the cable car back down — but our schedule didn’t have wiggle room for a hike that long, so I guess my life will not include a hike up Table Mountain, sob.)

Instead of Table Mountain, the group decided to go to Boulder Beach to see the penguins. Enroute, we took Chapman’s Peak Road. On one side, cliffs rose up so steep that huge nets were strung along them to keep the rocks from crashing down on the cars, and on the other side, the ocean was all a-dazzle. We stopped at a lookout point along the way.

I tried to chill the heck out — it was beautiful — but I was about fed up with all the seeing and looking and photographing. I wanted to do something, and now [foot stomp].

At the beach, a boardwalk led us right through the penguins’ nesting quarters.

Penguins were everywhere (it was mating season), and they were kinda cute, but also just like chickens — stinky and spastic. 

the mood I was in, they should’ve put a fence around ME

We got ice cream — I ordered caramel toffee nut, which was nice — and when we reached the end of the walk, I tried to entertain myself by window shopping the street vendor stalls, but my heart wasn’t in it. Here I was in Cape Town freaking South Africa, and I hadn’t even touched ocean water yet. 

The last eight days of sitting, museum touring, eating, talking, and driving everywhere was beginning to take its toll on me. Except for when we were interacting with paid guides in museums or the occasional street vendor, our group had been held apart, sequestered in our retreat centers and convents, observing almost everything from behind the windows of our bus. It’d been fine — it’s what I expected — but now that I wasn’t climbing Table Mountain, I realized just how desperate I was to do something. 

not hiking Table Mountain
^{photo credit: Betty Shenk}

And then I looked down towards the water and realized there were no fences between it and me! Seconds later, I was shucking my shoes, scootching my running shorts up even higher, and wading into the cold water. (I wanted to strip down to my undies and jump in, but I had no towel and didn’t want to soak the rental van seats.) 

Seth joined me then, and we scrambled over the penguin poop-covered boulders. I watched as a seagull repeatedly picked up some sort of crustacean in its claws, flew up in the air, and then dropped its dinner on the rocks below to crack its shell. 

Finally, finally, finally, my feet were in South African waters.

It was glorious.

That evening, two other couples and I split from the group and met up with a South African couple who had attended our church twenty-some odd years ago. (They’d sailed to the states with their five children on their own boat, can you even imagine?)

We spent the evening outdoors under heat lamps, candles flickering, catching up over our pizza and wine.

It was lovely to see them, and so refreshing to be out and about, semi on my own. I needed that.

This same time, years previous: the quotidian (11.21.16), how to use up Thanksgiving leftovers in 10 easy steps, a big day at church, ushering in the fun, smashing for pretty, chocolate pots de crème.

Day Seven
Steve split us into small groups to read that morning’s scripture — the Parable of the Talents — but before we dug in, he said, “I want you to ask yourselves how is this parable a parable of resistance? Read it through that lens.”

But first, for those of you who aren’t familiar with Matthew 25:14-30 (pause and go read it, if you want to really play along), here’s a summary:

• A master provides each of his servants a different number of talents (a single talent is 20 years worth of wages) based on their abilities, and then leaves.
• The first servant invests the five talents he was given and doubles the amount, and the second servant, who was given two talents, does the same. But the third servant, who was given just one talent, buries it in the ground.
• When the master comes back, he praises the first two servants, but with the third servant, the master is angry. You should’ve invested it, he says, and then he gives the man’s single talent to the first servant and casts the unprofitable servant into the darkness. 

I’d always been taught that this parable was about using our God-given gifts in whatever measure we’ve been granted to do good in the world (an explanation I’d always founds trite because wasn’t using one’s gifts to do good a no-brainer?) But listening to the parable that morning I was struck with an entirely different meaning. In fact, it was so wildly different that when Pokie asked us what we thought it meant, I hesitated to share. 

“We’re brainstorming,” Pokie said. “There are no wrong ideas.”

“I don’t think the master is God,” I said. ” I think the master is a master. And the servant who buries his talent is refusing to participate in the master’s system. Perhaps by burying the talent, he’s opting for contentment instead of accumulation? Maybe contentment is an act of resistance?”

Turns out, my gut reaction wasn’t far from the mark. When Steve called the whole group back together, almost everyone had reached similar conclusions: that third servant was refusing to participate in a system of death by keeping the money out of circulation. 

“But can’t a parable have more than one meaning?” one guy asked.

“Of course,” Steve said. 

“So it can still be about using your gifts wisely?”

“Sure,” Steve said, “but that’s not what this parable is about. If you think this parable is a story about using your God-given gifts, then you’re taking it out of context and turning it into colonialist theology.” 

“Listen,” Steve explained, “If I read myself into the narrative, then as a white, cis-gendered man from the United States, I am the colonialist. I am the master. The Bible isn’t written for us” — he waved his arms to indicate our group and himself, and grinned — “at least not directly. Capitalism says that righteousness is the multiplication of talents. Apartheid was a Christian movement using exploitative labor to sanctify capitalism. Apartheid theology is slaveholder theology. We have to ask ourselves who are we reading the Bible with? When we talk about good stewardship, what is the system to which we are being stewards?”

Suddenly, a parable that had always seemed meaningless to me felt nothing short of revolutionary. It had power. 

This could get exciting, I thought.

***

At Langa, one of Cape Town’s informal settlements, we toured a museum that focused on the pass laws. During apartheid, Black people were forced to carry pass books with them at all times. Not having one could result in imprisonment, or worse. 

The museum was housed in a former courthouse: pass books had been issued in the front room, and in the second room Black people had been tried for pass book infractions.

In 1954, men and women gathered in Langa to protest the pass laws, and out of that gathering, the women’s movement was formed. Less than a year later, 20,000 women staged a march to protest the pass laws and meet with the Prime Minister. He wasn’t there when they arrived, though, so they left petitions with more than 100,000 signatures for him and then stood silently for thirty minutes, hands raised in an open-palmed salute.

***

From there we went to the District Six Museum which commemorated yet another community which had been razed during apartheid, the people forcibly removed to different neighborhoods according to the race they’d been assigned. 

photo of a museum photo

Before we went into the museum, we were met on the street by Reverend Rene August, a student and close friend of Desmund Tutu’s. While we waited for our tour, she told us the story of the District Six street signs.

When organizers had first planned to build a museum, they put out a request for memorabilia from District Six. Not long after, one of the organizers received an anonymous call. “I’m the one who gave the order for the bulldozers to begin destruction,” said man’s voice. “I have something to show you — I think you’ll want it for the museum — but I will not give you my name. I will pick you up to take you to see the items, but you can not see my face.” 

Even though this organizer had been jailed and tortured during apartheid, he allowed himself to be blindfolded and folded into a car. When they arrived at the location, the nameless man opened a garage door revealing dozens of street signs from District Six. He explained that after the first day of razing, he’d picked up one of the street signs and took it home with him, even though it was illegal. From then on, collecting the signs became an obsession. Now he was turning them over to the museum.

^{photo credit: Andrew Suderman}

On the museum floor was a large map of District Six as it had been before it was destroyed. When the museum first opened, people flooded into the building, immediately dropped to their knees, and began writing themselves into the map. After a few years, the museum put a second layer on top of the floor map to keep it protected. 

An elderly woman gave us a tour of the museum. She’d been a child when the forced removals had happened. One of the hardest things for her was losing her beloved doll. But then, just a few years back, some people began unearthing artifacts (illegally, I think) and uncovered her doll. Nearly 60 years after the demolitions, her doll was returned to her. “I feel complete now,” she said.

After the museum, Rene led us up the street to the original site of District Six.

It’s just a barren field now, “a scar to remind us of what happened here.” 

This same time, years previous: the quotidian (11.20.23), a fun kitchen hack, the quotidian (11.20.17), apple raisin bran muffins, candid crazy, lemony lentil goodness.

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

Welcome to Cape Town.

This same time, years previous: what I don’t do, fight poem, the quotidian (11.19.18), spiced applesauce cake with caramel glaze, in my kitchen: noon, sock curls.