Day Five
Good morning!

^{photo credit: Seth Meyers}

A few more facts about South Africa:

*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.

Mzi and Tany

This same time, years previous: a mere trifle, fat cow, the quotidian (11.15.21), my new kitchen: the refrigerator, guayaba bars, success!, Thai chicken curry, gravity, lessons from a shopping trip, the wiggles.

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.

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.