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.
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.
