It was surprising to hear this coming from a black South African pastor, in a country that has a lot of poverty and a lot of need. However, from the perspective of the rest of Africa, he was stating the obvious. South Africa is the wealthiest country on the continent. Immigrants stream into South Africa from the neighboring states and all across the continent. There are gleaming cities in South Africa and pockets of wealth that rival the seventeen wealthier countries of the world.
Carolyn and I have been struck by the incredible contradictions we see and have to face on a daily basis in this country. For the past two days we've been sitting in the lap of luxury, staying at the lovely Zandberg B&B and winery near Stellenbosch, about an hour outside of Cape Town. Stellenbosch is in the heart of South African wine country in the Western Cape province, which includes the city of Cape Town. Western Cape is the most "Western" (as in European) of the provinces, and the one province in South Africa that is not dominated by the ANC (African National Congress -- the party of Nelson Mandela and the current government). It is also historically the area most dominated by Afrikaner culture. It is the most conservative in its politics, and the wealthiest area of the country. It is also a exquisitely beautiful part of the country.
Following the Amahoro Gathering in the Johannesburg area, we flew to Cape Town where we spent two days with fellow Amahoro pilgrims, getting to know the city as we were led by two local Amahoro guides, Rene August and Marius Brand. They introduced us to this remarkable city, with all of its contradictions and complexity. We started with a visit to The Warehouse, a ministry of St. John's Parish, which includes six Anglican congregations who have partnered to reach out to the very poor in the Cape Town area. Their ministry includes providing food and clothing to local churches of all denominations for distribution to the poor, as well as spiritual guidance, facilitation and technical assistance to congregations wishing to develop ministries of justice and compassion at the local level. It is an impressive ministry led by a group of very committed, very intentional Christians with a lot of wisdom, compassion, and grace. We followed that up with a trip to top of Table Mountain, the stunning backdrop to this amazing city, 3500 feet straight up from the coast just below, to watch the sun set on a picture perfect partly cloudy day. Later that evening we were introduced to our host families where we would spend the next two nights in one of Cape Town's large townships -- Guguletu.
Guguletu is a huge area that most white South Africans have never seen. They just don't go there. It is an area of very modest housing, some of it run down and some of it well kept, but an area that under apartheid would only have been for blacks. And although anyone can now legally live there, it is hard to find anyone there who is not black. Our host was a lovely woman named Noxie. (The X is a click sound in the Xhosa language, and Noxie is actually a nickname for her surname, Noxolo. For us she pronounced it Nok-see since the click is very hard for non-Xhosa-speakers to pronounce.) She drove us to her beautifully kept but modest home, where we spent two nights in a detached bedroom behind her house in a neighborhood of houses that were substantially less desireable than hers. Some of them were shacks. They're all, including hers, on very small plots, side by side. If something is going on in the house next door, you hear it all. We fell in love with Noxie, and she was able after a day to share with us some of the real pain in her own life -- the death of her only child, an eighteen year old son, who was murdered in 2003. She told us how, as he lay on the hospital table dying, she was presented with the possibility of donating his organs, which she did. She gains comfort knowing that other people were enabled to live because of that decision. She hears from at least one of them, who stays in touch to express his deep gratitude. She also talked to us about what it was like to be in the crowd of hundreds of thousands of people who gathered to hear Nelson Mandela speak in downtown Cape Town after his release from prison, and to vote for the first time in her life after the fall of apartheid in 1994.
Guguletu is not the worst slum in Cape Town. There are massive shantytowns where virtually all of the housing is shacks made of corrugated tin or other semi-permanent materials. Some of them began as "informal settlements" when the people who moved there had been the victims of forced removals under the Group Areas Act of the apartheid government. Some have now been made "formal" settlements, the only change being that there are now utilities and addresses.
We began our second day in Cape Town with a visit to Mannenberg. This name also strikes terror into the hearts of many people here. Under apartheid it was a "colored" area -- that is, the mixed race, Afrikaans-speaking people who are descendents of Malaysian workers in South Africa. We met with Jonathan, a man who grew up in Mannenberg and now runs a ministry called Fusion that works with gangs and gang leaders. Eighty percent of all young people in Mannenberg belong to a gang. Jonathan walks the streets, befriends them and their leaders -- and he prays. When people ask him what Fusion does, he says, "Walk and pray. We walk and pray." I left our meeting with Jonathan in tears, moved by his courage, and his love for the young people he gets to know. I was humbled and deeply grateful for people like him who do this kind of work on behalf of the rest of us.
From that experience we took a driving tour around the Cape of Good Hope. It's hard to describe the sheer beauty of this area. The interplay of mountains and sky makes for an often breathtaking display of natural beauty. At Cape Point, we stood on a precipice at the very southern tip of the Cape of Good Hope looking across the intersection of the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic with no land between us and Antarctica. Dinner that evening was in a rather posh restaurant in a large modern shopping mall on the Cape Town waterfront -- "the other Cape Town" from where we had been staying. It was hard not to think of our hosts in Guguletu or the people in the Khayelitsha shantytown or Mannenberg.
Just two days later is a national holiday here in South Africa -- June 16 -- Youth Day. It is named for the 500 youth of Soweto township in Johannesburg who were killed in a day of rioting known as The Soweto Uprising on this day in 1976. A few days ago we were in Soweto and visited the memorial to the first and the youngest of the youth who died that day, Hastings Ndlovu. The Soweto Uprising took place in response to the Afrikaans Medium Decree of 1974 which forced all black schools to use Afrikaans and English in a 50-50 mix as languages of instruction. Afrikaans is the first language of about 13% of South Africans -- both Afrikaaners (people of Dutch descent) and the mixed race (or "colored" under apartheid) people. Hardly anyone in the black townships, including the teachers, spoke Afrikaans, and hence the uprising. This event is looked upon in this country as a watershed moment in the effort to put a stop to apartheid.
It's hard not to think about those young gang members in Mannenberg who don't really have a lot of other options, or Noxie's son who was murdered, or the children who grow up in the shantytowns across South Africa today -- even as we bask in the beauty and gentility of Stellenbosch and South Africa's wine country. As in all of life, there are competing realities that must be held in some kind of creative tension that keeps us aware of the multiple truths around us -- and keeps us working for justice and freedom for all people.
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