south africa reflections 4
OUT OF AFRICA
I'm finally out of Africa, after an intense three-week experience leaving me with very ambiguous and contradictory feelings. Of joys and hopes, of pains and frustrations.
Of not totally comprehensing the depths of meaning of this pilgrimage. Of a sense of how blessed I was to embrace the original Mother of Humankind. Of fear as to what can happen next in sub-Saharan Africa. Of wanting to stay a little longer and yet of feeling relieved that I am back home, in the safety of the familiar.
The only imagery in my mind of that last week I spent in South Africa is that of a whirlwind! And I was swept along with the wild wind's movements along with its varying consequences.
Saturday, July 22, I took the morning Nationwide Airlines flight from Cape Town to Johannesburg (Jo'burg, for short). I was brought to the airport by South African confreres, Fr. Sean Collins, CSsR and Fr. Jim McCauley, CSsR. (They also came to fetch me when I arrived at Cape Town on July 18).
In our conversations, both Fr. Collins and Fr. McCauley have commented that one of the main causes of death in South Africa (after complications arising out of HIV-AIDS) is vehicular accidents. Many other South Africans whom I had met earlier also made the same comments. As one read the local papers and watched TV, there were, indeed, many reports of people dying along the streets because of such accidents.
Because I was so engrossed with the statistics related to HIV-AIDs as well as concrete faces of people with AIDS whom I had met, the data on road accidents did not fully register. Until what happened in the evening of July 22.
That evening, Fr. Jim, his driver, Peter, Peter's wife and a Nazareth Sister went out to dinner. On their way home, they got into a head-on collision with another vehicle. Fr. Jim and Peter were dead on the spot, the two women survived but were badly hurt.
I received the news actually a few days after it happened through an email message from Fr. Sean. Naturally, I was quite stunned with the news. And I thought: if only
there was a way to know that I would met Fr. Jim for the first, but also for the last time, during that short visit to Cape Town!
Fr. Sean's news came after I was watching news on TV where a news report flashed images of a Mexican sociologist who was mugged by a group of teen-agers right outside their hotel in downtown Durban City. He had come to South Africa to attend an international conference of sociologists. After dinner, he and a Belgian woman colleague wanted to see Durban City by night. Instead, they were mugged.
The imagined face of Fr. Jim in the head-on collision and the TV image of the battered head of the Mexican sociologist added to the accumulated heartaches that had built up through the days of my South African sojourn..
Part of the reason why I came to South Africa was to attend the 6th General Assembly of the Ecumenical Association of Third World Theologians (EATWOT). Lucky for us, we were not billeted in a hotel in downtown Durban City or Jo'burg where crime statistics are rising. Instead, we were out in harm's way, as we were in the Kempton Park Conference Center (owned by Lutherans) in a secured area not too far from Jo'burg international airport.
The first day of the conference was a tour of Jo'burg and its main highlight was a visit to Soweto. The delegates (16 from Asia, 14 from Africa, 8 from Latin America and 5 from US minorities), naturally, were pleased that the conference organizers made sure we would visit this historic place. Soweto is actually an acronym, standing for South-West Township. It is miles outside Jo'burg and covers quite a big area.
Soweto's claim to historic fame arose out of the uprising of students on 16 June 1976, at the height of the apartheid. A grateful nation continues to celebrate the heroism of the hundreds of students and other young people, whose action on that day helped to advance the anti-apartheid struggle which ultimately led to South Africans liberation from white rule in 1994.
The black South Africans have done much better than us Pinoys in remembering and celebrating their heroes - both the famous and the unknown, men and women, adults and children, those in the cities and the savannahs. All we could come up with are simple commemorative statues and plaques here and there.
But South Africa have built very impressive museums to honor the memory of those who took part in the long struggle to freedom and democracy. There is the museum in Robben Island and the Jo'burg Fort Entrance.
In Soweto there is the Hector Pieterson Museum and that of the family of Nelson Mandela. The former is named after the 13 year-old boy who was the among the first student who died when the police started shooting the young people as they marched the streets to oppose the apartheid regime. The main issue that triggered their demonstration was the imposition of the Afrikaan language - deemed the language of the oppressors - as medium of instruction in their schools.
The dead body of Hector in the arms of an older boy who carried him, with Hector's sister crying beside them, was an iconic image that was splashed across the frontpages of newspapers around the world. That image meets the visitors as soon as they find themselves just outside the museum.
The museum of Nelson Mandela is in itself a travel through the life history of this remarkable man and what he did for his country, along with those associated with him, especially Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, his previous wife. A few small details that the tour guide mentioned were un-expected: no one among Mandela's children have taken up their father's cause, one son died of complications owing to HIV-AIDS, a daugher has joined the Jehovah's Witnesses and no one came up to be part of the leadership of the African National Congress (ANC).
(A side comment was provided by another delegate: the children of Martin Luther King in order to accomodate President George W. Bush at the funeral of their mother, Corita King, did not include Harry Belafonte to the funeral in order to avoid embarassing moments. And yet Harry Belafonte was the one who put up a fund for them to be able to go to college. Whether true or not, when put side by side with what happened to the children of Nelson Mandela, provide very interesting stories as to what happens to children of some of the most known heroes of the world.)
The street on which Nelson Mandela's house is located is also where Bishop Desmond Tutu still lives. Those who live along this street are certainly very proud to claim that on this street two Nobel Peace Prize winners were residents. Today, Nelson Mandela lives elsewhere, but Winnie has a house at the next corner and most of the time, she lives here.
Which is to say that some parts of Soweto has changed, but other parts remain as they were during the apartheid. AFter 1994, the State have put up public housing in Soweto which radically changed the landscape of this once-blighted township. Some parts of Soweto could be our middle-class enclaves in our cities in the Philippines, with electricity and running water.
However, there are still parts of Soweto that retain its "slum" look with boxhouses where one family live in what are one-room houses with no electricity and running water. Where the people ekk out a living in nearby Jo'burg through all kinds of enslaving labor. Where kids are into drug addiction rather than into formal education that could uplift them from the harsh poverty experienced by their elders. Where women are forced to go into prostitution, making them very vulnerable to HIB-AIDS.
South AFricans would tell us later that, in fact, Soweto's situation is no longer as bad as before. If one wanted to actually see townships and informal settlements that are no different from those of the apartheid regime, one only goes to a place like Alexandria, where things are far worst.
The day's exposure was capped with a visit to the Origins Centre, another remarkable inter-active archaeological museum that celebrates South Africa's paleontological achievements as well as the richness of the San Tribe, the equivalent of our own indigenous peoples in Mindanao like the T'boli. Compared to the Maropeng Museum, it also showcases fossils recovered from the same caves but it focuses a big chunk of its exhibits to the main indigenous peoples of South AFrica, especially the San Tribe.
The documentation of their cave paintings, mytical rituals and sophisticated crafts leave the visitors in awe. However, the same visitors are heartbroken to know that most of these are glories of the past, as the present-day descendants of San ancestors have been fully assimilated into the dominant contemporary South African culture.
As a Mindanawon, I shuddered at the thought that this, too, could be the way forward of many of our indigenous peoples in Mindanao. And yet, there have been so little archaeological and anthropological research studies made to document all that which are still being practiced today despite the fact that there are supposed to be Mindanawon universities committed to this kind of scholarship. Unfortunately, unlike South Africa, provides so little budget for this sort of undertaking.
The EATWOT conference lasted for three days. The deliberations were quite interesting although it was such a big disappointment that the local hosts brought in so little of the richness of the South African culture into our liturgies and celebrations. Still we had good discussions both in terms of the global realities, especially in terms of the Third World perspectives (very much influenced by the World Social Forum) and the implications for our theologizing praxis.
In our Final Statement, we committed to the following covenant for future action and program development: 1) Concerted engagement of gender theologies and new methods for such theologizing be developed and which challenge patriarchal privileges and require the reconstruction of ideologies of all genders; 2) exploration of the authority of the biblical text in our theological endeavors along wih naming additional orgal and written sources to be engaged and explored in the formation of these new theological endeavors; 3) reaffirmation of praxiological methods which constructively engage the tensions between action on the ground and theological formations and constructions; 4) affirm our commitment as theologians to working with gender, racial, ethnic, indigenous, and sexual groups in mutuality, learning from each other to enhance the building of viable liberatory communities; and 5) the importance of developing dialogical styles and approaches to interaction with each other and with membes of other religious groups which are non-hgemonic and which affirm the humanity and worthiness of all parties in the dialogue.
Whew! That is quite a mouthful.
My last two days in Jo'burg provided a fitting end to my very special sojourn in South Africa. Two friends from decades ago, Stefan Cramer and Erika Hauff - who both used to work in the Philippines - have been in Jo'burg for five years. Fortunately, on the last two days there, they were around and were most willing to be the perfect host. They would respond to whatever else I wanted to do while I was in that country and I had three requests as these were still left unfulfilled vis-a-vis my own expectations of this travel: see a public market, get into the art scene and see the wild animals.
The public market was best on a Sunday and I could no longer stay the following Sunday so that was out. But the art scene was awesome: their own home was an exhibition space of the best of wood sculptures as they had helped put up an exhibit and these have been deposited in their house after the exhibit. They took me to the Market Theatre - scene of the radical plays that challenged apartheid rule - and we saw, THE SUITCASE, a most powerful play that could be easily translated and adapted into any Third World city which attract thousands of people from the countryside only to find out that their dreams of prosperity demand such a huge sacrifice.
The National Park we visited was a time to be with the gentle creatures, the deer and the antelope, the onyx and the wild buffalos, the ostriches and the hornbills, the lions and the rhinoceros. This, too, was a pilgrimage of sort. One imagines St. Francis in the midst of it all. And I thought of the Bible text, of that day when all animals could lie together in peace under the bright African sun. For after all, the Bible text was written on African soil.
If this could happen to animals, what more for the descendants of the first man and woman who arose out of Africa.
Out of Africa, indeed.
In the airport, most souvenir items have a tag which declares the product to be OUT OF AFRICA. I had to smile at that clever appropriation of Robert Redford and Meryl Streep's film. I bought a few for family, conferes and friends back home with the little South African money I still had.
Out of the window of that Singapore Airlines plane that took off that afternoon of July 30, I took a lingering look at what I could still see on the ground.
The savannahs glittered in the afternoon African sun, bright as ricefields ripe with golden grains across the undulating hills of some parts of Zamboanga del Sur.
I prayed for a safe trip.
And prayed, too, for South Africa.
I'm finally out of Africa, after an intense three-week experience leaving me with very ambiguous and contradictory feelings. Of joys and hopes, of pains and frustrations.
Of not totally comprehensing the depths of meaning of this pilgrimage. Of a sense of how blessed I was to embrace the original Mother of Humankind. Of fear as to what can happen next in sub-Saharan Africa. Of wanting to stay a little longer and yet of feeling relieved that I am back home, in the safety of the familiar.
The only imagery in my mind of that last week I spent in South Africa is that of a whirlwind! And I was swept along with the wild wind's movements along with its varying consequences.
Saturday, July 22, I took the morning Nationwide Airlines flight from Cape Town to Johannesburg (Jo'burg, for short). I was brought to the airport by South African confreres, Fr. Sean Collins, CSsR and Fr. Jim McCauley, CSsR. (They also came to fetch me when I arrived at Cape Town on July 18).
In our conversations, both Fr. Collins and Fr. McCauley have commented that one of the main causes of death in South Africa (after complications arising out of HIV-AIDS) is vehicular accidents. Many other South Africans whom I had met earlier also made the same comments. As one read the local papers and watched TV, there were, indeed, many reports of people dying along the streets because of such accidents.
Because I was so engrossed with the statistics related to HIV-AIDs as well as concrete faces of people with AIDS whom I had met, the data on road accidents did not fully register. Until what happened in the evening of July 22.
That evening, Fr. Jim, his driver, Peter, Peter's wife and a Nazareth Sister went out to dinner. On their way home, they got into a head-on collision with another vehicle. Fr. Jim and Peter were dead on the spot, the two women survived but were badly hurt.
I received the news actually a few days after it happened through an email message from Fr. Sean. Naturally, I was quite stunned with the news. And I thought: if only
there was a way to know that I would met Fr. Jim for the first, but also for the last time, during that short visit to Cape Town!
Fr. Sean's news came after I was watching news on TV where a news report flashed images of a Mexican sociologist who was mugged by a group of teen-agers right outside their hotel in downtown Durban City. He had come to South Africa to attend an international conference of sociologists. After dinner, he and a Belgian woman colleague wanted to see Durban City by night. Instead, they were mugged.
The imagined face of Fr. Jim in the head-on collision and the TV image of the battered head of the Mexican sociologist added to the accumulated heartaches that had built up through the days of my South African sojourn..
Part of the reason why I came to South Africa was to attend the 6th General Assembly of the Ecumenical Association of Third World Theologians (EATWOT). Lucky for us, we were not billeted in a hotel in downtown Durban City or Jo'burg where crime statistics are rising. Instead, we were out in harm's way, as we were in the Kempton Park Conference Center (owned by Lutherans) in a secured area not too far from Jo'burg international airport.
The first day of the conference was a tour of Jo'burg and its main highlight was a visit to Soweto. The delegates (16 from Asia, 14 from Africa, 8 from Latin America and 5 from US minorities), naturally, were pleased that the conference organizers made sure we would visit this historic place. Soweto is actually an acronym, standing for South-West Township. It is miles outside Jo'burg and covers quite a big area.
Soweto's claim to historic fame arose out of the uprising of students on 16 June 1976, at the height of the apartheid. A grateful nation continues to celebrate the heroism of the hundreds of students and other young people, whose action on that day helped to advance the anti-apartheid struggle which ultimately led to South Africans liberation from white rule in 1994.
The black South Africans have done much better than us Pinoys in remembering and celebrating their heroes - both the famous and the unknown, men and women, adults and children, those in the cities and the savannahs. All we could come up with are simple commemorative statues and plaques here and there.
But South Africa have built very impressive museums to honor the memory of those who took part in the long struggle to freedom and democracy. There is the museum in Robben Island and the Jo'burg Fort Entrance.
In Soweto there is the Hector Pieterson Museum and that of the family of Nelson Mandela. The former is named after the 13 year-old boy who was the among the first student who died when the police started shooting the young people as they marched the streets to oppose the apartheid regime. The main issue that triggered their demonstration was the imposition of the Afrikaan language - deemed the language of the oppressors - as medium of instruction in their schools.
The dead body of Hector in the arms of an older boy who carried him, with Hector's sister crying beside them, was an iconic image that was splashed across the frontpages of newspapers around the world. That image meets the visitors as soon as they find themselves just outside the museum.
The museum of Nelson Mandela is in itself a travel through the life history of this remarkable man and what he did for his country, along with those associated with him, especially Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, his previous wife. A few small details that the tour guide mentioned were un-expected: no one among Mandela's children have taken up their father's cause, one son died of complications owing to HIV-AIDS, a daugher has joined the Jehovah's Witnesses and no one came up to be part of the leadership of the African National Congress (ANC).
(A side comment was provided by another delegate: the children of Martin Luther King in order to accomodate President George W. Bush at the funeral of their mother, Corita King, did not include Harry Belafonte to the funeral in order to avoid embarassing moments. And yet Harry Belafonte was the one who put up a fund for them to be able to go to college. Whether true or not, when put side by side with what happened to the children of Nelson Mandela, provide very interesting stories as to what happens to children of some of the most known heroes of the world.)
The street on which Nelson Mandela's house is located is also where Bishop Desmond Tutu still lives. Those who live along this street are certainly very proud to claim that on this street two Nobel Peace Prize winners were residents. Today, Nelson Mandela lives elsewhere, but Winnie has a house at the next corner and most of the time, she lives here.
Which is to say that some parts of Soweto has changed, but other parts remain as they were during the apartheid. AFter 1994, the State have put up public housing in Soweto which radically changed the landscape of this once-blighted township. Some parts of Soweto could be our middle-class enclaves in our cities in the Philippines, with electricity and running water.
However, there are still parts of Soweto that retain its "slum" look with boxhouses where one family live in what are one-room houses with no electricity and running water. Where the people ekk out a living in nearby Jo'burg through all kinds of enslaving labor. Where kids are into drug addiction rather than into formal education that could uplift them from the harsh poverty experienced by their elders. Where women are forced to go into prostitution, making them very vulnerable to HIB-AIDS.
South AFricans would tell us later that, in fact, Soweto's situation is no longer as bad as before. If one wanted to actually see townships and informal settlements that are no different from those of the apartheid regime, one only goes to a place like Alexandria, where things are far worst.
The day's exposure was capped with a visit to the Origins Centre, another remarkable inter-active archaeological museum that celebrates South Africa's paleontological achievements as well as the richness of the San Tribe, the equivalent of our own indigenous peoples in Mindanao like the T'boli. Compared to the Maropeng Museum, it also showcases fossils recovered from the same caves but it focuses a big chunk of its exhibits to the main indigenous peoples of South AFrica, especially the San Tribe.
The documentation of their cave paintings, mytical rituals and sophisticated crafts leave the visitors in awe. However, the same visitors are heartbroken to know that most of these are glories of the past, as the present-day descendants of San ancestors have been fully assimilated into the dominant contemporary South African culture.
As a Mindanawon, I shuddered at the thought that this, too, could be the way forward of many of our indigenous peoples in Mindanao. And yet, there have been so little archaeological and anthropological research studies made to document all that which are still being practiced today despite the fact that there are supposed to be Mindanawon universities committed to this kind of scholarship. Unfortunately, unlike South Africa, provides so little budget for this sort of undertaking.
The EATWOT conference lasted for three days. The deliberations were quite interesting although it was such a big disappointment that the local hosts brought in so little of the richness of the South African culture into our liturgies and celebrations. Still we had good discussions both in terms of the global realities, especially in terms of the Third World perspectives (very much influenced by the World Social Forum) and the implications for our theologizing praxis.
In our Final Statement, we committed to the following covenant for future action and program development: 1) Concerted engagement of gender theologies and new methods for such theologizing be developed and which challenge patriarchal privileges and require the reconstruction of ideologies of all genders; 2) exploration of the authority of the biblical text in our theological endeavors along wih naming additional orgal and written sources to be engaged and explored in the formation of these new theological endeavors; 3) reaffirmation of praxiological methods which constructively engage the tensions between action on the ground and theological formations and constructions; 4) affirm our commitment as theologians to working with gender, racial, ethnic, indigenous, and sexual groups in mutuality, learning from each other to enhance the building of viable liberatory communities; and 5) the importance of developing dialogical styles and approaches to interaction with each other and with membes of other religious groups which are non-hgemonic and which affirm the humanity and worthiness of all parties in the dialogue.
Whew! That is quite a mouthful.
My last two days in Jo'burg provided a fitting end to my very special sojourn in South Africa. Two friends from decades ago, Stefan Cramer and Erika Hauff - who both used to work in the Philippines - have been in Jo'burg for five years. Fortunately, on the last two days there, they were around and were most willing to be the perfect host. They would respond to whatever else I wanted to do while I was in that country and I had three requests as these were still left unfulfilled vis-a-vis my own expectations of this travel: see a public market, get into the art scene and see the wild animals.
The public market was best on a Sunday and I could no longer stay the following Sunday so that was out. But the art scene was awesome: their own home was an exhibition space of the best of wood sculptures as they had helped put up an exhibit and these have been deposited in their house after the exhibit. They took me to the Market Theatre - scene of the radical plays that challenged apartheid rule - and we saw, THE SUITCASE, a most powerful play that could be easily translated and adapted into any Third World city which attract thousands of people from the countryside only to find out that their dreams of prosperity demand such a huge sacrifice.
The National Park we visited was a time to be with the gentle creatures, the deer and the antelope, the onyx and the wild buffalos, the ostriches and the hornbills, the lions and the rhinoceros. This, too, was a pilgrimage of sort. One imagines St. Francis in the midst of it all. And I thought of the Bible text, of that day when all animals could lie together in peace under the bright African sun. For after all, the Bible text was written on African soil.
If this could happen to animals, what more for the descendants of the first man and woman who arose out of Africa.
Out of Africa, indeed.
In the airport, most souvenir items have a tag which declares the product to be OUT OF AFRICA. I had to smile at that clever appropriation of Robert Redford and Meryl Streep's film. I bought a few for family, conferes and friends back home with the little South African money I still had.
Out of the window of that Singapore Airlines plane that took off that afternoon of July 30, I took a lingering look at what I could still see on the ground.
The savannahs glittered in the afternoon African sun, bright as ricefields ripe with golden grains across the undulating hills of some parts of Zamboanga del Sur.
I prayed for a safe trip.
And prayed, too, for South Africa.
posted by kakay at 6:52 AM
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