In June of 1989, I first boarded an airplane. For London.
And on to Johannesburg. I
traveled to South Africa with a group of college students to spend four weeks
in this beautiful but deeply scarred country.
I didn’t know much about South Africa when I left the US. My interest in visiting the country stemmed
from my nascent knowledge of the Civil Rights movement and my deep respect for
Dr. King. I studied Dr. King during my
senior year of high school, writing a senior thesis paper on the relationship
of his life and experience with his writing.
As profound as his most famous speeches and letters were, it was a small
collection of sermons compiled in the book “Strength to Love” which had the
most lasting impact on me. I read and
re-read his sermon “And who is my neighbor?”; a searching introduction to the
meaning of the parable of the Good Samaritan and the implications of the great
commandment to love my neighbor in the context of injustice, social inequality,
discrimination and poverty. The
Samaritan had compassion on a suffering person, his neighbor, acting
courageously in the face of personal risk, reaching out across lines of
ethnicity and class, and demonstrating abundant generosity and concern for a
person he did not know. These simple
concepts permeated my thought and spiritual life, challenging me to think about
how to love my neighbor as a global citizen in a world full of suffering and
injustice. These questions challenge me
still.
In 1989, South Africa was a very different place. We went to South Africa auspiciously to learn
about reconciliation in a country still suffering under institutionalized
racism and oppression. Segregation, forced
relocation, detention of political dissidents, and the extreme juxtaposition of
poverty and wealth characterized South Africa at the time. We made pilgrimages to places known and
unknown among those familiar with the struggle for equality and freedom in
South Africa. We drove along the cliffs
near Cape Town overlooking the ocean where Robben Island still housed its most
famous political prisoner. We visited
non-descript shanty towns where displaced persons struggled to find
shelter. We stopped to see a communal
housing area where men from rural villages lived in hostels while they worked
in the mines, their families miles away in the homelands. We spent an afternoon in the tranquil garden
outside the church where Desmond Tutu ministered. We stayed for a week with materially poor
families in a homeland north of Johannesburg where our hosts gathered to
worship in the evenings and the children led powerful songs of hope and
redemption.
On the 16th of June, we attended a remembrance
service. A remembrance service for the
children who were killed in the SOWETO uprising of 1976. We drove to the place where the shooting had
happened, where the school children had rallied and where many had been killed. At 18 years of age, 1976 seemed to me like
the distant past. Reflecting now, as a
43 year old adult, I realize that the scars of a people are not easily healed
in the span of 13 years. At that time,
SOWETO was to the black South African community as raw and recent and painful
as 9/11 is to the current American psyche.
I realize also that the children who died on June 16, 1976 were my
peers. They would be the community
leaders of today, the teachers, the entrepreneurs and professionals of the
South Africa that has come to be.
So much has changed in South Africa in 25 years. Certainly I am not in a position to make any
real meaningful comment on the metamorphosis of the country. I can only really reference what I remember
then in comparison with what I experience now, admittedly confounded by the
changes in my own perspective and the influence of my independent
experiences. Still, to me, the story is
a story of hope and reconciliation. From
my limited perspective, the free South Africa of today is healing, is
progressing, is overcoming. It is a
vibrant and beautiful country, a place that I will always be fond of and a
people I will always respect.