Robben Island
This week I saw Robben Island. And that was pretty much it. It was a prison, much like other prisons, bare. As I remarked to my roommate how I wasn’t as moved as I thought I would be, a thought hit me- It wasn’t the place that had inspired me, but the way the people who were held their as political prisoners transformed the place. Don’t get me wrong-walking the place where Robert Subukwe was held in solitary confinement, seeing the lime quarry where education for cognitive liberation and deliberations regarding the future South Africa took place, and seeing the small cell where Mandela was held for many years left a footprint in the sands of mine that will motivate to use the freedom at my disposal to create change.
BUT The place, devoid of the revolutionary heroes that turned it from a prison to a university, was just South Africa’s Alcatraz. When De Klerk freed the political prisoners and let them loose, Robben Island lost all of its value, and all of its mystique. It’s the people, not the place. The memory, not the monument. Visiting Robben Island was great as our guide was once held in prison there, but it was like visiting an empty tomb. Those that were sent to Robben Island to die, have been resurrected and are the architects behind the new democratic South Africa. Inspiration is found on the land, and not on the island.
The People
It’s the people, not the place may very well surmise my feelings toward South Africa. 7 weeks in, the novelty has worn off, the parties are not as fun, Long Street has lost its allure, and the only thing that is keeping me interested is the fascinating people that I have met. For example, one guy at work, a year younger than me told me about life on the streets as a street kid. About how many of them come from severely dysfunctional, abusive, and/or poor homes and make the decision at 9 or 10 years old that life on the streets would be better for them. About how many are addicted to drugs, because they first start smoking to keep warm and to help them go to bed at night and how that nightly habit turns into a day one and turns into using harder drugs. About how rich old tourists and South Africans coerce them with money to have sex with them, and give them drugs so that they are able to serve as sex slaves for hours. About how the lice so consumes your body that you smoke so you don’t itch anymore. About how once you lived on the streets for a year, it’s hard to get used to a bed and the routine in school. About God-given agency and grace because through all that he survived and is motivated to help others to do the same . About how this gringo thought he knew about hardship, but the people have opened his eyes to suffering and evil. About how through telling their story as a story of triumph the “victim” becomes the “Victor” and a testament to the fact that there is always hope. About how hope is illogical if you only see your eyes. About how you must see with your heart because faith is the substance of things not seen. About how hope requires an audacity of optimism, an audacity of belief , an audacity of hope.
Wednesday Dinner
On Wednesday, I organized a dinner with a former Champlain to the ANC and current Dean to St. George’s Cathedral, Pastor Mike Weeder. This was the highlight of the week as it gave me a lot to think about and gave me a flesh and blood example of ministry to oppressed groups and Christianity as the impetus for revolutionary social change. A man of immense wisdom, he told our group that “liberation doesn’t end” that slavery causes a “genocide of identity” that as a colored man who identifies as black that , he was “not anti-white, but pro-black”, that the ANC and Black Consciousness gave him a sense of self to revolt against a society that would have him think that his only future lie in manual labor or in the kitchen, and that righteous indignation is ok, healthy and necessary. During the course of the conversation he told us stories of life in exile, of the difficulties in functioning as a “normal” human being post 1994, and sprinkled his wise insights with quotes from Tupac, Malcolm X, and Bob Marley. (my type of preacher! Lol)
Racial Profiling Does Exist in South Africa
Finally, my roommate and I saw racial profiling in a blatant way at a spot called Joburg this week, which plays only Black American hip hop music. After we were not let in, while 20+ white people were we decided to peep game and watch how the club operated. White guys, especially those with white girls got in easily and free, while black guys were let in only sparingly and had to pay a cover to get in. Sadly, I was neither shock, nor surprised, and honestly wasn’t even angry. As they say, “This is South Africa..” which brings me to another point…
This is Africa?
South Africa is a beautiful country, but far from the Africa I imagined, probably because I’m in Capetown. I think it’s funny that on the motherland, I have been around more white people than I have been at any point, including at Stanford, in the United States. That’s not to say that it’s necessarily a bad thing, but to say that it is an interesting thing. I came hear hoping to feel home and recapture some of the sense of self that the trans-Atlantic slave trade robbed me off. I will come back with an understanding of a complicated history of a place and with the evidence that the world, is indeed flat. Maybe the Africa I long for ,the home I thought I was coming to reclaim, doesn’t exist in the 21st century . Or maybe I should have know that a Stanford program in Africa, would be a program without many black African professors, without Black African staff (besides domestic servants), without black African lecturers for our sites of memory class…or as I call it “non-Black everything.” Who knows? But that has indeed been my biggest disappointment by far and I am thankful for my job and for one of my professors who give me the Black and coloured South African experience.
Am I abroad? Yes, I’m definitely far from home. But this ain’t Africa, or at least the (South) Africa that I envisioned.
