In spring 2023, Jennifer Murch joined a United States Civil Rights Just Peace Pilgrimage. In fall 2024, she spent two weeks on a Racial Justice Just Peace Pilgrimage to South Africa and blogged about her experience. This is her fifth and sixth blog from her pilgrimage, edited for length. You can find the original post on her blog. We will publish her blog series weekly for several weeks, so be sure to check back for more.
A few facts about South Africa:
- The unemployment rate in South Africa is around 38%. To put that in context, the highest the unemployment rate in the United States was during the Great Depression at 25%. In Kliptown, the unemployment rate is 98%.
- Black, Colored (biracial Black and White), White and Indian are the four main categories for race. During apartheid (and, to a large extent, today), White people owned and controlled everything, Indians were charged with managing businesses, and Coloreds 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 six or more languages. Some of the languages are similar so there are conversations in which each person speaks the language they are most comfortable with, yet they can all understand each other.
I thought the languages Zulu and Xhosa sounded similar to Spanish. The difference is the three kinds of clicking sounds 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 against the roof of the mouth. They are beautiful to hear and, for me, impossible to do. (Here’s an example: “click song”)
On our way to visit a homeless shelter in Hillbrow, an inner-city residential neighborhood of Johannesburg (Jo’burg), known for its high levels of population density, unemployment, poverty and crime, we stopped for some of the members of our group who wanted to shop for supplies for the shelter. The rest of us waited on the bus and continued the previous afternoon’s discussion:
- “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.”
- “What do we do with all the stuff we’re learning?”
I didn’t feel it was realistic to think that a couple of 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 mining dumps. There are 278 abandoned mines and 200 mining dumps that contain about six billion tons of waste scattered throughout Johannesburg.
At the shelter, we were told to leave everything on the bus, including phones, and to greet the men with fist bumps only, for sanitation reasons. Throughout our trip, we were discouraged from taking photos in the poorer communities. “They have been stripped of so much of their dignity already,” Buyisiwe Pokie Putu (Pokie), an Iziko Lamaqabane, (the hosting organization) leader 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 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 sleeping in the median strips; entire communities had erected cardboard shelters, each one the size of a single pup tent, 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 white person.
Leaders of MES, a Christian social development organization, led us into a large room where they explained their relief, development and professional service programs for preschool-age children through adults at risk. Afterward, about 60 men filed into the room for lunch and people in our group began carrying trays laden with pap (corn porridge) and ground beef sauce from the kitchen to the men lining the room, and I immediately felt deeply, profoundly uncomfortable.
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), and act. That day at the shelter, I saw 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 were probably handed food 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.
We spent the afternoon shuttling around to the MES centers — 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,” said pilgrimage leader Andrew Suderman, Mission Network Director of Global Partnerships. “Notice what you see and then meet back here in an hour.” To enter, 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 cream, and then a couple of us walked through the casino with eyes agog.
We returned to St. Benedict’s for supper.
After supper, Iziko leader Nkosivumile Gola (Nkosi) led 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.
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.
- I chose to address Nkosi. After I’d 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.
- One person opted out of the activity, but when it was Iziko’s director Mzwandile (Mzi) Nkutha’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.” 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, but also necessary work.
That’s the thing about Mzi: he has a way of seeing people, really seeing them, which, in turn, helped me to better see myself.
Day Six
“We are fragment workers,” Mzi said that morning in our last gathering in Jo’burg. Our leaders repeatedly referred to that term, coined by Willie James Jennings, and our job, they said, is to pick up the fragments of our world — the fragments of faith, colonialism, and commodity — and try to put them back together again.
In the center of the circle, Mzi arranged a variety of common South African beverages on the mat: red wine, amasi, stoney (ginger beer), a fermented drink meant to be sipped from a gourd, and fruit juice. Two baskets were heaped with a wide variety of breads: short bread, multigrain bread, steamed bread, flatbread, etc.
In Iziko’s communion liturgy that we read aloud, each bread and each drink represented a different group of people — flat bread for the people of Palestine, saltines for the “salty” elderly ones, rye bread for the laboring class, and so on — and then we all converged on the food and drink, sharing communion.
I don’t like flowery language about ordinary things, but in South Africa, the roundabout way of speaking, the scriptural references, and the layers of meaning they attributed to simple things like names and histories felt rooted, poetic and true.
And then I began to wonder if the artifice I often rail against in the States is a byproduct of colonialism? As Whites in the United States, our physical place in the world is rooted in exploitation. We have so much to protect, and so much to fear, so perhaps that explained why I so often got the feeling that what we said and did smacked of pretention.
I don’t think oppressed people, or any particular group of people, have all the answers (we’re all just people), but I was beginning to notice that the Black South Africans seemed able to access the depths of humanity in ways that didn’t seem accessible to us White people — or just me, maybe.
