Seven Days In

Okay! So we’ve been here in South Africa for seven days now, but it honestly feels like much longer than that already. We’ve been running around like mad for the last week, getting our fill of South African culture & history, but in the midst of all that I’m also starting to get into the daily rhythm of life and school.

To start off: I love my host family. Joelle, my host “mom” is actually British; she’s been living in South Africa for seven years, working with a soccer ministry and studying at Cornerstone part time—and being our host mom, and being a foster mom full time (with more girls coming to stay over holidays). Lindo (who’s Xhosa) is the youngest of my new sisters; she’s ten. She and I are having a Karate Kid party tomorrow since it’ll be on TV. Ode is Congolese and is hoping to go to Tennessee for college in the fall on a soccer scholarship; Mimi is also Xhosa; she’s the oldest and is working in downtown Cape Town right now. I’m also staying with Mourette, a Bethel junior on the program. We have a twenty-minute walk to and from school together each day.

School itself has been really engaging so far. We’re currently on interim, so it’s just us Americans taking a course on South African history and culture right now (in February the Cornerstone students will return and we’ll be on a regular school schedule). The class has been fascinating. I always took for granted the multiculturalism of South Africa, but they really aren’t kidding. It seems like there’s people from everywhere here, except maybe Latin America. The coloured community (it’s not a derogatory term here, don’t worry) has ancestors from everywhere and everyone—the British, the Dutch, the Germans and Scandinavians, the Khoisan, the Bantu peoples, Malaysia, Madagascar, Indonesia, India… it’s incredible. Genetically, they’re apparently the most diverse people group in the world.

But the history has been really interesting. I’m beginning to come to terms with the fact that I’ve really romanticized Africa all my life (I can’t currently think of anyone who hasn’t, but I know that’s not an excuse). The reality that I’m living in now seems to be much more nuanced than I ever imagined. There’s been so much tragedy and struggle here and it’s easy from afar to paint any one people group as martyrs and blame everything on the Europeans. And there really is a lot of truth to that: we haven’t even reached the apartheid in our historical study and already the British and the Dutch have been guilty of horrific atrocities (early versions of the concentration camp, for instance, first appeared during the Anglo-Boer War). But not everything is as clean-cut as all that; the Bantu peoples, who we normally think of as those poor oppressed indigenous people, were also invaders, settling in South Africa in about 600 AD and pushing out the Khoisan. So I’m trying to break down all the assumptions I’ve had all this time—no one is pure oppressor, pure victim, or pure martyr.

So that’s the gist of what we’ve been studying. We’ve been going out on excursions most afternoons; so far we’ve been to Bo-Kaap (an old neighborhood in Cape Town that was originally home to the Cape Malays), the Slave Lodge, the fort built by the Dutch East India Company, the Afrikaans language monument, the seminar at Stellenbosch (which was originally used to justify apartheid but eventually produced a good number of liberation theologians), a Dutch Reformed Church, a mosque, the French Huguenot settlement, and the Cape of Good Hope (where our lunch was cut a little bit short by a group of baboons looking for food). It’s been an incredible week—but I don’t know if I’ve ever been so excited for the Sabbath.