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Stephanie Joy Tisdale:
June 8th, 2004 2:30 a.m.
I'm thinking that everything happens for a reason because my intention
was to spend the summer of this year in Paris. However, as fate,
destiny, and all other mysterious powers would have it, I am actually
preparing to travel to South Africa. This trip has surfaced at a time
when my hunger for more has become consuming. The same old same old is
getting to be so old and I keep feeling like there's more to this whole
life thing.
I've been blessed to travel to Senegal, the Gambia, Ghana, Amsterdam,
Egypt, and Israel and have found, in every place, a new taste, a
different sound, an untapped feeling. Not perfection or even bliss, but
a sense of learning something that I didn't know before. And, as if this
weren't enough, I will be spending my 21st Birthday on a plane,
traveling to the other end of the earth. The anxious, pessimistic part
of me envisions a dramatic finale: the girl who thought she could
journey across the globe and actually live to see it! But I believe that
all things are divine and in order, so the best I can do is use my human
intuition, letting it guide me in the direction I think I should be
going.
I know that there is a reason why I will be in South Africa this summer.
I'm thinking that it is my job to recognize what that reason is. In my
partially-successful search to find information about the people--the
indigenous African population--I have discovered that there are many who
actually believe that South Africa is a European nation. Its original
people are pushed to the periphery of not only the political and
economic mechanisms of the country, but are even culturally
marginalized. Thus, South Africa is very much so the mirror image of the
United States: a place so fantastically created, it is unreal.
Nonetheless, I am not going for the politics. Or to understand the
economic climate. I'm going because I am hungry. I want to know what
manner of humanity lies in this place, at the very tip of a land mass
that is home to the people who have been on earth the longest. If there
is anything to learn or understand, it must be there. Even in the midst
of the indignities which force young orphans to prostitute their
adolescent bodies, or the desperation which allows adults to attempt to
cure illnesses by defiling the innocence of their own children; and in
spite of excessive unemployment, townships and displacement, or the
engineered plaque that continues to take lives--these people continue to
survive. How or why these things occur, I do not know. But there is
something to be said about this place and the will of its people to
press forward.
I am humbled and grateful to have the opportunity to travel to such a
powerful place, significant in and of itself (with or without the "afrikaaners"
or the Apartheid). I am interested in using this time to learn from my
people: to understand what it is that they live for, what gives them
strength. While I am not sure what twist of circumstances have made me
who I am, nor have I pinpointed--as of yet--why it is that my life has
taken this particular path, I know that besides living and dying, there
is the space in between for learning and understanding. In my attempt to
learn and understand, I hope to build bridges and make connections in
ways that will be helpful to the people of South Africa.
Lord Willin'!
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Melvin Barolle
Wow, so I’m finally leaving the country and going to South Africa of all
places. It’s still hard for me to fathom that I’ll be boarding that
plane in a couple of days. While I’ve primarily seen clips and read
about the struggles of Africans against the evils of apartheid, I am not
particularly interested in black rage. It seems as if the fascination of
black rage has become a lucrative market. Nowadays, bookstores are
overflowing with literature detailing the intricate lives of folk who
took a principled stand against injustice and inequality. There are
stories of martyrs, life timers in jail, victims of state sanctioned
terror and those that never made it to their 21st birthday. Yet, there
is nothing exoticized about this rage for me. Growing up in my hood,
I’ve witnessed the dire effects. The problem with black rage is that it
is uncontrollable. Its organic nature coupled with survivalism makes
targets of not only to those responsible for their condition but those
who share it. Saddest of all, black rage determines. Dreams are
deferred, excuses consume, and that most precious of life, hope, is
compromised. Nah, I’ve seen black rage and my interest in South Africa
at least for now is not that. Moreover, thus far my college experience
has taught me that the current exigencies we as a people face are not
definers of who we are or more importantly have been as a people. While
the problems we face today cannot and must not be ignored, it is
important that we do not bind ourselves to the conceptual fetters of
modernity because as the old maxim goes: “This too shall pass.” Hence,
I’m going to South Africa not for militants, conspirators or the like.
Not to say I’m eschewing this group, my level of respect for those that
stand in the face of adversity is enormous, especially after reading up
on the psyche of those European descended degenerates parading around
the country preparing for a literal Armageddon-esque situation. On the
contrary, what I am seeking in South Africa is to be around that so
essential to life… people. As Archbishop Tutu is fond of saying, My
humanity is bound up in yours, for we can only be human together.
Expanding this to Africana exigencies, I look forward to seeing how
American Africans are viewed in the imagination of South Africans. What
are the shared cultural characteristics? Where do we diverge? When are
those points of departure surface level and can they be scraped? These
are queries that occupy my mind at this time. Ultimately, this trip will
give me a chance to forge relationships with those in a country who I
believe along with Brazil, Venezuela and Nigeria are the vanguard of the
Africana movement to break the shackles of the 500-year room we as a
people have been encapsulated in.
--------------------------------------------------------------
Nate Mathews
I haven't been able to write in many months. Oh, I can churn out
research papers, flyers, emails, and memos like a paper mill. But my
mind seems to resist the self-reflection of personal writing; my
journals come off sounding like political tracts or degenerate into
ideological sparring.
I wanted to get back into this discipline of personal reflection in
order to prepare myself for my first visit to South Africa, so I turned
to an old exercise: journal writing.
Unlike Stephanie, this will be my first time on the continent, only my
second time out of the country. I have been reading articles,
newspapers, and books about South Africa and its history, paying special
attention to place names, so that I can quickly form a geographical idea
of the area when we begin our travel. These place names--Soweto, Robben
Island, Cape Town, Sharpeville-- are loosely linked with a series of
events in my mind, and I am looking forward to making them more
concrete. Honestly, I do not have any idea what to expect, but I can
feel my excitement rising as the date draws near.
Two days ago, I stood outside the federal arsenal in Harpers Ferry, West
Virginia. This is the town where John Brown and his band of 12 men, held
off a contingent of U.S. Marines for several hours, attempting to incite
a rebellion that would end slavery in America. Ironically, the marines
were led by Robert E. Lee, who would later go on to lead the Confederate
Army. Inside the nearby museum, there is a quote from Malcolm X, “If you
want to help me and my cause, you must be willing to do as old John
Brown did.” I know he is speaking to me.
John Brown was a race traitor of the first order. Stating that, if
necessary, he would “forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of
justice and mingle my blood further with the blood of…millions in this
slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked cruel and unjust
enactments,” he struck a blow that would ignite the fires of Civil War
and eventually end slavery in the United States of America. In a society
where the lines of racial division had been drawn clearly, he identified
totally with the struggle for black freedom, and willingly paid the
price for it.
The image of John Brown, with his piercing stare and long beard, runs
through my head as I prepare to travel to South Africa. I admire his
clarity of vision, the way he saw clearly what he had to do based on the
material conditions around him.
Were there any John Brown’s among the whites of South Africa? I want to
find out if there were Afrikaaners who defied the government in the same
way, Afrikaaners who stood up to the Nationalist government and paid the
price. Were there whites in South Africa who resisted the hegemony of
racist doctrine?
If nothing else, the situation in South Africa may shed light our own
American racial schizophrenia, where white boys and girls are raised in
segregated communities and schools yet dress like blacks, talk like
blacks and make up over ¾ of the consumer market for hip-hop music. I
wonder if there are any similar phenomena in South African society. What
has apartheid done to South African whites, spiritually, morally, and
culturally? Are they, like American whites, still trapped by the
uncertainties of a racist logic their ancestors invented, still clinging
to vestiges of the old apartheid regime? Have any of them embraced this
change? In the place somewhere between dreams and nightmares I see
Afrikaaner kids nodding their heads to 50 Cent and affectionately
calling each other “kaffirs.” We live in a strange world.
I use America as my yardstick, because of some the uncanny similarities
between the two governments in history. Peep this:
• Both rigidly enforced racial boundaries and categories: in the US it
was the Jim Crow laws. In South Africa, it was apartheid, which
literally means, “separateness.”
• Both governments were formed by Europeans fleeing oppression, who
themselves became the oppressors. Puritans seeking religious freedom and
political freedom were among the first European settlers of America, and
the Boers, or the Afrikaners, as they later came to be called, fought to
be free from British rule.
• Both have a strong underlying strain of religious zeal, which turned
into racist fundamentalism.
But beyond the shared history of the two countries, beyond the
complicated minefield of race, politics, and identity I am navigating
mentally, I am simply trying to be silent. I want to clear my mind of
all the half-formed ideas, the biases, the romanticized images, and the
racist baggage I have at one time or another associated with Africa. I
want to frame my mind to listen and absorb. I want to see as clearly as
possible when I step off that plane.
W.E.B. Dubois writes that it was John Brown’s ability to honestly listen
to African Americans that formed the foundation for his later actions.
His radical witness did not emerge from ideological battles within
himself, but from his experiences with the oppressed. This trip is a
chance to listen, to learn, to open my eyes, and gain understanding. It
is a chance to listen to the voices of resistance to apartheid, as well
as the voices still suffering from its after-effects. It is an
opportunity as well to study those who actively or passively maintained
the apartheid government, in order to understand their motivations and
feelings.
I do not know what my response will be until then. I do not feel called,
much less ready, to storm any federal arsenals, or to openly defy the
U.S. government. But through my listening in South Africa I hope to
frame an appropriate response of conscious resistance to the America I
find myself living in today. |
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