When Change is not Enough

One particular experience during my South African sojourn seem to have reverberated down the years, the impact of which I cannot really verbalize. The experience and its aftermath unravelled my world view and left it floundering and adrift, while I struggle to get a handle on a new construct that remains beyond simple articulation.

It was the day of my first visit to that Johannesburg Township (see Back to Africa). Afterwards I sat in the minibus taking us to the next stop on the day’s itinerary, feeling numb and quite sick. I had gone into another space and only vaguely aware of what was going on around me. Did I really see a man sauntering across the motorway just a little ahead of us? A voice asked what on earth was he doing. Our driver said 'they built a motorway through his ancestral land and he needs to get from one side to the other, what do you want him to do'? That made perfect sense to me.

Within half an hour we arrived for lunch at the home of a well-known anti-apartheid activist. Like the home of most white South Africans, it was surrounded by very high walls and the only way in was through imposing electronic gates, as high as the walls. I was not prepared for the level of opulence that awaited me. It was a buffet lunch like no other I had ever seen, and certainly never participated in.

Table after table was laden and overflowing with food. The spread was indescribable –  game/meat of every variety, including kudu - a South African antelope - fish, caviar, the best wines. Everything that anyone could wish for was catered. If I wanted good old British fish and chips or Jamaican jerk chicken or even Eastern Caribbean style saltfish, fried dumplings and callaloo, it would have been conjured up in an instant.

I needed time and space to reconcile the collision of two mindblowingly different but juxtaposed worlds: the one I had just left behind in the Township, and this one. There was also my own world, the one I inhabited back in England, vastly diffferent to the two I had encountered that day. I was suffocating and needed to breathe. 

I stepped out into the garden which rolled away into the distance with orchard, separate rose, vegetable and herb gardens, swimming pool, tennis court, all protected by the high wall surround. I had little doubt that a guard would patrol the extensive grounds at night. I stood on the veranda for a while, then walked back into the dining area and stood on the periphery looking in.

My eyes stared, mesmerized by the white gloves of the black male servers, at least four of them; a couple bustled between kitchen and dining area; a second pair stood unobtrusively on the circumference of the room anticipating every need of the guests of the Mistress of the house. Surely, even in immediately post apartheid South Africa, this was not really happening; I was stuck in some horrible time warp, a kind of British Raj era. Why was everyone acting so normal? This was a stage and I was watching a play, surely.

The hostess appeared before me, smiling warmly, asking what I wanted to eat, at the same time beckoning one of the servers to bring me a plate.  I was not hungry; the food refused to go down my throat. I heard myself asking my hostess whether she had ever been to the Township just down the road from her home.

The temperature change was immediate. The smile vanished, the piercing blue eyes narrowed, became icy. She knew where this was coming from. A cold voice said, ‘you people come here and make judgments. Poverty is everywhere, even in your own country’. And she was right. Whatever way you look at it, in North and South America, in Australasia, throughout Europe, in Africa and Asia, it is exactly as she says.

At one end of the spectrum there are those who have more than they could possibly need in this lifetime and well into the next, and at the other end there are those, including the upstanding and hardworking, who are barely able to survive from day to day. But the issue is not poverty is it, that’s just one of the many labels we give it. Is it really to do with race and/or class and so called under-development?  I’m beginning to think not. No. For many in South Africa today, Mr Mandela's Long Walk to Freedom turned into something of a chimera. The more things change the more they remain the same.

Change, real fundamental change, does not come by moving the pieces around. It's not about moving from apartheid or dictatorship to democracy. It’s not about changing your spouse or partner, leader, political party, government….its about dismantling and obliterating a deeply ingrained and entrenched pattern that is apparently impervious to change. It’s about transformation and that is quite different to change.

----------------------------
Related Post: Back to Africa; Rock and Royalty in South Africa; Predictions of a Sangoma

Comments

  1. Carole Pluckrose26 February 2013 at 05:27

    This is a great story - really capturing in its description the well made point about the real nature of change. As Neale Donald Walsh aptly says and is the title of his book " When everything Changes - Change everything" - do we dare?

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

When a President Cried

Image
At a time of year when Christians around the world are commemorating the birth of the Divine Child, some parents in Newtown , Connecticut , USA are mourning the death of their children. There are probably hundreds of children around the world – in under developed countries, in conflict zones – who will die every day up to Christmas and beyond. But right now the focus has been on what one British newspaper described as a massacre of innocents. How horrendous to lose your child in such a manner. Schools should be one of the few places where you expect your children to be safe.   I worked with several of the paramedics who were first on the scene dealing with the carnage on the trains at various metro stations after the 2005 London bombings. Many, especially the younger ones, suffered severe post traumatic stress. Not trained for such horrors, those teachers immediately on the scene at that school in Connecticut will carry the scarring from that day for some time. How many more
Read more

The Economic Migrant and the Bag Lady

Image
Some years ago I was telling someone about my bag lady experience. She looked at me with astonishment and disbelief.  The Bag Lady Many years later this person, who had by then become a friend, also had her own bag lady experience. She had gone from place to place, not quite sleeping on a park bench but near enough, with only the barest essentials – a toothbrush and change of clothes in a bag – not enough to merit a supermarket trolley! The economic migrant and bag lady experience are etched into my DNA. I was born on the Caribbean island of Dominica nestled between Guadeloupe and Martinique , two French colonies. Dominica was itself fought over by the French and British for centuries. The French eventually lost. I could so easily have been a French citizen sitting in Paris writing this. In fact my mother's maiden name is the same as her family's French slaveowners of yester-year. A SNAPSHOT OF HISTORY: In 1635, France claimed Dominica along with all th
Read more

The Trickster as Teacher

Image
I received mail from a reader who was unable to post a message following my comment last week about ‘Myth as Metaphor’ (see The Fool Unmasked). He asked whether I knew any myths which were more relevant to his African culture. Well yes I do….but not a myth as such, more of a folktale. But all myths are relevant to every culture .   Archetypes are generally referred to as "the gods". It is generally claimed that Carl Jung, Swiss psychiatrist and a founding father of depth psychology, brought knowledge of these innate patterns of human behaviour to the attention of Western psychology. Certainly all my training text books made the point.  Obatala - Father of Humankind Divinity of Light I guess he did do that but long before Jung, West African Orishas were known as multi-dimensional beings representing, not only the forces of nature but certain human attributes. Their characteristics and legend were similar to those used to describe the ancient Greek and Roman go
Read more