Sabbatical reflections #9: arriving a stranger

Day 1

After a day and night of travelling from North to South across the planet, Johannesburg airport didn't feel dramatically different to the Newcastle airport I'd left the previous day. 'Non-places', a world apart. The smooth and sparkling clean GAU train from Johannesburg to Pretoria was not too strange either - apart from the visible presence of armed security guards, that is. My first host of this trip, waiting for me at the station in Pretoria, was a welcome, and welcoming, familiar face - Cobus van Wyngaard and I had met briefly in an academic context in Amsterdam, a couple of years ago, and it was he who'd suggested I come to South Africa. Just as I was questioning white middle-class privilege in the context of the Church of England in Brexit Britain, he was asking similar questions of the Dutch Reformed Church in 'post-apartheid' South Africa. We had sensed common ground in our first encounter, and I was excited to explore further, on his home turf.

But despite some fleeting familiarities, I was acutely aware, arriving in South Africa, of being a stranger. This was my first visit to anywhere on the continent of Africa, and although my itinerary for the next two weeks was thrillingly full, Cobus was one of only two people I would spend time with that I had ever met before, and both of those were conversations that had lasted less than an hour. I had had all kinds of introductions made for me, through mutual friends, but I came as an unknown guest, and a largely unprepared traveller.

And although my 'strangerness' was repeatedly, and often rapidly, transformed into something deeper, more intimate - as will hopefully become clear as these next few blog posts unfold - returning home I brought back with me many rich stories of encounter, but only at best impressionistic, very partial, glimpses of South Africa in 2019. So please don't take whatever follows to be any kind of authoritative account. And please (especially if you know South Africa much better than me) bear with me - and ideally tell me - when I get it wrong!

Cobus drove me to his home not far from the centre of Pretoria, and in the following hours I was welcomed warmly by every member of his family. My 'strangerness' dawned on me again though, when I realised - of course! - that while all of them spoke perfect English, their mother tongue, their family language, was Afrikaans - of which I knew not a word. Over the next few days I came to see one of South Africa's many complexities: a nation of multiple languages, with no 'lingua franca' free from ethnic division, or oppressive, colonial, historical baggage. While Afrikaans can never be disentangled from Dutch colonialism and the white supremacist apartheid regime, my own English language in South Africa holds within it just as long and sordid a history of invasion, violence and 'ethnic cleansing'. I would also discover, as my time in South African went on, the sheer number and diversity of 'indigenous' African languages spoken across the country too.

Later that afternoon, I was driven to another suburb of Pretoria by Klippies Kritzinger, missiologist, critical white theologian, and minister in the Uniting Reformed Church of Southern Africa (which in 1994 brought together the two denominations that historically were created out of the white-dominated Dutch Reformed Church, for black and so-called 'coloured' members). Klippies and his wife Alta welcomed me into their home with joyful, generous hospitality, and shared with me just a little of their life story, infused with deep solidarity with their black and so-called 'coloured' neighbours, and their radical resistance to the divisions and oppressions of the apartheid regime, and its 'Christian' theological legitimisers.

Alta pointed me in the direction of the South African heartlands, way beyond the urban centres that I would be spending my time in, where human civilization itself began - 'prehistoric' burial chambers with evidence suggesting the possibility of co-habiting pre-human hominid species, hundreds of thousands of years ago - and the ancient traditions of profoundly embodied wisdom rooted in that deep ancestry. "The arrogance of white newcomers," Alta exclaimed, "imagining themselves superior!"

From Klippies, among much wisdom, I learnt two new words that made my heart sing.

Klippies is less interested, he told me, in ecclesiology (the study of the church's life), or missiology (the study of the church's mission), than in encounterology: an attentiveness to (and careful, multidimensional analysis of) encounters - encounters between Christians and 'others', but also a much broader horizon of encounters, both within and beyond the Christian community - and how they transform each of us.

In an academic article about Klippies' work, Cobus (van Wyngaard 2016) highlights a personal encounter in 1986, a moment of challenging friendship between Klippies and black theologian Dr Mpho Ntoane, that changed the course of the former's theological journey:

'Mpho enquired about my research and then asked whether I was giving the same attention to my own white history and identity as I was giving to the struggle of black Christians with their black history and identity. I had to admit that I was not, and realised that I had to add a chapter on white responses to Black Theology and to situate my whole study as a particular type of white response to it.'

Out of this conversation, Klippies 'became convinced that the only credible way to pursue my theological vision was to come to terms with my whiteness, religiously as a Reformed Christian, culturally as an Afrikaner, economically as a member of the privileged middle class, and politically as a person who was legally allowed to vote under apartheid.' (Kritzinger 2001:247)

'A self-effacing concern of white people to achieve only black liberation,' Klippies argues, 'cannot escape the trap of paternalism, since it contains the tacit assumption that white people do not need to be liberated.' (Kritzinger 1988:296)

As Cobus observes, 'the challenge that Kritzinger picks up from Black theologians is to consciously give attention to his own history and identity as white in the midst of a racialised society. Key to this is that Kritzinger allows Black theologians to become his primary interlocutors in an attempt at analysing whiteness.' (van Wyngaard 2016).

***

As first Cobus, and then Klippies, drove me around Pretoria on that first day of my South Africa trip, I got my first glimpse of the stubbornly enduring effects of the geographical dimension of apartheid: the big cities like Pretoria organised with a central business district - the centre of (still white-dominated) business, finance and power - surrounded by a ring of still-largely-white suburbia, itself ringed by the city's industrial zone, and furthest out, the 'townships' created by the apartheid government to house the city's black residents (mostly forcibly re-located from across the city). The geography - sustained now not so much by racist policy but by that policy's lasting effects, and ongoing class inequality - still means that black cleaners living in the townships have to travel 120km every day to clean offices in the CBD, to give but one example. And self-proclaimed 'progressive' white South Africans often end up living in ethnically homogenous gated communities, separated from their neighbours out of a 'fear of crime'.

Talking with Cobus about the ongoing challenges of the geography, he suggested that there's no 'programme' that will somehow 'solve' it. White people need to acknowledge that the racism goes deep, he said. That a white fear of intimacy with black people is deep in the subconscious of racialized whiteness; visceral, bordering on disgust, even. And that there is only one way to change that: "We just need to spend lots of time, over a long time, together." Encounter. Difficult, patient, persevering, humble, hopeful encounter.

***

The second word I learnt from Klippies is a South African answer to the neoliberal mantra "There Is No Alternative" (TINA for short). Instead, Klippies insisted, "THEre Must Be an Alternative" (THEMBA). And guess what? 'Themba' is the Zulu word for 'hope'.

References:

Kritzinger, J.N.J., 1988, 'Black Theology: a challenge to mission', DTh thesis, Dept of Missiology, University of South Africa

Kritzinger, J.N.J. 2001, 'Becoming aware of racism in the church', in M.T. Speckman & L.T. Kaufmann (eds.), Towards an agenda for contextual theology, pp.231-275, Cluster Publications, Pietermartizburg

van Wyngaard, G.J., 2016, 'White theology in dialogue with Black Theology: exploring the contribution of Klippies Kritzinger', HTS Theological Studies 72:1