That’s what I love about Sunday

The sun was out for a second straight day and I took full advantage!  I read Nelson Mandela’s political autobiography for my seminar class while laying out on the roof or beach with SPF 30 on, and I am browning up nicely!  I cooked up my blue pumpkin, and it tastes pretty much like pumpkin in the states.  I also did yoga on the roof as the sun went down.  It was awfully nice to have some alone time, and the beautiful shoreline in plain view was conducive to meditation as well :)  If you read between the lines, you realized that I didn't do a lot today, and that is what I love about Sunday.

Culture Questions for Bruce

Some thoughts on Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom:

“While I was walking in the city one day, I noticed a white woman in the gutter gnawing on some fish bones.  She was poor and apparently homeless, but she was young and not unattractive.  I knew of course that there were poor whites, whites who were every bit as poor as Africans, but one rarely saw them.  I saw used seeing black beggars on the street, and it startled me to see a white one.  While I normally did not give to African beggars, I felt the urge to give this woman money.  In that moment I realized the tricks that apartheid plays on one, for the everyday travails that afflict Africans are accepted as a matter of course, while my heart immediately went out to this bedraggled white woman.  In South Africa, to be poor and black was normal, to be poor and hat was a tragedy” (219).

This comment was set in 1955, and the same seems to be true now.  I grew up with a school system and job trainings that encouraged tolerance and acceptance, but it is the classification of people by race that is the downfall regardless of if I choose to be tolerant of different groups.   Today Taylor and I went to the end of the market where I had bought a township painting last week and the street vendor promised us each a gift because he loves his customers.  As he explained that his gift was out of appreciation for our support, not to monopolize our business, for we were free to buy from anyone at the market.  He also explained his relation to the painter and other aspects of the business, and I found myself listening as if to a child explaining the mechanisms of their Little Tykes kitchen business encouraging me to “eat” the plastic food on my plate.  If the man were white would I have had the same reaction?  

Thoughts of racism were on my mind yesterday dampening my experience a bit.  The parks were great.  The weather was so nice and it was amazing to be away from the city and surrounded by green country.  I read today in Nelson Mandela's autobiography that the first time he saw an elephant or baboon was in the late 1950's when he was about 40 years old.  By then, white people owned the Africa that we hear about in storybooks as we grow up.  I was sorely aware that there were only white people running the Schotia Game Reserve.  It's sad that we learn more about the animals of Africa rather than the people.  I think whether I have acknowledged it before or not, I still consider the native tribes oppressable.  Why else would I ignore their worth to the preference of animals?

Mandela wrote, “For the everyday travails that afflict Africans are accepted as a matter of course” (219).  Considering the answers of Pres. Zuma’s aids about the government’s failure to deliver services to the people that I blogged about last week, I think that the African leadership has even accepted the oppression of Africans.  Here again I arrive at the constant problem I observe both in South Africa and in the States in myself and others, by categorizing people I invoke fear (at some level, maybe even fear of the unknown) and distance myself from the mistreatment of others, because they are unlike me.  What does it take to treat people with respect based on the dignity of their humanity?  Why is it so hard?