Fwd: What have we done?
I’m slowly recovering from jet lag.
Ah, there are so many stories to tell. But this one comes from a
heavy heart. It keeps echoing through my heart, inviting itself to be
told.
I am a Lutheran. One who understands that God is a God of grace. So,
with that in mind, this is tough.
On Monday of this week I visited the parish of Nazareth, a rural
mountainous parish about an hour’s drive south of Dundee on a dirt
road. The church (and school) at Nazareth was built by the German
mission society in about 1929 for the Zulu people. It has fortress
thick walls, like I would assume old German cathedral walls had.
There is a white German Jesus for an altar painting. A mile or two
down the road is a German Lutheran Church. The people who worship
there still worship in German. There were many mission societies that
came from Germany, so I have no idea if the same group built both
churches or not. However, slowly the people of the Zulu congregation
explained to me what had happened in that remote corner of South
Africa. One of the troubling things of apartheid was that there was
legislation that forcibly separated the blacks and the whites. The
Zulu were deported to areas that the whites didn’t consider to be of
commercial importance. And so it was that the land that the Zulu were
living on in the area around Nazareth was considered to be good crop
land. According to the Zulu telling the story, their German Lutheran
neighbors wanted their land, and so asked the government to have them
deported. I asked for clarity, “Did the white Lutherans do that?”
and they said yes. In fact, they said, to this day the white
Lutherans will have nothing to do with them. A couple of years ago a
man from the white German congregation died. He had been a shop
keeper and in the course of doing business had made many Zulu friends.
And so many Zulu came to his funeral. They were forcibly not allowed
into the church, and had to sit outside during the service. They told
me that there were 2 such instances in the past 3 years. The dean of
the circuit (the lead pastor) told me that to have a visit with the
white German pastor he has to go in through the kitchen (doesn’t sound
like its a regular occurance!!!). He is not allowed in through the
front door. This is today. Not 30 or 40 years ago. The Nazareth
parish only has a few Zulu in it. All the people are 40-50 miles
away, in a new church that they call Nazareth, in honor of their old
home. The church, while structurally sound, has had no tender loving
care for a long time. There aren’t enough people to care for it.
What have we corporately as Lutherans done? Do we own some
responsibility for brothers and sisters abroad who treat their
Lutheran neighbors as though they were less than human? In Germany
during World War II there were many Lutherans that didn’t speak up.
Bonhoeffer did. I’m told that if Germans from Germany visit the area
they won’t have anything to do with their German counterparts in the
area. I expressed my sorrow at the treatment of my Zulu Lutheran
brethren. Strongly. Vocally. But is that where my responsibility
ends? Ignoring my German Lutheran brethren who continue to wound?
I’m not asking these questions because I have answers. I ask because
I ache at what I saw in one little hidden part of the world. Perhaps
unhiding is a part of healing? Lutherans claim to understand grace.
What does grace look like here?
I saw many more effects of apartheid. The Zulu “homeland” (as
designated by the government) is mountainous and rocky. Waste land
that no one else wanted. People struggle to eek out a living. Now
there is the possibility of returning to the good lands that they
lived on before. But when one has been gone for 40 or many more
years, does one leave ones’ current family and friends to return?
Will people be able to make it if they do return? Many don’t have the
technical skills to be competitive.
One of the many destructive affects of apartheid is in the attitudes
toward the land. One of the few ways that a young adult could get an
education was to earn a bit of money working as a “garden boy”… To
say “garden boy” they needed to say no more… it was a humiliating
degrading position that those hungering for an education put up with.
Bheki Mathe, who was with us in Minnesota this past spring, told of
working as a garden boy to put his way through college. He said that
the whites would put his coffee next to the dog house, where the dog
would pee in it. The Zulu were considered no better than dogs. One
of the ways that we affirmed the land was to state that we worked the
land ourselves. Over and over again I stated that we who were from
the US like to get our fingers dirty. In one sermon I stated that one
of the ways that the white South Africans had enslaved the Zulu was to
teach them that to work the land was a degrading thing, not a
privilege. I talked about how God has blessed us and gifted us with
land, Zulu and white alike, and we are invited to care for the land.
Princess, the head of the partnership committee, stated as she
introduced me once that she was amazed to see that a pastor knew
things about gardening. When I would walk into a garden I would feel
the soil, talk with people about my garden and theirs… admiring,
praising, pointing out a few possibilities for raising more produce.
There are simple things, like crop rotation, like proper planting
distances, like removing bugs. Water is a problem. The whites took
the land that has proper clay amounts. They also took most of the
land where there would be adequate water supplies. The Zulu now have
the right to reclaim these lands, but that doesn’t make it easy.
Speaking of images…
http://www.matthewsullivan.org/zagallery/v/rsulliva2008za/2008-02-04/IMG_3903.JPG.html
will give you one view of the church I was speaking of… If
you wish to see a bunch more pictures, Matthew (thanks, Matthew!) has
placed all my pictures on the web. Just back up to
www.matthewsullivan.org/zagallery and you can access all the pictures.
However, it will be a while before I get labels on them (keep
checking back). Linda and David Pedersen have also entered their
pictures from the trip. And they are all labeled. Enjoy!
More later.
May God’s peace guard and guide our hearts and minds as we struggle to
continue to make sense of all the we have seen and heard.
Revkah