Sunday School: Understanding an African Past
By Dawna Shawntelle Quick
When I was awarded a fellowship to design an educational project and travel to developing countries, all my family heard was the word “Africa.” I sympathized with their need to have a defined past and accepted their expectations of Africa as my own. To them, Africa was the mother country, and by visiting it I could restore the past that slavery had erased.
Some months later, I arrived in Langa Township, Cape Town, South Africa. The road looped around a complex of domes covered in layers of multi-colored plastic. Here, in secret, boys underwent the rite of circumcision to become men. Fascinated, I stared at the weathered huts decorated not in the thatched roofs of ancestry but in the discarded wrappings of toilet tissue, bottled water and trash can liners.
When we finally arrived at the rendezvous point, St. Michael’s Catholic Church, I was handed over to Siphokazi, the daughter of my host mother Nomowethu. Siphokazi was a thin, lanky child of 16 years with long braids down her back. She led me to our seats and I looked at the cracked white walls, plain brown furniture and small altar. As everything was conducted in a mixture of Xhosa and English, I had little to contribute. Indeed, even the Psalter and hymnals contained Xhosa and an order of service alien to my Methodist eyes.
While I had stood before the gold-gilded altars of ornate churches and suffered vertigo after exploring spires befitting Babel, I had always felt that something was missing. The tourists came to see the decadence; they completely ignored the sermon.
Sitting in St. Michael’s, I felt what could only be described as a warm, fuzzy feeling. A lively but solemn reverence permeated the atmosphere so profoundly that I instinctively knew not to take photographs. The simple building represented the best that this congregation had to offer. It held something that even my church at home did not.
After church, Siphokazi walked me to her home in the heart of Langa. We talked mostly about her school and how it would feel to graduate in two years. The vistas of Langa greeted us as we trudged along in the ceaseless heat. We passed corrugated tin homes surrounded by twisted, sandy paths lined with broken stones that led to more distant places. Men openly pissed in the streets, and their wandering eyes caught my gaze. Plastic bags were caught on the razor wire that surrounded the nicer brick homes. The Cape winds blew grating sand against my exposed arms.
When we first reached Siphokazi’s home, my sun-blindness prevented me from viewing clearly the interior of the small, dark house. Then, I saw that it had a single light bulb, suspended above the kitchen, and a few appliances. In seven steps, Siphokazi and I had passed by the living room with its aged TV, the bathroom, and her mother’s room and had arrived at her room. She pointed me toward the set of bunk beds on the far wall, three steps away. The wall held bloody streaks from smashed bedbugs. The odor of burnt oil from the lamps lingered in the air.
Later, as we left for an outing, I noticed a gray, mousepad-sized box on the wall with a keypad and LCD display. I asked Siphokazi what it was.
“That’s for electricity,” she said as she turned off the light.
The next morning, three uniformed men came to the house and began operations on the electric box.
“What’s going on?” I asked Nomowethu.
She sat on the sofa tailoring pants. She had unbuttoned her denim skirt so it wouldn’t eat into her skin. “Oh, they’re fixing the electricity.”
“What problems have you had?”
“Oh, well it was fixed to read the wrong amount.” She made a Xhosa click in her throat.
“What?” Eight months ago, she explained, her husband, a Kenyan, had adjusted the box so that it recorded less electricity than was actually consumed. The company found out a month ago.
“They could have turned off the electricity,” she said, “but I paid a fine of 500 rand, and then 360 rand for them to come fix it. It was a good thing that I was here when they came.”
“Why?”
“Well, if I hadn’t been here, they would have just cut the electricity off. If it ever happens again, they’ll turn my electricity off, and I’ll never be able to use it again.”
“Never?”
“Never. Click. I’ll just tell my husband never to do that again.”
The men left shortly after they arrived and the bizarreness of it reeled through my head.
That night we ate a meal of pork chops, green beans and yams. This was the first time in months that the family had eaten meat and even this luxury was possible only because of the stipend that I had paid in order to visit Langa. Nomowethu explained that their meals usually consisted of milk, bread, eggs and occasionally bacon.
That night, Nomowethu provided practical advice: “If the bedbugs bite, just crush them.”
Nomowethu’s precarious struggle for survival reminded me of my mother’s childhood stories. My grandfather sharecropped and my mother picked the cotton fields and ate mayonnaise sandwiches for lunch. While I had never experienced a subsistence existence, I related more to my mother than to Nomowethu.
My jealousy of Africa and its traditions subsided. I waded through the self-pity that had disallowed me to recognize my own culture—things I carried as close as my skin. I realized that I had suffered from a streak of naïveté.
Many African traditions, while beautiful, hold very real and negative consequences. The local papers trumpeted the curse of the circumcision rite I had so admired: infection, permanent disability and death. I had to accept that an African tribe concerned my history more than my culture. I had only to respect that and learn from it.
At the time of this writing, Dawna Quick was a senior Business and Economics major at Wofford College in Spartanburg, S.C. During the 2002-03 academic year, she was Wofford’s 18th Presidential Scholar, an award given to a rising senior to design an educational project and implement it in developing countries around the world. Dawna studied labor, wages and human development as she traveled in South America, Africa, Europe and Asia. This essay won third prize in Wofford’s 2003 Beyond the City’s Northern Border Scholarship Competition. Contact her at quickds@wofford.edu
2004 presidential scholar Allyn Steele is currently Wofford College’s 19th International Presidential Scholar. Steele left on Oct. 1 for a 7-month journey to study water resources and how irrigation, privatization and trans-boundary water management affect economies in six developing countries— Mexico, Hungary, Thailand, Vietnam, Egypt and Jordan. The research project is an extension of his previous stint abroad, when he studied in Thailand during the fall 2002 semester with the Council for International Educational Exchange and the Research and Development Institute of Khon Kaen University. While there, he organized a conference that examined research on the potential damage to the region caused a hydrologic dam.
Wofford’s International Presidential Scholar is chosen by the college president and is based on a student’s ability to contribute to world affairs. Steele will return to Wofford for a fifth year to complete regular coursework and share his experience. You can follow Steele’s journey at www.wofford.edu/presidential_scholar/index.htm