Feud Within the Human Family

I came to South Africa yearning to be shaken up. I wanted to get my hands dirty. I wanted to be exposed to poverty that I could not fathom. I wanted this experience to change and shape how I view my place in this world. Every day that I am here I get a little closer those goals. I can feel God pushing me and making me think critically about what I am being exposed to. My heart and mind are being constantly challenged to understand my surrounding and love in spite and because of it all. This tends to happen at the most unexpected times.

Mid air while bungee jumping
off of Bloukrans Bridge

Last week I went on a road trip across South Africa with 17 of my housemates and our guide Jimmy. We drove along the Garden Route stopping in small towns along the way en route to Durban, Johannesburg, and Kruger National Park. This included bungee jumping off of Bloukrans Bridge, the world’s highest bungee bridge (216 m which is about 72 stories), and spending two days in Coffee Bay, a rural area in the Transkei. We saw parts of South Africa that few tourists take time to see, mainly because we drove from one side of the country to the other and spent countless hours staring out the window. 

Small shop in a village in the Transkei

As we drove through the country we passed through many small towns that were poor, made up of mostly black inhabitants, and always had a vast area of informal settlements. After seeing a couple of these towns something struck me: none of this happened by accident. Many of these people have been controlled and actively suppressed, keeping them poor, by different minority groups for centuries. Their government has failed them. No wonder reconciliation is so difficult when you are faced with the need for forgiveness in everything that surrounds you. How do you forgive what can be seen as the root of all of your problems? If you get to a place where forgiveness is an option, whom do you forgive? The government? Your colonizers? White people as a whole? It was in asking these questions that I came to realize that apartheid and other systemic failures like it were not the fault of the government alone, but a failing of the entire human family, who for centuries has found it acceptable to use and abuse other human beings. By this common failure we are all bound, as well as by God, love, and the dignity we claim as God’s children. Through this brokenness, we are also connected by our struggle to repent for our sins and malicious acts, as well as those of our brothers and sisters.

Traditional Xhosa houses in the
Transkei

I sat with this notion in my heart for several days until I was overcome by it in Johannesburg as I walked alone and silent through the Apartheid Museum. While walking in I heard one of my housemates express that seeing all of these horrible things made her hate being white. That statement started an avalanche of thoughts and emotions within me about my own culpability in the matter. You can blame the British and the Afrikaners and the chain can go one forever without end, but it must be taken into account that the injustices of apartheid and systemic violence are occurring all over the world at the hands of people of every race, colour, and creed. How can we say that apartheid and everything that goes along with it is the fault of only whites when we look at the African slave trade of other Africans, civil wars in Latin America, and a vast array of other human rights violations happening all over the world? I am not saying that no one can be blamed for these atrocities. In fact, I am saying the opposite. Every single human being holds fault for the injustices of the world. We are all broken and through that individual brokenness we add to the brokenness of the world, but that does not take away from the fact that we are all our brothers’ and sisters’ keepers. We must all share our responsibility for the current state of our world that we have been given to care for. There is a feud within the human family and we are all called to work for its end.

But here is the real question: How do we as the human race work to repair these injustices? My answer: by loving every individual with everything you have and everything you are. I am a firm believer that the only way to change the world is to do it one person at a time.

I thought that I was just going on vacation to see the rest of South Africa. What I didn’t know was that God had a plan to work within that and open my eyes to my place in the human family.