It was a windy Wednesday evening, the type of night that could give wings to a whisper. Seven of us gathered for dinner with a South African preacher, a colored man with a quiet disposition and thunderous history. We gathered for dinner to hear the stories of a man who helped navigate a congregation through apartheid, of a man who helped deconstruct the South African architecture of inequality and build in its ashes a home of freedom. We talked, debated, laughed and cried with a preacher who was a secret advocate for the ANC (African National Congress, the resistance party), who helped hide terrorists and smuggle weapons into the country. A man who talked peace but walked in the path of a revolutionary.
What inspired him we asked? “What willed you into action?” What was the source of your personal rebellion?
Mandela’s ANC, he said, gave him meaning, gave him a course for attaining his freedom and dignity. Before the movement, the notion of self for a black African was meager and incomplete: apartheid was a “genocide of identity.” It was an incredibly moving comment. Unfortunately this blog post could never recreate the power of that moment. I wish I could follow those words, wherever the wind took them. And even though they came out soft, they hardened and took on a new prominence. They formed an army, marching through our minds conquering any and all pre-conceived notions of what constituted a deep statement: “a genocide of identity.”
When I look back on South Africa I’ll be sure to remember this revolutionary preacher: a man that’s inspired me to train my words, to condition them to resonate with others, so that when they break the plane of sound they’re powerful enough to break something as goliath as apartheid.
