Our faith shows us what must be done

I NEVER went to school barefoot, but always wore the obligatory black Bata Toughees.

One day as I entered the grounds of St Augustine Senior Secondary in Parow I saw a smidgen of candlewax on my otherwise spit-and-polished shoe. This telltale sign of poverty was a momentary cause of shame: Of where I came from, that we lived in a single room in someone’s backyard and shared a communal toilet and bathroom; that my father was materially and emotionally absent from our lives.

All the good sermons I heard on a Sunday failed to disabuse me of this sense of second- rateness. Redemption came with political conviction via a study-group induction into the liberation movement in 1980.

Popular culture was the manna I feasted on in the previously bleak, social landscapes of my youth. I intuitively sought and found resonating meaning in the socio-politic archipelagos of southern humanity. Jamaica provided the soundscape of our reggae gumbas and parallel examples of slavery-rootedness and subdued nihilism.

In 1979, the English punk-rock band The Clash recorded an anthem of lament and youth rage set in a season of urban discontent in the wake of Britain’s economic recession marked by police brutality. It was named Guns of Brixton.

We were living in Portlands when this song came to my attention via the sound-system of an Original Milnerton Rude Boy, Tony Karon.

To my mind the opening verse: “When they kick at your front door / How you gonna come? / With your hands on your head / Or on the trigger of your gun?” was akin to the whispered exploits of urban guerillas such as Cliffie Brown, the East London-born fellow who periodically found his way to Cape Town on some clandestine mission. He was killed consequent to a rocket attack on a oil-refinery in Durban. He was known to some in a small, tight circle of friends with whom I shared a firm commitment to work towards a revolutionary change in our land.

But as much as politics can redeem, it can also damn you when you seek to honour the realm of right ideas, pursuing the path of just and necessary action.

Jose Miguez Bonino, the Argentine liberation theologian, pierced the thin skin of my uncertainty when he wrote, referring to the necessity of political involvement by people of faith, that “crudely ambiguous and dirty though it may be, to courageously assume our position as believers and dare to name God, to confess God from within the womb of politics, from within the very heart of commitment”.

But it is to the Reverend Allan Boesak, who this week attained the biblical promise of “threescore years and ten”, I owe a debt of gratitude. It was his account of a question directed by Aunt Meraai Arendse a few weeks after his ordination that led me to revisit and drink from the personal and collective wells of our culture and history.

Aunt Meraai, was not interested in talk about Jesus; after all “I have known and loved him long before you were born” she said. Her interest, in the matter of the Group Areas Act, was: “What is God saying about this injustice? I am going to lose my house, this place we built and loved, where my children grew up. Am I going to lose my memories?”

Every phase of struggle delivers new challenges and no answer in any given instance is permanent.

People like me believe life is to be lived in solidarity with others and when we strive together in a common cause to care for all of creation answers and the ensuing call to act come, often unexpectedly but with an undeniable certainty.

I certainly saw God smile at his children in Parliament on Wednesday. His presence was palpable as Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan cited Nelson Mandela in his 2016 budget: “I am fundamentally an optimist. Whether that comes from nature or nurture I cannot say.

“Part of being optimistic is keeping one’s head pointed toward the sun, one’s feet moving forward. There were many dark moments when my faith in humanity was sorely tested, but I would not and could not give myself up to despair. That way lays defeat and death.”

And all God’s people say, “Amen”.