This is how I know who I am

PALM Sunday provides a forum for the donkey, GK Chesterton’s “tattered outlaw of the earth”, to come into his own.

He reminds us he had “One far fierce hour and sweet” when “There was a shout about my ears, and palms before my feet”.

The purpose of the donkey in Jesus’s last days is to redirect the messianic hopes of the pilgrims who gathered in Jerusalem, the city of David the warrior king.

It had to shift from conquering messiahs who entered a city astride chariots and on warhorses to a man on a donkey who heralded peace and was a sign of new beginnings.

This is a bit like the nativity of our nation.

There were no tanks rolling over the border from Mozambique; no unbowed freedom fighters marching on to the streets of Pretoria.

Our new era was epitomised by an aged, smiling warrior walking free and away from the chains that had shackled him for 27 years. Madiba led us with a firm and gentle strength, exemplary of the teaching of Saint Francis de Sales that there is “nothing so gentle as real strength”.

In the Christian liturgical calendar the week ahead focuses on the martyrdom of a young prophet who proclaimed a simple revolutionary message.

It is premised not so much on our faith, on how we believe in God, but emphasises God believes in us, in our ability to do right by each other and to care for the world.

God talk surfaced in the national narrative this week when Deputy Minister Mcebisi Jonas was warned, prior to his testimony about the Gupta family’s offer of 30 pieces of silver: “Please keep your own counsel. Martyrdom is best left to Christ.”

South Africans are confronted by the question Jesus asked of his disciples and which the betrayal of our better selves by President Jacob Zuma and his confederates compels us to address: “Who do you say I am?”

There is a rapid rearranging of the liberation narrative ranging from Nguni triumphalism to narrow African chauvinism as in “we and none but ourselves freed ourselves”.

The reference to “minorities”, as in coloured, Indian and white, is on the increase.

It is often the rationale for exclusion from resources. These tendencies are at home in the corporate world, religious communities and other sectors.

I claim myself, not in exclusion from others, but in relation to all our African selves seeking to distil the varied way Africa is uniquely contextualised in all of us.

we were black enough to earn little enough to splurge on

the three-course banquet of greenbean bredie; Sunday heaven

in a mystery of cloves and peppercorns. turmeric-yellowed rice,

cardamom scent in a bowl of sago or a choice of jelly and custard

the happy certainty of Monday leftover beef on baked bread,

red with beetroot salad or the belly-comfort of pens-en-pootjies;

curried silt in a history of runaways to the walk-aways

at aunty Jaynie’s fiftieth wedding anniversary bid-uur

where it was so well with our souls that we never gave thought

of who we were in the lull of the skuins le between the long,

late lunch and afternoon tea. the heavy chain of time, dragging

through the thickening concrete of last night’s babalaas

knowing, from the heart of a storm-blue indian sea,

that we were coloured like blood on the gallows steps

named in the song of church bells, refrained in the ache of the athaan

remembered like barakaat at eid and kifyaat kos, in the sweetness of gedatmelk as a safron sun slips over signal hill.