'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

SOWETO AND JOHANNESBURG:

SOWETO AND JOHANNESBURG: We had a busy and informative weekend. On Saturday we had lunch with Emily Mnisi, a Quaker woman from near Jo'burg whom I had gotten to know last year when we were both on an international Quaker fact-finding mission in Israel and Palestine. Emily is a special-education specialist who currently trains and supervises the house-parents at a residential farm for some 70 people with mental handicaps, half an hour out of Jo'burg.

Then I had a long conversation/interview with Dr. Mongezi Guma, who is Executive Director of the Ecumenical Service for Socio-economic Transformation. He talked mainly about the topic I first asked him about: the effectiveness or otherwise-- as viewed today-- of the TRC process whose open hearings were such a prominent feature of South African public life in the 1995-98 period.

The TRC has only now been winding up its final work. On April 15, it presented its final report-- including recommendations on reparations to victims of serious abuses under apartheid and on amnesties for perpetrators who confessed--to President Mbeki. He then requested parliament to pass bills funding the reparations. And I think-- though I'm not quite clear on this-- that parliament is now working its way through this process. So I need to nail down those facts a little better.

Anyway, Dr. Guma was really interesting about the TRC-- and he also talked a little about what he did as a church-based social activist during the dark days of apartheid. One of the things he was working on was church-based support for the families of political prisoners.

Yesterday Morning, Leila and I went to the 9:30 worship session of Johannesburg Quaker Meeting. I'd worshiped there before, when I came here in August 2001; and this time they had asked me to stay afterwards and talk a little about the present US-Iraq war. Well, it was a little challenging to get my head around that, so I gave some personal reflections on what I saw as the motivations of the warmongers in Washington-- and also on the potential strength of the movement for peace and justice there.

It really has been quite interesting, over this past month, following the news of the US-Iraq war FROM AFRICA. I mean, using force to impose your will on distant lands; doing so in the name of some attractive, "modernizing" ideal; and doing it also with a firm eye on control of natural resources-- all these things are very familiar to people in Africa. And they seem SO VERY NINETEEENTH CENTURY....

Well, Emily Mnsisi had been at the Quaker sessions yesterday, and afterwards she had promised to take us on a visit to Soweto. On our way there, we stopped to get something to drink at Gold Reef City, the amazingly kitsch amusement park where on Firday we had gone down the unused gold mine. But yesterday, we went into the casino which is part of the park, as Emil had heard of a nice restaurant inside there.

Well, there we were three Quakers in a casino on a Sunday morning... (Not sure if Leila describes herself as a Q these days; but you get the drift.) For Leila and me, it was our first visit inside one of these huge, ugly, money-gobbling behemoths. People inside there looked so sad in the gloomy light, with their faces lit mainly by the strange flashing tones of the slot machines into which they stared, likes zombies.

That was quite a strange thing to be doing on our way to visit Soweto.

So then, on we drove. And drove and drove and drove. The first stop Emily had planned to go have lunch with an old college friend of hers called Ria, a special-ed specialist who runs programs for the provinicial government here in Gauteng Province. Ria and her family live in Protea, which is in a far-out part of Soweto, so we drove for many miles along a sort of perimeter highway before we got there.

I've had Soweto in my mind since 1976 or before. That was the year the schoolkids there all walked out of school on June 16 to protest new requirements that would force them to pass exams in some subjects in Afrikaans, not in English or a native language. The police met the walkout with violence, killing two that first day and many hundreds more over the half-year of insurrection that followed.

The uprising that the Soweto schoolkids started that year spread to all the major South African urban areas (except, apparently, Durban). It did not immediately lead to the victory of the African nationalist/liberationist movement. But it did dent the self-confidence of the apartheid bosses considerable, and it started a longterm process whereby black resistance made the apartheid system fundamentally unworkable and thus forced the National Party to the negotiating table. The economic sanctions imposed on the regime by all major outside powers (except Israel... ) also helped to bring this about.

Oh, wouldn't it be great if we could see the same support from outside powers for the movement for equality, peace and justice in Israel/Palestine???

But anyway. So, I had known and thought a lot about Soweto since 1976. But I'd never visited it at all till 2001, when Harold Annegaarn took Bill and me on a quick visit by car to some parts of it. On that occasion, I gathered that Soweto is large-- but yesterday, I really got a better feel for its true enormity. It is like a huge sister-city to Johannesburg, spread out to the southwest and separated from Jo'burg by the massive, rhomboidal slag heaps produced by the gold mines all round here.... (more to come, later)