Cover story: Their world is measured by their walk

By Dick Hagen
The Land Staff Writer

February 29, 2008 03:28 am

— Travel rural South Africa and the most obvious sight is that just about everybody walks.
This includes children walking to school, ladies walking to their local market often with their purchase balanced on their head, families walking to church each Sunday, and young people simply loitering along various roadside hangouts.
“Right now their world is about as big as they can walk in a day,” said George Tesch, a retired Olivia seed man, as he reviewed his 14-day experience in South Africa as part of the 28-member mission of the Southwest Minnesota Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America.
20 hours to a different world
When the group left Minnesota on Jan. 14, the temperature was 8 below zero with an 18-below wind chill. Some 20 air hours and 10,000 miles later, the group exited their Boeing 747 (passenger capacity 450, and it was full), in Johannesburg, South Africa at 11:30 p.m. Jan. 15 with temperatures at 72 F.
This church-ag mission team returned Jan. 30 (some stayed an extra week) from life-sharing experiences with the rural black families of the Kwazulu-Natal province of South Africa. With the Indian Ocean bordering the east coast, this province is the heart of Zulu Kingdom. South Africa is a country of amazing contrasts and is now home to about 51 million people, 85 percent of which are black. Of this black population only about 50 percent are literate.
Yet the folks from southwest Minnesota found a gracious, sharing and loving population within the rural black communities. Most still live in small, thatched-roof, one-room circular homes made of rocks cemented with clay. Most still share a “community well” both for washing their clothes and cooking their food.
Most of their food often is garden-grown potatoes, pumpkins, tomatoes, cucumbers and stiff corn meal mush called pap.
Most use candles because they can’t afford electricity, or electric power simply hasn’t yet reached their rural area. Most protect their meager property with serpentine fences, to keep out vandals and roaming animals — cattle, goats, even monkeys.
“Your impression is that they live in extreme poverty,” Tesch said. “But spend a few hours with these people and you realize they don’t even recognize poverty. Theirs is a lifestyle, a culture they have lived with for decades. They seem contented and perfectly at ease with their life.”
The apartheid era, a 46-year tragedy, politically ended in 1994 but economically it still persists across most of South Africa. The majority of schools are not yet integrated. Even with the end of apartheid, the gap between rich and poor gets wider and wider. Today much of this economic stratification is within the ranks of the black community. The blacks in power are getting richer. The vast majority aren’t.
Yet in the black communities visited by this Minnesota delegation, their faces showed little of the discontent and misery normally associated with such poverty.
Access to the fishing pond
“To be free is not merely to cast off one’s chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others.” This statement by Nelson Mandela greets visitors to the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg, a facility that impacts your brain much like a visit to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. During the apartheid era, Mandela spent several years in prison yet he rose to become the first freely elected president of South Africa.
The Rev. Phil Knutson, whose father was an African missionary from Minnesota, told the visiting Minnesota group, “whites still own 80 percent of the land in Africa. Whites still effectively control the country. Whites have tried for centuries to fix Africa. Maybe it’s time for black Africans to have the opportunity to fix their country themselves.
“We have to think differently. Within our mission work, we need the black community to work with us. And we need to build upon their strengths, their assets. The old principal of giving a fish is fine; teaching them to fish is even better. But unless they have access to the fishing pond, are you really helping?”
Rudy Bausch, general manager of the ELCSA Property Management Co., said that between 1900 and 1930, existing church missions at the time obtained much land.
“This land was bought from local farmers and local chiefs,” he said, “with missionary families then placed on the land to commercialize the land by growing sugar cane, maize, timber and other crops. These mission farms often had 100 or more workers. However in the 1940s the state decided this was not the intent of mission farms so many were depopulated, and the church lost access to the land.”
Bausch said the government is now attempting a major land reform initiative so that both mission churches and rural black families are given the opportunity to apply for land restitution.
“A noble decision by the government but land reform is moving slowly because of legal roadblocks as to who actually owned the land,” said Bausch. “... where ownership is identified it should be the goal of the church to make this land productive for its people.”
Richard Agullhas, director of the ELCSA Development Service, providing assistance to church communities throughout South Africa, said, “people may be poor but they are not stupid. They are not without ambition and vision. The way to address poverty is to enable people to take care of themselves and we do this through entrepreneurial training and adult literacy training.”
Youth don’t return to rural areas
Simple things like getting community gardens established with the various rural churches is a major goal of the Development Service program, which also includes HIV-AIDS Awareness training classes. HIV is increasingly becoming a rural problem in South Africa.
Much of this stems from the high unemployment among the young adults. Often after finishing their high school training they turn to crime, sexual indulgence, drugs and other acts of vandalism simply because there is no work.
Much like rural Minnesota, if they do manage to go on to a college or university, they seldom return to their home community.
“The bright lights and job opportunities in our cities is a terrific drain on the young people of our rural parishes. Yet if they have no jobs, then crime and vandalism become a recourse unless they have the money to get a higher education,” said Jabulani Makhoba, a retired school administrator now doing volunteer work within the churches of the Kranskop area.
Young and old alike earn little in day’s work. Daily pay is perhaps only 40 Rand, the currency standard in South Africa. For comparison, 100 Rand is the equivalent of $7 U.S., making a typical day’s pay only about $2.80. That in a nutshell explains why few black South African’s have cars, or smoke cigarettes. They simply can’t afford such indulgences.
A gallon of gasoline currently costs about $6.80. Stretched out old Toyota and Nissan vans that function as taxis are the primary people-movers in rural South Africa. These taxis generally don’t depart their roadside loading areas until they have a full load, and that can be anywhere from 10 to 16 people.
Women ‘heart and soul’ of churches
Because of limited jobs, adult men usually work away from their home communities. For men working the gold fields, coal mines and diamond mines, they generally get home to their church only for special church holidays such as Christmas and Easter.
That is why the women, especially the older women, are the key people keeping the rural churches intact within the province of Kwazulu-Natal where the Minnesota delegation spent its two-week visit.
The Rev. Mbukeni Mkhwanazi, dean of the Umvoti Circuit which encompasses 10 parishes and 61 Lutheran congregations, said, “the women are the most active workers within our churches simply because they are often the only adult people around during the week. At our Women’s Conference within the circuit we often have 500 or more attending. At our Circuit Youth Conferences, the attendance is about 300. But when we have a Men’s Conference, maybe we have 50.”
The persistence of older women there is remarkable. “Some walk up to 6 kilometers (about 3 1/2 miles) just to get to church. And once in church, they lead the singing. And they teach Sunday school. They really are the heart and soul of the churches that we visited. But it’s going to take new thinking, new money for seed and equipment, and a stronger cooperative approach to get the land of these rural churches into production. The reality is that it looks like at least two more generations of young people moving through the system before land reform and new agriculture really kicks into gear,” Tesch said.
An immediate issue for South Africa are the “rolling blackouts” because the outdated electrical generating plants across the country are unable to keep up with the escalating demands for electrical power.
The major utility providing power to the country says this could be a five- to six-year problem.

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