by Mphuthumi Ntabeni

Special to G21 Africa

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QUEENSTOWN, SOUTH AFRICA - I have a friend from Germany who was an exchange student at our local University last year. He wanted to stay in a black township some of his time in SA (South Africa) in order to be introduced to the quintessential township life style. In most Western circles township life is viewed with a romantic eye; regarded as the capital of vitality and vigorous fun in a South African life. The shebeen culture has a lot of influence to that view.

In the short time that he has stayed with us we became close friends. There is a certain quality of earnestness I liked about him. He has that rare union of genuine suavity with unaffected kindness and a refreshing lack of pretence that they tell me is the best quality of Germans. I took him on extensive tours of the city and its townships. I tried to introduce him to a whole lot of traditional, political, boisterous situations. This afforded me an opportunity of learning about European culture also.

In the month of May I took him to a Unitary Mass the central deanery of our diocese organizes every Pentecostal Sunday. The Mass was held at Motherwell Black Township, largely because the biggest Catholic Church building is there. It also facilitates the chance for white Catholics to learn more about how their fellow black Catholics worship. The atmosphere was vibrant, as always, with heavy devotional singing that I often wish would be accompanied by a better intellectual faith in our society. There's no avoiding the fact that the noise of worship in African congregations is often mistaken for the smoke of light. Having said that, the African Church does have a lot to teach the tepid Western Church about joyful worship.

Coming from the Mass I was very much interested on my German guest's opinion but he wasn't forth coming so I thought it prudent not to probe. Further on, June the sixteenth (Youth day), I took him to one of the celebrations commemorating the valour of our youth who died after taking issues to the streets with the apartheid regime in 1976. In the celebrations, speech after speech was made that produced an interplay of anger and frustration. People were whipped and deceived into opinions by slogans and other means with the power of forcing opinions. Obstreperous applause was quickly turning into contemptuous sneers around us; I had to assume because he was white. When the situation bordered on the edge of being nasty we left. I see no need of arguing with a mind prepossessed with prejudice, especially when it's full of that dangerous air of the righteousness of its position. Inordinate enthusiasm is a legitimate sprout of irrationality. I blame no system for a lazy mind.

I would have been embarrassed had I not known the kind of person my German guest is; instead I felt he had experienced township vox populi unsheathed by a glove of diplomacy and saw how township mentality can sometimes be.

As we waited for a mini-bus home he impressed on me that he then understood me better. "I now understand how a person like you could be little else but Catholic in this situation."

"What exactly do you mean by that?" I asked with some trepidation.

He said: "In the township it very easy to sink in your own misery, or to propagate villainy because of anger from past humiliations. But to avoid these two extremes requires something akin to strength of individual character. There's still too much anger lying unresolved in this country.

"People have a need to get it out, but they have no channels, which makes for something constipated in your specious racial reconciliation."

It amused me a little at first to think that he saw my faith as a psychological need until I remembered that he was studying the economics of development, a field fraught with Marxists underpinnings. That's how he would likely see the matter, I said to myself.

He went on to say when he was with Catholics the previous two weeks he felt strange, as a non-practising Lutheran perhaps, but not unwelcome or uncomfortable. "Catholics too still lack a broad integration. But at least with their exaggerated prudence and politeness they're doing something on a living level about it. They do want to integrate but the historical baggage of their inheritance is still a stumbling block.

"I think with fading memories of the past they'll be alright. But there today [at the Youth Day gathering] things were different.

"I'm German, so I recognize that poison. There's a resurgence of evolved fascism in the West in our era. Once it clashes with that sort of nihilism things can easily fall prey to anarchy, and all hell will break loose. Well meaning as it was; Mandela's non-discriminating reconciliation has concealed, rather than treated, a certain indigent feeling among the majority of black people in this country. And I don't think that's healthy. When I came into your country I was high up on the ideals of Africans feeling themselves as brothers to all men; I think you call it the spirit of Ubuntu or something. I wish the ideal was also the real, but I'm afraid it's not so yet, not in the townships at least. Anger, disorder, disarray are still dominant.

"There's a most disturbing absence of reflection that comes with the romantic politics of mob irrationality. I so much prefer the honest struggling reciprocal unity of the Catholics to that deceptive unity of passionate political confusion. The Catholic broad integration without losing unique values of all communities involved is rather impressive even as the idea for it is primarily, above all, man who must be reformed, and all else will follow naturally. That is the Catholic strength. Your spirit of Ubuntu will have no power or efficacy unless it adopts the universality of all embracing humanism."

We rode the kombi in a non-accusing silence between us, which got me thinking about my faith. I was proud to be Catholic, Universal. Proud also that my faith is confessional, i.e. it finds fault with its children first before looking for it in the world. Yes, this makes it very vulnerable to the accusations of opportunists and latterday saints, but the spiritual gains supersede the material misunderstandings. Proud also that, in my country, though we've not yet advanced to perfect synoikismas , there are people who're are prepared to be their brother's keepers; people who made my German white friend feel at home in our black township for the moths he stayed with us against a plethora of warnings from our political couch analysts.