Learning from Cape Town...

Today's Irish News has a story about poverty in South Africa on page 3. And they have a picture of a 'township' to show how poor people in South Africa live - and it's a shot of some of that relatively nice, new, RDP housing along the N2 around Nyanga and Crossroads. And you just think, no, those small but actually rather pretty red roofed houses aren't how most townships look ... this is how most townships look.

Why travel from Belfast Lough to the Cape of Good Hope?

On 4 April, I am leaving Belfast to spend 6 months volunteering with the Anglican Archdiocese of Cape Town under the auspices of the United Society for the Propagation of the Gospel’s Experience Exchange Programme. I will be working with the principal inter-faith body in the region, the Western Cape Religious Leaders’ Forum, as a co-ordinator and facilitator.

The work of the Religious Leaders’ Forum goes well beyond the purely ‘religious’, with much effort being put into social justice and environmental issues, as well as holding governments and political parties to account and demanding honest conduct; if it could be summarised in one sentence, it is to ensure that the powers that be at Federal, Provincial and city level live up to the promise in South Africa’s constitution that everyone in South Africa is entitled to be live with human dignity.

Why am I asking you to donate to me?
I am an entirely self-supported volunteer; I receive no support in paying for flights, medical insurance, accommodation or living costs. I paid more than half of my training costs (the rest was borne by my sending agency, USPG). When I arrive in South Africa, I will need to buy a reliable car to be able to carry out my duties properly, and although I will be able to sell it before I return to Belfast, this is a significant up-front cash requirement. Motor insurance is also likely to be a major cost.

The programme I am taking part in works on the basis that British and Irish volunteers should not be a financial burden on churches in countries which are much less wealthy. This makes a great deal of sense, and I support this principle entirely. However, offering my skills as a volunteer will cost me a significant amount of money; even if I raise a reasonable amount of money online and through the support of my own Parish, it will still probably cost me a four-figure sum.

There is a Paypal button on the right hand side of this page where you can donate via Paypal or credit card. You can also send cheques to me via my parish in Belfast, St. George’s, High Street, at the address opposite. Please indicate that cheques are for the ‘St. George’s USPG Volunteers Fund’.

I will provide a receipt to all donors and unless you stipulate otherwise will print a list of donors on this site, and will keep you regularly up to date with my work. Having been unemployed for most of the past 6 months myself, I am well aware of how difficult things are financially for many people. If you are unable to assist financially at this time please pass on the link to this page to anyone else who you think might be able to support me, and please pray for the people of Cape Town and the work of USPG and the Anglican Church of Southern Africa.

Why Cape Town?
If the UN listed World Heritage Sites for the richness and diversity of their human culture, rather than just their historical or ecological significance, Cape Town would come close to the top of the list. Cape Town has a kaleidoscope of cultures not always appreciated outside South Africa; while the contribution of English, Dutch and Xhosa culture to modern Cape Town is widely assumed, few foreigners appreciate that these communities account for less than half of the people of Cape Town.

The Cape Coloured community, the largest in the city, are the descendents of an incredible mix of ancestries, a result of Cape Town’s history as a cosmopolitan trading port and centre of the slave trade. The Coloured community grew from the intermingling of not only European and Xhosa people, but also Indonesians, Malays, Indians, Madagascans, Mozambicans, Mauritians, many Black Southern African nationalities, and the original inhabitants of the Western Cape, the Khoi-San people, still better known in Europe by the now disregarded terms of Bushmen and Hottentots. This incredible blending of cultures is perceptible in almost every aspect of Capetonian life – from its food, to its architecture to its music.

Sitting alongside this stunning cultural diversity is a degree of economic inequality unmatched almost anywhere on the planet. While wealthy suburbs of neat villas clamber up the slopes of Table Mountain, and Cape Town’s city centre is transformed by upmarket new developments, these sit just a few miles away from the shacks of Crossroads and Khayelitsha, or the bleak apartheid-era housing estates of Athlone.

Cape Town today
Much of what we know about South Africa is still shaped by what we learned when it was on the TV news every night, spiced with some more recent anecdotes about violent crime.  It sometimes seems difficult to remember that it is now almost a generation since Nelson Mandela was freed from prison, and that time has not stood still.

Cape Town has boomed in the 17 years since democratic rule came to South Africa. Unburdened of the shackles of legalised racism and international isolation, tourism, mining, financial services and the IT industry have generated hundreds of thousands of new jobs. Cape Town’s stunning natural beauty, Mediterranean climate and rich culture attract people of every conceivable nationality, faith and cultural background.

Thousands of people migrate to Cape Town every month looking for a better quality of life. Some of these come from rich countries and have either the skills to secure well paid work or independent means to live comfortably. Many more migrate from rural parts of South Africa; for some the Cape Town dream comes true. For others, the gross economic inequalities of South Africa and the lingering effects of apartheid trap them in irregular, badly paid, work and substandard housing while preventing them from accessing the educational and work opportunities to escape poverty.

While the Black and Coloured middle-class has grown dramatically over the past 15 years or so, it remains a blunt fact of life in Cape Town that most of the people at the top of the economic tree are White and most of the people at the bottom are Black or Coloured.

St. Mark’s Church and District Six
I will be worshipping at St. Mark’s Anglican Church in District Six (website at www.smd6.co.za), near the office where I will be based. In the early years of apartheid, District Six was one of the few areas in South Africa where people of different races lived together; while a majority Coloured area, a significant Xhosa and smaller White minority lived peacefully there. Like the community I grew up in, District Six was a traditional docklands community, poor and tough but with a strong community spirit.

In 1966, the apartheid government declared District Six a “whites-only” area, probably coveting potentially valuable land close to the city centre and Table Mountain. Almost the entire population, around 40,000 people, was forcibly evicted from the area between 1968 and 1982 and rehoused in bleak housing estates on the then isolated Cape Flats. Almost every home in the area was bulldozed with only a few schools, churches and mosques surviving. Due to political pressure at home and abroad, Pretoria’s grandiose plans for a wealthy, whites-only, community never materialised and much of the area remains uninhabited to this day.

Along with the rest of the population, the parishioners of St. Mark’s were forcibly evicted to the Cape Flats. To legitimise their theories of racial separation, the government in Pretoria offered to build an exact replica of St. Mark’s miles away on the Cape Flats if the parishioners consented to their church being deconsecrated and demolished. Refusing to give credence either to the destruction of their community or the theories of apartheid, the parishioners of St. Mark’s refused the government’s offer and returned the attached two million rand compensation cheque.  To this day, St. Mark’s parishioners travel many miles from the Cape Flats every Sunday to attend the 9 o’clock Sunday Eucharist.

Interfaith work in Cape Town
Another aspect of Cape Town life which is little recognised abroad is its religious diversity. About 10% of the population of Cape Town is Muslim, a community whose origins go back to the beginnings of the city, when the Dutch imported many slaves from modern Indonesia and Malaysia. The city also has significant Jewish and Hindu communities, along with smaller numbers of people belonging to almost every faith in the world.

In a world where conflict between the religions seems an ever present threat, Cape Town is a beacon of hope where people of different faiths have long come together to work for justice, freedom and fairness.

To me, effective mission work is a two-way process, where both the sending and receiving community benefit from the exchange. In Northern Ireland, we are just beginning to grapple with what it means to be a multi-faith society; we have much to learn from a South Africa which has been a multi-faith society since it emerged in its modern form.