I've decided to write a blog about my experiences living in Mamelodi (a township east of Pretoria) as a white Afrikaans male. I'm want to humbly submit my voice to the ongoing racial discussion in our country and hopefully bring some understanding and perspective.
Firstly a bit of background about me. My name is Gerhard Jacobs, I'm an thirty-one year old Afrikaans white male. I grew up just outside of Pretoria, approximately 15kms from where I stay now. Despite the Geographical proximity my life growing up had almost nothing in common with Mamelodi, the way of life here or it's people.
My only experience growing up with a person of a different race was with our stay-in domestic worker, Sannie, and her family. I went to an white Primary school, white Secondary school, played on white sports teams, went to a white church, I think you get the picture. And even though there would be a person of another race in some of these circles, I've never had a meaningful friendship with a person of a different skin color until the age of thirty. And I know this to be true for most of my peers.
Let me clarify a few things. The reason why I didn't have any friends of a different race is not because I didn't want to. I just didn't have enough contact to people of other races. This didn't have anything to do with me or my parents being racist, well at least not consciously. I just realised that I have to be intentional about crossing the racial divide that our country's history implies. The problem is that Apartheid was never just a political system, but a social construct that is still alive and well in the people of our nation.
I'm more and more convinced that we as South-Africans don't understand each other. We don't see each other as people.
What if we could stop arguing about whether there is or is not a genocide on white farmers. And have compassion for the family that lost a father, a brother, a son because of one of these crimes. And bring the criminal to justice. What if we could stop feeling guilty or trying to justify what happened during Apartheid. And respond to the needs of a mother that is desperately trying to provide for her children but because of generations of poverty she is failing and it is making her hopeless.
What if we became people again. Better yet, friends. It's easy to respond with pride on social media. Its easy to throw accusations at a computer screen or a cellphone camera. But I believe we are better than that. I believe we are wiser than that.
So here is my challenge to you. Make a friend, not an acquaintance, of another race and listen to their story, listen to what happened to them and how it made them feel, how it formed them. Try to understand their struggles and their hurts. Leave your ideologies at the door, leave your opinions and listen.
Here is what will happen. You will learn something, you will learn that your current perspective might be very warped. You will learn that your responses and replies might have been very prideful and presumptuous in the past. You will learn that you can not respond to a friend like you respond to a Facebook status. You will by God's grace learn to be humble.
I beg you, please be brave our nation and its people need you to learn these lessons now. We can not wait for a political party or a system to save us. We need to take responsibility for our hearts, our actions and our words. We need to humble ourselves before God and be intentional about building these bridges between races and cultures.
This entry turned out a bit different than I planned but I feel like this is a critical mind shift that we need to make to walk the road of reconciliation. In the rest of my entries I will be sharing about my friends and some of my experiences here in Mamelodi.
God bless.
Umlungu in Mamelodi.
