The tears of KwaZulu
Schroth, Raymond A.
have broken down and there does not seem to be any reasonable expectation they can be restored, extraordinary mechanical devices can be removed. "This action," Harakas says, "should never be...
...There was the first spark--a hint of reincamation?--in a day that would singe the catechism...
...I let it pass...
...That realization is the greatest safeguard in promoting the advancement of human rights and the dignity of each one of us...
...and now with its future--the pariah's new international respectability...
...Smith's account of his tenure at Elandskop (1983-90), in the novitiate's diaries and a memoir, is a microcosm of what was happening to the whole country...
...and Smith records that many of the youths enlisted by the police as "constables" were in fact Inkatha thugs...
...I had arrived early for a "Whither Christianity...
...It is the third world--wondering how it will fit into the "new" South Africa which, free of sanctions and warming up for the Olympics, will have less incentive to either educate its black poor or redistribute the land (87 percent in white hands) stolen over a century...
...symposium, a provocative theme to be presented by a languishing religious community of priests and brothers belatedly making gestures toward survival...
...In 2004 the white population will be 10 percent...
...To allow physician-assisted murder would be to alter irrevocably the nature of the physicianpatient relationship...
...As we leave, Chris introduces me as a priest-journalist from America...
...in a series of laws in 1913, 1951, and 1971) as something like Indian reservations where all blacks, unless licensed to work in cities, were expected to live, used tribalism----or "ethnicity" or "cultural identity"--to isolate blacks and consolidate white minority power...
...And there's blood on a lot of hands...
...it is not mentioned by contemporary theologians...
...Then, with two women leading the way, reciting the rosary and singing as we go, for two hours we make the rounds up and down the dirt roads of the Zulu settlements, to bring Communion to the sick and old...
...deKlerk accepted in one word capital after another...
...Since my visit, the July ANC convention, which reinforced Mandela's pre-eminence while bringing a cadre of well-organized, competent pragmatists (some of them Communists)---those who held the ANC together while Mandela was in prison--into second-level positions, is evidence that the ANC is making the transition from an underground revolutionary movement to a political party...
...Our conference master suggested another pilgrimage on earth could be a blessing for many of us...
...We pass a military convoy...
...Forster or D.H...
...At this judgment, a person will be directed to heavenly glory or a place of temporary purification or hellish torture...
...On the hillside I inspect the murder scene where two sisters were shotgunned in their beds by Inkatha warriors...
...From Chris's hilltop he can see both the lush, white-owned farmlands and the eroded landscape of the blacks--"a world of mud and cow-dung, of flies and rusting corrugated-iron pit latrines, of scrawny, furtive dogs" where "each homestead houses an average of ten people, most of them children...
...an invitation to a track meet in Kenya...
...In June, as Parliament repealed a series of apartheid laws, each day's paper and TV news brought new boasts: President F.W...
...it is quite another thing to 'allow the peaceful separation of soul and body.'" The challenge of Initiative 1 t 9 is not only for physicians and the prolife movement...
...Father PeregrineS...
...As my Johannesburg-bound bus pulled out of Pietermaritzburg, the army's armored personnel carriers unloaded troops in the center of town...
...Thus it would be a mistake to romanticize Mandela or back the ANC uncritically...
...The widely respected Weekly Mail in early June lambasted Buthelezi, who retained as his cabinet minister Samuel Jamile, a convicted murderer, and took no action against disappeared members of his own police force indicted in a series of killings...
...The way things are going, they won't have far to look...
...He brought to our attention and lamented the fading of several ancient Catholic beliefs and practices: indulgences, purgatory, the devil, holy days of obligation, tithing, the sinfulness of birth control, papal infallibility, fasting and abstinence...
...South Africa as host to the Olympics in 2004...
...Every good person will be rewarded, every wrongdoer punished...
...This is called reincarnation, the reentrance of a person's tarnished soul into another human body for another opportunity or several opportunities to become prepared for God's blessed reward...
...On a typical circular, mud-brick hut, called a rondavel, a cattle skull hovers over the door, and a rubber tire--which Zulus believe wards off lightning---encircles the thatch roof's peak...
...Other days he sees that the urban-based ANC, according to the polls, really does have broad support and should win a post-apartheid, postnew democratic constitution election with over 50 percent of the vote, with the white-colored-Indian National party second, and Inkatha a poor third...
...he wants his parishioners to understand that the outside world is interested in them...
...The National party's new educational reform would mandate universal schooling through the first seven grades, but since South Africa has no separate-but-equal case history, it will be a long while before we see black faces on the soccer fields of Jeppe High School...
...My bus rolled smoothly through Montana-like landscape toward Pietermaritzburg, in the province of Natal, about forty miles in from Durban and the Indian Ocean...
...the worldtraveling "Holiday on Ice" show opens in Johannesburg...
...He further commented on a few traditional Catholic beliefs and practices that are, he hinted, now in the process of fading: three persons in one God, Original Sin, chastity, hell, confessions, the priesthood, and the permanence of marriage...
...He described the kind of Catholicism that prevailed in the years before Vatican II...
...Inside, in the center of a hard dirt floor, a wood fire bums continually, cutting the winter cold and warming water for tea...
...People joined UDF or Inkatha, Smith wrote, in order to survive...
...So it is no accident that the rise in political violence corresponds with the breaking up of the old order, the rise of Inkatha, and the determination of pro-apartheid die-hards--referred to as a mysterious "Third Force"--that, even if a new constitution is in place by the time of the next national election, Nelson Mandela of the ANC will never sit as president...
...Another monk, the author of several unpublished novels, came to the podium and gave us the heartening news...
...This has been our understanding of eventual religious experiences, our guru at the podium explained, until recent developments in religious doctrine have brought a more enlightened understanding of the Christian message...
...In the church of our childhood, he said, we believed that every person is created to praise God eternally and that, when the body dies, the soul of that person goes promptly to be judged by a God both merciful and just...
...If there is a hell, it is empty...
...One afternoon I ran three miles through the hills of the Kensington neighborhood--with its beautiful middle-class homes and gardens, middle-class snarling guard dogs, and WARNING security signs on their ten-foot walls--and stopped to watch a field hockey game at the renowned Jeppe public high school...
...A goat looks in the door...
...The epitaph on one marker caught my eye: "I'11 be right back...
...Then the resident theologian, Vaticanized a generation ago, reflected on eternal verities and alluded to an evolving problem...
...He sniffed and shuddered...
...the Alan Patons of the future "will have to find new causes and controversies...
...The eyes of participants were popping, but no objections were raised...
...The revolutionary character of Initiative 119 will dismantle that sea wall and leave us exposed to the tides of arbitrary power and mere utility...
...Chris has doubled as novice master--though there are no novices at the moment--and pastor since April 1990, when Tim, threatened with death because he dared to intervene in the killings, had to leave...
...One, pregnant, was shot and set on fire...
...In the previous week approximately ninety Zulus had died in a series of retaliatory murders as men and boys carrying spears, shields, and guns ran and drove hysterically from one burning village to another in search of enemies--some of whom they had prayed with at Sunday Mass...
...Their resurgence, first as a tribal force, now under the auspices of the Inkatha Freedom party, corresponds with the birth pains of a"new," postapartheid South Africa, which is neither as peaceful as the white liberals who rejoiced at the February 1990 release of Mandela had hoped, nor as "democratic, unitary, and nonracial" as the ANC platform dreamed...
...Some days Chris fears a civil war prolonged by the alliance of the heavily armed black and white right wings...
...Though we must all learn to accept the inevitability of death and its wrenching consequences, we must still maintain our hope in the face of them and help others to do so as well...
...A professor of Scripture, short of stature and breath, made only a brief stop at our meeting and a brief comment on the theme...
...That day's Natal Witness (June 15) turned its attention to the report that philanthropists had rescued from oblivion the manuscripts of Pietermaritzburg-bom novelist Alan Paton, whose Cry the Beloved Country was "the opening salvo in the literary attack on apartheid," and were returning them to South Africa...
...But there seems to be more blood on Inkatha's...
...THEOLOGICAL TRENDS "I'lL BE BIGHT BACK" REINCARNATION REVIVED he cemetery at the monastery needs a major manicure...
...After we trudged through four verses of "Amazing Grace," the keynote speaker, an underemployed master of novices, intoned the mandated clichr: pleased and privileged to be with us...
...Heaven is a glorious reward for saints, the blessed, the pure of heart, people who sought and followed an enlightened conscience--for all authentic lovers...
...Apartheid, by creating the ten "homelands" (Transkei, Venda, KwaZulu, etc...
...It is a hopeful hypothesis, believed by millions of religious persons in the past and today...
...Chris cautions against what he calls the "Idi Amin Syndrome"--by which he means that white liberals are too slow to realize that blacks can be as bad as whites...
...a one-thousand-student grade school and high school where six-year-olds learn English through computer-assisted instruction...
...The smoke stings our eyes...
...Lawrence story...
...With all the boys so white, blond, and fresh-faced, handsome in their bright uniforms and blazers, I could have been in England---or rather on the set of a British movie based on some E.M...
...Nor is there any proof that it is false...
...He reminded us that many persons thought Jesus was a 9 August 1991:455...
...Tribal chiefs, many of them, in the eyes of the ANC, corrupt stooges who played along with the system, became tools of apartheid themselves...
...REPORT FROM SOUTH AFRICA THE TEARS OF KWAZULU BLOOD ON MANY HANDS bout an hour to the north of Elandskop, during the Boer War (1899-1902), the Boers ambushed a British train and captured war correspondent Winston Churchill...
...Across the room an old woman and five or six neighbor women--all very heavy and wrapped in colorful sweaters and robes--kneel or sit and sing as Chris reads the prayers in Zulu...
...This action," Harakas says, "should never be confused with euthanasia, which brings to an end, deliberately and consciously, a life which is capable of maintaining itself with normal care...
...Each human life has an intrinsic value...
...The question: If only purified lovers can enter into eternal union with a God of love in heaven, where goes the person who has not yet achieved his or her designated degree of love...
...About another hour away, in the midst of the "Great Trek" in 1838, Andries Pretorius, with 500 well-armed men and two cannons, killed 3,000 Zulus armed with spears, and didn't lose a man...
...In the Natal the conditions that foster violence--poverty, landlessness, unemployment--are at their worst...
...A boy sets a tiny table for the Eucharist and places stools for the two priests...
...It is this civil war's tragic paradox that the Zulu people--by nature and history so gentle, hospitable, often Christian, almost saintly in their forbearance--seem to have reached for their redefinition back to the 1820s, to those twelve years when the monster, warrior king Shaka, famed for his splendid physique, transformed the Zulu kingdom into a militarized state, which degenerated into a reign of terror...
...The area reeks, with its military monuments and Voortrekker museums, of South Africa's white history--a historical prison from which the nation is only beginning to escape...
...An awkward question has surfaced and our speaker took it on with aplomb...
...9 August 1991:453 At Elandskop, at the hilltop mission on the KwaZulu border, overlooking Pietermaritzburg, Father Chris Chatteris, S.J., fortytwo, who was born in northem Rhodesia and came here in 1985, leads me through his four little "kingdoms": a foundation-funded development project which teaches Zulu women nutrition and how to raise vegetables organically...
...There is no need any more for protest literature," the Witness editorialized...
...the other collapsed over her four-yearold son, pinning him, and soaking him with her blood until Father Tim Smith, S.J., arrived to discover her corpse and rescue the child...
...Yet, twenty-four hours later I stood on a hillside in KwaZulu, 450 kilometres south, looking into the charred remnants of a hut where two young women had been murdered in a tribal war that, nationwide, for the last three years has killed an average of nine people a day...
...Maybe, just maybe, that person, after death, will get another opportunity, another chapter of life on earth, to be converted from sin and selfishness to a love that grants admittance into heaven...
...It is for all members of society...
...Brother Dolce, all effervescence, gave me a booming greeting: "Hello, Comrade...
...At the orientation meeting in the Great Hall, dozens of veteran symposia attenders, members of church staffs and parish committees, gathered, each equipped with the necessities of pastoral life--notebook, name tag, coffee cup, and furrowed brow...
...A 1989 study documented that sixteen of twenty-nine Natal violent incidents were Inkatha-initiated, three UDF...
...Our speaker suggested that our more enlightened attitudes in these areas have recently helped to reduce the incidence of at least three ugly experiences in our society: abortions, the casual use of drugs, and street crimes in several large cities...
...It is one thing to kill and murder...
...Several refreshing religious beliefs, he declared, are coming on strong: the infinite power of love, the nobility of every human person, universal salvation, the glorious goodness of all creation, the supremacy of conscience, reincarnation, and respect for the rightful roles of women in our society and church...
...These treasures, he mourned, are disappearing, not by direct resistance, but by the quiet inattention of faithful Catholics...
...Yet today, choosing carefully----don't go downtown on weekends--you could move around Johannesburg, particularly places like the Eastgate shopping center, and think your world was white...
...Each incarnation provides an occasion for a person to grow in love...
...At the end of June the Johannesburg Sunday Times published a photo of Inkatha supporters toting G3 automatic rifles issued by KwaZulu police...
...Few had ever composed a sonnet, voted for a socialist, bet a Daily Double, or winked at a stranger...
...Olympic Games approval looms...
...Several tombstones are tilting...
...We don't know it, but at the intersection we have just passed, six men have been killed within the last few days in clashes between the African National Congress (ANC) and the Inkatha Freedom party, the followers of the KwaZulu "homeland" chief, Mangosuthu Buthelezi, who that week was on his way to Washington, D.C., to promote himself as a non-Communist alternative to Nelson Mandela's ANC...
...Members of the same parish, many of them teen-agers, killed one another in a tuff war between the United Democratic Front (UDF), ANC allies, and Inkatha, who, beginning in 1987, promoted a join-us-or-else policy...
...I had come to South Afric~ because it seemed, in its transition from apartheid to democracy, the politically most interesting place outside of Baghdad...
...Even worse, it would mean the final abandonment of what is most sacred and vulnerable in the human project...
...It was the battle of Blood River--South Africa's sacred moment, proof that God had chosen the Afrikaners to own this land and keep their white blood pure...
...I found a nation doubly obsessed: first with its history, the mythical, theologized treks and nineteenth-century battles which had established its identity...
...They were most likely on hand to control the expected weekend demonstrations celebrating Soweto Sunday, the fifteenth anniversary of the slaughter of the student protesters 454: Commonweal whose refusal to be taught in the Afrikaans language unleashed the final phase of the black revolution...
...Purgatory has been a Catholic fantasy without a biblical foundation, now forgotten...
...Most had looked at too many screens--computer, television, confessional---m search of Godot...
...He gave no statistics on these developments...
...four churches spread throughout the hillside settlements...
...This June the weekly New Nation published the confessions of a white, former South African Defense Force chief who recruited and trained homeland youths (without Buthelezi's knowledge, he said) to foment black-onblack violence and thus demonstrate that blacks, specifically the ANC, were not fit to govern...
...At first the people openly condemned those responsible for the killings, but soon fear took over, and they lapsed into abstraction and condemned "the violence"--with a shake of the head and a sigh...
...March 31, 1915...
...At the first pause in the program, members of our group stampeded to recharge their psyches with caffeine...
...Of course, there is no scientific evidence that the reincarnation theory is true...
...The plan of God for all persons to gain salvation will be fulfilled...
...and a clinic with an emergency room and maternity ward which assists 500-700 births a year...
...RAYMOND A. SCHROTH Raymond A. Schroth, S.J., journalism professor at Loyola University in New Orleans, is author, with Jeff Theilman, of Volunteer: With the Poor in Peru (Paulist...
Vol. 118 • August 1991 • No. 14
