Walking into the uncertainty was not easy.
This same God that she was praying to was brought by the same people whose coming caused the troubles she was praying about. Gogo moans the lot of black South Africans, the violence, the unemployment, the pain, the assault…The prayer was moving to read until I got to the end where Gogo inexplicably made peace with the God she was praying to, convinced that this God would resolve the issues and make a way. She visits her grandmother, Gogo, and participates in her prayers that go on for several hours, a dramatic performance accompanied by wailing and sobs. In the book I had just read, Fikile, a waitress living in a township, aspires to make it big and be white. I started asking myself: can we recover these ways of being, knowing and doing, and re-engage with the living Earth from a place beyond coloniality?īut back to the night of the crash. We’re all living with the ecological fall-out from this kind of worldview. And as a researcher of the environment, I see the connection of these silences and the colonial enterprise, which forced a forgetting of an all-alive Earth, the ancestors and other un-embodied beings like nature spirits, and rendered the Earth as a space for domination. Even more, however, I have begun to wonder about the silence around African spirituality, and its persistent labelling as sorcery or devil worship. The crash that happened that night hadn’t left a map of where to go, much less where to begin, so I had to make the way as I went.Īfter seven years of being on the journey, I can say that I have arrived at several shores of knowing and understanding. I didn’t have the answers, and I was making this journey far from home and without much (worldly) guidance. People had many questions, especially those who had known me as the person who would constantly invite others to Mass, or who would confess the mortal sin of having skipped Mass. The quest has involved many locations and people – many of them not in Africa – and has helped me to re-evaluate and reconstruct a world that had come crashing down that night. That night was the beginning of my now seven-year quest to discover, recover and live African spirituality. I don’t know what that means at that moment, having been a staunch Catholic, but I know that I’m not going back. At 11 pm on Thursday, 20 th October 2011, I turn the last page of Coconut by Kopano Matlwa, and I know that I’m not going back to church again.
0 kommentar(er)
