We're On!

Flights finally booked..! Less than a month to go... 

A Rainbow in the Night

Before I embark on my journey and the super long legal reading list I have decided to indulge my passion for history by finding out a little more about South Africa and her past.

This book by Lapierre, who boasts Mother Theresa among his associates due to his humanitarian work, is beautifully written and I am enjoying it immensely. Translated from its original French, he manages to romp through a few centuries in a couple of chapters in a pacy and lively account. It's really well done and although brief on historical detail manages to eloquently convey a sense of history from the feeling of what it was like to be in South Africa when it was originally settled by the Dutch in the C17th to the hardships of the Great Trek and settlement in the C19th. 

The book is also great at delving into the developing psyche of the Afrikaner movement and has made me think quite considerably about the social, religious and moral justifications for Apartheid used by the Afrikaners to subjugate not only the Black population of South Africa but also their own. It's struck me how so much of the C19th and early C20th ideas about race and superiority are rooted in the Reformatory movement of the late C16th and in particular Calvin's doctrine of the Elect. This doctrine with its focus on the elect of God being his chosen people lead logically into the beliefs which emerged in the C19th of nationalism and the right to a country for the people of the same shared tongue and religion. But then again, I've never been a fan of the Elect of God which seems to me so at odds with the message of universal salvation by faith and through living a good life with is the heart of my own faith. So not going to fan John Calvin on facebook anytime soon.

The only thing that annoys me about the book is that like so many histories it reads the South African experience in isolation from what was going on in the rest of the world. But this has always been one of my biggest bugbears from being an undergraduate and I find it's a folly. Collective ways of thinking mushroom off events both contemporaneously and in the past. Countries don't exist in isolation from the general socio-cultural atmosphere of the times, just as we don't exist in isolation from the experiences of history. The very fact that the Apartheid conjures up images of the night and the darkness of South Africa's past shows this. I can't help but think that the segregation laws in America are so very obviously rooted in the same ideas, ideologies and experiences of South Africa. There are plenty of parallels to draw from the early experiences of Calvinist settlers and their belief that God had chosen them as his elect people to settle the land, to invasion and war with the British cementing national ideology and pride, etc. Although for South Africa you'd have to swap the "as" in WASPism to WAP or WAD...Then there's the experiences of the Jews in Germany under the Nazis that the architects of the Apartheid self-consciously copied. These in their turn were modelled on the divide and rule policies of Glorious Britain and her Majestic Empire. Britain turning a blind eye to ethnic cleansing unless its in her back garden.

The saddest thing I have read in the book is the retelling of a mass under Apartheid where the congregation were made to sit in different parts of the Church and where there was a racial order of how they received Communion. But then again the image I have in my head of the congregation sharing the Eucharist, the one body, and themselves being the one body of the Church overcomes this superficial segregation and reminds me of why I am going - well that and the description of the first Hugenot settlers planting the vineyards in Stellenbosch. Ophs, hope that doesn't make me sound too much like an alkie wino.