Silence
Refugee children at the Central Methodist Mission, Johannesburg/Photo by Sokwanele
The experiences of meeting and talking to various people and seeing different places are stunning me into silence. On one hand, not much of what I see and hear is different from what I have seen and heard before, nor is it different from what I expected. On the other hand, I am once again saddened by inhumanity. The inhumanity that forces people to leave their homes and the inhumanity they face in search of peace and security. I asked a wonderful human rights lawyer we interviewed today why refugees/asylum seekers/immigrants are pouring into South Africa in recent years. She told me that they perceive South Africa as an economic success, tolerant, open, welcoming. It is seen as “Mandela’s country,” she says. I asked her what happens after they arrive and she shook her head. “It is very difficult,” she said. “There are success stories but they are few and far in between. And there has been lots of progress, but still lots of frustration as well.”
Mandela’s country. I ponder that later as we meet and talk to a Congolese refugee working as a parking lot attendant, a wonderful Zimbabwean asylee who runs a community based organization helping his fellow Zimbabweans, and finally as we stand inside the Central Methodist Mission in downtown Johannesburg in early evening hours as hundreds of men, women and children, young and old, healthy and disabled, start pouring in to spend the night at the only shelter they can afford and will not evict them or turn them down for lack of paperwork or money. We hear the stories of missing family members, split families, struggles to find work, housing and even food, poor or denied access to health care and housing even with proper papers. And I am stunned into silence. I have nothing to say. I travel back through my own war and refugee journey and, as my insides start burning with familiar pain, all I want to do is tell them that it will get better. And I want to do something – anything – that will make their situation better. But I don’t know that it will get better. And I feel powerless to make a significant change.
Mandela said: “There are few misfortunes in the world that you cannot turn into a personal triumph if you have the iron will and the necessary skill.” How many of the people we met today will be able to do that in Mandela’s country?
The stunning silence you experience has been borne by us the victims for almost a decade now, like lambs to the slaughter. A sense of hopelesness and helplessness has been our resigned fate as what was once an idyllic life turned into a nightmare. Millions of educated and semi literate took to the diaspora while others succumbed to both timeous and untimely death from both natural causes and ineptitude.Is it in this generation or the next that we can trace our steps back home to where we belong and not wake up to the pangs of hunger, joblessness or lack of medication. Yes things will get better but only when there is a coalition of the willing, inside and outside the country, who will recognise there is another way! One which recognises that as mortal beings our lifespan is finite and threfore the conspicous consumerism is mindless greed. Sustainable development lies in investing for the majority good and for future generations. This is the iron will and necessary skill we need in Mugabe’s country. We do not need to sojourn in other lands against our wish.
Thanks Darija. By engaging with our story you are joining that “coalition of the willing” to inspire an alternative moral vision which will make it better! Maybe not immediately and for these people at the Methodist church, but for all Zimbabweans and in the near future!
Yes our country of 14 million with all its natural wealth and beauty can rise again and occupy its pride of place in the world!
After we have been stunned into silence, regaining our voice and inspiring the next generation of leaders not to be sucked into a whirlwind of fleeting personal material accumulation and greed could provide the moral compass for a new and just beginning
Darija,
Once again your article has tugged away at my heart. I too was left in silence with only the lump in my throat to keep me company……