5 am…

Saturday night my sniffle became a full blown beast of a cold and I was up every 10 or 15 minutes, which ended up being just as well because we had to wake up at 4 am to catch our airport shuttle at 5 am. Stumbling around in the cold, trying to make sure we haven’t left anything behind, was not fun. Marcus took the bags out to the curb and I went down to the lobby to say good-bye to Zuki and to give her the special edition Ebony Magazine I had picked up before we left the states. This issue was dedicated to the use of degrading and misogynistic language in the black community – the fall out from the Don Imus situation that we had talked about earlier in the week. While we were saying goodbye I heard a familiar voice on South African television.

Certain that I was mistaken, I slipped into the TV room and sure enough Creflo Dollar was preaching from the World Changers Church in ATL Georgia at 5 am. His lesson for the morning… what else... the gospel of prosperity. I fell out laughing (I’m sure partially from being tired / loopy and particularly because that TV gets very few and spotty American TV programs.) But Reverend Dollar came in loud and clear. There were two black South African men in the lounge watching the show and they asked me if I knew of Creflo and his wife, Taffi. Indeed, which launched a mini conversation about the mega church phenomenon in the USA. In South Africa, Zuki explained, there is a surgence of “charismatic churches” that are not as large as the mega conglomerate churches of Osteen, Dollar, and Jakes, but in the same vein of evangelical message. She said people were flocking to these new churches based on the American model. In land with such poverty, a charismatic message of prosperity would definitely be appealing to me. {And please don’t get me wrong I enjoy Joey Osteen’s sermons tremendously.} The two gentlemen were former Rhodes University students, who grew up in the Eastern Cape and were in town for the festival.

One asked me, “why are you here?”

It’s a complicated question, which sent us down the long and winding conversational road of what I think about South Africa.

The same gentleman said, “people come to South Africa and they think it is urban because that is what the media shows, that’s what the tourist see. You go to Cape Town, Durban, Johannesburg, and you think that is South Africa. South Africa is predominantly rural and very poor. No one addresses that, not even the government. I grew up herding sheep and milking cows. If you don’t milk the cow where I grew up you have no milk. If you don’t get eggs from the chickens, then you have no eggs.”

Indeed that is the South Africa that hasn’t been helped yet by the ANC’s economic policy and are still in short supply of electricity and water. I knew Marcus would be coming for me soon, and there were too many questions to begin a meaningful conversation with these men about the issues of rural South Africa.

Just as Marcus reached my side one of the gentlemen asked, “Do you believe in the African Diaspora?”

Coming from Spelman, {all those ADW classes} I said, “of course.”

“But do you believe that Africa, the continent, will find stability and flourish?”

As I took Marcus’s hand to leave the room I said, “I believe the future of the world depends very much on what happens on this continent.”