The Poor ... Blessed?
There was no blessing in the poverty of the cemetery in KTC, the name given to the edge of Cape Town’s Nyanga township where we were building houses for a few weeks in June and July. For those weeks this cemetery was a constant land mark keeping me from getting lost in the vast shack infested sprawl of the Cape Flats. My photographer friend Gordon Ashbridge has a fetish for the image of graveyards and I always said, “When Gordon comes we must go in there.”
When we finally came the weather had turned and there were dark ominous judgemental clouds nestling over Table Mountain. The Cape Flats where the old apartheid government had dumped millions of black people in the 80s is bleak enough in its sandy flatness. On this particular day the barrenness was added to by the wind and the blustering sheets of showers that it carried. Gordon pointed out that graveyards are notoriously desolated and boy desolate had never been more desolate than on this particular winter’s afternoon.
There was a separate depravity to the desolation. There were scatterings of decent head stones and one or two that in the context looked more than decadent. One of the most luxurious marked the grace of someone whose epitaph read “PEACEMAKER”. Ironically it was protected behind bars and barbed wire; the freedom to rest in peace was unavailable in a land of such seismic division. I also wondered about how there were some who could afford such extravagance in deaths contextualised in the make shift shacks that surrounded the burial ground. I remember someone telling me in Khayelitsha that life membership of the Kaiser Chiefs’ supporters club gave life insurance policies that paid for your funeral etc.
It was the majority of graves that raised our sorrow and anger. It was the little frail graves, just little mounds of sand with a few rocks sitting haphazardly and little home made make shift markers, mostly wooden crosses, with felt tip markers scrawling names and ages and dates of birth and death. Little bits of rusted corrugated iron with rough scratchings of paint were all that some could afford. There were few flowers and little grass; just scenes from some old cowboy movie.
Then it got worse. We found ourselves in a sea of children’s graves…stillborns everywhere…a five month old here…a day old there. I took a photograph of four graves in a line and all four souls that lay just a few feet below the frail crosses totalled just over five months of living. Tears and anger fill the ether. This is naked poverty. This is the harvest of the seeds of apartheid but the injustices that caused it are not unique to South Africa’s inequalities. If you are white of skin, European of history and First World of comfort and convenience then there are questions to ask, confessions to face and evils to stand up to.
My friend Christian who was building houses with me a matter of a few hundred yards from these graves had told me he had read somewhere that Cape Town was a microcosm of the world. Here the poverty and the wealth that is built upon it sit cheek by jowl. For me in Belfast or Christian in Toronto our townships are hidden away. We don’t drive past them to go to the airport for our luxurious holidays like Capetonians do. Ours are thousands of miles away in Thailand, Malaysia or Mexico. Too easily we point fingers at our South African cousins asking how they can allow such poverty when we are unaware of our own culpability.
We stopped with Barrington, a local shack dweller, who was digging graves. He was telling us that they bury the children at weekends and what depth the children’s were compared to the adults. When we asked why so many children he avoided the AIDS word; it was poverty and disease. He said that sadly even the little crosses were sometimes stolen for fire wood for the nearby shacks in the winter chill and then people couldn’t find their loved ones.
Whatever Jesus meant by “Blessed are the poor…” it had nothing to do with this. This was the poverty of Amos’s prophetic rage. In a world where it seems religion was pietistically strong with the faithful committed to their places of worship, religious festivals and praise songs Amos had a message from God that was sobering to say the least – away with the noise of your songs I want justice and righteousness. The accusations of injustice are clearly the oppression of the poor. Jesus of course took up the theme of the prophets that takes us to the heart of God. The poor were his first priority whether it was the poor spiritually, physically or materially. Indeed what we do with the poor he told us in an apocalyptic vision of the separation of the saved and the damned at judgement was what we did for the poor. It was a long history of places and moments like this specific square of history in this particular plot of land in Western Province, South Africa that has fired God’s anger and his compassion for the poor.
No, this is not what Jesus meant when he said “Blessed are the poor…” This is what he meant when he said, “But woe to you rich for you have already received your comfort.”
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